by Jeff Chang
In just a decade, major labels had gone from playing catch-up in a musical genre they had once pegged as a passing novelty to signing every rap act they could to shaking out large numbers of rappers because of their political beliefs. It was that old familiar cycle: neglect, seduction, fear.
A Call to Atone
Amidst all the political and cultural attacks, the young burned for something that would give them a renewed sense of purpose and move them out of a defensive posture. The hip-hop generation waited for a call.
The gang peacemakers worked with a special urgency. Their truce movement literally meant the difference between life and death. And the victories came. From Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, Latino gangs began peace meetings. Fifty Latino gangs in Santa Ana signed a truce in 1992. Months later, an edict from prison leadership in the Mexican Mafia declared an end to drive-bys. On Halloween in 1993, hundreds of Latino gang members declared a massive truce in the Valley. By 1994, the Rollin’ 60s, Eight-Tray Gangsters, Hoover Crips and the Black P-Stones—four of the most intensely warring Black sets—gathered to announce a truce in the Los Angeles’ Harbor area.
From Los Angeles, the movement expanded nationwide. On April 29, 1993, Carl Upchurch and the Council for Urban Peace and Justice, with support from Reverend Benjamin Chavis and the NAACP, convened the first national gang summit in Kansas City with representatives from twenty-six cities. Summits were soon organized in Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and San Antonio, and truces followed in each of those cities. The energy unleashed by the gang peace movement helped to catalyze Minister Louis Farrakhan’s call for the Million Man March.
Beginning in the summer of 1994, Farrakhan began to shift the tone of his “Stop the Killing” speeches toward a new idea that might climax the street peace ministry he had begun five years before. He would gather a million Black men on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a display of unity and peace. It would show to the world, he said, “The image that you have of Black men is not the image of who and what we really are.”44 He called it a holy day of atonement and reconciliation.
For several years, the Nation of Islam had been moving into closer relations with traditional civil rights organizations and the Congressional Black Caucus. By December, he had tapped the ex-NAACP head Reverend Benjamin Chavis to serve as the national organizer for the March. Chavis had recently been dismissed from the organization amidst charges of sexual and fiscal misconduct, but Farrakhan welcomed him into the Nation, telling followers that Chavis had been run out because he had been too closely courting youth and the poor. Chavis began a massive organizing effort, working outside of the Nation to recruit Christian churches and college student, community, youth and gang peace organizations.
The Quest for Unity
The effort would be surrounded with controversy. In speeches, Farrakhan had told his followers that the day was to be for men only, that women should stay home and support the March from there. “If not for the woman in the home there could be no strong family or strong community,” Farrakhan said. “We are saying to our Black women you have always been by our sides. In fact you have been leading us. So now that we have made up our minds to stand up for you and our families, we want you to help us in this march by staying at home and teaching to our children what their fathers, uncles or brothers have decided to do.”45
This line closely echoed the ministry of the Promise Keepers, a Christian evangelical organization that had made inroads into working-class and middle-class communities of color. Society was falling apart, they said, because the men were not fulfilling their traditional roles as patriarchs and providers. But to Black feminists, this was retrograde politics. Marcia A. Gillespie, editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine said, “They are stepping up to a patriarchal vision that automatically says Black men are the leaders, and that women’s place and role is with the children, frying the chicken, providing medical assistance when needed and writing a poem. I don’t think so.”46
Gillespie, Angela Davis, Jewell Jackson McCabe, the founder of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, and Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights formed an organization called African-American Agenda 2000 to oppose the March. Others, like Julianne Malveaux, Kimberle Crenshaw and Michelle Wallace, also raised their voices against the March. It was no less, bell hooks said, than a “celebration of fascist patriarchy.”47 For their criticism, the women became targets of personal attacks, called race traitors and worse.
Black gay men debated how best to engage the Million Man March. Some boycotted it, convinced the March’s definition of masculinity was not inclusive. Their fears were confirmed when the March organizers declined a call to include a Black gay speaker and an HIV-positive speaker on the March platform. The National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum voted not to endorse the rally because of Farrakhan’s “sexist and patriarchal tone and the homophobic comments made by some march organizers.”48 But many chose to attend the March anyway. Gregory Adams decided the March was not about Farrakhan. “I think we belong right next to our straight brothers,” he said. “We experience the same racism. I’m a Black gay man who still can’t get a cab in D.C.”49
As the March neared and it became clear that hundreds of thousands had been inspired by the call for the March, African Americans argued over how much credit Farrakhan himself should get. In the end, Reverend Chavis sought to establish the March as a big-tent event. “Minister Farrakhan will tell you himself that this is not a Farrakhan march. This is a Black people’s march,” Chavis told the Washington Post. “We have never said that we are requiring people to agree with a particular philosophy or particular ideology.”50
Morning in a Perfect World
At dawn on Monday, October 16, 1995, the highways into Washington, D.C., were jammed with carpools and 15,000 buses. Hundreds of thousands of Black men had already gathered on the Mall. The mood was upbeat. The usual tourist-oriented kiosks had been replaced by vendors of jerk chicken and fruit juices, African trinkets and Afrocentric books, Million Man March T-shirts and baseball caps. D.C. activist Al-Malik Farrakhan’s gang peace organization was doing a brisk business selling its DON’T SMOKE THE BROTHERS T-shirts. Husbands brought their wives and children. Behind the desks of dozens of voter registration booths were women volunteers.
