Half of our problem is the one I’ve been on about my whole life, what my uncle Ricky taught me: ownership. Owning your own self, your own property, your own labor. In a capitalist society, money is power. Property is power. But we were denied that. Time and again our land and our wealth and our labor have been taken from us, leaving us with no economic leverage to demand the change we deserve. The other half of our problem is that black communities don’t engage the way we should. If President Barack Obama’s not on the ballot—and he never will be again—we don’t vote in the numbers we should. We’re apathetic about the process because we don’t believe the system will work for us, which guarantees that the system won’t work for us, which leads to a cycle of frustration and hopelessness.
The Cubans came in fifty years ago, just at the moment when we were supposed to finally secure our rights. They took Malcolm X’s playbook and ran with it. They used their buying power and their wealth and their ethnic solidarity, they took all the government programs meant to help other minorities, and they built a political coalition that controls not only south Florida but that swings national elections. Eventually, they became the more solid race of people. We became the more disenfranchised and confused race of people—a divided community.
When the Alvarez recall happened, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to energize the black community, to raise awareness of the black community’s needs in the places where our concerns never get addressed. I was using my weekly column in the paper to hold politicians’ feet to the fire, but I felt like the only way I could really accomplish that was to put myself out there, to go out and say all the things that I wanted to say. I decided to run for mayor myself. Luther Campbell for Mayor.
My campaign slogan was “I’m dead serious . . . are you?” Because I was serious. I wasn’t running as some novelty candidate. I was running to win, to have an impact. The theme of my campaign was One Miami. I wanted to energize African-American voters and raise awareness of the issues that affect the black community, but my main thing has always been bringing this city together. When I announced my candidacy, I got a few of the predictable jokes from the national media, but down here in Miami, nobody was laughing. They know that we’ve got serious problems, and they know that I’ve been working hard in the community for the past twenty years. They read my column and listened to me on the radio all the time, talking about housing and taxes and education. Joy Reid, the Miami Herald columnist and MSNBC host, wrote that I was “as credible a candidate as any” with “some serious ideas about things like policing, politics and community development.”
I knew it would be virtually impossible to win the election, but my goal was to energize voters, wake people up, and change the conversation. I had Trick Daddy and NFL celebrities come out for fundraisers, exciting young people who probably never voted before. I sat down with the police union and the firemen’s union and the housing authority and kept it 100 percent with them. I was brutally honest about issues like low-income housing, over-policing in black communities, failing schools. The two leading Cuban candidates, Hialeah mayor Julio Robaina and county commissioner Carlos Gimenez, were forced to respond, forced to address issues that otherwise they could have avoided.
For me personally, the single best and most rewarding part of the campaign was going into old folks’ homes in Overtown, soliciting votes. I’d introduce myself. They’d say, “Yeah, I know your mamma. I grew up with your mamma.” Or they’d say, “I know your granddaddy and your grandmamma. Your grandmamma, she loved to play cards.” I started hearing all these stories that I’d never heard before, about my aunts and uncles, how my mom and dad really met, about the history of the community, how deep and rich that history is, how far back it goes. Running for office, I learned who I really am. I’m a better person for it, a much better person. I understand where I’m going and that I’m definitely going in the right direction. I’m not just a famous rapper and a successful businessman. I’m a part of a community and a history and a tradition. Working with the kids in Liberty City, running for office, I’m doing what my mother, father, and all these folks set out for me to do. In the end I got 11 percent of the vote. Not enough to win, obviously, but it represents a real constituency. My campaign accomplished what I set out for it to accomplish: it energized the community, in better ways than I ever could have hoped for.
Keon Hardemon grew up in Liberty City, in the Scott Carver housing projects. He spent most of his childhood living with his grandma while his mother was away in the army. He met his father only twice, once in fifth grade and again in high school. Like hundreds of other young black boys from the projects, Keon could have slipped though the cracks, but fortunately for him he found a constructive outlet: playing youth football with the Liberty City Optimist Club. The program gave him the discipline and focus he needed to stay out of trouble and stay in school, same as it did for Devonta, Durell, and Rakeem.
