Can't Stop Won't Stop (36 page)

But to younger heads, who had been denied so much, told in so many ways to “just say ‘No,' ” they heard in Farrakhan a resounding, “Yes.” Bill Stephney, who would become a founder of Public Enemy, says, “He was the only Black leader who said, ‘
You
, Black man, can pick yourself up. You can have strong families. You can build your own businesses. You
can do
. He was the only affirming leader.”

Farrakhan was despised by liberals and conservatives, whites and mainstream
Blacks. He had been unanimously censured by the U.S. Senate, was hounded by accusations of anti-Semitism and was treated as a pariah by the media. But all of these factors helped legitimize him as the rare man of an older generation whom young people might respond to.

Better than any Black leader, Farrakhan seemed to understand the crisis of the generation left to be abandoned or forcibly contained. As Black-on-Black violence climbed during the summer of 1989, he began to avidly court them. He went first to those furthest from the mainstream, holding an unprecedented peace summit for gang members in Chicago. Then he visited the Cook County Jail, where he was received as a hero.

His major theme for the next several years became “Stop the Killing.” In his speeches, Farrakhan said the fact that Black men were killing Black men in unprecedented numbers was not an accident, it was by design. “We believe that the government . . . is frightened by the rise in population of our people,” he told
Los Angeles Times
reporter Andrea Ford. “We believe (the government) sees in Black people a useless population that is considered by sociologists a permanent underclass. And when you have something that is useless, you attempt to get rid of it if you cannot make it serviceable.”
²⁰

On June 25, he took his message to over a thousand gang leaders and members. “The government of the United States of America is planning an assault on the Black community, specifically aimed at our youth,” he told them.
²¹
“Brothers, you are playing into the hand of your enemy and he is using you to set up your destruction.”
²²
If young Black men did not unite to defend themselves, they would certainly be crushed.

White liberals despaired at the deepening schisms, bemoaning “identity politics” and “Black paranoia.” Others felt as if the clock had been turned back two decades. One white political scientist, an expert in urban riots, said, “We have produced in the Black underclass a revolutionary consciousness.”
²³

Only eleven weeks after the 1986 Congressional anti-apartheid victory, a twenty-three-year old Trinidadian American named Michael Griffith was run over by a car and killed in Queens after being beaten and chased by a mob of whites shouting, “Nigger, you're in the wrong neighborhood!”

The incident began the Friday afternoon before Christmas. Griffith, his friend, Timothy Grimes, his stepfather, Cedric Sandiford and his cousin, Curtis Sylvester, had gone to Far Rockaway to collect a paycheck for some construction work Griffith had done. When they were returning back across Jamaica Bay on a lonely stretch of the Cross Bay Boulevard, Sylvester's 1976 Buick overheated. Griffith, Sandiford and Grimes left Sylvester with his car and hiked three miles into the nearest town, Howard Beach, in the gathering darkness.

Nestled in the inner Jamaica Bay amidst soft salt marshes, Howard Beach had once been a resort area. By the mid-1980s, it was a whites-only enclave, situated between the Belt Parkway, garbage landfills and John F. Kennedy Airport. New York City's population was almost half people of color, yet there remained pockets in Queens and Brooklyn from which whites had never taken flight. Reaganomics had devastated many of these enclaves, like Bensonhurst—where whites attacked three African-American Veterans Administration workers in 1983—and Gravesend—where in 1982, a group of thugs chased three African-American transit workers and beat one of them to death.
²⁴
Not so with Howard Beach, which was solidly middle-class and had registered solid economic gains through the decade.
²⁵
Yet the area was now best known as the home of John Gotti and the prevailing view among residents seemed to be that Blacks or Hispanics mainly came into their neighborhood to rob or rape them.
²⁶

Griffith, Sandiford and Grimes were walking up the road into Howard Beach when a group of white youths drove by screaming racial epithets at them. The three continued on, then stopped at the New Park Pizzeria and asked for directions to the nearest subway station.
²⁷
They sat to rest and eat. By the time they had got up to leave, the white boys in the car had returned. They had a dozen others with them.

It was going to be one of those nights. Two hours before, in another part of town, cops had received a call about a gang of whites who had beaten and chased two young Hispanics. And while Griffith, Sandiford and Grimes were eating, someone had called the police to report “three suspicious Black males.” Police had come, seen only the three young men eating quietly, and left.

Now it was after midnight. This crowd was drunk, some had baseball bats, others had tree switches. The whites yelled at them, “Niggers, you don't belong
here.” When they stepped forward to leave, the mob surged forward and began beating them. Sandiford covered himself and yelled, “God, don't kill us!” Grimes suffered a blow but ran north into the cold night. Griffith and Sandiford ran west, with the mob in pursuit in car and on foot.

Eight blocks away, the mob caught up with them. In a field of bushes and weeds next to the Belt Parkway, they beat the young Black men mercilessly. Sandiford played dead as Griffith slipped through a hole in the fence onto the six-lane parkway. When Griffith tried to cross the parkway—perhaps confused, certainly in pain and terror—he was struck by a car. His body crushed the hood and he bounced off the windshield out toward the dividing barriers. Police later found Sandiford, badly injured and dazed, stumbling blindly through the streets.

Mayor Ed Koch compared the incident to a lynching in the Old South, called it “the most horrendous incident” of his term and went to Howard Beach to call for the formation of a new Kerner Commission. He told the media that the nation was still divided in two societies—one Black and one white. Howard Beach residents booed him. Some of them told reporters that if they had been walking in Bed-Stuy late at night, surely they would have expected to be visited with the same kind of violence.

