Can't Stop Won't Stop (37 page)

After World War II, African Americans began moving to the suburbs of Queens. Soon what would become known as “the Black Belt” spilled past Queens's eastern borders into Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk Counties. By the 1970s, it stretched from Merrick and Freeport through Roosevelt to Hempstead.

“Long Island represented an outpost for many New Yorkers trying to escape what had become the ravages of urban America in the ‘60s,” says Bill Stephney. “White ethnics—Italians, European Jews, Irish—were all moving out from their various sectors of New York City to escape Blacks and Latinos. The thing is the working to middle-class Black generation living in the Bed-Stuys and the Parkchesters, the Bronx and Harlem, also wanted the same thing. Raise their kids with backyards and birds. The quote unquote American dream.”

The core of what would become Public Enemy—Carlton “Chuck D” Riden-hour, Bill Stephney, Hank “Shocklee” Boxley, William “Flavor Flav” Drayton, Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin and Harry “Allen” McGregor—were all born between 1958 to 1961, and had moved to the Black Belt by the early ‘70s. 1980 census data showed that over 40 percent of white New Yorkers lived in the suburbs, but only 8 percent of Black New Yorkers did.
²
In other words, they were part of the race's “talented tenth,” the very embodiment of the brightest hopes of integrationists.

Bill's father, Ted Stephney, had been a Jackie Robinson of sorts, joining the staff of
Sports Illustrated
magazine in 1954 and eventually rising to become the magazine's first Black editor. In 1965, he moved his family from Harlem to Hempstead. The Stephneys were pioneers on their block, one of three Black families among about forty whites. More Black families moved in, but in practice, integration never worked the way that civil rights activists had hoped.

In 1966, integration orders were issued by New York State education officials
for Freeport, Glen Cove, Roosevelt and Amityville. These communities suddenly looked more attractive to Black homebuyers. White real estate agents descended on white homeowners to encourage them to sell their homes and “upgrade” to new developments to the north and east. By skillfully exploiting fears, real-estate agents could double their sales in a practice known as “block-busting.” For all practical purposes, racism and the market ensured that these neighborhoods were “integrated” only in passing.

When Chuck's family moved from the Queensbridge projects to Roosevelt in 1969, buying their piece of the dream for the relatively affordable price of $20,000, the number of Blacks in the neighborhood had long passed the tipping point—that unspoken ratio somewhere between 10 and 20 percent that triggered white flight. “Two years prior it was about maybe 90 percent white. When we moved in it was about 50 percent. Two years later, about 90 percent Black,” he says. The oldest of three children, Chuck grew up in virtually an all-Black suburb.

Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act had banned discrimination in selling and renting homes, Stephney says, “Black folks were shown Hempstead and Roosevelt and parts of Freeport, also New Cassel.” Other Long Island towns, like Wyandanch, Brentwood and Amityville—homes to the rappers Rakim Allah, EPMD and De La Soul, respectively—also became largely Black. In between, places like East Meadow, Baldwin, Rockville Centre, the fading
über
burb of Levittown and the sparkling “edge cities” or exurbs encircling the Black Belt to the north and east remained mostly white.

By the early 1970s, Long Island's Black Belt was firmly established. Two decades later,
Newsday
would find that illegal steering practices were still commonplace and called Long Island housing patterns “apartheid-like.”
³
While the victories of the civil rights and Black power movements had expanded the Black middle-class, that middle-class was now just as segregated as its “underclass” counterparts were.

So yes, they had made it to Long Island. But no, this wasn't the promised land. Black suburbia was a safe island in a sea of whiteness, and incontrovertible evidence of white resistance to King's dream.

Newsday
found that while many of Long Island's white students attended some of the best schools in the country,

[m]ore than half of the Island's 40,000 Black public school children attend 11 districts where academic programs and resources are measurably inferior to those in white schools: They are poorly equipped, their teachers are less experienced and underpaid. Test scores are low, the dropout rate is high, few students go on to college.
⁴

In a
Newsday
poll, most Blacks rated race relations as “fair” or “poor.”
⁵
Three-quarters wanted to live in integrated communities. By contrast, fully 55 percent of white Long Islanders preferred to live in mostly white neighborhoods, a rate high above the national average.