But Keon wasn’t destined for the NFL. He graduated from Northwestern High School, got his bachelor’s degree from Florida A&M, and earned his law degree from the University of Miami. Straight out of law school he landed a fantastic, high-paying corporate job with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. They had him flying all over the world on business. He was living the good life, supporting his family. Then late one night he was in Shanghai, stuck at the airport because he’d missed a flight. He was browsing the Internet for news from back home and he saw a video about my run for mayor. Seeing that video reminded him of how important the Optimist Club had been to him, how I’d always stressed the importance of community and giving back.
It was a message that hit home for Keon in a particularly hard way. The Scott Carver homes where he’d grown up had been destroyed, bulldozed by developers with a promise from the city that the land would be used for better mixed-income housing, with new facilities and services to help the poor. The eight hundred families who lived there were evicted, scattered out to Homestead and other places out in the middle of nowhere, and the promised development never came through. Private developers and their political cronies used the money to line their pockets, embezzling millions while poor black families lost their homes and their community—the same script that’s been playing out ever since they ran the I-95 through Overtown, ever since they took our beachfront land and handed it over to white folks to build hotels and resorts.
Keon could have stayed in his corporate job and made a lot of money for himself, but he didn’t. He quit, came home to Miami, and went to work as a public defender, fighting on behalf of the young black men who got trapped in the cycle of poverty and violence and lack of opportunity, guys who weren’t lucky enough to make it out like he did. In 2013, the city commissioner representing Miami-Dade’s Fifth District was going to be stepping down. District 5 is the poorest and most crime-ridden district in the city. It covers Liberty City, Overtown, and Little Haiti. Keon called me up and reminded me of his time in the Optimist Program. He told me he was going to run for the city commission, and he asked for my help. His opponent was the establishment candidate. All the big-money people were backing him. He was going to win. Keon told me, “I don’t have a lot of money, but I’ve been inspired by you and would like your support.”
I saw in this young man the culmination of everything I’d been working toward. I couldn’t say yes to him fast enough. With the political base I’d built, I wasn’t going to be the king, but I could be the kingmaker. I brought out all of Miami to get behind him. I cut radio commercials for him. I staged a fund-raising concert with Trick Daddy and all the other local hip-hop artists. I tapped the network of donors and voters I’d built by running my own campaign, and we went hard to get his name out there and get people involved in the process—and we won. It wasn’t even close. Keon was getting double and triple the usual numbers in the youth vote, and he ended up winning with 72 percent of the overall vote.
We celebrated with a big election-night party at Overtown’s Jackson Soul Food restaurant. That night, Keon pulled ou
t his phone and showed me a video he took of himself three years before at the airport in Shanghai. It was a testimonial he’d made, talking about being inspired to run for public office by my campaign and how he was going to dedicate his life to public service from that point on. I couldn’t have been more proud. Now we had one of our own in office: the youngest city commissioner in Miami, just twenty-nine years old, a young African-American man from the hip-hop generation who knows and understands what our community needs.
Charles Hadley Park has been home to the Liberty City Optimist Club for the past twenty-five years. It’s the place where our community has healed and come together, where we’ve launched dozens of young boys like Hardemon himself on to college and better lives. But the park itself hasn’t done well. It’s falling apart. When Sam Johnson was alive he fought the city commission year in and year out for the $6.5 million appropriation we were owed to bring the park back, to fix the drainage and add new facilities. Sam hit a wall of bureaucratic incompetence and indifference every single time. Then in January of 2014, Keon Hardemon, just weeks into the job, used his political capital and leverage to lean hard on the rest of the commission, and he drove the appropriation through with a unanimous vote.
We’re getting the money. The facilities are being built. The park is being restored.
Considered against all the problems that African-Americans face today, it may not seem like much, just a simple park, but it couldn’t be more important. That park was ours. In 1947, thirty-five black families owned homes on that land, and they were evicted by the city to make way for an all-white park. We lost our land, our leverage, our control. It was taken from us. But we rallied, we organized, and now we’ve taken it back. Today, Charles Hadley Park is a place where young kids come to get the guidance and tutoring they need to stay in school. It’s a place that gangs know to stay away from, because it’s too important to destroy with more violence. It’s a place where cops mentor and coach young black boys, instead of gunning them down in the streets. It’s a place where families can come together and enjoy a Saturday afternoon—and not just black families, but white and Hispanic families, too, who bring their children and see that our community is warm and welcoming and not so different from their own.
