Still on tour with Drake and A$AP Rocky, Kendrick was watching TV on his bus when he came across the news of Trayvon’s murder. He was seething, and as he told Rolling Stone in 2015, the incident “put a whole new anger inside me,” to the point where he picked up a pen and started jotting down lyrics. An hour later, he had the first draft of a new song called “The Blacker the Berry.” Trayvon’s death “made me remember how I felt. Being harassed, my partners being killed,” Kendrick told the publication. To him, Trayvon wasn’t just some kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. He could’ve been Trayvon, shot down in cold blood as the public looked elsewhere. Not only did the news distress Kendrick, it disturbed the highest-ranking politician in the world, U.S. president Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” he told reporters at the White House. “Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago.… There’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.” Central Florida, South Side Chicago, or Compton, it didn’t matter: Kendrick had made similar runs to the convenience store without thinking twice about it, not worried if some glorified security guard would try to earn stripes at his expense. Trayvon was all of us, every black person in America. The bullet that pierced his skin could’ve punctured ours just the same.
Though the track appeared in finished form on 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick was already thinking two steps ahead, letting the anger fuel the most venomous rhymes he’d ever written. He was tapping into Compton, scrolling through the gang culture and near-death instances, funneling the angst into an unprocessed stream of intense fury. In its finished form, Kendrick spews his rage through clenched teeth, tight fists, and a furrowed brow, his tone so raspy you’d think he swallowed nails before the beat started. “You hate me, don’t you?” he growls. “You hate my people, your plan is to terminate my culture.” Stylistically, Kendrick had to summon a persona he hadn’t tapped into for at least three years: K-Dot, the rancorous alter ego that he left behind in 2009. But this Dot was a little older and more enlightened, less interested in touting how dope he was; for “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick seemed to tap into K-Dot’s fearlessness, blending that aggression with his newfound insight to let America know just how racist it was.
Though Trayvon’s murder awakened Kendrick and Black America at large, it was just the latest in a long line of savagery against unarmed people of color. In 1999, New York City police officers Kenneth Boss, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon, and Sean Carroll fired forty-one shots at a twenty-two-year-old West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Diallo had been in the U.S. for two years from his native Guinea, and when he died at the scene—from sixteen bullet wounds—there was no gun near him, just a pager and his wallet. The officers had mistaken Diallo for a serial rape suspect they’d been looking for. When Diallo had reached into his jacket to pull out his wallet, Carroll thought it was a gun and started firing; the other three officers followed suit. A year later, the four officers were acquitted of second-degree murder charges.
Then, in 2009, Bay Area Rapid Transit officer Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant III, a twenty-two-year-old black man, on the platform of BART’s Fruitvale station in Oakland. Grant was pinned to the ground with his hands restrained behind his back when Mehserle stood up in a panic and fired his weapon. The bullet entered Grant’s back, exited his front side, ricocheted off the platform, and punctured his lung. “You shot me,” Grant lamented, looking at Mehserle in disbelief. He died at Highland Hospital in Oakland seven hours later. In 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, but wasn’t found guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to two years in prison; BART reached a number of multimillion-dollar settlements with Grant’s family.
The same words arise in cases like these: fear, intimidation, suspicion, panic. The police somehow felt afraid of Amadou’s wallet, panicked by what Oscar could do facedown with his hands restrained. George Zimmerman claimed Trayvon looked suspicious, and that was enough reason to follow him through the rain and pull the trigger at point-blank range. Regardless, Trayvon’s parents sought a peaceful resolution to that incident, and if they did demonstrate, it was at an event like the Million Hoodie March, where hundreds of supporters donned hooded sweatshirts at Union Square in New York City and asked a Florida jury to convict Zimmerman. Sadly, though, there’s another word that often arises in cases like these: acquitted. In July 2013, Zimmerman was found not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter, and as of this writing, he was still free to walk the streets of Florida. It was as if—despite all the news coverage and activism—Trayvon’s life still didn’t matter. “Even though I am broken-hearted,” Tracy Martin tweeted, “my faith is unshattered.” George Zimmerman’s brother, Robert, tweeted that he was “proud to be an American.”
After the verdict, on the same day, three black women—Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi—founded a new civil rights group called Black Lives Matter (BLM) as a direct response to Zimmerman’s acquittal. Garza wrote a post on Facebook called “A Love Letter to Black People” that sought to allay fellow people of color who felt dejected by the state of race relations in America. Brimming with anger, despondence, and real talk, Garza urged readers to keep fighting injustice. “Stop saying we are not surprised,” she declared in the post. “I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter.… Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.” Cullors saw Garza’s post and put it on Twitter with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; Tometi constructed the websites on which they and the public could see what was next about the Trayvon incident and others. A movement was born. But this wasn’t your grandfather’s activist group; while Khan-Cullors, Garza, and Tometi took their fight to the street, they also took advantage of Twitter’s growing popularity, where users reacted to Zimmerman’s acquittal in real time.
