At the Pac Jam, I decided I had to clean all that up. We couldn’t be known as the guys throwing the party where you were going to get the fuck beat out of you over some bullshit. I would get on the mic and say, “Look, we trying to be peaceful. If you come to our party, you going to be safe. But if you trying to start shit up in here, you gonna get fucked up by some Ghetto Style DJs. Simple as that.” When people came into our party and tried to fight, we beat the shit out of them, threw them out. So people knew it was safe to come to our party. We started getting more and more popular. Pretty soon we were the big-time DJs around the neighborhood. If you wanted the dopest party with the finest girls in Miami, the Pac Jam with Luke Skyywalker and the Ghetto Style DJs was the place to be.
Starting the Pac Jam, that was the difference between how I ran the Ghetto Style DJs versus a lot of these other groups that you’ve never heard of. Most people take the opportunities that are presented to them, and in the ghetto the opportunities put in front of you aren’t worth shit. Me, I was always on the make, always looking for new opportunities. I didn’t have time to sit around waiting for shit to happen. I wanted to make shit happen.
RIOTS
Everything changed for Liberty City and black Miami on December 17, 1979. That night, a black insurance agent, Arthur McDuffie, left his girlfriend’s house around one in the morning. He was riding his motorcycle home along North Miami Avenue. A Dade County policeman in a patrol car says he saw McDuffie pop a wheelie on the bike and blow through an intersection. Cop threw on the lights and went after him. McDuffie took off.
Pretty soon it was a high-speed chase, a dozen cop cars running this guy down. McDuffie finally pulled over around Thirty-Eighth Street. The cops swarmed in—all of them white cops, of course—with their guns drawn, pulling him off the bike. This is where one of the cops says McDuffie took a swing at him, if you want to believe that. The cops pulled him to the ground, cuffed him, and started beating him with their Kel-Lites, those industrial metal flashlights that cops use. Three minutes later, McDuffie was unconscious on the pavement, skull cracked open. They took him to the hospital, he fell into a coma, and he died four days later.
The cops tried to cover it up. They filed a report said that McDuffie was injured being thrown off his motorcycle. The cops even backed over his bike with a patrol car to make it look like it had been in an accident. But his injuries were far too severe for that. The man’s head had been bashed in. The medical examiner said his injuries were consistent with falling off a four-story building and landing on concrete face-first—and he was handcuffed the whole time they did it to him. On December 29 they buried McDuffie in full dress uniform; he was a marine, had served his country. The whole city was on edge while we waited for the case to go to trial. White folks were terrified that we were going to burn the place down. And black folks, well, let’s just say none of us expected the verdict to go our way.
Shit’s bad between cops and the blacks everywhere, but in south Florida it’s different. It’s a different history. In the early days, Miami was growing so fast they had to bring in Bahamian labor to build the roads and dredge the beaches. The city also needed more cops to patrol the streets, but they weren’t about to hire a bunch of Bahamians to be cops. To build up the police force and the fire department and organizations like that, the city fathers went up and got a bunch of white guys from Georgia and Alabama hick towns. They recruited these ignorant white rednecks, brought them down to Miami, gave them badges and nightsticks and shotguns, and made them policemen.
Their main job was to keep the blacks in line. These Georgia and Alabama boys, they were used to dealing with former slaves, blacks that knew how to stay in their place, knew how to say, “Yes, boss,” and all that. But Bahamians are proud people, independent people. They weren’t used to shuffling down the street, averting their eyes from white women, being called boy and nigger. They didn’t just bow down and lie down for the cops. That Bahamian independence had to be beaten down, broken.
It was brutal. Young black boys were shot in the back for shoplifting bread or eggs, trying to get something to eat. Black men would be accused of raping white women and then just disappear in the night. To get confessions, they would actually torture us. They had a torture room in the Miami police headquarters, just for blacks. They’d chain people up for days, beat them on the soles of their feet with metal rods. They had an electric chair, and they’d shackle you down, put the clamps on your genitals, and shock you. They’d tie black women to the chair, naked, and hit them with the current and watch them shake and convulse. For fun. Anytime blacks tried to organize or protest, if there was any kind of disturbance in Overtown, a hundred cops and Klansmen would ride in together on horseback with torches and dogs—“nigger hounds,” the sheriff called them—to keep everyone in their place.