Some white youths apparently shared their parents' feelings. In 1985, a cineplex in Franklin Square, a white town edging against Hempstead, opened the Run DMC vehicle,
Krush Groove
, next to the Freddy Krueger bloody-white-picket-fence flick,
Nightmare on Elm Street
, and fights between Black and white youths broke out. One white teenager complained that
Krush Groove
was “attracting a Black crowd to a white town. That means trouble, especially because they come out of the movie all psyched up.”
⁶
The movie was a comedy. Critics hated the movie, but no one else had ever accused it of being provocative.

White cops seemed to treat the Black suburbs as an advancing border. Although Blacks made up only 9 percent of Long Island's population, they made up over 30 percent of the arrests in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and 43 percent of suspects shot at by police. Only 2 percent of the police force was Black.
⁷
The poll found that Blacks were four times more likely than whites to distrust police.

Sociologists had begun calling places like the Black Belt “inner-ring suburbs.” The housing stock was aging, housing values had leveled off, education and social services were declining and crack dealers were beginning to appear. These suburban Blacks were caught between Black poverty and white flight. They were buffers between inner-city ghettos of color and the
new
New Frontier of white wealth in the exurbs.

To neoconservative and neoliberal pundits, the end of integration meant it
was time for the Black race's talented tenth to take responsibility to save the race. But as journalist Ellis Cose wrote in his book
The Rage of a Privileged Class
, “The irony in such arguments is that the ‘decent Black people' who will save America from the underclass, those paragons of middle-class virtue who will rescue the ghetto from violence, are themselves in a state of either silent resentment or deeply repressed rage. Taken as a group, they are at least as disaffected and pessimistic as those struggling at society's periphery.”
⁸

Living in this borderland, where everything mixed and clashed, one might be freighted with a feeling of being in-between all the time—a Duboisian double-consciousness complicated by the burden of class. But being Black and middle class could also be liberating. The
Newsday
poll noted what it thought to be a conundrum: “[M]ost Blacks were optimistic about the future even while believing that segregation will stay the same or increase.”
⁹

A sacred tenet of the civil rights movement had been that allowing Black families into white neighborhoods or Black students into white classrooms would lift their expectations, eliminate their alleged pathologies, and brighten their life chances. Integration was presumed to be the economic and cultural ideal for Blacks, just as assimilation was for immigrants. But while most Long Island Blacks liked the idea of integration—indeed, much more than their white counterparts—they certainly did not feel that they
needed
integration to succeed.

To them, the Black Belt was also an idyll, the sort of place in which Marcus Garvey's son, a doctor named Julius, could open his heart surgery practice. Whites often came to Dr. Garvey's office, took one look at him, and never returned. But this Black-owned business was not suffering, nor were many others.
¹⁰

The Black Belt was culturally rich. Chuck's mother, Judy Ridenhour, formed the Roosevelt Community Theater and ran it from 1971 to 1985, mentoring a number of young actors and actresses, such as Chuck's childhood buddy, Eddie Murphy. Chuck, Hank, Eddie and Richard Griffin, were sent to study blackness on white campuses. Between 1970 and 1972, they attended a summer program at Hofstra and Adelphi universities organized and taught by Black Panthers, Black Muslims and university students, called “The Afro-American Experience,” the local manifestation of the national movement for ethnic studies and Afro-American studies. The program proved instrumental in convincing Chuck and Hank to attend those still largely white universities years later.

And the Black Belt never felt far from the city. “Every weekend my family and most of our families would come back from Long Island and visit our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on the weekend in Harlem and in the Bronx,” says Stephney. That's where the kids discovered the future culture.

