Can't Stop Won't Stop (53 page)

When he returned to South Central to film the movie, he met Craig “Kam” Miller, a rapper and a former gang member who was in the process of becoming Craig X at the Compton Mosque #54. Cube was soon meeting with Khallid Abdul Muhammad, the charismatic firebrand who had organized Muhammad Mosque #27. The bald-domed Muhammad called himself a “truth terrorist and knowledge gangsta, a Black history hit man and an urban guerilla,” and his mosque expanded its ministry into the broadening gang peace movement, becoming a national model for Farrakhan's gang outreach work.
⁵
Cube shaved off his jheri-curl and took refuge in the Nation of Islam. Full of new ideas, he was confident his next album,
Death Certificate
, would be his masterpiece.

Angela Y. Davis had grown up in the South in an activist household, and proved an intellectual prodigy. At Brandeis University, where she was one of a handful
of African-American students, she was enthralled by a speech given by Malcolm X. Later, while studying in Germany with Theodor Adorno, she had come upon a picture of the Black Panthers in the Sacramento Assembly chambers. She returned to South Central Los Angeles to join the Revolution. After checking out the various political organizations, she rejected Karenga's US Organization as anti-feminist, and joined both SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Soon after, she would note, the Panthers published an essay by Huey Newton in its newspaper that called for solidarity with the emerging gay liberation movement.

After George and Jonathan Jackson were killed and her trial ended in acquittal, she had emerged as an international hero and a leading light in the anti-prisons movement. She became a professor in women's studies and African-American Studies, finally landing at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

As the 1990s opened, she had become painfully aware of how images of her youthful life-and-death struggles were being revived to signify an all-too-vague oppositional style. In a speech she mused, “On the one hand it is inspiring to discover a measure of historical awareness that, in our youth, my generation often lacked. But it is also unsettling. Because I know that almost inevitably my image is associated with a certain representation of Black nationalism that privileges those particular nationalisms with which some of us were locked in constant struggle.”
⁶

She said, “The image of an armed Black man is considered the ‘essence' of revolutionary commitment today. As dismayed as I may feel about this simplistic, phallocentric image, I remember my own responses to romanticized images of brothers (and sometimes sisters) with guns. And, in actuality, it was empowering to go to target practice and shoot—or break down a weapon—as well, or better, than a man. I can relate to the young people who passionately want to do something today, but are misdirected . . .”
⁷

These youths still saw Angela Y. Davis's afro and her Black fist frozen in time. But she had moved on, and she hoped to engage them as an elder would.

It had been publicist Leyla Turkkan's idea to sit Angela Davis and Ice Cube together. Turkkan had grown up on New York's Upper East Side, a bohemian “parkie” hanging out with graffiti writers like ZEPHYR and REVOLT. In college, she became a promoter for Black Uhuru on their breakthrough
Red
tour, then
moved into publicity, always looking for ways to bring together her P.R. skills, her extensive industry contacts and her progressive politics. Like Bill Adler, she was particularly ready for the rise of Black radical rap. But after the success of the Stop the Violence Movement, she had felt sideswiped by Public Enemy's Griff debacle. At one point, David Mills forced her to deny that she and Adler had ever tried to build up Public Enemy as politicians or social activists. Turkkan felt she had another chance with Ice Cube. By sitting Cube with Davis, he could be presented as an inheritor of the Black radical tradition.

The interview was a provocative idea—one that both Davis and Cube welcomed. But none of them had any idea how the conversation would turn when they got together in Cube's Street Knowledge business offices.

To begin with, Davis only heard a few tracks from the still unfinished album, including “My Summer Vacation,” “Us” and a track called “Lord Have Mercy,” which never made it to the album. She did not hear the song that would become most controversial—a rap entitled “Black Korea.” In another way, she was at a more fundamental disadvantage in the conversation.