The only difference between what happened with McDuffie in ’79 and what happened back then was that back then they didn’t even bother to cover it up. Black bodies could be found out by the train tracks. There’d be no investigation. Cops would just say the man jumped and rule it a suicide. By the time I was growing up, the cops had cleaned up on the surface. They made things look better, had hired a few blacks to work patrol, but day to day it wasn’t much different. Cops would stop black men on the sidewalk. “Hey, nigger. Over here.” They’d make us show ID and tell them where we were going. If they didn’t like the answer, they’d pick us up on a vagrancy charge. Cops would come through Overtown just to harass and intimidate, crack some heads on the pavement.
The civil rights movement woke people up. Black folks started to fight back. We tried sit-ins and nonviolent protests. Later we had Bobby Seale and Huey Newton saddled up with shotguns, defending their homes, standing up to the police. This was followed by the riots: Watts, Detroit, Newark. Cities going up in flames. The first big riot in Miami happened in August of ’68, during the Republican National Convention. Blacks were holding a political rally at a community center in Liberty City, hundreds of people standing around in the heat waiting for this thing to start. Some asshole drove by in a car with a “George Wallace for president” bumper sticker on it. People started throwing rocks and bottles at the car. Car stopped, they dragged the driver out, flipped the car over, set it on fire. Pretty soon it was riot cops and tear gas, black kids looting stores, National Guard coming in. Whole thing lasted for days.
In most American cities, once the sixties were over, the riots died out. Thanks to affirmative action, we gave out enough jobs and put enough black kids in college that most folks were willing to settle down, go along, see how this whole integration thing played out. Not in Miami. Down here, the riots never stopped. It wasn’t full-out, citywide riots. It was more like at the end of the movie Do the Right Thing. There’d be some incident. A white cop would pull some shit, a bunch of blacks on the corner would be watching because they didn’t have anything else to do, they’d start throwing rocks and bottles, and the whole block would erupt, windows smashed, a car set on fire. We had shit like that go down at least a couple times a year. Sometimes it would last a few hours, sometimes a few days. It didn’t take much to set off a riot in Liberty City.
The year running up to McDuffie, it was even worse than usual with the cops. In January of ’79, some white cop picked up an eleven-year-old black girl, molested her in the back of his patrol car. She reported him. He got off with three years’ probation. No jail time. Not even a month later, a bunch of cops were making a drug raid in Overtown. They busted down the door of the wrong house. The guy who lived there was a junior high school teacher. He ran, hid in his closet, called 911, and said he was being invaded. Cops busted into his bedroom, pulled him out of his closet, and pistol-whipped him, yelling, “Where’s the drugs? Where’s the drugs?”
They tore up his house looking for drugs that weren’t there. They put that man in the hospital; he was pissing blood from the damage they did to his kidneys. Then they charged him with resisting arrest. Later the truth came out. Wrong house
. Innocent teacher. But the cops who beat him? No arrests. No indictments. A slap on the wrist, and they were back on the street.
That fall, a few weeks before McDuffie, a black kid was driving through Hialeah with his sister late at night and he pulled over on a deserted street to take a piss. Some white cop rolled up and got out, sighting a “suspicious” black male. This cop had a gun on the back of the kid’s head while he was frisking him, and the gun went off: a black kid shot dead in the street for taking a piss. His sister watched the whole thing go down. The city ruled it an accident. The cop wasn’t even suspended. He was given paid leave. Two months later, he got a promotion.
You shoot an innocent black man in the back of the head and you get a promotion? And people wonder why McDuffie ran. People say he ran because he was driving on a suspended license.
