by Jeff Chang
Nestled in the inner Jamaica Bay amidst soft salt marshes, Howard Beach had once been a resort area. By the mid-1980s, it was a whites-only enclave, situated between the Belt Parkway, garbage landfills and John F. Kennedy Airport. New York City’s population was almost half people of color, yet there remained pockets in Queens and Brooklyn from which whites had never taken flight. Reaganomics had devastated many of these enclaves, like Bensonhurst—where whites attacked three African-American Veterans Administration workers in 1983—and Gravesend—where in 1982, a group of thugs chased three African-American transit workers and beat one of them to death.24 Not so with Howard Beach, which was solidly middle-class and had registered solid economic gains through the decade.25 Yet the area was now best known as the home of John Gotti and the prevailing view among residents seemed to be that Blacks or Hispanics mainly came into their neighborhood to rob or rape them.26
Griffith, Sandiford and Grimes were walking up the road into Howard Beach when a group of white youths drove by screaming racial epithets at them. The three continued on, then stopped at the New Park Pizzeria and asked for directions to the nearest subway station.27 They sat to rest and eat. By the time they had got up to leave, the white boys in the car had returned. They had a dozen others with them.
It was going to be one of those nights. Two hours before, in another part of town, cops had received a call about a gang of whites who had beaten and chased two young Hispanics. And while Griffith, Sandiford and Grimes were eating, someone had called the police to report “three suspicious Black males.” Police had come, seen only the three young men eating quietly, and left.
Now it was after midnight. This crowd was drunk, some had baseball bats, others had tree switches. The whites yelled at them, “Niggers, you don’t belong here.” When they stepped forward to leave, the mob surged forward and began beating them. Sandiford covered himself and yelled, “God, don’t kill us!” Grimes suffered a blow but ran north into the cold night. Griffith and Sandiford ran west, with the mob in pursuit in car and on foot.
Eight blocks away, the mob caught up with them. In a field of bushes and weeds next to the Belt Parkway, they beat the young Black men mercilessly. Sandiford played dead as Griffith slipped through a hole in the fence onto the six-lane parkway. When Griffith tried to cross the parkway—perhaps confused, certainly in pain and terror—he was struck by a car. His body crushed the hood and he bounced off the windshield out toward the dividing barriers. Police later found Sandiford, badly injured and dazed, stumbling blindly through the streets.
Mayor Ed Koch compared the incident to a lynching in the Old South, called it “the most horrendous incident” of his term and went to Howard Beach to call for the formation of a new Kerner Commission. He told the media that the nation was still divided in two societies—one Black and one white. Howard Beach residents booed him. Some of them told reporters that if they had been walking in Bed-Stuy late at night, surely they would have expected to be visited with the same kind of violence.
Bishop Emerson J. Moore, New York City’s only black Roman Catholic bishop, declared, “I have lived in New York all my life, and the racial polarization now is as bad as it’s ever been. Things are very bad now, and I fear for a hot summer.”28
In New York City’s Black community, the message of the Michael Griffith’s death, coming on top of the Stewart killing and the Goetz shooting and all the others, was clear. Northern racism was alive and well, and it was time for action. Rage was the dominant chord, an emotion that seemed to catch the Black civil rights leadership by surprise. Following the incident, some had even invited graying southern civil rights icons to come north to give them advice.29 But many favored a more militant, nationalist line, and hoped that new leaders would step forward. They did not want someone who had marched with Martin in the misty past. They wanted a latter-day Malcolm who spoke to their fearful, tense present.
Sandiford’s and Grimes’s lawyers, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, took a confrontational approach. Sandiford himself was still angry that, after he was beaten, he had been harassed by police and treated as a suspect. And thirty-one-year-old Reverend Al Sharpton, whose résumé already included boy preacher, teen community organizer and tour promoter for James Brown and Michael Jackson, led a series of marches into Howard Beach, often ending at the New Park Pizzeria. Separated by thin blue police lines, the marchers faced off with angry white residents.
