Justice & Law Quote by Ralph Abernathy

Abernathy’s line lands like a punch because it hijacks the familiar cadence of a campaign promise and flips it into an indictment. “Take crime out of the streets” is the politician’s comfort-food phrase: vague, paternal, supposedly apolitical. Abernathy grants the claim for half a beat - “He did” - then detonates it with the twist: the “crime” didn’t disappear, it changed addresses. The profanity isn’t decorative; “damn” functions as moral emphasis, a refusal to launder outrage into polite civics.

The specific intent is to reframe law-and-order rhetoric as a tool of power, not public safety. Abernathy is arguing that what gets labeled “crime” is selective: street-level illegality becomes a spectacle, while elite wrongdoing is normalized, bureaucratized, and shielded by office. The subtext is prosecutorial: the real threat isn’t the mugger or dealer, it’s the sanctioned actor who can weaponize the state - who can order surveillance, suppress dissent, bend rules, and still be treated as respectable.

Context matters. Abernathy, a central figure in the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor at the SCLC, watched “law and order” become a coded counterrevolution against Black freedom struggles. In that era, the White House was not an abstraction; it was the command center for policing narratives, federal priorities, and, at times, the criminalization of protest itself. The line endures because it names a recurring American pattern: we obsess over disorder at the margins while excusing it at the top.