Can't Stop Won't Stop (42 page)

A Nation of Millions: A Las Vegas
Chicano goes home to beats and rhymes.
Photo © B
⁺

 

 

It's my sense that this is the summer it's all gonna come down.

—White American film critic to Spike Lee at Cannes Festival
¹

Oh 1989, man. I planned for it to be crazy. But shit.

—Chuck D

There would be no dead air on Public Enemy's second album,
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,
not a second wasted. “Armageddon has been in effect,” Professor Griff boomed on the live clip opening the album, “go get a late pass!”

Public Enemy's presentation had crystallized. They positioned themselves as heirs to James Brown's loud, Black and proud tradition, putting their black vinyl inside a re-creation of the soul-on-lockdown album cover of Brown's
Revolution of the Mind
. Chuck summed up how they had adapted JB's aesthetic: “Repetitive repetition, relentless—no escape. He took it to the bridge, we take it over the bridge. Over and over. Again and again.”
²

Across the bottom of the cover ran a quote lifted from the Bar-Kays at Wattstax:
FREEDOM IS A ROAD SELDOM TRAVELED BY THE MULTITUDE
. On the back, the crew glared upward, dressed for combat, their feet soiling an American flag on the prison floor. Flavor Flav's clock read somewhere round midnight. If you weren't getting yourself free in this hour of chaos, they seemed to say, your mind would always be behind bars.

Opening with an urgent speech by Nation of Islam “hip-hop minister” Dr. Khallid Abdul Muhammad, “Night of the Living Baseheads” was their sampledrenched
tour de force
—the emergency pulse of “Rebel Without a Pause” reversed, quickened, chopped up, disrupted and displaced to convey crack's poison attack. Bomb Squad alarms were more ironic than the Ohio Players' arson-era “Fire,” more dramatic than the Clash's roots rebel rock, “White Riot.” After
Nation of Millions,
the siren became a generational motif, a sign of provocation and reaction, not just through rap, but post-freestyle house (via the New York producer Todd Terry, whose best track was done under the pseudonym Black Riot), and the anarchic British rave scene.

Chuck and Flavor Flav described coming of age in a state of unending war. Even Flavor's showcase, “Cold Lampin,” made dark humor of the ever-present danger of instant death.
Nation of Millions
represented organized reaction. “I never live alone, I never walk alone,” Chuck rapped on “Louder than a Bomb.” “My posse's always ready and they're waitin' in my zone.” On the album's centerpiece, an Attica revenge tale called “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” he rapped, “I'm a Black man—and I could never be a veteran.”

“Simply put,” Harry Allen wrote in
The City Sun,
“this is the album that ends the ‘80s.”
³

But what were the ‘90s supposed to be about? That's where it got messy.

On the campuses, the political and cultural rads of color who had once found common inspiration in the anti-apartheid struggle now seemed to be moving in different directions.

The political rads formed organizations like the Black Student Leadership Network, ran the United States Student Association, and formed the backbone of resurgent labor and community organizing movements. Their Third Worldist philosophy—drawn from the anticolonial writings of Franz Fanon and some of the last speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—was summed up in the name of the powerful student coalition that had emerged at U.C. Berkeley during the anti-apartheid movement, United People of Color.

At the same time, cultural nationalists like Karenga and Molefi Kete Asante championed Afrocentricity as an intellectual program that would decenter Eurocentric educational bias, recover and reclaim the lost ancient roots of African glory, and recenter African thought and experience in the production of
knowledge and self. They developed a curriculum based on an alternative canon of Chiekh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, John Henrik Clarke, Martin Bernal and their own writings. Their emphasis on self-esteem and self-actualization dovetailed with the street ministries of the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters.