Young anti-apartheid activists also emerged, such as Rutgers’ Lisa Williamson, the leader of the newly formed National African Youth and Student Alliance. Williamson, Sharpton and Ocean-Hill/Brownsville vet Sonny Carson called for a “Day of Mourning and Outrage” and a symbolic boycott of white businesses. On January 21, ten thousand marchers led police all over the city, before they stopped at Mayor Koch’s residence. “Mayor Koch, have you heard? Howard Beach is Johannesburg,” they chanted below his window. “Black power! African power!”30
Hip-Hop in a New Era
These were the currents that swirled during the mid-1980s. The culture that had poured out from the streets of the Bronx was transitioning into a new era.
Graffiti, pushed off the subways, poured onto the streets and highways and freight trains, initiating a new wave of police crackdowns and internecine fights. Style wars dispersed to thousands of distant cities, where fervent new movements opened new frontlines with local authorities.
B-boying, a dance style that had already died once in New York, disappeared again, to be replaced by a succession of fad dances. Steps like the Whop, the Reebok, the Cabbage Patch and countless others got everyone back on the dancefloor. But each one disappeared faster than b-boying ever had. Third-generation breaking adherents continued the artform as Rock Steady’s disciples covered the globe.
Rap proved to be the ideal form to commodify hip-hop culture. It was endlessly novel, reproducible, malleable, perfectible. Records got shorter, raps more concise and tailored to pop-song structures. Rap groups shrank, from the Furious Five and the Funky 4 + 1 More down to the Treacherous Three, and now, to duos like Cash Money and Marvelous or Eric B. and Rakim.
DJs were still often billed first, and after Grandmaster Flash’s epochal “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel,” they enjoyed a brief artistic surge with singles like Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” Grandmixer DST’s “Crazy Cuts,” and the B-Boys’ “2,3 Break.” But DJs no longer enjoyed the eminence or the central musical role their billing implied. When drum-machine and sampling technology were turned into hip-hop tools, the record producer filled that space. Early rap labels had already marginalized the DJ, and the new technology effectively mimicked and extended the DJ’s musical capabilities. The rise of the rap producer, the arrival of some extraordinary rappers, and the increasing flow of capital propelled hip-hop music into a period of remarkable stylistic development.
By 1986, rap eclipsed all the other movements. It had expanded to incorporate many more pop perspectives—satirical rap, teenybopper rap, X-rated rap, Roxanne rap, Reagan rap, John Wayne rap. But in the new crisis time, as it had been for Jamaica’s embattled roots generation, rappers were increasingly being recognized as “the voices of their generation.” The center of the rap world swung decidedly in a Black nationalist direction. Hip-hop culture realigned itself and reimagined its roots, representing itself now as a rap thing, a serious thing, a Black thing.
The unlikely hotbed of the new energy was in the Black Belt of Long Island.
The making of the Enemy, 1988.
Photo © Michael Benabib/Retna LTD.
12.
What We Got to Say
Black Suburbia, Segregation and
Utopia in the Late 1980s
Ay uh we didn’t get our forty acres and a mule but we did get you, C.C.
—George Clinton
Long Island, where I got ‘em wild and That’s the reason they’re claiming that I’m violent
—Chuck D
“Def Jam is the ultimate suburban record label,” wrote music cr
itic Frank Owen in one of the earliest articles on Public Enemy. He argued that Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin were creating “the first Black music that hasn’t had to dress itself up in showbiz glamour and upwardly mobile mores in order to succeed.” They were leading the battle “against the gentrification of black music.”1 Significantly, Simmons, Run DMC and LL Cool J were from home-owning Queens, and Rubin, Original Concept and Public Enemy were from “the well-to-do beach communities of Long Island.”
Owen quoted Public Enemy’s lead rapper, Chuck D, an intimidatingly articulate guy whose eyes always seemed hidden beneath the brim of his baseball cap. “Raps from the suburbs are a little more broad,” Chuck said. “They don’t have the closed-in focus like inner-city raps. In the suburbs you can rap about regular everyday life like going to the park and taking a swim. The rest of America can relate to that.”
