When the McDuffie case went to trial, the facts of the case were plain as day: a defenseless black man in handcuffs with his skull bashed in and a bunch of white cops standing around with bloodstained flashlights in their hands. Unfortunately, the prosecution put all the cops on trial together, rather than as individuals, and every cop who testified covered his own ass by pointing the finger at somebody else. This cop saw that cop deliver the fatal blow. That cop saw a different cop do it. All the cops were guilty, either of making it happen or letting it happen, but the prosecution couldn’t give a clear picture of who did what.
The real problem was the jury. Down here in the bullshit Florida judicial system, they have this thing in selecting juries called a “peremptory challenge,” which means either the defense or the prosecution can strike a certain number of potential jurors from the jury pool without giving any justification whatsoever. All of these cases of white cops molesting, beating, and killing black folks and getting off had all-white juries. Every. Single. Time. Any black juror who came up? “Your Honor, we’d like to dismiss this juror.” Gone. No questions asked. That’s how they did it, and it was completely legal. And that’s what they did on the McDuffie jury, too. They’d dismissed every black juror who came up until they got a nice, all-white jury, guaranteed to acquit.
It all came down on May 17, 1980. The jury spent less than three hours deliberating, and came back with the verdict: Not guilty on all counts. Not guilty of murder. Not guilty of evidence tampering. Nothing. A black man beaten to death for a traffic violation, and all twelve perpetrators walked free.
I watched them announce the verdict on TV. When we heard “not guilty,” that just lit the fuse. It was like all this shit had been building up, all these years of getting fucked with by the cops, having our communities destroyed, being displaced by all these Cubans coming in. We just blew the fuck up. The Liberty City Riot was on.
Folks started to gather in crowds along Sixty-Second Street, near African Square Park. Pretty soon everybody was shooting, throwing rocks, setting fires, looting. People were taking shopping carts and walking them down the street with color TVs and shit in them. They had couches balanced on them, walking that shit home. We had this little shopping mall down the street from my house, man, people just tore that place up. I think it might have been a Sears there. They went through it. Didn’t leave nothing. My homeboys mounted up. They were like, “Man, we gotta go and get some of this shit.” Me, I wanted no part of it. My old girl, she told me, “Don’t bring that shit in my house. Don’t bring no groceries, nothing.” I mainly walked around, watching.
The whole thing was wild. I mean, people burned the fucking place down. Storefronts smashed in. Buildings on fire. The police shooting tear gas. The people who owned the shops and stores, they were getting thrown out in the street while the stores were looted. It was supposed to be just the white-owned stores that got looted, but they hit everybody. Some of our best black-owned businesses were completely destroyed. It was horrible.
Downtown, outside the metro justice complex, the NAACP tried to hold a peaceful rally. They started out marching and singing “We Shall Overcome,” but pretty soon the whole group just turned into a mob. They were smashing down the doors of the city government buildings. They were taking official Dade County vehicles, flipping them over, shoving gas-soaked rags in the tanks and setting them on fire—and this was respectable, middle-class black folks doing this. Imagine what it was like in the ghetto.
In all the riots from the 1960s, young blacks were venting their pent-up anger and frustration, setting fires, smashing windows, looting. The difference in Miami, what had never happened before, was that black anger wasn’t just directed at destroying property. It was directed at white people, at individuals. For three days, any white person caught in the wrong place at the wrong time was killed. Some white college kids were driving the wrong way through Liberty City when the riot started. A black mob pulled them from their car and beat them and stabbed them to death with fucking screwdrivers. There was this one white lady, elderly woman, they stopped her car and smashed it with rocks and then set it on fire with her in it. Burned her alive.
Eight white folks were killed that week for no reason other than black people were fed the fuck up. And if blacks were killing whites, for whites it was open season on blacks. These crazy rednecks were driving through Liberty City, picking us off from the back of pickup trucks. The cops and the National Guard, they were coming in like it was a war zone, shooting at anything that moved. By the time it was over, dozens of people were dead, hundreds in the hospital, half the businesses in Liberty City had been burned to the ground, and Miami was never the same.