I never got beat by the cops, just arrested. Everybody got arrested. It was every day. Every fucking day there were little pockets of bullshit going on. There were many stories. “Oh, man, police arrested so-and-so and he ain’t even did nothing.” It started to build up.
I was arrested at least twelve times. If one guy shot a gun in the air and ten guys were sitting around, the cops would lock us all up to get somebody to tell them who did it. Even if you never did anything it’s on your record that you got pinched for gun possession. Sometimes we’d just be sitting there on the corner and the cops would roll up and say, “Y’all get the fuck off the corner or we’re gonna lock y’all up.” Sometimes they’d throw us in the car without a charge, just to try and intimidate us because they thought we knew something.
Worst I ever really did was sell a little weed, but if you looked at my rap sheet you’d think I was a gangster. Some of it I did. Display of firearms? Yeah, I did that. But the majority of the stuff was just police harassing me, throwing me in jail for no reason. I’ve always been self-employed, so it never affected my career, but a lot of guys pile up these bullshit rap sheets and they go and apply for jobs and can’t get them. It follows them around their whole lives.
Right before I went to stay with my brother in DC, I got busted for marijuana while driving in my van. I was busted by a crooked cop, this white guy named Bachmann. Everybody in Liberty City knew about Bachmann. Cops like him were everywhere. They’d bust you, but they wouldn’t take you in. They’d confiscate your weed and take whatever money you had on you. Afterward they’d turn you loose, knowing you couldn’t do anything about it. Sometimes Bachmann would stop you, take your weed off you, and smoke your shit right there. Everybody knew he was a dirty cop. He’d come around the corner, and we’d say, “Oh, here comes Bachmann.” He’d just go into people’s houses like he was a warlord or some shit, like he was the gestapo.
That’s the world we were living in when the McDuffie trial started in March of 1980. Everybody followed it on the news. We had to follow it on the news, because they’d moved it to Tampa. The Miami judge said the case was a time bomb, and he didn’t want it going off in his courtroom. The judge was wrong: the McDuffie case wasn’t the time bomb. Miami was the time bomb.
The economy was in a terrible recession. No jobs. We had the cops harassing us and killing us on one side, and on the other side—the thing that makes the black situation in Miami unique—on the other side we had the Cubans taking over, pushing us out. At that point, shit between the blacks and the Cubans was bad. It had been getting worse for years. Thousands of wealthy Cuban families flooded in right after Castro took over, and a couple hundred thousand more came in the years after that. Under Jim Crow, Florida was always trying to pass laws to restrict the number of Caribbean blacks who could come over. Jamaicans, Dominicans, Haitians, they had all kids of visa requirements and hoops to jump through. Not the Cubans. Immigration just waved them on in. Political refugees. The government gave them a free pass—but only some of them.
The island of Cuba is predominantly black. You go over there, look around, that shit is black. But that’s not who came over, not in the first wave. It was just the white Cubans they let in, immigrants who looked like the people in power so they could keep the power. White folks in Miami said, “We’ve gotta get some people who look like us, who think like us. Conservative-type people. We can sit down with them. We can break bread with them.”
That’s how black people lost Miami. Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers, their whole message was about economic self-sufficiency, about how blacks needed to own and patronize our own businesses, to lift up and take care of ourselves. And I believe that. The problem was that the government had denied us our property rights for so long that we didn’t have much to work with. The small value of what we did own, our business district, they destroyed that when they put the expressway through. Most blacks didn’t own any assets or property to borrow against. Banks discriminated, so we didn’t have access to business loans or financial capital that you need to run a business.
But the Cubans, a lot of the wealthy Cubans brought money with them. They also had La Lucha, “the struggle,” the fight against Castro. They said they were only here in Miami temporarily, that if the US helped them take down Castro they’d be going right back. So all the resources that blacks have been denied the government gave it to the Cubans. Just gave it to them. That shit didn’t stop with the Bay of Pigs. If you said you were an anti-Castro group, an anti-communist group, the federal government would pretty much write you a blank check. The CIA had this training center at the University of Miami, hundreds of agents, the largest CIA facility in the world outside of the headquarters at Langley. They were pumping millions of dollars into these anti-Castro programs. They were running a secret airline, buying boats, planes, guns. They financed camps out in the swamps, where all these freedom fighters were training to overthrow Fidel.
