The cop frisking me proceeded to shove me against the car for good measure. Then the six cops got back into their cars and unsurprisingly offered no apology before driving off.
After I picked up my papers, I was still shaken up, and so was my family. Back in the car, I fast-forwarded the tape of N.W.A.’s debut album, Straight Outta Compton, to “Fuck tha Police,” their blunt and poetic war cry against unwarranted police aggression and terror. I cranked up the volume, blasting the song out of my car window. The FBI harassed N.W.A.; local police were enraged by their lyrics. But many of us felt that this song about brutality and profiling finally captured our rage against police terror.
I thought “fuck” seemed the right word for cops who bring terror on black folk.
The historian Edward E. Baptist reminds us that “fuck” is from the Old English word that means to strike or beat, and before that, to plow and tear open. The cops have fucked the lives of black folk.
*
Beloved, as your choir director, I implore you to sing with me now. These hymns pronounce profane lyrical judgment on our unjust urban executioners. Some will be unfamiliar to you. But critical times call for critical hymns. These songs reflect our terror at the hands of the police in the strongest words possible. These are what our hymns sound like in America today. Therefore, as the old folk say, I will line out the hymn for you and give you the words of the tune as they are to be sung.
Our first hymnist is KRS-One, our generation’s James Cleveland, the master composer of gospel songs. KRS-One wrote a wonderful song that captures our collective trauma. It is entitled “Sound of da Police.”
Let me call out his words for you to repeat. “Yeah, officer from overseer you need a little clarity? / Check the similarity.” Dear friends, in this song KRS-One argues that his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather had to deal with the cops. KRS-One asks the question, and I ask you to sing along with me, “When’s it gonna stop?!”
We will also sing another of KRS-One’s splendid songs. It is entitled “Who Protects Us from You?” KRS-One says of the police: “You were put here to protect us / But who protects us from you?”
Let us turn our hymnals to our next song, composed by the Fugees, fronted by the powerful Lauryn Hill, who eventually left the group to find even greater applause as a solo artist. Think of her as you think of our beloved Aretha Franklin, who was a member of the New Bethel Baptist Church choir in Detroit before she departed to achieve international stardom on her own. The Fugees wrote a powerful attack on police brutality entitled “The Beast.” In it, Lauryn Hill raps that if she loses control because of the cops’ psychological tricks then she will be sent to a penitentiary “such as Alcatraz, or shot up like El-Hajj Malik Shabazz . . . And the fuzz treat bruh’s like they manhood never was.”
The next hymn was composed by the great Tupac Shakur. He was one of the most influential artists of our time. Shakur began his career composing odes to the Black Panthers. He went on to embrace more universal inspirations before meeting a violent death on the streets of Las Vegas. Shakur brings to mind Sam Cooke, the legendary gospel artist who shifted gears and became a soul and pop star before he was violently shot down in Los Angeles. Let us perform together the words of Tupac’s poignant hymn, “Point The Finga.” In this song Tupac says that he had been lynched by crooked cops who retained their jobs, and that his tax dollars were subsidizing his own oppression by paying them to “knock the blacks out.”
*
I teach the work of these hymnists at Georgetown, so my students can hear their lessons and perhaps change their tunes of social justice. We have pored over Jay Z’s lyrics. Of course they hear his exaltation of hustling. But more important, they hear in his “A Ballad For The Fallen Soldier” a deep and angry battle with the police terror that grips black life.
Off to boot camp, the world’s facing terror
Bin Laden been happenin’ in Manhattan
Crack was anthrax back then, back when
Police was Al-Qaeda to black men.
And we also study Beyoncé. Many of you have danced to her feminist rhymes and absorbed her insistence that black life matters. That insistence rings out on her song “Formation,” whose video features the songstress sitting atop a sinking cop car in the post-Katrina Louisiana bayou and a message scribbled on a wall that says, simply, plainly, unapologetically, “Stop Shooting Us.” Beyoncé also sang the song during an epic Super Bowl halftime show, garbed in black, as were her fashionable phalanx of backup dancers, paying tribute to the Black Panthers. Many cops charged that she was anti-police and threatened to withdraw protection during her “Formation” tour. “Let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice,” she told Elle magazine. “If celebrating my roots and culture during Black History Month made anyone uncomfortable, those feelings were there long before a video and long before me.” On tour her radiant blackness and her ecumenical humanitarianism never once clashed.
We also study Kendrick Lamar. We listen to his racial catechism and thus absorb as well his subtle and stirring exploration of black life in all of its magnetic contradictions. We watch the black-and-white video for “Alright,” a song of cataclysmic hope amidst cops’ fiendish assaults on black men and women. The video unveils the uplifting dimensions of an urban magical realism. Lamar flies over hood landscapes until he lands on top of a high streetlight, only to be felled by the imaginary bullet spun from a cop’s imaginary gun, a gun formed by the cop’s pointing fingers. Kendrick falls in slow motion, dead, or at least we think he is. Then he opens his eyes and smiles widely. He lets us in on the joke, on the artifice of what we have just seen. It is, too, a stinging rejection of the power of blue to determine black life and death.
These are our griots. These are their songs. These and a thousand others are the hymns that answer the reign of terror that consumes our days. These are the hymns that rally us against the fantasy of our erasure. May these hymns be sung loud until our slaughter ceases and our blood no longer spills.
III.
Invocation
O! save us, we pray thee, thou God of Heaven and of earth, from the devouring hands of the white Christians!!! . . .
The whites have murder’d us, O God! . . .
We believe that, for thy glory’s sake,
Thou wilt deliver us;
But that thou may’st effect these things,
Thy glory must be sought.
—David Walker