As the cultural rads spread the gospel of Afrocentricity from the Afro-American Studies programs to charter schools, black bookstores, and self-organized study groups, the political rads got out the vote for Jesse Jackson. His second presidential run in 1988 was pitched as a campaign of hope. At each whistle stop, he led rainbow crowds in chants of “Keep hope alive.” It might have seemed strange, but after eight years of Reagan these white heartland farmers and Chicano farmworkers, Black factory workers and Asian seam-stresses wanted to
believe
. The campaign would be a culmination of the ‘60s, a grand synthesis of the civil rights and Black power agendas, a united front of liberation movements saved from bullet nihilism by ballot-box optimism.

Jackson's campaign seemed to come out of nowhere. On Super Tuesday, Jackson took first or second in sixteen of the twenty-one Democratic primaries, and surged ahead of the field in total votes. In the next primary in Michigan, he crushed future presidential candidates Michael Dukakis and Al Gore, winning 55 percent of the vote. In Wisconsin, the next stop, his campaign was hitting new heights of fervor. Then Jackson ran headlong into an accusation he could never disprove.

The problem had begun during the 1984 campaign. While waiting for his plane one day in January, he beckoned to the Black reporters, “Let's talk Black talk.”
⁴
During the course of his light rambling, he referred to Jewish people as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” One of the reporters, Milton Coleman, reported the comments to another writer at his paper, the
Washington Post
, who ran them a month later in an article with the headline,
PEACE WITH AMERICAN JEWS ELUDES JACKSON
. Jackson was soon being called antiSemitic.

Jackson's relationship to Minister Louis Farrakhan attracted close scrutiny. The two were old Chicago friends. When the Secret Service refused to protect Jackson, Farrakhan sent the Fruit of Islam. When Jackson traveled to Syria to secure the release of African-American fighter pilot Robert Goodman, he
asked Farrakhan to join him. Now, at an assembly at his mosque, Farrakhan defended Jackson against the charges, pointing to him and saying, “If you harm this brother, I warn you in the name of Allah this will be the last one you harm.”

Jewish critics were already incensed at Jackson for his position on Palestinian rights. They had widely circulated a 1979 photo of him embracing Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, taken during a meeting to dissuade Arafat from terrorism. Now they leaped to sandbag him. Nathan Perlmutter of the Anti-Defamation League later said, “There's an irony with ‘Hymie.' On the scale of insults, ‘Hymie' isn't a yellow star pinned to your sleeve. [But] it's what opened up [the chance] for somebody like myself to be heard on a dimension of Jesse Jackson's character. He could light candles every Friday night, and grow side curls, and it still wouldn't matter. He's still a whore.”
⁵

At the same time, the mainstream media combed Farrakhan's NOI addresses for evidence of anti-Semitism. In a March speech, Farrakhan seemed to threaten
Post
reporter Coleman and his wife, and was widely misquoted by the media as calling Hitler “great.” Farrakhan's actual words had referred to “Hitler's evil toward Jewish people,” and he later said that he meant Hitler was “wickedly great,” but certainly he could not have been naive as to how such comments might play in the press.

In June, returning from a visit to Libya, Farrakhan condemned Israel by stating: “Now that nation called Israel never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under his holy and righteous name.”
⁶
Media reports held that he had called the Jewish faith a “gutter religion.” Farrakhan biographer Arthur Magida would later note that Farrakhan had also used the term “dirty religion” to refer to incorrect interpretations of NOI theology.
⁷
But the damage was done. When the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to censure Farrakhan, Jackson quickly repudiated him.

And yet, to many in the Black community, the minister was speaking a deeper truth. While defending Jackson, Farrakhan had said, “We know that Blacks and Jews have had a good relationship in the past. We've gotten along well, because you're a suffering people and so are we. But my dear Jewish friends, you
understand that everything comes of age. We cannot define our self-interest in terms of your self-interest.”
⁸
In New York City, the national center of both African-American and Jewish-American power, the Black-Jewish coalition was in the final throes of its spectacular collapse.