Like Davis, Cube's mother had grown up in the South. After moving to Watts, she had come of age as a participant in the 1965 riots. While Cube and his mother were close, they often argued about politics and his lyrics. Now it was like Cube was sitting down to talk with his mother. Davis was at a loss the way any parent is with her child at the moment he is in the fullest agitation of his becoming.

Cube sat back behind his glass desk in a black leather chair, the walls covered with framed gold records and posters for
Boyz N The Hood
and his albums. Copies of
URB, The Source
and
The Final Call
were laid out in front of him. Davis asked Cube how he felt about the older generation.

“When I look at older people, I don't think they feel that they can learn from the younger generation. I try and tell my mother things that she just doesn't want to hear sometimes,” he answered.

“We're at a point where I hear people like Darryl Gates saying, ‘We've got to have a war on gangs.' And I see a lot of Black parents clapping and saying: ‘Oh yes, we have to have a war on gangs.' But when young men with baseball caps and T-shirts are considered gangs, what you doing is clapping for a war against your children.”
⁸

When the conversation swung from generation to gender, Cube's discomfort was palpable:

ICE CUBE: What you have is Black people wanting to be like white people, not realizing that white people want to be like Black people. So the best thing to do is to eliminate that type of thinking. You need Black men who are not looking up to the white man, who are not trying to be like the white man.

ANGELA: What about the women. You keep talking about Black men. I'd like to hear you say Black men and Black women.

ICE CUBE: Black people.

ANGELA: I think that you often exclude your sisters from your thought process. We're never going to get anywhere if we're not together.

ICE CUBE: Of course. But the Black man is down.

ANGELA: Well, the Black woman's down, too.

ICE CUBE: But the Black woman can't look up to the Black man until we get up.

ANGELA: Well why should the Black woman look
up
to the Black man? Why can't we look at each other as equals?

ICE CUBE: If we look at each other on an equal level, what you're going to have is a divide. It's going to be divided.

ANGELA: As I told you, I teach at the San Francisco County Jail. Many of the women there have been arrested in connection with drugs. But they are invisible to most people. People talk about the drug problem without mentioning the fact that the majority of crack users in our community are women. So when we talk about progress in the community, we have to talk about progress in the community, we have to talk about the sisters as well as the brothers.

ICE CUBE: The sisters have held up the community.

ANGELA: When you refer to “the Black man,” I would like to hear something explicit about Black women. That will convince me that you are thinking about your sisters as well as your brothers.

ICE CUBE: I think about everybody.
⁹

When Davis tried to suggest the power of building alliances with women, Latinos, Native Americans, and others, Cube was dismissive. He said, “You have people who fight for integration, but I'd say we need to fight for equal rights. In the schools, they want equal books, they don't want no torn books. That was more important than fighting to sit at the same counter and eat. I think it's more healthy if we sit over there, just as long as we have good food.”

Davis replied, “Suppose we say we want to sit in the same place or wherever we want to sit, but we also want to eat food of our own choosing. You understand what I'm saying? We want to be respected as equals, but also for our differences. I don't want to be invisible as a Black woman.”

Cube answered, “It's all about teaching our kids about the nature of the slave master. Teaching them about his nature, and how he is always going to beat you no matter how many books you push in front of him, no matter how many leaders you send to talk to him. He's always going to be the same way. We've got to understand that everything has natural energies.”

Then he cited Farrakhan's analogy: “There's the chicken and the chicken hawk. The ant and the anteater. They are enemies by nature. That's what we've got to instill in our kids.”
¹⁰

In May 1963, news footage of Black civil rights protestors being attacked by police and dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, Alabama, had a powerful effect in mobilizing public opinion during debates over the Civil Rights Act. In March 1991, there was no remotely comparable legislation on the table when two videotapes—one from an amateur's camcorder, the other from a store surveillance
camera—surfaced. Public horror and outrage would have no channel to find. Tension filled the moment to its bursting point.

After midnight on Sunday, March 3, Rodney King was beaten by five police officers at the entrance to Hansen Dam Park in Lakeview Terrace. He had led police on a chase in his battered old Hyundai before stopping there.

