Can't Stop Won't Stop (46 page)

There appeared to be a sense of ennui within the Public Enemy camp. They had returned home to get their first rest in months and to resolve their personal issues. The band was in crisis, and they looked like they were sleepwalking through it. In reality, they were gasping for air, hoping for Chuck to take control.

They convened to try to work out a consensus, but the energy around these meetings was low. Chuck says, “Somebody would show up not on point. Either Griff would come late, I would be present or not present or somebody else would be present or not present. So therefore the meeting grew into meetings and there was different ideas and philosophies on how to handle it.

“I said no matter how we deal with this, chances are we should deal with this as together as we can, even if motherfuckers ain't feeling each other. Regardless of whatever the fuck we gonna do, we all gonna be looking at each other in Roosevelt one day or another so let's handle this right. And it just wasn't handled totally right.”

Chuck was reluctant to lead. He felt he should defer to Bill Stephney and Hank Shocklee, especially Hank, who was two years his senior and had been the leader since their Spectrum City days. At the same time, he says, “I didn't want anybody handling me, telling me what I should do.”

By now Griff's statements had hit the network newscasts and Hank and Bill were convinced something needed to be done. Chuck wanted a compromise that would save him and the touring crew some face. He felt Hank and Bill were forcing him into a difficult choice, to choose between Public Enemy as an idea dreamed up at 510 South Franklin and the actual group that it had become, a choice between “the creation and the creators.”

“The only thing that would have made everything fit is if I actually assumed leadership and jacked everybody and said, ‘This is how it is and fuck y'all!' ” he says. But that was the last thing he was going to do.

At the same time, Chuck was pissed at Griff. He felt Griff knew the line not to
cross with interviewers, but he had taken it there by himself. In one of the crew meetings at 510 South Franklin, Hank and Bill had played a taped copy of the taped interview with Mills, and questioned Griff about it. Stephney says, “Griff, at that meeting, basically said he was having difficulties with the group. He had had a bad day that day, that apparently some dissension had been building that [Hank and I] were unaware of. That perhaps these comments were a cry for help. But then again, later, Griff said they weren't a cry for help, that it was what he believed.”

The crew was torn. Some believed Griff had tried to sabotage the group. They could either demand Griff's ouster or publicly affirm that the crew stand by him. They would do neither. They were paralyzed.

Yet Smith's column had created a firestorm that demanded a resolution. First Chuck called Smith and yelled at him, “Listen to me, R. J., any shit comes down on me, it's coming down on you! And that's a goddamned threat! Write this down! I ain't gonna write no white-boy liberal letter to the editor, no article either.”
⁴⁰

But Chuck did write a letter, dated Monday, June 19, 1989. Addressed
TO ALL OFFENDED, CONCERNED AND UNCONCERNED
, it read as much like a manifesto of Public Enemy's cultural radicalism as a condemnation of Griff:

Public Enemy stands for the rebuilding and the preservation of the Black mind, be it young, old or unborn. Our sole purpose is to make our people and all people recognize and repair the true state that we are in . . .

Professor Griff's timing, choice of words or attitude reflected in his statements is not representative of the program of Public Enemy or reflective of the position of Minister of Information for the group. . . . In that this is the first Black music group whose goal it is to raise the consciousness level of Black people and let them know that the real enemy is a system, not a people, this form of information (music) breaks down barriers quicker than any previous methods . . .

This is a
Black
and I repeat
Black
family matter. This decision had to be made in a Black disciplined manner, since this industry has a large vested
interest in the Black community, as well as a history of unfair compensation to our Black artists, producers and talented people involved. We feel that our decision should be acknowledged and respected. The outside points of view and feelings to oust our brother are that of an emotional lynch mob. We can understand the mentality behind that. Also understand that Public Enemy is the official voice of the rap world, Black youth, oppressed youth and yes, many white youth in the western world . . .