But Public Enemy’s art would always belie easy sociology. Public Enemy’s second single, “You’re Gonna Get Yours,” was Chuck’s ode to his 98 Olds, “the ultimate homeboy car!”—a theme as American as The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe.” Yet the song was also about facing down racial profiling with Black posse power, an act of defiance set within the historical context of Robert Moses’s expressway-fueled segregation and Levittown’s racial covenants. Chuck himself would never rap about going to the park or taking a swim. The suburbs that birthed Def Jam’s cultural vanguard were no white-bread New Frontier futurama.
The Black Belt and the Resegregation of Long Island
After World War II, African Americans began moving to the suburbs of Queens. Soon what would become known as “the Black Belt” spilled past Queens’s eastern borders into Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk Counties. By the 1970s, it stretched from Merrick and Freeport through Roosevelt to Hempstead.
“Long Island represented an outpost for many New Yorkers trying to escape what had become the ravages of urban America in the ‘60s,” says Bill Stephney. “White ethnics—Italians, European Jews, Irish—were all moving out from their various sectors of New York City to escape Blacks and Latinos. The thing is the working to middle-class Black generation living in the Bed-Stuys and the Parkchesters, the Bronx and Harlem, also wanted the same thing. Raise their kids with backyards and birds. The quote unquote American dream.”
The core of what would become Public Enemy—Carlton “Chuck D” Riden-hour, Bill Stephney, Hank “Shocklee” Boxley, William “Flavor Flav” Drayton, Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin and Harry “Allen” McGregor—were all born between 1958 to 1961, and had moved to the Black Belt by the early ‘70s. 1980 census data showed that over 40 percent of white New Yorkers lived in the suburbs, but only 8 percent of Black New Yorkers did.2 In other words, they were part of the race’s “talented tenth,” the very embodiment of the brightest hopes of integrationists.
Bill’s father, Ted Stephney, had been a Jackie Robinson of sorts, joining the staff of Sports Illustrated magazine in 1954 and eventually rising to become the magazine’s first Black editor. In 1965, he moved his family from Harlem to Hempstead. The Stephneys were pioneers on their block, one of three Black families among about forty whites. More Black families moved in, but in practice, integration never worked the way that civil rights activists had hoped.
In 1966, integration orders were issued by New York State education officials for Freeport, Glen Cove, Roosevelt and Amityville. These communities suddenly looked more attractive to Black homebuyers. White real estate agents descended on white homeowners to encourage them to sell their homes and “upgrade” to new developments to the north and east. By skillfully exploiting fears, real-estate agents could double their sales in a practice known as “block-busting.” For all practical purposes, racism and the market ensured that these neighborhoods were “integrated” only in passing.
When Chuck’s family moved from the Queensbridge projects to Roosevelt in 1969, buying their piece of the dream for the relatively affordable price of $20,000, the number of Blacks in the neighborhood had long passed the tipping point—that unspoken ratio somewhere between 10 and 20 percent that triggered white flight. “Two years prior it was about maybe 90 percent white. When we moved in it was about 50 percent. Two years later, about 90 percent Black,” he says. The oldest of three children, Chuck grew up in virtually an all-Black suburb.
Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act had banned discrimination in selling and renting homes, Stephney says, “Black folks were shown Hempstead and Roosevelt and parts of Freeport, also New Cassel.” Other Long Island towns, like Wyandanch, Brentwood and Amityville—homes to the rappers Rakim Allah, EPMD and De La Soul, respectively—also became largely Black. In between, places like East Meadow, Baldwin, Rockville Centre, the fading über burb of Levittown and the sparkling “edge cities” or exurbs encircling the Black Belt to the north and east remained mostly white.
By the early 1970s, Long Island’s Black Belt was firmly established. Two decades later, Newsday would find that illegal steering practices were still commonplace and called Long Island housing patterns “apartheid-like.”3 While the victories of the civil rights and Black power movements had expanded the Black middle-class, that middle-class was now just as segregated as its “underclass” counterparts were.