Our community was destroyed. The riots killed everything. The total damage was something like $200 million. All these plans and programs were set up to help us rebuild, but we even got fucked on that. That’s how it always goes. The government sets aside all this money to invest in the ghetto, to create “empowerment zones,” but somehow nothing ever gets built but chicken shacks and check-cashing joints. There were millions of dollars set aside for rebuilding the stores and the businesses in Liberty City. Over 90 percent of that money went to whites and Hispanics, because they were the business owners, the property owners. Almost all of them used the money to get out, to relocate. The grocery stores were gone. The tire factory closed. The gas station on the corner never came back. Even some of the black-owned businesses that got some of those funds, they left, too. They moved out to the suburbs, over to Coconut Grove, left the community.
To this day right now, Liberty City is still fucked up behind those riots, because after that nobody would insure new businesses there. For years after, the only businesses were the corner store, the wing joint, the fish joint. And those establishments were barred like a fucking fort. Everything behind plexiglass. No place to sit down. They just wanted you to order your shit and get out.
That was the world I lived in. I was a DJ, with no real thoughts or aspirations of being more than an entertainer in the neighborhood. With the whole neighborhood gutted like that, groups like the Ghetto Style DJs became even more important to people. There were no real restaurants, no good bars. Our dances were the only entertainment lots of people had, the only thing to lift people’s spirits. We’d play gigs in the park, and thousands of people would come, dance, let off steam. For some of them, it was the highlight of their week. But even after hassling us for years and nearly destroying the whole neighborhood, the cops still wouldn’t leave us alone. They prodded and provoked us until one night I ended up starting a riot of my own.
It was March of ’83, a Sunday night. The Ghetto Style DJs were playing a free gig in African Square Park like always. Park was packed. We were jamming with about a thousand people in the pit, everybody dancing, having a good time. It was pretty late at that point, getting dark out, when I saw the red-and-blue lights coming from up on the street. Cops started making their way through the crowd to talk to me at the turntables. One of the cops, a black guy, asked me to turn the music down. He said, “It’s late. Some of the older residents are complaining.”
I said okay, and I turned the music down. I wasn’t stupid. I knew how this went. We were out there late, didn’t have a permit or anything like that. I just wanted to play it straight. I’ll take the party down a notch, and everything will be cool. But the other cop with this black guy, the white cop, was that asshole Bachmann: the same crooked, gestapo motherfucker who’d been fucking with the neighborhood for years. We were down in the pit of the amphitheater, and Bachmann was up a little hill on the sidewalk with his flashlight shining down on everybody. He didn’t even give us a chance to quiet things down. He just yelled, “Y’all can’t be out there. Y’all niggers cut that shit off and get the fuck out of the park!” I was like, Hold the fuck on. Who the fuck is he talking to? And he just kept yelling, “C’mon! Y’all niggers out the fucking park.”
Back then, my fuse was short. My head was already on a Black Power trip
thanks to my uncle Ricky. He’d been training me for something like this, and Bachmann was a guy who’d already pissed off everybody in the community. At that moment, all the tension that had been building up between us and cops like him, it just snapped. He was flashing the light in my eyes and I cut the music off and I yelled out, “You want us out the park, bring your motherfucking ass down here and do something about it. Fuck you!”
The whole crowd chimed in yelling, “Yeah, fuck him! Fuck you! Fuck you!” The rocks and the bottles started flying. Everybody in the pit was hurling shit at this guy. Bam! It was a full-blown riot. Sirens went off. Dozens of cops flooded in. People were throwing shit. Cops were beating them down. When the sun came up the next day, the shit was still going. It had spread. By the time the whole situation was defused, nobody had been killed, but a few hundred injured and something like thirty people arrested.
