Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  A decade later, Brown was on the staff of the Atlanta-based civil rights stalwart, the Southern Organizing Committee, where she formed the Youth Task Force to organize youths from ten states and eighty-five universities into the environmental justice movement. She began to realize that a sharp, traumatic generational divide was emerging. Elders called her generation apathetic, but Brown saw a fundamentally different politics.

  “The way in which they built their movement was around the ‘lunch counter’—SNCC and others coming down to the South to challenge segregation on the lunch counter,” she says. “We didn’t have a single ‘lunch counter.’ We have had many ‘lunch counters.’ Our fight has been a constant barrage of struggles.” No longer was there a single Movement, but dozens of movements—civil rights, education, environmental justice, AIDS, prisons, the list went on. But Brown noticed that where the dialogue really collapsed, where the generation gap was deepest, was over the question of hip-hop culture and rap music.

  It was a divide that a fading Black Pennsylvania politician named C. Delores Tucker tried to exploit. Born in 1929 and raised in northern Philadelphia, Tucker inherited twenty-four tenement buildings from her parents and by 1966 had been singled out by the local newspaper as one of the city’s worst slumlords. Her buildings were all soon boarded up, taken over by the city, given to charities or simply abandoned.8

  Tucker’s failures as a property manager did not stop her from seeking the civil rights limelight. She marched arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma and became a close ally of Jesse Jackson. She became a rainmaker for the Democratic Party and was appointed Pennsylvania’s secretary of state in 1971, the highest-ranking Black woman official in the state’s history. Six years later, she was fired by the Democratic governor for allegedly using state employees to write personal speeches and collecting kickbacks from charities.

  In 1984, Tucker formed a lobby group called the National Political Congress of Black Women. Two years later, she became the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee’s Black Caucus. She then embarked on a series of unsuccessful runs for lieutenant governor and Congress before fading back into obscurity. In 1993, her friends Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore gave Tucker an opportunity to climb back into the spotlight when they approached her about having the NPCBW take up the fight against gangsta rap. Reverend Calvin Butts had already been steamrolling rap CDs in Harlem. They wanted in on the action.

  Tucker repeated the same critique that hip-hop feminists had been leveling at media monopolies and rap misogynists for years. Corporations were not taking responsibility for the images they were distributing, and ducking serious discussion by hiding behind the First Amendment. But there was something disingenuous and opportunistic about her attacks.

  Tucker won over both the liberal and conservative wings of her party by courting Senators Carol Moseley Braun and Joe Lieberman. Yet she also avidly welcomed the support of cultural conservatives like prominent Reagan/Bush cabinet member Bill Bennett. As the presidential election season rolled around, she joined with Republican candidate Bob Dole. Together, Bennett, Dole and Tucker made Suge Knight, Death Row Records and Snoop Dogg into clay pigeons for their culture war.

  Tucker was enormously helpful to white cultural conservatives. In interviews, she compared herself to Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and made an explicitly racial appeal that insulated white cult-cons from criticism. Tucker was also mouthing the most extreme fears of many disillusioned, middle-class, middle-aged people of color, the very same civil rights generation elders who felt they had given everything in struggle for their kids, only to see them turn out to be spoiled, anarchic, value-free ingrates. She attracted Blacks who supported police crackdowns and strengthening juvenile-crime laws, the very same elders with whom Angela Brown was having anguishing arguments. To the cult-cons, Tucker was mobilizing fresh troops for further attacks on youths of color.

  In early 1994, Tucker prevailed upon Moseley Braun to convene an unprecedented Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gangsta rap, an inquiry into “the effects of violent and demeaning imagery in popular music on American youth.” Tucker was the star witness. Echoing right-wing backlash architects like James Q. Wilson, John Dilulio and James Alan Fox, she called for a broadening of the War on Youth:

  As we have seen in the last thirty years, increasing law enforcement and correctional facilities have not reduced crime. These short-term fixes will do nothing to improve the lives of children like the nineteen that [sic] were recently removed from a home in Chicago because of parental neglect and abuse. Because of the lack of positive influences, their minds will be fertile and receptive ground for internalizing the violence glorified in gangster rap. Children such as these, our most neglected population, will become a social time bomb in our midst. Being coaxed by gangster rap, they will trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions that we have never seen the likes of. Regardless of the number of jails built, it will not be enough. Neither will there be enough police or government programs to contain the explosion of crime. We as a Nation must act now and we must act decisively.9

  The Return of Hip-Hop Activism

  Brown and the Youth Task Force had heard enough. Not only had Tucker committed the political equivalent of taking a family argument public, she seemed to be calling down the wrath of the government on the hip-hop generation by arguing that sweep laws, new prisons, and profiling were inadequate, that youth culture also needed to be regulated. Not just bodies, but ideas needed to be contained. By articulating a broader basis for the politics of containment, Tucker had turned the debate over hip-hop culture misogyny and violence into something much worse—she had mobilized the elders to turn on their children, to join their enemies in a broad political and cultural attack on youth of color.

