It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (21 page)

The scene:
A calm, star-spangled sky suspended above Philadelphia like the snatch of silence before a great storm. This moment of clarity was fitting because, just hours earlier, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, I interviewed rappers Dead Prez about their altercation with and subsequent civil suit against the notorious NYPD. Even amid a hip-hop landscape overrun with toxic waste, Dead Prez has been an unflinching beacon of light, critically exposing, among a myriad of other contributions, the police brutality that occurs routinely in Black and Latino communities. In their song “Police State,” they rap:

Instead of
protecting and serving
the community, these cops
served
Dead Prez (etc.) with nightsticks and handcuffs. Dead Prez responded, in part, by retaining the legal services of Brooklyn-based activist and attorney Karl Kamau Franklin in hopes of using the System against itself. One wonders, though, as I did driving through “the city of
brotherly love” on my way home, if this could really be done. Wasn’t this a case of running to the wolf to tell on the fox? Wasn’t it Audre Lorde who proclaimed, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”? That while “they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, they will never enable us to bring about genuine change”? Or, perhaps like the work of all great artists, there was something else—something greater, something deeper, something more knotty—at work here. And I began to see, as I drove up the battered blocks of North Philadelphia, the black face of Caliban, the slave from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
who was taught, by brute force, the bloody language of Prospero, his oppressor. Caliban, in turn, used Prospero’s language to curse him, just as Dead Prez sought to do now.

M.K.A.: What do you hope to accomplish with your lawsuit against the NYPD?

Dead Prez: Our legal representation right now is in Karl Kamau Franklin, who has been very gracious to us and who has been one of the movement lawyers. He donates a lot of his time, pro bono. Knowing that we suffer so much economically, financially, and legally in the hood we need resuscitation. We’re in an emergency, we’re dippin’ in the red zone. We need an IV and he is there to administer. He is leading our legal campaign and has been working with [us] for years and years on some of the same issues, since three years ago when we were attacked and before then. A huge civil suit is being piled up against the state of New York and NYPD by many, many people, who were terrorized by the police here including ourselves, which he hopes to lead along with the Center for Constitutional Rights. That’s a major part of our campaign. However, our campaign cannot simply be legal, there also needs to be people campaigns that put the pressure on Doomberg or Bloomberg to make decisions he wouldn’t normally
have to make. We have to use the legal aspect to provide an out for any community pressure that he might face and he may get a rock thrown at him at a press conference, and he may not be able to open up the stadium that he wanna open up over here for the Brooklyn Nets in the middle of our community in Brooklyn so easily. If the community provides pressure and legally Karl Franklin can point toward a strategy that relieves some of that pressure for him, i.e., freeing political prisoners and prisoners of war, stopping the unjust police practices and so on and so forth.

I was almost home when I, too, was blinded by Prospero’s bloodred and cold, blue flashing lights and deafened by his high-pitched gulp of a cry—
Woop-woop! Woop-woop!
I pulled my car over and came to a full stop in front of a check cashing spot and a thin storefront with a handwritten sign that read
OFF THE CHAIN BAIL BONDS
.

Possible (not probable) causes cascaded through my mind—
Maybe my brake lights are out… Maybe my tag’s expired… Damn, maybe I didn’t pay those parking tickets… Nah, I paid them
—as a cop approached my car, crushing gravel beneath his bulky boots.

“Problem?” I asked, as a pale, paunchy man whose eyes were veiled with tinted shades arrived at my door.

“Where you coming from?” the officer questioned.

“Brooklyn,” I told him as I scanned his tag—
I. CLARK
—into my memory.

“Brooklyn?” he said, surprised. “What’s in Brooklyn?” I knew that, because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, I wasn’t obliged to answer his questions, but because I wanted to get home as soon as possible, I did.

“I was conducting an interview,” I said plainly.

“License and registration,” he requested as his eyes, chasing the orb of his flashlight, searched through my car.

“It’s in the glove compartment,” I stated.

“Slowly,” he warned.