Always Between: The Black Middle Class
So yes, they had made it to Long Island. But no, this wasn’t the promised land. Black suburbia was a safe island in a sea of whiteness, and incontrovertible evidence of white resistance to King’s dream.
Newsday found that while many of Long Island’s white students attended some of the best schools in the country,
[m]ore than half of the Island’s 40,000 Black public school children attend 11 districts where academic programs and resources are measurably inferior to those in white schools: They are poorly equipped, their teachers are less experienced and underpaid. Test scores are low, the dropout rate is high, few students go on to college.4
In a Newsday poll, most Blacks rated race relations as “fair” or “poor.”5Three-quarters wanted to live in integrated communities. By contrast, fully 55 percent of white Long Islanders preferred to live in mostly white neighborhoods, a rate high above the national average.
Some white youths apparently shared their parents’ feelings. In 1985, a cineplex in Franklin Square, a white town edging against Hempstead, opened the Run DMC vehicle, Krush Groove, next to the Freddy Krueger bloody-white-picket-fence flick, Nightmare on Elm Street, and fights between Black and white youths broke out. One white teenager complained that Krush Groove was “attracting a Black crowd to a white town. That means trouble, especially because they come out of the movie all psyched up.”6 The movie was a comedy. Critics hated the movie, but no one else had ever accused it of being provocative.
White cops seemed to treat the Black suburbs as an advancing border. Although Blacks made up only 9 percent of Long Island’s population, they made up over 30 percent of the arrests in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and 43 percent of suspects shot at by police. Only 2 percent of the police force was Black.7The poll found that Blacks were four times more likely than whites to distrust police.
Sociologists had begun calling places like the Black Belt “inner-ring suburbs.” The housing stock was aging, housing values had leveled off, education and social services were declining and crack dealers were beginning to appear. These suburban Blacks were caught between Black poverty and white flight. They were buffers between inner-city ghettos of color and the new New Frontier of white wealth in the exurbs.
To neoconservative and neoliberal pundits, the end of integration meant it was time for the Black race’s talented tenth to take responsibility to save the race. But as journalist Ellis Cose wrote in his book The Rage of a Privileged Class, “The irony in such arguments is that the ‘decent Black people’ who will save America from the underclass, those paragons of middle-class virtue who will rescue the ghetto from violence, are themselves in a state of either silent resentment or deeply repressed rage. Taken as a group, they
are at least as disaffected and pessimistic as those struggling at society’s periphery.”8
Living in this borderland, where everything mixed and clashed, one might be freighted with a feeling of being in-between all the time—a Duboisian double-consciousness complicated by the burden of class. But being Black and middle class could also be liberating. The Newsday poll noted what it thought to be a conundrum: “[M]ost Blacks were optimistic about the future even while believing that segregation will stay the same or increase.”9
A sacred tenet of the civil rights movement had been that allowing Black families into white neighborhoods or Black students into white classrooms would lift their expectations, eliminate their alleged pathologies, and brighten their life chances. Integration was presumed to be the economic and cultural ideal for Blacks, just as assimilation was for immigrants. But while most Long Island Blacks liked the idea of integration—indeed, much more than their white counterparts—they certainly did not feel that they needed integration to succeed.
To them, the Black Belt was also an idyll, the sort of place in which Marcus Garvey’s son, a doctor named Julius, could open his heart surgery practice. Whites often came to Dr. Garvey’s office, took one look at him, and never returned. But this Black-owned business was not suffering, nor were many others.10
The Black Belt was culturally rich. Chuck’s mother, Judy Ridenhour, formed the Roosevelt Community Theater and ran it from 1971 to 1985, mentoring a number of young actors and actresses, such as Chuck’s childhood buddy, Eddie Murphy. Chuck, Hank, Eddie and Richard Griffin, were sent to study blackness on white campuses. Between 1970 and 1972, they attended a summer program at Hofstra and Adelphi universities organized and taught by Black Panthers, Black Muslims and university students, called “The Afro-American Experience,” the local manifestation of the national movement for ethnic studies and Afro-American studies. The program proved instrumental in convincing Chuck and Hank to attend those still largely white universities years later.