Can't Stop Won't Stop (34 page)

Across the country, the hottest mixtape in Los Angeles was a homemade cassette made by Compton DJ Toddy Tee in his home-studio. On the tape, Toddy Tee rapped about the new cracked-out world over instrumentals of east coast hits. Whodini's “Freaks Come Out at Night” became “The Clucks Come Out at Night”; UTFO's “Roxanne Roxanne” became “Rockman, Rockman.” Most famously, Rappin' Duke's “Rappin' Duke” became “Batterram,” at tale about the military-armored personnel vehicle L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates used to bust down the doors of rock-houses.

L.A. rap pioneer Tracey “Ice T” Marrow and his Chicano friend, Arturo “Kid Frost” Molina Jr., had cut a handful of tracks in the early ‘80s to no great consequence. Instead Ice T had parlayed his street rep into a starring role in
Breaking and Entering
, a 1982 cult movie about the L.A. dance scene that inspired
Breakin'
, and led to his casting in a role for that movie. He had started rapping as a teenage Crip with lines inspired by the Crips' poetry books and Iceberg Slim pulps, like:

Strollin' through the city in the middle of the night

Niggas on my left and niggas on my right

Yo I Cr-Cr-Cr-Cripped every nigga I see

If you bad enough come fuck with me.
³⁹

“Batterram” and “P.S.K.” gave him the juice to revisit his old gang rhymes. In 1986, Ice T dropped “Six in the Morning” on the b-side of his single, “Dog N' The Wax.” “That song,” he told journalist and photographer Brian Cross, “turned out to be my identity.”
⁴⁰

The tale of a “self-made monster of the city streets, remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats,” “Six in the Morning” was a revisionist rap history told from the hard streets of Los Angeles. The tale begins in 1979, the same year as “Rapper's Delight,” with an early morning escape from the cops—no comic book superheroes here, just a ghetto
noir
anti-hero on the run. “Didn't know what the cops wanted, didn't have time to ask,” he sneers.

As he runs, he stops on the corner to roll some dice, ends an argument with a woman by beating her down, and finally gets arrested and thrown in jail, where he causes a riot. When he emerges from prison seven years later, it's 1986, the old school is over, the action has moved west and the whole world has
changed. “The Batterram's rolling, rocks are the thing,” he raps. “Life has no meaning and money is king.”

At the end of the summer of “Six in the Morning” and “P.S.K.,” as the
Raising Hell
tour was heading into its final stretch, Run DMC's limo pulled up to the Long Beach Arena in Southern California. They anticipated fourteen thousand fans anxiously awaiting them inside. Instead they found a full-scale melee in progress. Los Angeles's gangs had turned the concert in the arena into their own private battlefield, with thousands of innocents caught in the middle.

Local radio personality Greg Mack was MCing the show. He told Brian Cross:

[T]his guy threw this other guy right over the balcony on to the stage while Whodini was peforming, so they got up on the stage trying to talk to the guy, next thing you know a whole section was running, gangs were hittin' people, grabbing gold chains, beating people . . . I got the girls, ran to the car, there was a Crip standing next to me getting his shotgun, getting ready to do God knows what.
⁴¹

This was a new breed of renegades. The hip-hop generation had reached childhood's end, and was coming into an era of rebellion.

Hip-hop was not just a ‘Fuck you' to
white society, it was a ‘Fuck you' to
the previous Black generation as well.

—Bill Stephney

 

 

The search for identity. Harlem, 1992.
Photo © John Van Hasselt/Corbis Sygma

In response to the killing of Michael Griffith, the “Day of Outrage”
demonstration comes to Howard Beach, 1986.
© Eli Reed/Magnum Photos

 

 

Not only there but right here's an apartheid.

—Rakim

If there was a single moral struggle that gripped the 1980s in the same way that desegregation had the 1960s, it was the global fight against apartheid, the racist South African apparatus of law and ideology that allowed the white minority, outnumbered five to one, to maintain political and economic power over the native Black majority. The anti-apartheid movement represented the climax of a century of anticolonial and antiracist resistance, the light piercing the last darkness before the dawn of a new global century.

Pedro Noguera, a student leader at U.C. Berkeley during the mid-'80s, says, “Apartheid was such a stark situation. It was so clear. How repressive the regime was, how unjust apartheid was—in some ways it was easier to see the issues there than it was to see the issues here.”

The Black struggle in the American south for desegregation had inspired millions around the world to throw off the shackles of white rule, and the children of civil rights, the young Americans who came of age during the late seventies and early eighties, were never allowed to forget it. The elders spend a lot of time talking about the glories of the civil rights movement, while dismissing the hiphop generation as apathetic and narcissistic.

Angela Brown, the daughter of a family of civil rights activists, was one youth organizer who wearied of her elders' criticism. “Most young people who have grown up in the South have really gone through hell with our elders,” she says. “They have constantly challenged us, that we haven't done what they've done as far as moving the movement forward.” But in the fight against apartheid, the
post–civil rights children found a desegregation battle to call their own, something in which to find their own voice and stake their own claim to history.