My hands, moving in calculated slow motion, floated toward the glove compartment when—

“I said slow,” the cop screeched as he grabbed the handle of his Glock. “Unless you want to get shot!” His voice harshened.

At that moment, I came to the pungent realization—just as so many, too many, before me have—that this already tragic encounter could very easily conclude with that gun, which his pink hand was now molesting, tugged out of its dark nest, aimed at me, and fired multiple times into my Black body. What’s worse is that this outcome, which was not at all uncommon, was beyond my control. If I followed his instructions, he might, overwhelmed by an unwarranted but very real fear, imagine my wallet or cell phone to be a gun and shoot me. If I didn’t follow his instructions, then he would certainly send shots my way. Either way, because of my hue and, indeed, his, he had carte blanche. With my back against the wall, I knew, as James Baldwin did when he inked
A Dialogue
, that “he’s got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That’s the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.”

My fingertips and palms, moist with the anxiety of sudden death, handed him my license and registration.

“Why was I stopped?” I asked.

“Hold tight,” he said, as he took my papers and turned around.

“Why was I stopped?” I repeated as he wobbled back to his squad car.

I watched him, through the sharp panorama of my mirror, as he ran my papers. I was reminded of the armed white men, dubbed “pattie rollers” by African-Americans, who were deployed throughout the South to patrol and prevent slave rebellions. These pattie rollers, which white men in the South were required to serve in, patrolled
exclusively at night, traveling on horseback from plantation to plantation, harassing Black people, looking for contraband (weapons, liquor, books, et cetera) that might indicate a plan to flee. Pattie rollers were instructed to viciously lash any enslaved African without a written pass. In North Carolina, a law ordered pattie rollers to whip on the spot any “loose, disorderly or suspected person” found among enslaved Africans. It was from these pattie rollers, funded by local taxes, that many modern policing concepts were derived. For example, pattie rollers, like modern police, referred to patrollers’ designated areas of operation as “beats.”

M.K.A.: Why did the cops start harassing y’all?

Dead Prez: There’s nothing we did wrong except for being Africans in our community and standing up for what we believe in. This ain’t a new struggle, it happens to thousands and thousands of Africans each day. Our comrades had been accosted by the police, who came up and asked, I guess suspiciously, that they show ID. There is no law on the books that states that in New York City you have to walk around with your ID in your pocket nor do you have to show it to the police. We had the right to ask “why.” Because we know our rights and also because we are always aware that there is this constant engagement going on between the people in the community and the occupying army, which to us, comes to us in the form of the police department. We knew that we had rights and our rights were that we ask, “Why? Why do we have to show ID?” Not that we were resisting showing ID but we have the right to ask why. Why? Why were we even being questioned at all? When that was asked there was no reasonable response by the pigs, or the police, as some of y’all call them. Since they couldn’t come up with any reason why they were asking for ID and because we were firm with the fact that we knew we had rights, they began to call for help in that situation, because the community was
around. It’s a Saturday, in the middle of the day, we’re shining, resilient Black soldiers, RBG [revolutionary but gangsta] in the broad daylight, you know. I believe that they saw this as a position that they didn’t really want to back down from. I think they wanted to be seen as the people who run the block. But we know that it’s the people who run the block. So, they called for backup and so some more pigs came. These pigs came in white shirts, I guess this means that they are special kinda pigs, ’cause those other pigs were in blue.

I think that not knowing what to do, because we knew our rights and we insisted to know why, we never backed down on why. We never said no, but we insisted on why. I think the pigs then gave the order that they move in on us and start handcuffing brothas. They started to try to handcuff each and every one of us. They began to try to move forward, handcuff us, harass us. Some of us were handcuffed. Dedan, one of my comrades, wouldn’t be handcuffed easily, because we don’t back down easily. We just don’t. There is no reason to, especially because we’ve only been criminalized; we’re not criminals. At that, they began to show excessive force, at that point we began to show more force. And that’s when, to me, the brutalization began. My partner Nes was beaten so bad his eyes became swollen. Dedan was slammed onto the hood of the police car, the pigs’ car, and four of our comrades were consequently taken to the seventy-seventh precinct where they were given no due process for twenty-four hours in a cold cell, with no rights to medical treatment, and no rights to phone calls—pretty much the standard arrest procedures for brothas.