It made the front page of the city section of the Miami Herald. Later that week, the city sent in these Community Relations Board representatives. This group the city kept on their payroll. They always got sent in to patch things up whenever there was an incident between the cops and the blacks. Their job, basically, was to get us to shut up, to smooth things over so we wouldn’t burn the motherfucker down like we did with McDuffie. This time it was just about a bunch of ghetto kids playing our music too loud, so they probably figured they could quiet us down without too much trouble.
They arranged a meeting with representatives from a lot of the different DJ groups that played in the parks. Me and a couple of the Ghetto Style guys went. The guy they sent to meet with us was this black dude from some kind of community relations board. He sat down and started talking all this shit trying to get on our side. He came in telling us, “Yeah, I’m gonna fight for y’all. We gonna make things right.” He put on this big show about how he’d been harassed by the cops before, too, and those white motherfuckers had sent him to jail on some trumped-up bullshit, so he knew what we were going through. But now he was in this position and he would make things better if we just worked with him.
But me, being smart, I was just sitting there, thinking, The fuck you talking bout? You work for the city. How you on our side? I sat there listening, because that’s what I’d learned how to do in business negotiations. If you’re arguing with someone and talking over them, you think you’re making your point, but you aren’t learning what the other guy is about, what his agenda is. I like to sit back and just let people run on at the mouth so I can hear what’s coming out. You listen to people long enough, eventually they’ll reveal what their angle really is. They’ll let it slip.
There was this one kid in the meeting, kind of a hanger-on, a wannabe, a guy always trying to get in with us to be a part of our crew. He was a nobody, but the guy from the city was making this big effort to rope him into the discussion. Once I saw that, I knew exactly where all this was heading. Long story short, a couple of days went by and all of a sudden, this guy, this hanger-on, he’s riding around in a city car with the community relations dude. The Ghetto Style guys, we were all on the corner, and we saw them roll by. What the fuck is he doing? He’s down with them.
White folks been doing that shit for years. They find the strong black guy and they find the weak black guy and they prop the weak black guy up, make him important, put him in their pocket, make him the HNIC, make him a spokesman or some shit so they can keep it looking like the situation is taken care of. That was exactly what happened. They took this weak guy out of the group, gave him a position with this community-outreach thing, and they made him feel like a big shot, like he’s gonna be the liaison with the city and get the concerts going again and he’ll be a hero.
Over the next couple weeks, the city said they were working on settling the issue. Next thing you know, the city called this big press conference. He got all the local reporters and a bunch of DJ groups and cops and community leaders out in the African Square Park amphitheater. I showed up to see what the fuck that nonsense was going to be. They had this chump up there at the podium, talking like he was a representative of the DJ groups. He was reading off this prepared statement, saying shit like “We, the youth of Liberty City, would like to say that we know what we did was wrong. We disrespected the police. . . .” And blah blah blah, all this shit. He said that the park was going to start doing official daytime concerts. Not with us. Not with Ghetto Style. They’re going to bring in these soft soul and R&B groups that the city approved, and they were using this kid to make it look like the DJ groups had agreed to be a part of this settlement.
“Hold on, hold on. What the fuck?” I got up and said it right in front of the whole press conference, right in front of all the news cameras. “Hold the fuck up. We ain’t had nothing to do with writing this shit. I didn’t agree to this shit.” I pointed at the community relations guy and then at the chump. “That motherfucker wrote this shit for this motherfucker. This motherfucker, he ain’t even in our group. Y’all done paid this dude off so now he’s the spokesman for us? Y’all lost y’all fucking mind. Y’all crazy. Y’all full of shit.”
I walked out of the press conference. The Miami Herald wrote the whole thing up. “Luther Campbell of the Ghetto Style DeeJays erupted in an angry stream of obscenities before stomping out of African Square Park’s outdoor amphitheater. . . .” That was the day Luther Campbell started becoming a name in Miami. That was the day I set off on the road to becoming public enemy number one. You tell me I can’t do something I have every right to do? I’m just gonna do it more. I’m gonna do it bigger.