Bishop Emerson J. Moore, New York City's only black Roman Catholic bishop, declared, “I have lived in New York all my life, and the racial polarization now is as bad as it's ever been. Things are very bad now, and I fear for a hot summer.”
²⁸

In New York City's Black community, the message of the Michael Griffith's death, coming on top of the Stewart killing and the Goetz shooting and all the others, was clear. Northern racism was alive and well, and it was time for action. Rage was the dominant chord, an emotion that seemed to catch the Black civil rights leadership by surprise. Following the incident, some had even invited graying southern civil rights icons to come north to give them advice.
²⁹
But many favored a more militant, nationalist line, and hoped that new leaders would step forward. They did not want someone who had marched with Martin in the misty past. They wanted a latter-day Malcolm who spoke to their fearful, tense present.

Sandiford's and Grimes's lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, took a confrontational approach. Sandiford himself was still angry that, after he
was beaten, he had been harassed by police and treated as a suspect. And thirty-one-year-old Reverend Al Sharpton, whose résumé already included boy preacher, teen community organizer and tour promoter for James Brown and Michael Jackson, led a series of marches into Howard Beach, often ending at the New Park Pizzeria. Separated by thin blue police lines, the marchers faced off with angry white residents.

Young anti-apartheid activists also emerged, such as Rutgers' Lisa Williamson, the leader of the newly formed National African Youth and Student Alliance. Williamson, Sharpton and Ocean-Hill/Brownsville vet Sonny Carson called for a “Day of Mourning and Outrage” and a symbolic boycott of white businesses. On January 21, ten thousand marchers led police all over the city, before they stopped at Mayor Koch's residence. “Mayor Koch, have you heard? Howard Beach is Johannesburg,” they chanted below his window. “Black power! African power!”
³⁰

These were the currents that swirled during the mid-1980s. The culture that had poured out from the streets of the Bronx was transitioning into a new era.

Graffiti, pushed off the subways, poured onto the streets and highways and freight trains, initiating a new wave of police crackdowns and internecine fights. Style wars dispersed to thousands of distant cities, where fervent new movements opened new frontlines with local authorities.

B-boying, a dance style that had already died once in New York, disappeared again, to be replaced by a succession of fad dances. Steps like the Whop, the Reebok, the Cabbage Patch and countless others got everyone back on the dancefloor. But each one disappeared faster than b-boying ever had. Third-generation breaking adherents continued the artform as Rock Steady's disciples covered the globe.

Rap proved to be the ideal form to commodify hip-hop culture. It was endlessly novel, reproducible, malleable, perfectible. Records got shorter, raps more concise and tailored to pop-song structures. Rap groups shrank, from the Furious Five and the Funky 4 + 1 More down to the Treacherous Three, and now, to duos like Cash Money and Marvelous or Eric B. and Rakim.

DJs were still often billed first, and after Grandmaster Flash's epochal “Adventures
on the Wheels of Steel,” they enjoyed a brief artistic surge with singles like Herbie Hancock's “Rockit,” Grandmixer DST's “Crazy Cuts,” and the B-Boys' “2,3 Break.” But DJs no longer enjoyed the eminence or the central musical role their billing implied. When drum-machine and sampling technology were turned into hip-hop tools, the record producer filled that space. Early rap labels had already marginalized the DJ, and the new technology effectively mimicked and extended the DJ's musical capabilities. The rise of the rap producer, the arrival of some extraordinary rappers, and the increasing flow of capital propelled hip-hop music into a period of remarkable stylistic development.

By 1986, rap eclipsed all the other movements. It had expanded to incorporate many more pop perspectives—satirical rap, teenybopper rap, X-rated rap, Roxanne rap, Reagan rap, John Wayne rap. But in the new crisis time, as it had been for Jamaica's embattled roots generation, rappers were increasingly being recognized as “the voices of their generation.” The center of the rap world swung decidedly in a Black nationalist direction. Hip-hop culture realigned itself and reimagined its roots, representing itself now as a rap thing, a serious thing, a Black thing.

The unlikely hotbed of the new energy was in the Black Belt of Long Island.

The making of the Enemy, 1988.
Photo © Michael Benabib/Retna LTD.

 

 

Ay uh we didn't get our forty acres and a mule but we did get you, C.C.

—George Clinton

Long Island, where I got ‘em wild and That's the reason they're claiming that I'm violent

—Chuck D

“Def Jam is the ultimate suburban record label,” wrote music critic Frank Owen in one of the earliest articles on Public Enemy. He argued that Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin were creating “the first Black music that hasn't had to dress itself up in showbiz glamour and upwardly mobile mores in order to succeed.” They were leading the battle “against the gentrification of black music.”
¹
Significantly, Simmons, Run DMC and LL Cool J were from home-owning Queens, and Rubin, Original Concept and Public Enemy were from “the well-to-do beach communities of Long Island.”

Owen quoted Public Enemy's lead rapper, Chuck D, an intimidatingly articulate guy whose eyes always seemed hidden beneath the brim of his baseball cap. “Raps from the suburbs are a little more broad,” Chuck said. “They don't have the closed-in focus like inner-city raps. In the suburbs you can rap about regular everyday life like going to the park and taking a swim. The rest of America can relate to that.”

But Public Enemy's art would always belie easy sociology. Public Enemy's second single, “You're Gonna Get Yours,” was Chuck's ode to his 98 Olds, “the ultimate homeboy car!”—a theme as American as The Beach Boys' “Little Deuce
Coupe.” Yet the song was also about facing down racial profiling with Black posse power, an act of defiance set within the historical context of Robert Moses's expressway-fueled segregation and Levittown's racial covenants. Chuck himself would never rap about going to the park or taking a swim. The suburbs that birthed Def Jam's cultural vanguard were no white-bread New Frontier futurama.