All of that money and those resources went into Cuban hands. At the same time Overtown was being destroyed, Little Havana was being built up. It was mostly Cubans, but it wasn’t just Cubans. Feds were scared of communism spreading all over Latin America and South America, and there were exiles from all of those countries, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Argentinians, Bolivians. They all set up shop in Miami to organize and try and take down this dictator or that dictator, and the boys in Washington made sure they were taken care of. That’s the mistake that blacks made. We should have been an anti-communist group. Then maybe white folks would’ve given us some of that covert money. The only oppressive government we wanted to overthrow was our own, so we didn’t get shit.
Not only did the Cubans get taken care of by the government, they also got in on the programs that should have been ours. Civil rights marchers fought to get things like affirmative action and access to minority loan programs. That’s what we had coming to us as a people who had worked for more than 250 years for free. But anybody who was a minority could qualify, not just blacks. Of all the small-business government loans made in Miami in the 1970s, Hispanics got 47 percent. Blacks got 6 percent. All the new affirmative-action laws about how minority-owned businesses were legally entitled to a share of government and municipal projects, we got shut out of most of that, too. Pretty soon, over 50 percent of the minority contracting in Miami-Dade was going to Hispanic-owned companies. Black-owned companies were barely getting 10 percent—and we’re the ones who fought and died in the streets to get those programs put in place.
That’s pretty much how it went down, in Miami. The Cubans came in, the blacks got displaced—and there was a lot of anger at the ones who displaced us. A lot of people believe that white folks brought the Cubans in because they wanted a power struggle with the blacks. In the beginning, it was the blacks cleaning all the hotel rooms. Now it was the Hispanics. Under Jim Crow, they had us doing all the work. We got domesticated, comfortable, Americanized. We started to say, “We don’t need to do this shit.” They let in the next group. They’re always looking for the new nigger, as we say, to do the work.
But all that blew up in white folks’ faces with the Mariel boatlift. First blacks were d
isplaced, now whites started to get displaced, too. The same week the McDuffie trial started, Castro opened the port at Mariel to get rid of all the political protesters giving him headaches. He’d dump them on the US and was done with them. Pretty soon anybody who could get on a boat was on their way here. Marieletos, we called them. Only this time it wasn’t the wealthy, middle-class Cubans coming over. It was the poorest of the poor, the lowest of the low. Castro said he wanted to flush his toilets, empty his jails. He sent criminals, mental patients, all kinds of people. Over 125,000 showed up in just a few months. We had tent cities going up under the freeways.
Meanwhile, over in Haiti, there were all these poor, exploited people, and they saw the US opening its door to all these Mariel Cubans. So tens of thousands of Haitians, they started piling into ships and coming over, too. Only America didn’t let them in. They were “economic” refugees, not “political” refugees, so Washington said they didn’t qualify. Of course, the truth of it was that Haitians are black. This is how it went: you’ve got two boats in the water, both rowing over for freedom. Cubans jump off, they’ve got one wet foot, one dry foot. They’re okay. As long as they’re on the beach. Haitians do the same? Nah, you’ve got to go back. You’re going to jail. We’ll send you to Krome down the street to get deported.
The Krome Detention Center was this shithole on the edge of the Everglades. You had thousands of Haitians crammed into this prison built for a few hundred people. Like a concentration camp. Cuban criminals got government-funded refugee camps while innocent Haitians went to jail. So with the Haitian thing on top of the Cuban thing on top of the McDuffie thing on top of getting fucked with by the cops for the last hundred years, Miami was a big fucking time bomb. The whole place was ready to explode.
The Book of Luke Page 5