Social media changed the way news was consumed; no longer did viewers need to wait for the evening headlines, or for the newspaper to plop on their doorstep the next morning. The news was in their pockets; all they had to do was scroll and watch the outrage unfold.
The early days of Black Lives Matter were fairly quiet; its online presence lay dormant until 2014, when another two black men died during encounters with the police over a two-month span, which sent Black America—still raw from the death of Trayvon Martin—into a heightened state of unrest, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s.
In mid-July of 2014, Eric Garner was standing outside a storefront in Staten Island, New York, when police officers accused him of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on the street. It wasn’t the first time the cops had harassed Garner; just a few weeks prior, plainclothes officers in an unmarked car had pulled up on the forty-three-year-old as he walked down Bay Street near Tompkinsville Park, where locals sell cheap wares and try to avoid police pursuits. But according to the New York Times, which cited two witnesses, Garner refused to be frisked or detained, which might have raised the ire of police officers. He “shouted at them to back off,” they reported. “He flailed his arms.” Perhaps seeking retribution, the police encountered Garner later that month—on July 17—and questioned him after he broke up a fight on the block. Again, Garner was incredulous, pleading with the police to simply leave him alone. “I didn’t do nothin’!” he can be heard saying outside the storefront. “What did I do?! I’m standing here minding my business.” The encounter was videotaped via cell phone and, little did anyone know, the footage from that device would be seen by millions of people around the world. Officer Daniel Pantaleo moved in and put his forearm around Garner’s neck as his colleagues helped wrestle the six-foot-two-inch, three-hundred-ninety-five-pound man to the ground. Then, as they pinned him to the sidewalk, with his head pressed
against the grubby concrete, Garner whimpered a phrase eleven times, “I can’t breathe,” hoping that Pantaleo would release the choke hold—a move that’d been banned by the New York Police Department—and that his fellow officers would stop putting so much pressure on his chest as they handcuffed him. Video shows that, along with the choke hold, officers knelt on Garner’s back, which pressed his torso against the ground and further restricted his breathing. As the life slowly drained from Garner’s body, police officers ignored his pleas and proceeded with the arrest. They thought he was faking the despair as a way to avoid detainment.
Around 3:30 p.m., officers called for an ambulance to assist Garner, and emergency personnel arrived five minutes later. As he lay motionless on the ground, emergency workers were slow to give him oxygen or place him on a stretcher. The video shows emergency workers and police officers still trying to communicate with Garner although he was unconscious, and there appears to be no urgency to save his life. It wasn’t until twelve minutes later that medical workers upgraded the situation to Segment 1, the highest possible level. Garner was in cardiac arrest and needed to be rushed to the hospital right away. It was too late; he was declared dead at 4:34 p.m. at Richmond University Medical Center. Two weeks later, the chief medical examiner’s office ruled Garner’s death a homicide caused by neck compressions from a choke hold. “Racist-ass cops on Staten Island,” one woman says in the cell phone video, “this is what the fuck they do.”
The circumstances surrounding Garner’s death were eerily similar to a 1994 incident on Staten Island, where a twenty-two-year-old man named Ernest Sayon suffocated and died at the hands of a New York City police officer named Donald Brown. Sayon was standing outside a housing complex at Park Hill Avenue and Sobol Court when officers said they heard what they thought was a firecracker or a gunshot during drug sweeps in the neighborhood. There had been thick tension between the police and young black twentysomethings who felt they were being harassed and picked up on false charges of loitering. In some cases, according to the New York Times, the cops would pull down the young men’s pants in a vigorous search for drugs. Sayon, described as gentle by friends and residents, had a criminal record, so he garnered extra attention in a community where some residents were already feeling unsafe. He reportedly sold crack and cocaine, but he wasn’t some bloodthirsty kingpin terrorizing the block. “He never bothered nobody,” his friend Corey Washington told the Times. “It wasn’t like he was a menace to society.” Still, in 1992, Sayon was arrested for drug possession and resisting arrest, in which, according to police, he “flailed his arms and rolled on the ground,” causing injury to an officer’s thumb. On the night Sayon died, Brown tried to detain Sayon and a struggle ensued.
The two knew each other and had an adversarial relationship. A witness, who had just parked her car along Park Hill Avenue, claimed she saw Brown beat Sayon. “I saw Officer Brown,” said the woman, according to the Times. “He had his head in a choke-hold. He hit his head on the ground.” Reports the following day said Sayon might have died from a head injury, but the chief medical examiner ruled it a homicide caused by pressure on his back, chest, and neck while handcuffed on the ground. So for Staten Island residents, Garner’s death was more of the same. “It’s not new to us in Staten Island, which is sad,” Clifford “Method Man” Smith Jr., a Staten Island native and member of the Wu-Tang Clan, told the Huffington Post in 2015. “If we can just get a human level, and police can stay on a human level with the community… If we can just bridge that gap and get those two together… If we can be treated as human beings in our communities, we wouldn’t have any problem with being policed.”