And as the sun rose in the clear sky, they streamed into the National Mall—senators and city councilpersons, country preachers and urban ministers, gang members and college fraternity brothers, pro-Black militants and Vietnam veterans, desk jockeys and blue-collar workers, elderly and teenagers. They wore buttons that said, 1 IN A MILLION and carried signs that read, THIS IS HISTORY.51
On Ninth Street, a contingent of 150 Black gay men gathered. The night before, they had quietly and seriously discussed what they would do if they faced violence. Now they marched toward the Mall, chanting, “Gay men of African descent!” They carried signs that read, I AM A BLACK, GAY MAN. I AM A BLACK MAN. I AM A MAN.
“People were honking their horns and some of them would put their fists up in support. And when we got to the Mall it was just overwhelming,” Maurice Franklin, one of the marchers, told Michelangelo Signorile. “I’m not trying to dismiss the issue of homophobia in our community, because clearly it exists. But on that day, on that Mall, I felt like I knew what it was like to be in the promised land. I felt safe, as if I was in a perfect world for one day.”52
On the platform, Rosa Parks, Kweisi Mfume, Tynetta Muhammad, Maulana Karenga, Queen Mother Moore, Carol Moseley Braun, Cornel West, Stevie Wonder and Jesse Jackson came to the podium. Maya Angelou read a poem: “And so we rise, and so we rise again.”
In the afternoon, Minister Louis Farrakhan rose before the crowd. He spoke of the slaves that had once been sold on the ground they were standing on. “George Washington said he feared that before too many years passed over his head, this slave would prove to become a most troublesome species of property,” he said. “And so we stand here today at th
is historic moment.” Then, for two-and-a-half hours, with poetry, history, numerology, esoterica and wordplay, he gave a quintessentially American speech on his chosen topic: “Toward a more perfect union.”
“Freedom can’t come from white folks. Freedom can’t come from staying here and petitioning this great government. We’re here to make a statement to the great government, but not to beg them,” Farrakhan said. “Freedom cannot come from no one but the God who can liberate the soul from the burden of sin.”
Through personal atonement could come reconciliation, and then unity. Through unity, brothers could bring an end to white supremacy, which Farrakhan said was the ultimate source of America’s and the world’s sickness. But it all started with the redemption of one’s self.
He ended by asking the gathering to join him in a pledge:
Say with me please, I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will strive to love my brother as I love myself. I, say your name, from this day forward will strive to improve myself spiritually, morally, mentally, socially, politically and economically for the benefit of myself, my family and my people.
I, say your name, pledge that I will strive to build business, build houses, build hospitals, build factories and then to enter international trade for the good of myself, my family and my people. I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will never raise my hand with a knife or a gun to beat, cut or shoot any member of my family or any human being, except in self-defense.
I, say your name, pledge from this day forward I will never abuse my wife by striking her, disrespecting her, for she is the mother of my children and the producer of my future. I, say your name, pledge that from this day forward I will never engage in the abuse of children, little boys, or little girls for sexual gratification. But I will let them grow in peace to be strong men and women for the future of our people. I, say your name, will never again use the B-word to describe my female, but particularly my own Black sister.
I, say your name, pledge from this day forward that I will not poison my body with drugs or that which is destructive to my health and my well being. I, say your name, pledge from this day forward, I will support Black newspapers, Black radio, Black television. I will support Black artists, who clean up their acts to show respect for themselves and respect for their people, and respect for the ears of the human family.
I, say your name, will do all of this, so help me God.
As they left that evening, a generation seemed to have been moved.
The Nature of Transformation
Angela Davis would ask the hard question, “All of us have reasons to atone. But is that going to bring about jobs or halt the rising punishment industry? This march may have been the first demonstration in history where Black people were mobilized, not around any goals or political agenda, but simply because they were Black men.”53
In 1963, the March on Washington had been a watershed event, a moment pregnant with the possibility of transformation. By the hundreds of thousands, a generation had come to make change. They were a tide that would force the leaders in the Capitol on the opposite side of the Mall to become agents of that transformation, to pass the most important civil rights legislation in the nation’s history.
Thirty-two years later, the Million Man March was no less a pivotal cultural moment. But times were different. When another generation came to face the Capitol, one million strong, the white edifice was a hollow symbol and the leaders in it were mainly agents of reversal, chasing each other round in a politics of symbolism, stopping every once in a while to pass legislation that only seemed to further the devastation. This generation had no reason to expect change to come from inside the Capitol.