The roots of the contemporary American anti-apartheid movement date to 1963, the peak of the civil rights movement, a year after the CIA aided South Africa's white-minority regime in their capture of freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.
¹
That year, the United Church of Christ called for economic sanctions against the apartheid government, whose rule was being buttressed by highly profitable gold and diamond mining industries. By the end of the decade, the American Committee on Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, radical workers groups and others had launched educational campaigns in African-American communities.

In 1971, the National Council of Churches called upon General Motors to divest of all its direct investments in the South African economy. By pulling money out of South Africa, activists felt they could make a moral statement and weaken the apartheid regime. They then formed the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which helped organize shareholder resolutions against ITT, AT&T, Union Carbide, Ford, Exxon, Polaroid, Sears, Xerox, IBM and Mobil.
²
The following year, African-American student Randall Robinson and others turned Harvard Yard into a cemetery of five hundred black coffins, representing the victims of the university's investments, and set off years of student protests against their universities' “complicity in apartheid.” The movement would come to call for cultural and consumer boycotts, government sanctions, and divestment of public-sector and corporate funds.

In the beginning, the movement faced long odds. After arresting Mandela and banning his organization, the African National Congress, the South African government brutally quashed Black resistance and rapidly expanded its security, surveillance, and policing complex. The repression had the intended effect; foreign corporate investment skyrocketed. In 1973, U.S. direct investments in South Africa totaled over $1 billion a year.
³
The Nixon administration's so-called “tar baby option” further sealed North American participation in the regime, making it official U.S. policy to accommodate the white minority, and support South Africa as a strategic anticommunist beachhead in the region.

By the mid-1970s, South African youths had reshaped the growing Black Consciousness movement, and their protests took a more militant turn. The apartheid regime stepped up their repression. On June 6, 1976, South African troops fired on demonstrators in the townships of Soweto, leaving hundreds of youths dead. In the crackdown that followed, over a thousand were killed. In 1977, Stephen Biko, the father of Black Consciousness, died of injuries sustained in prison beatings. Dozens more Black and multiracial organizations were banned, newspapers were closed and hundreds more remained in jail. President Jimmy Carter recalled his South African ambassador and urged a tightening of the arms embargo. U.S. campus protests—from Princeton and Brown to Michigan State and Morgan State—took on a new urgency.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, foreign policy swung back toward Nixon-style normalization, articulated as “constructive engagement.” Reagan's United Nations ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, summed up the position by stating flatly that a racist dictatorship was not nearly as bad as a Marxist one.
⁴
In 1985, Reagan called the white-minority regime “a reformist administration,” and stirred global uproar by saying, “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.”
⁵

But while Reagan was prematurely hailing the end of South African segregation, the apartheid regime had declared a state of emergency, the equivalent of martial law, in an attempt to crush the rising Black movement. Between 1984 and 1986, the regime detained 30,000 protestors and killed 2,500 more.
⁶

In 1984, the American anti-apartheid movement began to peak. Jesse Jackson made South African divestment a presidential campaign issue. States like Michigan, Connecticut, Maryland, Nebraska and Massachusetts, cities like New York City; Boston; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Gary, Indiana; Wilmington, Delaware; and Washington, D.C.; and universities like the City University of New York divested.

On November 26, Randall Robinson, now the national coordinator of the Free South Africa Movement, led a small group of protestors to the South
African embassy in Washington, D.C., and launched one of the starkest protests since the height of the civil rights struggle. For months, whether in bitter cold or blazing heat, celebrities, citizens, congresspersons, congregations, youth and elderly sat in at the Embassy doors, and were arrested in a quiet daily ritual. In under a year, over three thousand were arrested there demonstrating against apartheid.

U.S. campus protests swung into high gear. In March 1985, Columbia University students launched a three-week takeover of Hamilton Hall, renaming it Mandela Hall—the biggest campus protest there since 1968. Run DMC came down to perform and show its support. During the divestment springs of 1985 and 1986, hundreds of campuses exploded in demonstrations. On the quads or in front of administration buildings, the shantytown replaced the cemetery as the symbol of disruption.

In one important respect, the student movement of the 1980s was very different from that of the ‘60s—students of color played a central organizing and demand-making role. During the 1960s, organizations led by young people of color, like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers and the Third World Studies coalitions at San Francisco State and U.C. Berkeley, had lent moral weight to the New Left. But white males had always dominated the student movement's leadership. Even the student anti-apartheid movement, at the beginning, had been led mainly by white students.

By the mid-1980s, students of color were no longer marginal. Students of color led the protests at pivotal campuses like Yale, Rutgers, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Columbia University's Coalition for a Free South Africa had emerged in 1981 out of the campus Black student organization. On many other campuses where whites led the anti-apartheid movement, a process of painful self-critique—often initiated by students of color—began to emerge.