  The Task Force reacted by organizing the Atlanta hip-hop community. They initiated a series of forums to defend hip-hop and constructively critique it. The forums brought artists like the Goodie Mob, Tupac and Afeni Shakur, and Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boyz together with elders, lawyers, scholars, activists, and poets. The Task Force catalyzed an active response in activism, the arts, and the record industry. Many now credit their work as laying the foundation for Atlanta’s leap to the cutting edge of both the rap industry and hip-hop activism by the end of the decade.

  Around the country, hip-hop heads took similar stands. These activists were not trying to stifle or chastise the artists Tucker-style, they were trying to create a sense of community and responsibility, and to define a new praxis of politics and culture. The aim was, as Maxine Waters had put it during the gangsta rap hearings, to “embrace and transform rather than to confront, isolate, and marginalize.”10 They were dealing with a unique paradox—a generation that had greater access to the media and culture than any other in history remained as politically scapegoated and marginalized as any in history. They called themselves “hip-hop activists” because the term spoke to the way culture and politics came together for them, and because it was a way to reclaim and define their generational identity.

  In fact, the hip-hop generation was at least as, if not more, politically active than the civil rights generation. In 2001, the UCLA Freshman Survey—the definitive documentation of college-age youth attitudes since 1966—found that nearly half of all freshman said they had participated in an organized demonstration during the past year. That number was three times greater than in the inaugural survey, conducted at the peak of the civil rights movement.

  Civil rights may have fixed an image of “The Movement” as picket-waving masses on the National Mall listening to Dr. King. If the youths weren’t there in D.C., elders figured, nothing must be happening. But hip-hop activism largely took place below the national radar. Capitol Hill’s diminished powers, big-money lobbying and campaign financing, and symbolic politics made it a less likely place than ever to go to get a problem solved. From Watergate to Monicagate, national politics often seemed just a lesser form of entertainment. Why bother marching on Washin
gton?

  The life-and-death struggles were happening at the local level, where hip-hop activists were busy fighting in the streets, neighborhoods, school boards, city halls, state legislatures and corporate offices. This time, the whole world would not be watching; global media monopolies could make sure of that. But the hiphop generation was pushing forward in a complicated world, in more sophisticated ways than previous generations ever had.

  Most visibly, Russell Simmons was assembling his hip-hop army, forming the Hip Hop Summit Action Network to bring together rappers, academics, music industry leaders, civil rights leaders, and politicians to push for social change. But the most compelling work was happening at the local level, outside of the traditional institutions. In Chicago, Brooklyn and Oakland, hip-hop activists used graffiti, b-boying, and DJing to educate and organize around education, gentrification, and juvenile justice issues. In Louisville, they fought book bans and youth curfews. In the Bay Area and the Bronx, they organized to stop the expansion of the juvenile detention facilities. In Albuquerque, they tossed out city council members who supported the building of a highway through sacred Native lands. On campuses across the country, they fought for labor unions, living wages, and against sweatshops and companies that invested in the prison industry.

  In introducing The Future 500, a ground-breaking study of five hundred U.S. hip-hop activist and youth organizations, William “UPSKI” Wimsatt wrote, “Young people are noticing that the only thing that can’t be bought sold, co-opted or marketed anymore is substantive political organizing and dissent.”11

  More War

  The millennium would not open with a Y2K apocalypse or the fulfillment of an obscure prophecy, but with a very real explosion of rage against a decade of an expanding War on Youth.

  In the streets of New York City, hip-hop activists took to the streets to protest Giuliani Time. Mayor Rudy Giuliani had implemented a zero-tolerance campaign focused on rooting out low-level “quality-of-life” crimes—the culmination of the Broken Windows theory—aimed at youths, the poor, the homeless and people of color. This zero-tolerance model would spread to urban centers across the country. It empowered a certain kind of lawless cop. In the summer of 1997, an innocent Haitian immigrant named Abner Louima was swept up and arrested when police broke up a fight outside an Afro-Caribbean nightclub in Brooklyn, then sodomized with a broom handle in the bathroom of the 70th precinct by outlaw cops.

  The shock troops of the campaign were NYPD’s Street Crime Units, mobilized into the poor neighborhoods at the borders of business districts. In 1997 and 1998, they stopped and frisked 45,000 people, mostly young, male and Black or brown. They were supposed to be stopping nuisance crimes, but their presence itself was a nuisance: fewer than nine thousand arrests were made.

  In February 1999, a report of a rape led four Street Crime Unit cops to a Soundview apartment building two blocks from Bronx River Houses where they found a slim, Senegalese immigrant looking at them quizzically from the vestibule. When Amadou Diallo reached into his pocket to pull out his wallet, the cops fired forty-one shots, killing him with nineteen bullets. There were many more victims: Yong Xin Huang, a sixteen-year-old Chinese American; Gidone Busch, a thirty-one-year-old Hasidic Jew; Patrick Bailey, a twenty-year-old Jamaican immigrant; Anthony Baez, a twenty-nine-year-old Puerto Rican.