For weeks before the march, they had quarreled about the march’s substance and meaning. But as a million men left the Mall that bright Monday, there was a new clarity. Surrounded by the symbols of American power, they contemplated their own redemption. For now, change would have to be measured in single lives.
Angela Davis felt she understood why the march had been so powerful to so many. “I think that the way the Million Man March captured the imagination of so many people had to do with this desire to feel a part of the larger Black struggle. Many people have not felt that connection for quite some time,” she said.54
“Now perhaps we can use that.”55
A generation went home with themselves, back to the business of becoming.
Bentleys and bling at twilight: David Mays (left) and Raymond “Benzino” Scott
(right), 2001. Photo © Christian Lantry
18.
Becoming the Hip-Hop Generation
The Source, the Industry and
the Big Crossover
In the home of the brave, land of the free
I don’t want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
—Leadbelly, “The Bourgeois Blues”
. . . to fuss about the exploitation of hip hop is quite often to take sides against the hip hoppers themselves—even though in the end that exploitation is certain to prove a juggernaut that the hip hoppers (and even the exploiters) can’t control. To counsel purity isn’t impermissible, but it’s certainly complicated, with ramifications that stretch far beyond the scope of this review, or indeed of any piece of writing of any length on any similar subject that has ever come to my attention.
—Robert Christgau, 1986
Hip-hop may have turned the world into Planet Rock, and may have had a lot to do with a million men gathering on the National Mall, but it never conquered Washington, D.C.’s Chocolate City. In the Black neighborhoods encircling the white structures of global power, the people embraced the music and culture they called go-go.
In D.C., bands had never lost their hold on the nightclub scene. Flesh-and-blood musicians still ruled. Dancers moved to two-hour suites of covers and originals yoked together with steaming fatback breaks of drums, percussion and bass pulls. DJs filled the set breaks and cursed the day they had refused to take trumpet lessons.
The godfather of go-go was an amiable gentleman named Chuck Brown. He had spent the first half of the sixties in Lorton prison for shooting a man in self-defense, but learned to play blues guitar there. He emerged into a city where the passage of civil rights legislation in the halls of power downtown had done little to change the race and class realities that had angered Leadbelly enough to write “The Bourgeois Blues.” Nightclubs were still segregated: whites went to the big clubs downtown, Blacks went to “go-gos” in cabarets, churches and community halls.
Brown found work in the go-gos with a top-40 dance band named Los Latinos, whose Afro-Cubanized backbeat enthralled him. When he formed the first Soul Searchers band in 1966, he brought together a little Latin and a little sanctified church and created a rhythm to glue together medleys that could last for hours. His beat drove the dancers crazy.
He had figured out what bandleaders in other cities would not until it was too late. Instead of the songs, he realized the transitions between the songs—the hypersyncopated breaks, hyped-up shout-outs, and church-style call-and-response—were the band’s main draw. What Kool Herc was doing for Bronx partyers at the same time, Chuck Brown was doing for D.C.’s go-go patrons. Brown short-circuited the rise of the disco DJ by reinventing the dance band format with go-go music.
At the beginning of the 1980s, go-go and hip-hop music were both outsider genres, inner-city musical cousins. Go-go bands lifted rap hooks for their jams and DJs like Charlie Chase and Cash Money rocked doubles of Trouble Funk and E.U. singles. Kurtis Blow, Doug E. Fresh, Teddy Riley and Salt-N-Pepa jacked go-go beats, while Big Tony, Jas. Funk, Lil’ Benny and D.C. Scorpio moved from singing to rapping.
When Run DMC was changing the rap game, Chris Blackwell, then the owner of Island Records and Island Pictures, arrived in D.C. with a plan to launch go-go like he had reggae—via a movie vehicle, backed up with a host of band signings. Unfortunately the movie, Good to Go, was no Harder They Come. After it flopped, Charles Stephenson
, then E.U.’s manager, says, “It was almost like the bottom dropped out.”
Despite the best efforts of Chuck, E.U., Trouble Funk and Rare Essence, gogo never crossed over. When the ‘90s came, New York execs rushed to sign hip-hop acts and stopped returning D.C. artists’ phone calls. Go-go survived as one of the last independent, indigenous Black youth cultures.
For its devotees in the Beltway, the Black suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, and southern Black colleges, that fact remained a point of pride. The most popular go-go bands could play to 20,000 fans every week. Clothing companies and concert bootleg (“P.A. tape”) purveyors sprung up. Rare Essence and Backyard Band recorded some of the most compelling dance music of the decade. Go-go evolved without the pressure of mainstream expectations, but it also remained a largely segregated world in a culturally desegregating era, a fiercely local scene in a globalizing era.
It was also an industrial-era music for a postindustrial era. Just as it was when Chuck Brown walked out of Lorton, bands’ fierce competition to remain atop the club scene remained the primary engine of go-go music. Making records and three-minute hit singles, the thing the music industry was most concerned with, was an afterthought. Economics partly explains why, after the 1980s, hip-hop went global and go-go remained local.