Can't Stop Won't Stop (63 page)

“The police are sending out a message to all the other record companies,” he added, admitting that he and Time Warner execs had received death threats. “I predict they will try to shut down rap music in the next three years.”
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Major labels immediately began to re-evaluate their investments in hip-hop, scrutinizing their rosters for artists whose works might prove politically provocative. By the end of 1992, the witch-hunt had affected dozens of major-label rappers. Kool G Rap and DJ Polo's
Live and Let Die
album was withheld. Tragedy was forced to drop a song called “Bullet,” about a revenge hit on a killer cop. Almighty RSO saw their single “One in the Chamba” lose its promotion budget after protests from the Boston Police Patrolman's Association. The centerpiece of a Boo-Yaa Tribe EP, a song called “Shoot ‘Em Down” that condemned the acquittal of a Compton policeman who had killed two Samoan brothers with nineteen shots, was shelved.

Bay Area rapper Paris was signed to Tom Silverman's Tommy Boy Records,
who had a distribution deal with Time Warner. The political rapper had not only recorded two songs for his new album
Sleeping with the Enemy
—”Coffee Donuts and Death” and “Bush Killa”—which assassinated corrupt cops and President Bush, but he had turned in cover artwork which depicted him laying in wait with a gun near the White House. Paris admitted it was all agit-prop. “In the real world, particularly Black and Latino communities, the problem isn't cop killers, much less records about cop killers,” he said. “The problem is killer cops.”

After President Bush joined the debate around “Cop Killer,” the album's cover art was leaked to the New York Sheriffs Association, and hit the tabloids. In September, Time Warner execs forced Silverman to drop him from Tommy Boy. His next deal with 4th and Broadway, an imprint of the multinational Polygram, was thwarted by high-level execs who, he says, were concerned that his record might visit the same kind of political attacks on the parent company that Time Warner had suffered.

By October, Paris had signed with Rick Rubin, who was also distributed by Time Warner. To avoid being hamstrung by Time Warner, Rubin formed an indie label, Sex Records, and hurriedly geared up to release the record before the election. But before the elections, Time Warner stopped Rubin from releasing the record and gave Paris $100,000 as a settlement. With the money Paris finally released the album on his own Scarface label three weeks after Clinton and Gore had defeated Bush and Quayle.

Ice T spent the last months of 1992 in bitter negotiations with Time Warner over the release of his next album,
Home Invasion
. He came to the realization, he later wrote, “that Warner Brothers cannot afford to be in the business of Black rage. They can be in the business of white rage, but Black rage is much more sensitive. The angry Black person is liable to say anything. The angry Black person might just want to kill everybody. You just don't know. So, they can't be in the business of Black anger while being in the business of Black control, which is another part of the system.”
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He left Time Warner and signed a deal with Byran Turner's indie, Priority Records.

In just a decade, major labels had gone from playing catch-up in a musical genre they had once pegged as a passing novelty to signing every rap act they could to shaking out large numbers of rappers because of their political beliefs. It was that old familiar cycle: neglect, seduction, fear.

Amidst all the political and cultural attacks, the young burned for something that would give them a renewed sense of purpose and move them out of a defensive posture. The hip-hop generation waited for a call.

The gang peacemakers worked with a special urgency. Their truce movement literally meant the difference between life and death. And the victories came. From Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, Latino gangs began peace meetings. Fifty Latino gangs in Santa Ana signed a truce in 1992. Months later, an edict from prison leadership in the Mexican Mafia declared an end to drive-bys. On Halloween in 1993, hundreds of Latino gang members declared a massive truce in the Valley. By 1994, the Rollin' 60s, Eight-Tray Gangsters, Hoover Crips and the Black P-Stones—four of the most intensely warring Black sets—gathered to announce a truce in the Los Angeles' Harbor area.

From Los Angeles, the movement expanded nationwide. On April 29, 1993, Carl Upchurch and the Council for Urban Peace and Justice, with support from Reverend Benjamin Chavis and the NAACP, convened the first national gang summit in Kansas City with representatives from twenty-six cities. Summits were soon organized in Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and San Antonio, and truces followed in each of those cities. The energy unleashed by the gang peace movement helped to catalyze Minister Louis Farrakhan's call for the Million Man March.

Beginning in the summer of 1994, Farrakhan began to shift the tone of his “Stop the Killing” speeches toward a new idea that might climax the street peace ministry he had begun five years before. He would gather a million Black men on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a display of unity and peace. It would show to the world, he said, “The image that you have of Black men is not the image of who and what we really are.”
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He called it a holy day of atonement and reconciliation.

For several years, the Nation of Islam had been moving into closer relations with traditional civil rights organizations and the Congressional Black Caucus. By December, he had tapped the ex-NAACP head Reverend Benjamin Chavis to serve as the national organizer for the March. Chavis had recently been dismissed from the organization amidst charges of sexual and fiscal misconduct, but Farrakhan welcomed him into the Nation, telling followers that Chavis had
been run out because he had been too closely courting youth and the poor. Chavis began a massive organizing effort, working outside of the Nation to recruit Christian churches and college student, community, youth and gang peace organizations.