“My grandmother lived in the projects in the northern Bronx where DJ Breakout basically was doing his thing in the Quadrangle,” says Stephney. “I'm thirteen, fourteen. The noise that we heard my parents thought was
crime
,” he laughs. Stephney was aware of the class gulf. These weekend trips offered a constant reminder of the way things
really were
, and even suggested an opportunity to be grabbed.

Stephney says, “We could sort of vicariously live out the life that our cousins were living. It was sort of like we were slumming. But then we could go back to Long Island and go to school and maybe get a couple of extra dollars from our parents to buy turntables, take some of the advantages that our cousins in Bronx River and Soundview Houses didn't have economic advantage to do.”

They were products of the failure of the civil rights dream of integration, but the Black Belt youths also had access to different realities, and they had the time and space to think through and map out how to take their place in the new world.

When Schoolly D's “P.S.K.” hit the Black suburbs of Long Island, Harold McGregor and Hank Boxley were two clerks in dead-end entry-level jobs at a fading department store called TSS. They were bored, unhappy and underemployed. They stole time to discuss the hottest new rap single and dream of the future.

By night, Boxley was a famous DJ, the Afrika Bambaataa of Long Island. In 1974, he had started doing shows as a teenager at the Roosevelt Youth Center. Now his mobile DJ unit, Spectrum City, was the one of the best-known sound systems in the Black Belt. But he had doubts about how far it could all go.

At one point, Spectrum City had been in the right place at the right time. In the mid-1970s, the teenagers of Queens's Black middle-class were building the biggest sound systems yet seen in the boroughs, putting scads of funk cover bands out of work. Long Island DJ crews followed soon after. Spectrum City and
its rivals, Pleasure, King Charles, and the Infinity Machine, rocked community centers, roller rinks, Elks Club and hotel ballrooms, and then moved to a bigger, more attractive base, the area's universities, including Adelphi, C. W. Post and Boxley's alma mater, Hofstra. Soon, folks came from as far away as the Queens neighborhoods of Jamaica and Hollis to check out the campus parties.

Carlton Ridenhour began writing rhymes after the blackout of 1977, inspired by cassettes he had encountered while working summer jobs in Manhattan. He and Hank both came of age just as the nascent Long Island scene hit a transition point in 1978 and 1979. While the hip-hop core in the city was growing up and moving away from the big street beat, a young Long Island hip-hop constituency was forming. Spectrum City was at the center of a new energy.

But their flyers were wack. Ridenhour was at Adelphi studying graphic design. He stepped up to Hank to offer to redesign their flyers. “Hank looked at me like I was crazy,” he says, and nothing came of the request.

By September 1979, Boxley was convinced he needed a permanent MC to front Spectrum City. One night at the end of an open mic session at Adelphi's Thursday Night Throwdown, a booming voice turned Shocklee's head. Riden-hour, it seemed, had other talents.

In fact he had the kind of voice that cut through brick walls. He had patterned himself after DJ Hollywood, DJ Smalls and Eddie Cheeba, disco rap DJs whose greatest skill lay in moving their crowds. “To get the party crowd amped, to get them hyped?” says Stephney, “Chuck D was one of the greatest party MCs of all time.”

“When they got to ‘Love Is the Message' or especially when they got to ‘Good Times,' you had people lining up on the mic trying to get down. And me, I would just get on the mic just to shut people up, because I just didn't want to hear nine million people on the mic,” Ridenhour recalls. “And when he found it was me, the same guy with the flyers, he was like, ‘What the fuck! You from Roosevelt! Why don't you get down with me?' ”

As Ridenhour pondered the decision, “Rapper's Delight” came out. The decision was sealed. He took over flyer design duties and became the rapper “Chuckie D.” He began wearing his Spectrum City jacket around campus. He landed a daily cartoon in the school paper and called the Pedro Bell–styled strip, “Tales of the Skind.” In it, Spectrum City became a crew of superheroes
who regularly saved the world from Reagan the “King of the 666,” and a host of lesser villains.