This is an important summer for Black youth and white youth as well; never have they shared so much in common. The once reluctant MTV brass seemingly cannot handle the mix of Black culture and white youth in a way that previous corporate structures have exploited this combination in the past. At the same time, it is “make it” or “break it” in 1989, the line between acceptance and exploitation is very vague and if the true word is not there, magnify Central Park times one hundred in the 1990s, that's how serious these crossroads are. This unnecessary noise in the quest for Black Power has halted progress for the future of the Black mindset here. Why Black Power? And what is it? Black Power is only a self-defense movement that counterattacks the system of white world supremacy, not white people or the religious sects that they choose. It does not mean anti-white, it means anti-a-system that has been designed by the European elite for the wrong purpose of benefiting off of people of color or at Black people's expense . . .
⁴¹

In this letter, Chuck announced that Griff had been removed from the Minister of Information position, to be replaced by Brother James “Bomb” Allen of the S1Ws. He would remain in the group but be relieved of spokesperson duties. Chuck alone would handle all interviews.

“Peace to all who are right,” Chuck's letter concluded. “Peace to all offended.”

Although David Mills reported on the letter in the
Washington Times
, it was never officially released. But by Tuesday evening, after Smith's account of his phone call with Chuck had hit the newsstands, a suspension seemed inadequate.
Adler, in particular, was encouraging Chuck to do more than suspend Griff. The two of them and Bill Stephney convened to write a press statement and called a press conference for the very next day.

Chuck says now, “Of course, people look back, ‘Oh Chuck was waffling.' Well, goddamn right I was waffling! What the fuck. How could you not waffle? And at the same time I would have to assume leadership in order to make that decision, knowing that one side or the other would be gone.

“It happened that both of them disappeared. Hank and Bill went off to do their thing, and Griff was out.” For Chuck, it was the worst of all possible worlds. And yet Public Enemy had still not hit bottom.

On Wednesday, June 21, flanked by Stephney and Rush Communications president Carmen Ashhurst-Watson in a midtown hotel room, before nearly three dozen reporters and cameramen, the unflappable Chuck was uncharacteristically stiff and formal, cap pulled low over his eyes, as he read the prepared statement:

The Black community, both here and abroad, is in the midst of a terrible crisis. Our plan has been, first, to define the problems then to suggest solutions. Offensive remarks by Professor Griff over the past, I should say, year, in a couple of interviews, are not in line with Public Enemy's program at all. We are not anti-Jewish. We are not anti-anyone. We are pro-Black, pro-Black culture and pro–human race, and that's been said before many times. You see, Griff's responsibility as Minister of Information was to faithfully transmit these values to everybody. In practice, he sabotaged those values.

In the interest of keeping the group together, we tried to deal with Griff's problems internally, but we were unsuccessful. Consequently, as of today. Professor Griff is no longer a member of Public Enemy.

This was the first anyone in the group besides Hank and Bill had heard of Chuck's decision. Now he departed from the text.

It is my obligation to discipline my brother if he's offended anybody. We apologize to anybody who might have been offended by Griff's remarks and we're kind of offended, too. Cause our policy is not to offend anyone,
it's to offend the system that works against us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
⁴²

Praise from Jewish leaders and the mainstream media, including
New York Newsday
, was immediate.

But in the Black community, there were different words. Some felt Chuck's statement was proof that Jews
were
running things. Others wondered if Griff were a counterintelligence agent. At the press conference, Armond White, one of the only Blacks in the room, asked Chuck point-blank if he wasn't caving to white pressure. In an essay in the
Brooklyn City Sun
, White dismissed the event as a “rap show” meant to smooth whites' ruffled feathers.”

White believed Chuck's stance, especially on Black-Jewish relations, was a crucial test. Was he really the organic intellectual he claimed to be? Could he engage the race and show them the way forward? Could a rapper be a Black leader? Chuck was found lacking.

“Here's the sad part: the fiery beauty of Public Enemy was that it refused to pander to ‘brotherhood' sentimentalists. PE made the uplifting of Black people seem connected to all human struggle,” he wrote. “Now, in apology, Chuck says that the specific discussion of race and Black-Jewish relations is a ‘conversation that's so detailed and so intense and so wrapped up, it goes outside the area of music and dealing with the masses. ‘Cause the masses of our people are not even at the level to understand something like that.'