King had just done less than a year in prison for trying to rob a Korean American–owned store with a tire iron. He had been such an ineffectual thief that the store-owner had seized the weapon from King and sent him running for his Hyundai as the store-owner took down the license plate number. King got out early for good behavior, and found work as a construction laborer.

After a hard week of work, he had been unwinding that Sunday, drinking 8-Ball and watching a basketball game with friends. By midnight, he was drunk and behind the wheel, pushing the limits of what his Hyundai could take, terrified of being sent back to prison. His carmates were yelling at him to pull over.

In the video, King is a shadow in the middle of a uniformed cipher lit by sirens, headlamps, and a ghetto-bird searchlight, a dark mass tossed and rolled by flashing batons for a minute and a half. By the time he whimpered, “Please stop,” and was hog-tied, he had suffered fifty-six baton blows and shoe stomps and kicks to the head and body. Within twenty-four hours, the video was being broadcast nationwide.

Two weekends later, on the morning of March 16, Latasha Harlins was shot dead by Korean-American storekeeper Soon Ja Du at the Empire Liquor Market Deli at 9127 South Figueroa in South Central Los Angeles. Harlins had been orphaned when her mother was shot to death when she was nine. When her mother's killer got off with a light sentence, she decided she wanted to become a lawyer. She had sprouted to a slender five foot five, and though she was now having difficulties fighting with other girls in her ninth-grade year, her aunt and grandmother doted on her.

Harlins had spent the evening at a friend's place, and as she walked back home, she decided to purchase a bottle of orange juice for breakfast. She put it in her backpack and went to the counter to pay for it. Du grabbed Harlins' sweater and screamed, “You bitch, you are trying to steal my orange juice! That's my orange juice!” Harlins yelled back, “Bitch, let me go! I'm trying to pay for it.”

In the video, the two are pulling on the bottle of orange juice. Harlins swings
at Du a few times and then backs away. The bottle falls to the floor. Du picks up a stool and throws it over the counter at Harlins. The girl ducks and reaches down to pick up the bottle. She places the bottle on the counter. Du swipes it away. She has unholstered the gun. Harlins pivots and prepares to step away. Du has raised the gun. Harlins shudders and falls out of the frame. All of this happens in under a minute.

Du was fragile, plagued by ill health, finding comfort only in her Korean-American Presbyterian church. The hours in the liquor store were long, and she suffered from migraine headaches. Recently their son, Joseph, had been harassed by more than ten Main Street Crips, and now some of them were in police custody. The store was briefly closed for fear of Crip retaliation. It had been held up more than thirty times, including the previous Saturday. But Du's husband, a former Korean army colonel, had worked fourteen hours the day before and that's why Soon Ja Du was behind the counter when Latasha Harlins walked in.

To many African Americans, the Dus were the symbol of Asian carpetbaggers. In fact, many of the liquor stores that Asian Americans bought in the area had been sold to them by African Americans, who had purchased them from Jewish owners after the Watts Uprising. This trend accelerated in 1978, when liquor prices were deregulated and profit margins plunged. Many Black owners were happy to get out of the business, even happier to sell to Korean immigrants at more than double their investment. “Seven days a week, twenty hours a day, no vacations, people stealing. That's slave labor,” said one African-American store seller. “I wouldn't buy another liquor store.”
¹¹

The bigger problem was that liquor stores were poor substitutes for grocery stores. Since 1965, very few supermarkets had reopened, and even fewer were built in the area. Vons had three hundred stores in the region, but only two in South Central.
¹²
Worse, study after study found that supermarkets in South Central were the most expensive in the county, with grocery prices up to 20 percent to 30 percent higher than those in the suburbs and exurbs.
¹³
Politicians would not do anything about it. It was as if they figured liquor was more important to inner-city residents than food. Immigrant liquor-store entrepreneurs did not provide what people really needed, but they still filled a void that no one else was willing to.