From that point on, my focus became making the group bigger, doing bigger things, branching out, moving up. I wasn’t gonna make some deal with the city to use the park on their terms. There was no way I was going to let them tell me where I can go and what I can say and what music I can play. Fuck that. “I’ll start my own club where I can do everything on my terms, where I don’t have to answer to nobody.” I wanted to be big enough, have enough money, and have enough leverage that the cops and the city couldn’t mess with me anymore. I’d be in control of my own thing.
I’d tell my guys what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, and they’d say, “Man, you talking crazy.”
I’d say, “Nah, motherfuckers, we gotta think big. It’s time to think about starting our own club. It’s time to think about promoting our own concerts. It’s time to think about blowing this shit up.”
II
LUKE RECORDS
When I started up with the Ghetto Style DJs, my goal was to be the best DJ in Miami. At the time I thought that was just spinning records and having the gift of gab and throwing the best party. As I got older, I would go to this club, Big Daddy’s, on Seventy-Ninth and Biscayne Boulevard. This guy DJ Frankie Hollywood used to be in there and he would spin, talk over records, rap all the good shit women wanted to hear. He would also talk up the best records: who was the hottest group, the new sound. At his club it wasn’t about speakers or having the biggest bass cabinets, it was about the music that was playing. It was about breaking songs, making hits, telling people, “This is the shit that you should buy and you should listen to.”
Not everybody can break a song. You have to be able to get control of the crowd. People have to believe in you and respect you so when you stand behind a song they’ll go with you and embrace it, buy the single, and make it a hit. The crowd respected this DJ at Big Daddy’s. If he stood behind a song, pretty soon you’d hear it blowing up on local radio, people calling in and requesting it. I realized that’s what I needed to learn to do. You ain’t a DJ unless you’re breaking songs. Most guys just spin. Wedding DJs spin. Real DJs break shit.
Up to that point we’d been doing most of our shows either out in the park or at the Sunshine Roller Rink, renting it out on slow nights and calling it the Pac Jam Teen Disco. I figured we were leaving a lot of money on the table paying the owners of the roller rink to be there, and I was tired of being hassled by the cops on other people’s turf. We started looking at ope
ning our own club. There was this empty one-story cinder-block building at the corner of Fifty-Fourth Street and Twelfth Avenue in the heart of Liberty City. We saved up some of the money we’d made and rented it out. We decided to make it a teen disco—a teen club, not an adult one. The riots had destroyed everything. There was literally nowhere for kids in the ghetto to find entertainment or to spend the quarters and dollars they got working their little jobs. That meant there was a lot of money on the street nobody was claiming.
I was all about creating a safe environment for the kids to have a good time so they wouldn’t have to hang out on the corners, getting in trouble. We called it the Pac Jam II. We didn’t serve anything harder than Coca-Colas and 7-Up. We did our own security to keep it safe. I paid off-duty cops to work the parking lot to make sure the kids were safe and there was no dope or alcohol on the premises. The kids knew it was a safe space, as safe as we could make it in a place like Liberty City. Parents knew that, too. We had a lot of support from the community. Weekends, that place was packed. It was a place for all the Liberty City groups to play their music, and the little jitterbugs were a great audience to try out new stuff. It was the perfect place for me to break records. Everything was in place for me to take off.
By the time we opened the Pac Jam II, around early ’84, hip-hop was blowing up out of New York. Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, those guys had started laying the groundwork in the 1970s, turning rap into a cultural movement, the voice of the ghetto. Then in ’79, the Sugarhill Gang came out with “Rapper’s Delight” and it was a huge hit all over the world. I still remember the first time I heard it. I sat there listening to it and I thought, This shit is hot. This is for the young people. We already had DJs rapping over songs, closing out their shows on the radio by doing little raps and shit. So it wasn’t entirely new. But it was just that moment where you could feel something was coming together. I knew it was going to take off.
The Book of Luke Page 6