“With this attitude, Chuck D isn't good for anything except recording mindless, pointless confections,” White angrily wrote. “This is the first tough fight Public Enemy has had to face and they've crumbled like chalk.”
⁴³

Chuck left the room as the press dispersed, stepped into an adjacent room and angrily began kicking over chairs. That night, he drafted another statement to the Black community. But even this statement wouldn't change the three most upsetting facts: Griff had never apologized to the crew; many Black fans felt Chuck had sold Griff down the river; and some youths might be learning the wrong lesson from the whole episode: that taking any kind of stand was futile. This letter, too, went in the wastebasket.

Chuck felt he was treading water: “You try to swim to the edge, wherever that edge was, and the edge was miles away.” With no good solution, he resorted
to elusiveness, rhetorical bobbing and weaving. The next day, in interviews with Kurt Loder for MTV News and on WLIB, Chuck announced, “We got sandbagged. And being that we got sandbagged, the group is over today.”
⁴⁴
Chuck spun it as a political statement: they were going out by boycotting a music industry that had robbed them of self-determination.

Behind the scenes, the group was still roiling. Chuck, Hank and a close associate Aliyah Mubarak drafted a final statement called “The Real Story.” While supporting Griff “as a brother,” the letter pointed the blame back at him. But this statement also ended up in the trash. Chuck says, “I didn't think the real story was anybody's business.”

Long ago, when Public Enemy was still on the drawing board at 510 South Franklin, Hank had concocted a plan and taken it to Chuck. “I wanted PE to have a born date and a death date,” Hank says. “The beauty of that would be to have an album called ‘The Day PE Died.' ” Chuck brushed it aside, and they had forgotten about it. Now that Hank, Bill and Griff were gone, that day seemed to have come.

In Chicago, Chuck led Public Enemy through a final gig, then the crew retreated to meet privately with Minister Farrakhan. He told them they were in for a trying time, that they needed to watch their words. For the time being, Farrakhan said, they should be to be silent and hope to ride the situation out. Humbled, they returned to Long Island to sort out the implosion.

At the end of 1989's riotous summer, two months after
Do the Right Thing
opened and Public Enemy collapsed, Bensonhurst happened. On the evening of August 23, sixteen-year-old Bed-Stuy resident Yusuf Hawkins was on the subway with three friends to see a used Pontiac G2000 in the primarily Italian Brooklyn neighborhood. There were eerie parallels to the Howard Beach incident.

Hawkins and his friends stepped into a bodega to ask directions and get some drinks and candy bars. They walked a few blocks up the street past a schoolyard where a mob of more than twenty young white males was gathering. A neighborhood girl had taunted them all day, telling them her Black and Latino boys were coming around to party with her, the local equivalent of nuclear
aggression. Armed with bats and golf clubs, the young whites were preparing to chase the outsiders out of their hood.

When Hawkins and his friends passed, the mob left the yard and followed them up the street. As Hawkins neared the address of the car owner, the mob stopped them. “What are you niggers doing here?” one yelled. Then Joey Fama stepped out of the mob and said, “To hell with beating them up. I'm gonna shoot the nigger!”
⁴⁵
Hawkins received four bullets in the chest, and died shortly thereafter.

In the following weeks, the Reverend Al Sharpton marched into Bensonhurst chanting, “No justice, no peace!” He was met by angry young whites holding up watermelons and screaming, “Niggers go home!”
⁴⁶
On September 1, in another Day of Outrage protest, Sonny Carson and his son's hip-hop crew, X-Clan and the Blackwatch Movement, led ten thousand demonstrators through downtown Brooklyn toward the Brooklyn Bridge, where they engaged in a bottle-throwing, baton-swinging standoff with the police that left forty-four cops injured. Perhaps, after years of racist killings and street reactions, the Black power activists were hitting a rhetorical and tactical standoff.