M.K.A: What happened next?

Dead Prez: We ended up inside the central booking, in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Central Booking, Brooklyn House, about thirty-six hours later. Then from there some of the comrades sat inside the holding cell until this kangaroo court thing happened. The pigs grabbed them up,
called their names, and like some old back-in-the-days Mississippi shit, opened the back door and booted them out the back door. Like, “Don’t say nothing. Y’all just go.” And they kept one of them, without any reason at all. So, three of the comrades were released, through the back door, with no due process, still no due process, not even speaking to anybody who would have any semblance of leadership in this whole thing, including the judge or any pigs. But one of my comrades was still held hostage, held kidnapped, ’cause that’s what it was, he was kidnapped, not arrested—kidnapped. He remained kidnapped until we freed him. We freed him and he faces charges of aggravated assault, assaulting an officer, and resisting arrest. And one of them is a felony charge. A felony resisting arrest charge, I mean what is that? Really, his hands were handcuffed. So, right now we’re still facing court dates.

M.K.A.: Has the community been supportive of you and your comrades?

Dead Prez: On the first court date we held a conference, which was basically for our community to know that when the pigs jive us like this, there are things that we can do: there is community action and legal action to be taken. Our intent by holding the press conference, which was held at the House of the Lower Church, Reverend Herbert Daugherty’s church, which is a historical place for struggle, and right around the corner from the courthouse. We held the press conference to announce to the community that not only would we be a part of the people’s self-defense campaign which has been administered and run by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, which is similar to a cop-watch program, but also that we would be suing the New York Police Department and the state of New York for its crimes against us. We’ve had words of support from people like Charles Barron and Mos Def, and from the National Hip-Hop Action Network and from the ACLU, believe it or not, and community organizations like Black Arts Collective. Because it was just well supported, we were able to get
it out into the broadstream media about what had gone down and that was on the first day of court. And me being in a leadership role, at that point, as the president of the Uhuru Movement, we planned demonstrations that really rocked the courthouse. Pumped in thousands and thousands of leaflets, probably fifty thousand leaflets. So all these people who were going into court the same day we had to go to court… were all victims, too, so they felt the same way we did.

Everything came back clean. No tickets. No warrants. No nothing.

“Do you have any drugs or weapons in the car?” the officer asked.

“You still haven’t told me why I was stopped,” I stressed.

“One more time. Do you have any drugs or weapons,” he repeated, resting his hand on his gun (again).

“I’ve got a registered handgun and a permit to carry it,” I stated.

I felt his demeanor morph and I could see from the involuntary breach between his cold lips that he wanted to say something. I anticipated him asking me, “Why are you brandishing a firearm?” And I anticipated telling him that although I hated guns—and never have liked them, not even as toys!—I was overcome just a few weeks prior with the awful feeling of not being able to save my own life. The trigger for me was when Sean Bell, twenty-three, an unarmed Black man and father of three children, was shot in a vicious hail of fifty bullets on the night before his wedding.

I’d made up my mind that I was not going out like Patrick Bailey, the twenty-two-year-old unarmed Black man shot and killed by twenty-seven NYPD bullets. Or Amadou Diallo, the twenty-three-year-old unarmed Black man who was shot forty-one times and killed by four plain-clothes NYPD officers. Or Abner Louima, another unarmed Black man who was beaten by the NYPD, and then sodomized by Officer Justin Volpe with the filthy handle of a toilet plunger, severely rupturing his colon and bladder, before Volpe jammed the
excrement-soiled stick down his throat, damaging his teeth, gums, and mouth. Mos Def, during the Diallo trial, asked, “At this rate, can we expect the hail of fifty-five bullets to be unloaded on another New Yorker by next fall?” He reminded folks that “this is not a Black issue, it’s a human issue.”