  Three weeks after Diallo’s killer cops were acquitted, an undercover cop approached Haitian-American Patrick Dorismond to ask where he could buy drugs. Dorismond refused to answer. He was trying to turn his life around and didn’t need trouble. But the cop persisted and a scuffle broke out. Dorismond was shot dead in the chest. At his funeral in Brooklyn, policemen provoked funeral marchers by arriving in riot gear, then moved in with batons to make arrests. Rocks and bottles rained down on them from apartment windows. Hip-hop activists began angry street protests the following month.

  In Los Angeles, the biggest police scandal in American history broke out in the Rampart Division, the same Westlake/Pico-Union neighborhood hit hard by the police and the INS after the riots. At Rampart, the rogue CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) anti-gang unit “jumped in” new members gang-style, kept a “CRASH pad” where they brought prostitutes to screw and get high, stole and resold confiscated cocaine, planted guns and drugs on gang members, and left many of them paralyzed or dead.

  Just as the brutality and murders of New York City’s Street Crimes Unit had been tolerated, Rampart CRASH’s lawlessness was overlooked. Politicians demanded numbers that would support their tough-on-crime, tough-on-youth bonafides—arrests, confiscations, prosecutions, anything at all. The means to these ends were less important. Zero-tolerance only worked in one direction.

  This attitude culminated in a March 2000 ballot initiative in California, numbered Proposition 21. The so-called Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act made it easier to unseal confidential juvenile records, to try juveniles as young as fourteen as adults or to send them to adult prisons, severely increased punishment for a number of juvenile crimes and expanded juvenile sentencing under Three-Strikes. Youths faced three years for just $400 of vandalism, or the death penalty for a “gang-related” homicide. Cops could wiretap young people they identified as gang members, and force them to be registered like sex offenders. Proposition 21 was counterintuitive. Juvenile crime rates were at their lowest levels since the mid-1960s. But on March 7, 2000, Proposition 21 passed with 62 percent of the vote.

  If there was an upside, it was that six years of ballot attacks in Propositions 184, 187, 209 and 227 had fueled a widespread politicization of youth. In 1994, hundreds of thousands of Latino student activists had staged a statewide school walkout to protest Proposition 187, the largest Latino student protests since the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Under constant attack, the youth movement built a strong infrastructure for protest. By the end of the century, some of the young hip-hop activists began making connections to other emerging movements.

  In late November 1999, Jasmine De La Rosa, an organizer with the Bay Area’s Third Eye Movement, and a contingent of hip-hop activists attended the biggest North American demonstrations in decades, the protests in Seattle at the meeting of World Trade Organization. “There were only a small number of hiphop activists in Seattle because the World Trade Organization wasn’t characterized in the words that we would understand. If motherfuckers heard, ‘The leaders of the New World Order are trying to meet in Seattle,’ I think that it might have brought more people,” she said.

  But Proposition 21 seemed to paint the New World Order in bold, vivid strokes. A month after the initiative passed, a bigger contingent of Californians joined hip-hop activists from Seattle, Boston and New York City at April 16, 2000, anti-corporate globalization protests at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington, D.C. They began to see connections. After returning, De La Rosa said, “Worldwide, there’s a militarization of the police forces. Governments are increasingly using them to push agendas that are intimately connected to the corporations.”

  Hoping to draw the links between the local and the global, hip-hop activists set their sights on the 2000 presidential election season. They had not forgotten that in the previous two elections their generation had been targeted and scapegoated. This time they would take a stand.

  A Different Kind of Globalization

  Few stories could illustrate the stakes for the hip-hop generation better than that of a Salvadoran ex-gangbanger in Los Angeles named Alex Sanchez.

  The stocky, charismatic program director of a peace organization called Homies Unidos was a legend on the streets, working tirelessly to calm the violence between the warring Latino gangs that dominated the Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods, a role that won him the respect of gang members as well as some of California’s leading politicians.

  Nothing in life had ever come easy for Sanchez. He was working for peace in the most corrupt police precinct in the nation—LAPD’s Rampart Division. And the U.S. government
was trying to deport him to El Salvador, where he was certain to face execution.

  Alex Sanchez was born in San Salvador in 1979. He fled with his family at the age of six to Los Angeles, a refugee of a brutal civil war which came to global attention after the Reagan-backed right-wing government assassinated six leftist opposition leaders. “When they got here, they’d already been through violence, they’d seen their fathers shot,” says Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist who, as a state senator, became close to Sanchez. “And they get here and there’s Mexican gangs and Black gangs, so they form gangs to claim a space.”

  During the late 1980s, Sanchez’s family obtained green cards, but Sanchez had run away from home by that time. He was rolling with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a gang swelling with disaffected immigrant and second-generation Salvadoran youths. “It was a complete liberation, it was complete independence. I wanted to rebel against everybody,” Sanchez says.

  Emerging during the mid-1980s, the quickly expanding gang was soon bumping heads on the Pico-Union streets with the largely Chicano 18th Street Gang. Sanchez became known to other gang members and to police, and spent much of his teens shuttling in and out of juvenile detention facilities. When he became an adult, he went to prison for grand theft auto. After his bid was up in 1994, prison officials discovered he had never secured his citizenship papers and handed him over to the INS for deportation.