In December 1987, the Palestinian
intifada
broke out in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, instantly polarizing Jewish-American politics. The defense of Israel became a defense of Jewish-American identity itself. Now, just as some Black nationalists conflated Zionism with racism, Jewish-American nationalist groups like the Anti-Defamation League conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

But as Black political commentator Adolph Reed pointed out, Israel and Farrakhan also provided symbolic cover for issues closer to home, ones that dated at least to Ocean Hill/Brownsville. Jackson's pro–affirmative action, pro-Black empowerment agenda could potentially upset Jewish privilege. At the same time, Jackson's “Black talk” revealed that upwardly mobile Blacks no longer perceived the Jewish middle-class as an ally but a threat. The result on both sides was, in Reed's words, “a meanness of spirit and small-mindedness.”
⁹

So the 1988 Wisconsin primary became crucial for Jackson and his opponents. On the eve of the primary, New York City mayor Ed Koch made his own Jewishness an issue and baited Jackson: “Would [Jackson] support any candidate who praised Botha in South Africa? I wouldn't. But on the other hand, he's praising Arafat, and he thinks maybe Jews and other supporters of Israel should vote for him.” If Jews were to vote for him, Koch added, “they've got to be
crazy
—in the same way that they'd be crazy if they were Black and voted for someone who was praising Botha and the racist supporters of the South African administration.”
¹⁰
With Koch's comments receiving extensive coverage, Jackson lost Wisconsin to Dukakis by twenty points.

The New York primary was to follow, and at almost every stop in New York City, Jackson had to answer to his “Hymietown” remarks and his relationship with Farrakhan. He continued his penitence—against the backdrop of the intensifying
intifada
—but it was like he had gone backward four years. Many Jews were angered anew, while many Blacks wondered what else Jackson could do to be forgiven. At one end of the unbridgeable gap was the Jewish Defense Organization, a tiny cadre of white-collar militiamen who showed up at
Jackson's appearances to call him a “Black Nazi.” At the other, the Nation of Islam revived a passel of anti-Semitic tracts, including Henry Ford's
The International Jew
, and the long-discredited forgery,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
.

When the New York polls closed in 1988, Jackson had secured 94 percent of the Black vote, 17 percent of the white vote and a mere 8 percent of the Jewish vote. He lost to Dukakis by fourteen points. A former aide called it the most disheartening electoral defeat Jackson had ever faced.
¹¹
The Rainbow dream had been dashed against the rocks of the Black-Jewish problem.

Despite collecting 1,200 delegates and 7 million actual votes and coming in second to Michael Dukakis, the closest any Black man had ever come to becoming president, Jackson felt that he was forced to beg to be Dukakis's running mate. In a final dis, he learned from a journalist that Dukakis had picked milquetoast Lloyd Bentsen as the vice presidential candidate. In the general election, the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket took Wisconsin and New York, but lost forty states to Bush and Quayle.

Perhaps Public Enemy had been prophetic in an unintended way. At the beginning of “Rebel Without a Pause,” the Bomb Squad seemed to salute Jackson's decision to run again. But rather than using one of Jackson's signature affirmations, they sampled him introducing a protest song from The Soul Children at Wattstax. Divorced from context, Jackson now sounded uncertain and troubled: “Brothers and sisters, I don't know what this world is coming to.”

After Jackson's candidacy was finished, Professor Griff said, “Not only didn't he win, he didn't even go out fighting.”
¹²

Perhaps the most vexing question of the post–civil rights generation—raised on
Sesame Street
and
Roots
, King's “I Have a Dream” speech and
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, and living within the coils of an unsleeping, omnipresent, icon-hungry media—has been: “Who will be our leaders?”

“In our hunger for a charismatic, post-King/Malcolm figure, a vacuum existed,” Bill Stephney says. “I don't think that the times of the eighties were any less politically volatile than at any other point in history. The difference was the vacuum of leadership.”

In an influential article in 1996 in
Social Policy
, the late black activist Lisa Sullivan, cofounder of the Black Student Leadership Network and one of the first hip-hop intellectuals, laid out the politics—and the stakes—behind Stephney's claim: