Can't Stop Won't Stop (2 page)

Up until recently, our generation has mainly been defined by the prefix “post-.” We have been post–civil rights, postmodern, poststructural, postfeminist, post-Black, post-soul. We're the poster children of “post-,” the leftovers in the dirty kitchen of yesterday's feast. We have been the Baby Boom Echo. (Is Baby Boom Narcissus in the house?) We have been Generation X. Now they even talk about Generation Y. And why? Probably because Y comes after X.

And so, by the mid-1990s, many young writers—sick of what Howe and Strauss and their peers had wrought—took to calling themselves “the Hip-Hop Generation.” In 2002, in an important book,
The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and The Crisis in African American Culture,
Bakari Kitwana forged a narrow definition—African Americans born between 1965 and 1984—a period bracketed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the assassination of Malcolm X on one end and hip-hop's global takeover during the peak of the Reagan/Bush era at the other.

Kitwana grappled with the implications of the gap between Blacks who came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and those who came of age with hip-hop. His point was simple: a community cannot have a useful discussion about racial progress without first taking account of the facts of change.

Folks got bogged down once again in the details. How could one accept a definition of a Hip-Hop Generation which excluded the culture's pioneers, like Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, for being born too early? Or one that excluded those who had come to claim and transform hip-hop culture, but were not Black or born in America? Exactly when a Hip-Hop Generation began and whom it includes remains, quite appropriately, a contested question.

My own feeling is that the idea of the Hip-Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and polyculturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.”

So, you ask, when does the Hip-Hop Generation begin? After DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. Whom does it include? Anyone who is down. When does it end? When the next generation tells us it's over.

This is a nonfiction history of a fiction—a history, some mystery and certainly no prophecy. It's but one version, this dub history—a gift from those who have illuminated and inspired, all defects of which are my own.

There are many more versions to be heard. May they all be.

Jeff Chang

Brooklyn and Berkeley

January 1998 to March 2004

And if I don't get my desire
Then I'll set the spaceships on fire

—Gregory Isaacs

 

 

“Ladies and gentlemen, there it is.”
Photo © Matt Daly/Code Red/911 Pictures

The St. Athanasius school baseball team, South Bronx
Photo © Mel Rosenthal

 

 

When you come to the ballpark, you're walking into a place that is all deception and lies. . . . There's nothing truthful at the ballpark. Except the game.

—Barry Bonds

It was a bad night for baseball in the South Bronx—an angry arctic wind, an ominous new moon.

The largest crowd of the year filled Yankee Stadium for the second game of the 1977 World Series, the New York Yankees versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, east coast versus west.

The Yankees were the best team money could buy. When Major League Baseball raised the curtain on free agency before the 1977 season, owner George Steinbrenner opened his checkbook and with a $3 million offer landed the biggest prize in the game, home-run slugger Reggie Jackson, the son of a Negro Leaguer who had received seven dollars a game. For the Yankees—who did not sign their first Black player until nine years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line—Jackson was their most expensive signing in history.

Manager Billy Martin seethed. He had opposed signing Jackson. He refused to attend the press conference introducing Jackson in pinstripes. As the season began, he cold-shouldered the star, sometimes benched him. When he was upset, he called Jackson “boy.”

Jackson got along no better with his new teammates. Some resented his salary, even though white players like Catfish Hunter had million-dollar contracts as well. They thought Jackson too flamboyant, flaunting his blonde girlfriends in the Rolls-Royce Corniche that Steinbrenner had bought him. But it was
his arrogance that finally turned them. In a magazine article, Jackson dissed captain Thurman Munson, saying, “This team, it all flows from me. I've got to keep it all going. I'm the straw that stirs the drink.” Maybe he had not meant to say it that way. Maybe he was just telling the truth. Jackson's teammates stopped talking to him.

During a June game against the Red Sox, the tension finally exploded. After Jackson missed a flyball in right field, Martin angrily pulled him off the field. Jackson trotted slowly and angrily for the dugout. “What did I do?” he asked Martin.

“What did you do?” Martin barked. “You know what the fuck you did.”

“I wasn't loafing, Billy,” Jackson protested. “Nothing I could ever do would please you. You never wanted me on this team. You don't want me now. Why don't you just admit it?”

“I ought to kick your fucking ass!” Martin screamed.

Jackson lost it. “Who the fuck do you think you're talking to,
old man
?”
¹
The Yankee coaches leaped up to restrain Martin from punching Jackson, while TV cameras rolled.

That night in his hotel room, Jackson came to tears in front of a small group of news reporters. “It makes me cry, the way they treat me on this team. The Yankee pinstripes are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle and I'm a nigger to them,” he moaned. “I don't know how to be subservient.”
²

It had been thirty seasons since Jackie Robinson, playing one game, had changed another, by taking Ebbets Field in Dodger blue. The postwar thrust away from racial segregation began with the pivotal cultural moment when Robinson stepped out of that formerly whites-only dugout.

After Robinson retired, he brought his commitment to integration into politics. The 1960s had begun, the Dodgers were in Los Angeles, and Ebbets Field was sprouting boxy brick and concrete beanstalks, honoring Jackie with towering public housing projects. American politics was lurching to catch up with the changes already felt in the culture and Robinson's legacy was being openly questioned.

In 1963, one of those inquisitors was Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, who made a point of appearing at a massive Harlem rally with a firebrand named Malcolm X. A contemporary of Robinson, Malcolm had been in jail
while Jackie was on the field. Both had seen the worst of America. Both wanted the best for their children. But their lives had not brought them to the same conclusions. At the heart of the issue was the age-old African-American question: Shall we fight for the nation or build our own? Shall we save America or ourselves?

Robinson denounced the congressman for aligning with the Black Muslim. “You have grievously set back the cause of the Negro,” Robinson wrote in an open letter to Powell on the pages of the
New York Amsterdam News.
“For you are aware—and have preached for many years—that the answer for the Negro is to be found, not in segregation or in separation, but by his insistence upon moving into his rightful place—the same place as that of any other American—within our society.”

On the same pages, Malcolm X himself responded to Robinson: “You have never shown appreciation for the support given you by the Negro masses, but you have a record of being very faithful to your White Benefactors.”
³

Later that year, in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In Harlem, days of street protests over education and poverty gave way to nights of clashes between white police and Black youths, the start of the long, hot summers that gripped America the rest of that turbulent decade.

As the ‘60s drew into the ‘70s, King and X were gone, the well of faith and idealism that had sustained the movements against the forces of rationalization and violence drained, and a lot of Black dreams—integrationist or nationalist—simply burned. For the next generation, there would be no more water for the fires. Robinson would approvingly quote his former adversary: “Jackie, in days to come, your son and my son will not be willing to settle for the things we are willing to settle for.”
⁴

So there was Reggie Jackson in a finely appointed hotel room in the summer of 1977, slugging behind both civil rights and Black power, playing one game and the other. “I'm a big, Black man with an IQ of 160, making $700,000 a year, and they treat me like dirt,” Jackson said. “They've never had anyone like me on their team before.”
⁵

Four months later, when baseball fans filed into Yankee Stadium for the World Series on that cold hungry October night, many debts of history were
waiting to be redeemed. New Yorkers had never forgotten Jackie Robinson's Dodgers or forgiven owner Walter O'Malley for pushing Robinson out and stealing the team from Brooklyn. To them, the very existence of the Los Angeles Dodgers represented the triumph of greed and betrayal. But the Dodgers were like a red Corvette in a Malibu morning, a team perpetually speeding into the future. Home runs came easily to them; four of their hitters had topped thirty homers that year. Two of them were Black, two were white.

The Yanks had already taken Game One. But in this game, by the third inning, three Dodgers had already hit Catfish Hunter's pitches to the beer-drenched bleachers. In four at-bats, Jackson never even got on base. It was useless. Down by four runs, the Yankees would never catch up. The crowd turned ugly. Smoke bombs traced slow arcs in the air and firecrackers crackled off the concrete. Drunks tossed their cups over the top deck rails. Fans hurdled the retaining walls and dashed across the outfield, stopping play. Fights erupted in the stands. The winds picked up, howling in from the west.

Outside the stadium, over the right field stands, past the most secure parking lot in the South Bronx, just a mile to the east, wisps and curls of grey smoke drifted into the sky. Then the gusts caught and ashen clouds billowed. A small crowd gathered at Melrose and 158th Street for a five-alarm show, a passing distraction as ordinary as a World Series. Beyond the game, the abandoned Public School 3 was aflame and imploding.

“Ladies and gentlemen, there it is,” Howard Cosell told 60 million viewers as the helicopter cameras zoomed in on PS 3. “The Bronx is burning.”

In 1953, the future of the Bronx could be seen along the seven-mile man-made trench cutting through it. Once an unbroken continuum of cohesive, diverse communities, the trench was now the clearing for the Cross-Bronx Expressway, a modernist catastrophe of massive proportions.

As the gray concrete slab plowed from the east into the South Bronx toward Manhattan, it left behind a wake of environmental violence. “(W)here once apartment buildings or private homes had stood were now hills of rubble, decorated with ripped-open bags of rotting garbage that had been flung atop them,” the historian Robert Caro wrote. “Over the rumble of the bulldozers came the staccato,
machine-gun-like banging of jackhammers and, occasionally, the dull concussion of an exploding dynamite charge.”
⁶
These were the sounds of progress.

Forward in the Expressway's path, the Irish and Jewish families that had once occupied well-appointed, if not plush, lower-middle-class apartments had been given months to relocate, with a paltry $200-per-room as compensation. In the meantime, as they struggled to find new quarters in a city with few vacancies, they huddled in heatless, condemned buildings. The man responsible for all of this was named Moses. Robert Moses, the most powerful modern urban builder of all time, led the white exodus out of the Bronx.