On the morning of August 9, 2014, some 960 miles from Staten Island, Michael Brown Jr. walked into a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, a mostly black community roughly twelve miles outside St. Louis. The teenager could be seen on surveillance video retrieving a box of Swisher Sweets cigars, then shoving a clerk into a display case on his way out. But according to other surveillance footage, the young man had visited the store earlier that morning, shortly after 1:00 a.m., trading a brown bag for the cigarillos he’d pick up later that day.
At 11:53 a.m., a police dispatcher reported “stealing in progress” at the Ferguson Market, and Brown, wearing a white T-shirt and a red St. Louis Cardinals hat, was the prime suspect. Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, left the store in the direction of a QuikTrip convenience store nearby. Then, at noon, police officer Darren Wilson arrived in an SUV and saw Brown and his friend walking down the middle of Canfield Drive. He asked them to walk on the sidewalk; Johnson said they were almost at their destination, but Brown had stronger language. “Fuck what you have to say,” he reportedly told the officer. A tussle ensued between Brown and Wilson at the vehicle. Wilson pulled a handgun and threatened to shoot. “I’m standing so close to Big Mike and the officer, I look in his window and I see that he has his gun pointed at both of us,” Johnson once said. “And when he fired his weapon, I moved seconds before he pulled the trigger. I saw the fire come out the barrel and I… knew it was a gun. I looked at my friend Big Mike and saw he was struck in the chest or upper region because I saw blood spatter down his side.”
From there, Brown and Johnson take off running down the street. Wilson gets out of his car with his gun drawn and fires a second shot at Brown, striking him. Then the teenager turns around with his hands up, saying that he’s unarmed and to stop shooting. Wilson fires several more shots at Brown, striking him four times. The teenager falls to the ground and dies, his body left in the street for four and a half hours.
In places like Staten Island and Ferguson, the deaths of Garner and Brown exacerbated long-standing strife between law enforcement and the black community. In both cities, there was a feeling that the police weren’t there to protect them. And because the officers assigned to their neighborhoods weren’t really from there, they didn’t have a connection with the city or understand its dynamics. Most cities deploy white cops to patrol black neighborhoods, and it’s largely white cops who claim fear after they shoot and kill an unarmed black person. This is the essence of white privilege: when you’re used to having your way, it’s easy to feel threatened when you’re devoid of power. Because white supremacy dictates reverence to white skin, and because the police thrive on terror, they can’t fathom those who won’t genuflect. They can’t deal when you don’t act scared, so they fire handguns to reclaim authority over the people they look down upon. Garner had the audacity to say no. Brown had the gall to fight back. Those actions disrupt the systemic racism and classism that keeps America running. If people of color realized they weren’t beholden to police, they’d upset the ecosystem of state-sanctioned violence that’s been in place since slavery. In Ferguson, some black residents make it a point to stay home after a certain hour, knowing that they could be stopped by the police for no reason at all. Like in 2009, when Ferguson police arrested Henry Davis by mistake, and instead of letting him go, they assaulted Davis in a jail cell and charged him with property damage for bleeding on an officer’s uniform. Five years later, Darren Wilson said he feared for his life when asked why he killed Brown. “It was like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan,” the officer said about the size difference between him and Brown. Pantaleo never claimed he was afraid of Garner; in his incident, he and his colleagues assaulted a man who’d clearly had enough aggravation from the cops.
The wounds are still fresh for Mike Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr. He’s incredibly measured when talking about his son’s death, but he cuts the anecdote short to dull the pain of that day. “I got a call that he was dead in the middle of the street,” Brown Sr. tells me. “I get in the car and I can’t even tell you about the ride.” Once he got to the scene, he saw his son’s flip-flops in the road, his red baseball hat resting on its crown. “By the time I got there, Mike was covered up” with a white sheet, he recalls. “He was on the ground for four and a half hours, deteriorating.” The image was unsettling, to say th
e least. For a while, Brown’s body was not covered up, which allowed neighbors to take pictures with their cell phones for social media. That Brown’s corpse was left to rot in the summer heat only amplified local tensions.
With each hour, Ferguson residents seethed. “The delay helped fuel the outrage,” Patricia Bynes, a former committeewoman in Ferguson, told the New York Times in 2014. “It was very disrespectful to the community and the people who live there. It also sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ ” Riots ensued following a candlelight vigil near the shooting scene two days after Brown was killed. Stores were broken into or set on fire. Police cruisers had windows smashed with bricks. It was akin to the riots in Kendrick’s backyard—in 1965 Watts and 1992 South Central. Americans didn’t know about Ferguson prior to Mike Brown’s death, but they would very soon; it would be the epicenter of unrest in the United States. The black people of Ferguson had had enough; the years of unprocessed fury finally bubbled to the surface and exploded over the next two weeks. Coupled with the still-potent pain of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012 and Eric Garner’s demise in July 2014, Ferguson, and Black America, was in the midst of a cultural revolution. Protesters marched down the street with their hands raised, chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” referring to the way Brown was gunned down despite having his arms raised.
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