If you come down to Miami, you won’t find Uncle Luke out on some yacht, drinking Hennessy, surrounded by groupies. You’ll find Luther Campbell in Charles Hadley Park, making sure kids have a safe ride home from practice. You’ll find me in the field house at Northwestern High, putting the defensive line through their hundredth round of practice drills in the hundred-degree heat. You’ll find me on the phone, talking SAT scores with guidance counselors and teachers and college recruiters. You’ll find me down at the city commission, raising hell about housing and education and changes in law enforcement. That’s where you’ll find me, because if we want to save our communities, that’s what it’s going to take—from me, from you, from all of us.
Twenty-five years ago, Sam Johnson walked into a millionaire rapper’s office and asked for a check to sponsor a Little League team. Since that day, we’ve done things and helped kids and saved families in a way no one would have ever imagined in a place that most of the world would rather forget. Liberty City gave me everything I have. It gave me an incredible family. It gave me a love of my own culture and its music. It gave me the opportunity to take an amazing, unbelievable ride, and I could never turn my back on a place that has given me so much. Liberty City is my home, and I’ll fight for it every day for the rest of my life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my family. I’m settled down and married now, to a wonderful woman, and we have an incredible son together. I love all of my kids equally: my daughters, Shanetris and Lutheria and Lucretia; my sons, Luther Jr. and Brooklyn and Blake; and I feel that they love me, too. I had my first daughter when I was twenty-one years old. I was young, and I wasn’t ready for it. At times it’s been difficult, a fact that the tabloids have always tried to sensationalize. But I’ve consistently tried to be the best father I know how to be.
What I am as a coach right now, and as a mentor to kids, is what Alex Medina was to me. He’s the guy who’s totally responsible for everything I do for kids today. Thanks for the inspiration.
Thank you, Tanner, for bringing my story to life and doing a wonderful job. Peter McGuigan, my literary agent, thank you for believing in my story; and to the New York Times writer that brought us together, Greg Bishop. And then there is Tracy Sherrod, my editor, and all the hardworking staff at HarperCollins, thank you for your commitment and passion.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my Haters—you keep me motivated.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LUTHER CAMPBELL, hip-hop’s original bad boy, a pop culture icon, and consummate businessman, is one of the few American celebrities who has had an indelible impact on the worlds of music, sex, business, law, and politics simultaneously.
The first southern rap star to emerge on the Billboard Pop charts, with “Move Something,” Campbell established Skyywalker Records (eventually renamed Luke Records), and made national headlines in the early 1990s as a part of 2 Live Crew, when he triumphed in one of hip-hop’s most important cultural and political victories, protecting the right to free speech in rap. His highly publicized obscenity trial and Supreme Court parody case were First Amendment landmarks that still shape the entertainment industry today. In 2000, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored Campbell’s contribution to hip-hop by including him in its “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage” exhibit. In 2004, Campbell won the Free Speech Coalition’s first Celebrity Freedom Fighter Award for his legal struggles against the federal government.
Today, Luther Campbell is known as Coach Campbell to students at Miami’s Northwestern High School, a position he won with the help of a letter-writing campaign from area parents and community leaders, testifying to his positive role as a mentor and leader in Miami’s black community. In addition to his work for the Miami public school system, Campbell is a coach in the National Youth Football League through the Liberty City Warriors, a youth organization he cofounded in his hometown to keep wayward boys out of trouble.
The Liberty City Warriors won the Pop Warner National Championship in 2005, but Campbell considers the program’s real accomplishment to be his players’ academic progress.
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CREDITS
COVER DESIGN BY GREGG KULICK
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © CHRISTOPHER BEYER / GETTY IMAGES
COPYRIGHT
THE BOOK OF LUKE. Copyright © 2015 by Luther Campbell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible ® Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission (www.Lockman.org).
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-233640-8
EPub Edition August 2015 ISBN 9780062336439
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