Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

History

First Advisor

Patricia Sullivan

Abstract

“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos: Hip-Hop and the Carceral State in the East San Francisco Bay Area” explores the histories of urban redevelopment and deindustrialization, racialized poverty, police and the carceral system, and hip-hop culture in Oakland and other parts of the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. It explores East Bay politics and urban development in the 1900s, which resulted in the flight of industries and wealthy white residents to the suburbs and the erosion of public services. Black community organizations and funk music alike articulated the damages done by these processes in the 1960s. Subsequently, politicians and the judicial system in the East Bay, California, and the United States worked to reverse many progressive prison and police reforms won in the Civil Rights era. Fears about crime, drugs, and violence by white Americans and bourgeois African Americans fueled the drive to a more punitive order. Police departments won nearly unchallenged authority. Legislators redefined crime and enhanced prison sentences, causing carceral populations to explode. Media, politicians, and police treated the new hip-hop culture, from rap music to graffiti and car shows, as nuisances, if not outright dangers to society, symbolic of a collapse of middle-class, white American moral order. At the same time, hip-hop culture in the 1980s became one of the primary mediums through which urban African Americans, especially in the Bay Area, expressed their frustrations with racialized poverty and policing. These trends came to a head in the early 1990s, when Bay Area rappers found their own music and lyrics treated as evidence of criminality and guilt in courts.

Rights

© 2025, William Maclane Hull

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