The effort would be surrounded with controversy. In speeches, Farrakhan had told his followers that the day was to be for men only, that women should stay home and support the March from there. “If not for the woman in the home there could be no strong family or strong community,” Farrakhan said. “We are saying to our Black women you have always been by our sides. In fact you have been leading us. So now that we have made up our minds to stand up for you and our families, we want you to help us in this march by staying at home and teaching to our children what their fathers, uncles or brothers have decided to do.”
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This line closely echoed the ministry of the Promise Keepers, a Christian evangelical organization that had made inroads into working-class and middle-class communities of color. Society was falling apart, they said, because the men were not fulfilling their traditional roles as patriarchs and providers. But to Black feminists, this was retrograde politics. Marcia A. Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine said, “They are stepping up to a patriarchal vision that automatically says Black men are the leaders, and that women's place and role is with the children, frying the chicken, providing medical assistance when needed and writing a poem. I don't think so.”
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Gillespie, Angela Davis, Jewell Jackson McCabe, the founder of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, and Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights formed an organization called African-American Agenda 2000 to oppose the March. Others, like Julianne Malveaux, Kimberle Crenshaw and Michelle Wallace, also raised their voices against the March. It was no less, bell hooks said, than a “celebration of fascist patriarchy.”
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For their criticism, the women became targets of personal attacks, called race traitors and worse.

Black gay men debated how best to engage the Million Man March. Some boycotted it, convinced the March's definition of masculinity was not inclusive.
Their fears were confirmed when the March organizers declined a call to include a Black gay speaker and an HIV-positive speaker on the March platform. The National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum voted not to endorse the rally because of Farrakhan's “sexist and patriarchal tone and the homophobic comments made by some march organizers.”
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But many chose to attend the March anyway. Gregory Adams decided the March was not about Farrakhan. “I think we belong right next to our straight brothers,” he said. “We experience the same racism. I'm a Black gay man who still can't get a cab in D.C.”
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As the March neared and it became clear that hundreds of thousands had been inspired by the call for the March, African Americans argued over how much credit Farrakhan himself should get. In the end, Reverend Chavis sought to establish the March as a big-tent event. “Minister Farrakhan will tell you himself that this is not a Farrakhan march. This is a Black people's march,” Chavis told the
Washington Post
. “We have never said that we are requiring people to agree with a particular philosophy or particular ideology.”
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At dawn on Monday, October 16, 1995, the highways into Washington, D.C., were jammed with carpools and 15,000 buses. Hundreds of thousands of Black men had already gathered on the Mall. The mood was upbeat. The usual tourist-oriented kiosks had been replaced by vendors of jerk chicken and fruit juices, African trinkets and Afrocentric books, Million Man March T-shirts and baseball caps. D.C. activist Al-Malik Farrakhan's gang peace organization was doing a brisk business selling its DON'T SMOKE THE BROTHERS T-shirts. Husbands brought their wives and children. Behind the desks of dozens of voter registration booths were women volunteers.

And as the sun rose in the clear sky, they streamed into the National Mall—senators and city councilpersons, country preachers and urban ministers, gang members and college fraternity brothers, pro-Black militants and Vietnam veterans, desk jockeys and blue-collar workers, elderly and teenagers. They wore buttons that said, 1 IN A MILLION and carried signs that read, THIS IS HISTORY.
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On Ninth Street, a contingent of 150 Black gay men gathered. The night before, they had quietly and seriously discussed what they would do if they faced
violence. Now they marched toward the Mall, chanting, “Gay men of African descent!” They carried signs that read,
I AM A BLACK, GAY MAN. I AM A BLACK MAN. I AM A MAN.

“People were honking their horns and some of them would put their fists up in support. And when we got to the Mall it was just overwhelming,” Maurice Franklin, one of the marchers, told Michelangelo Signorile. “I'm not trying to dismiss the issue of homophobia in our community, because clearly it exists. But on that day, on that Mall, I felt like I knew what it was like to be in the promised land. I felt safe, as if I was in a perfect world for one day.”
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On the platform, Rosa Parks, Kweisi Mfume, Tynetta Muhammad, Maulana Karenga, Queen Mother Moore, Carol Moseley Braun, Cornel West, Stevie Wonder and Jesse Jackson came to the podium. Maya Angelou read a poem: “And so we rise, and so we rise again.”

In the afternoon, Minister Louis Farrakhan rose before the crowd. He spoke of the slaves that had once been sold on the ground they were standing on. “George Washington said he feared that before too many years passed over his head, this slave would prove to become a most troublesome species of property,” he said. “And so we stand here today at this historic moment.” Then, for two-and-a-half hours, with poetry, history, numerology, esoterica and wordplay, he gave a quintessentially American speech on his chosen topic: “Toward a more perfect union.”

“Freedom can't come from white folks. Freedom can't come from staying here and petitioning this great government. We're here to make a statement to the great government, but not to beg them,” Farrakhan said. “Freedom cannot come from no one but the God who can liberate the soul from the burden of sin.”

Through personal atonement could come reconciliation, and then unity. Through unity, brothers could bring an end to white supremacy, which Farrakhan said was the ultimate source of America's and the world's sickness. But it all started with the redemption of one's self.

He ended by asking the gathering to join him in a pledge:

Say with me please, I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will strive to love my brother as I love myself. I, say your name, from this day forward will strive to improve myself spiritually, morally, mentally, socially,
politically and economically for the benefit of myself, my family and my people.

I, say your name, pledge that I will strive to build business, build houses, build hospitals, build factories and then to enter international trade for the good of myself, my family and my people. I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will never raise my hand with a knife or a gun to beat, cut or shoot any member of my family or any human being, except in self-defense.

I, say your name, pledge from this day forward I will never abuse my wife by striking her, disrespecting her, for she is the mother of my children and the producer of my future. I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will never engage in the abuse of children, little boys, or little girls for sexual gratification. But I will let them grow in peace to be strong men and women for the future of our people. I, say your name, will never again use the B-word to describe my female, but particularly my own Black sister.

I, say your name, pledge from this day forward that I will not poison my body with drugs or that which is destructive to my health and my well being. I, say your name, pledge from this day forward, I will support Black newspapers, Black radio, Black television. I will support Black artists, who clean up their acts to show respect for themselves and respect for their people, and respect for the ears of the human family.

I, say your name, will do all of this, so help me God.