The Butterfly Effect

by Marcus J. Moore

  Meanwhile, in New York City, there was a similar fight underway. In late August, an estimated 2,500 people—led by the Reverend Al Sharpton and Eric Garner’s widow, Esaw—marched through Staten Island to peacefully protest Eric Garner’s homicide. Unlike the Ferguson protesters, some of whom expressed their frustration through looting stores and vandalizing property, Sharpton and Esaw preached nonviolence. “We are not against police,” Sharpton reportedly told the crowd. “Most police do their jobs. But those that break the law must be held accountable just like anybody else.” As they marched across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, they carried signs that read “RIP Eric Garner” and “Police the NYPD.” And they had a chant of their own—“I can’t breathe!”—echoing Garner’s last words. It later became a slogan for the movement, not only for protesters in New York City, but for a world of black people who demonstrated in their own cities. It made its way into sports and pop culture later that year, emblazoned on T-shirts worn by professional basketball superstars like LeBron James, Derrick Rose, and Kobe Bryant. In their respective ways, the protesters on Staten Island and in Ferguson were forcing us to think about how we were being treated by police in our own communities, and to no longer accept the status quo as second-class citizens in the country that we built with our own hands.

  Two days before the Ferguson grand jury released its decision, a young black male named Tamir Rice was gunned down in a gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio. This time it was by a rookie police officer named Timothy Loehmann, who mistook Rice’s toy gun for a real one and shot him twice in the torso. Officers said they asked the young boy to raise his hands, but instead he reached for the toy gun in his waistband, which prompted Loehmann to fire. Once again, yet another officer—this time Loehmann—claimed he feared for his life, even though he shot Tamir within two seconds of arriving on the scene. Tamir’s fourteen-year-old sister couldn’t even help; when she ran to his aid, an officer tackled her, put her in handcuffs, and stuffed her into the back of a police car.

  Their mother, Samaria, had just gotten home from the grocery store when two boys knocked on her door and told her that Tamir had been shot. She ran across the street to see what had happened, like any well-intentioned parent would do. But when she got there, she was stopped by police and threatened with arrest. “They told me to calm down or I was gonna be in the back of that police car,” Ms. Rice tells me. She went with her son to MetroHealth Medical Center, where doctors worked to save his life. But after she was shadowed by police officers and given little information, Ms. Rice called the local news and told them what went down between Tamir and Cleveland police. “It was a whirlwind of a disaster,” Ms. Rice recalls. “They had no answers about why he was shot.” Tamir would never make it out of the hospital. He died from his injuries the next morning. He was just twelve years old.

  This tragedy shouldn’t have happened at all. Before he was a member of the Cleveland Police Department, Officer Loehmann quit the Independence Police Department after he was deemed emotionally unfit to serve. The department’s deputy chief, Jim Polak, questioned Loehmann’s ability to make the right decisions in stressful situations and said he shouldn’t be trusted to handle firearms. According to the report, the officer showed up “weepy” and “distracted” for firearms training and couldn’t “communicate clear thoughts.” Loehmann’s handgun performance was called “dismal,” and that during training he had an emotional breakdown due to issues with a girlfriend. “Maybe I should quit,” the officer reportedly said. “I have no friends.” Polak said Loehmann displayed a “dangerous loss of composure” during live range training and that neither time nor training would correct his behavior.

  Loehmann joined the Cleveland Police Department in early 2014 under false pretenses. He claimed he left Independence because he wanted more action. In turn, the Cleveland force failed to investigate his background and let Loehmann roam the streets with a gun. So Tamir’s blood wasn’t just on Loehmann’s hands, it was on the hands of the entire department, which didn’t do enough to make sure the officer was ready for the job. Their shortcomings took Tamir’s life. Loehmann wasn’t charged with a crime.

  At the age of twelve, with the whole world in front of him, there’s no telling what Tamir could’ve been—an athlete, an artist, who knows. Ms. Rice remembers Tamir as a fun, affectionate kid who was very attached to her and his older sister. He liked to draw and loved to play soccer, basketball, and football. “He was a busy little boy, a hyper child,” his mother remembers today. And he loved PBS—Sesame Street and The Big Comfy Couch were his favorite shows. Tamir had big dreams, even as a young kid. “He always wanted to do more,” his mother says. “He wanted to play even more basketball and soccer.” She remembers the little things about Tamir, the fact that he picked up potty training very young, was a talented swimmer, and never needed training wheels on his bicycle: “No one showed him how to do anything, he did it on his own.” Even at five years old, Tamir was outspoken and liked to make his family laugh. He was gonna be tall, so much so that in the first grade, teachers used to call on Tamir in class because he stood head and shoulders above his classmates. He was also a character who loved to lighten the mood.

  Michael Brown Sr. can’t help but think what could’ve been if the convenience store employee hadn’t called the police to claim his son was stealing (“He was picking up what he was owed,” he says), if the police hadn’t been looking for him, if Wilson hadn’t stopped to talk to him. “Big Mike” would likely still be alive, still writing rhymes and uploading music to SoundCloud, still making his family laugh, still listening to Kendrick Lamar on his computer. “He just graduated and wanted to be a rapper,” Brown Sr. recalls. “He had his own dreams, things he wanted to figure out on his own.” Rapping under the name Big Mike, the teenager used to spit bars about becoming a star and making it out of his neighborhood. He was clearly a novice, but was planning to attend vocational school while learning more about sound engineering.

  Racial tensions escalated even further after that, but the nation still had its eyes trained on Ferguson and the grand jury decision. Then it happened: on November 24, 2014, the grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Mike Brown. Rage consumed the protesters. New York fumed and Ferguson exploded. “Burn this bitch down,” Mike Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, yelled to the crowd following the grand jury decision. That’s just what they did: police cruisers and businesses along West Florissant Avenue were set on fire. The riots went against the wishes of Michael Brown Sr., who said that destroying property wasn’t the way. He wanted a peaceful protest, just like the one on Staten Island, New York. “Let’s not just make some noise,” went a line from a family statement, “let’s make a difference.” It was too late, though; the people had suffered enough. The years of police harassment, the questionable traffic tickets that led to arrest warrants, the feeling that they didn’t belong in their own community. The people demanded answers. The pain, anger, and resentment finally bubbled over, and most musicians responded in kind. Before his show in St. Louis as one-half of Run the Jewels (with rapper-producer El-P), rapper Killer Mike tore into Ferguson officials, lamenting Mike Brown’s death and the grand jury decision. “Tonight, I got kicked on my ass when I listened to that prosecutor,” he told the crowd through tears. “I knew it was coming.… I have a twenty-year-old son and a twelve-year-old son and I’m so afraid for them.” In Seattle, Macklemore took to the streets to protest the Ferguson decision. Q-Tip, of the legendary rap group A Tribe Called Quest, joined protesters in New York City to demonstrate there. J. Cole released a song called “Be Free” that mourned Mike Brown’s death. “Can you tell me why,” the rapper lamented, “every time I step outside I see my niggas die?!”

  In the middle of all this, Kendrick released a song called “i,” an upbeat ode to self-love that didn’t fit the social climate. Ferguson and New York City were raging, and some wondered why the rapper dropped such a happy-go-lucky track at t
hat time. Black people were incensed and some wanted to lean into that anger: Our brothers and sisters are being murdered without consequence and someone needs to pay. As a community, black people are forgiving—perhaps too forgiving—and with the high-profile killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Tamir Rice, it seemed the black community had run out of fucks to give. Kendrick’s “i” wasn’t protest music, at least not in the way we’re used to hearing it. It wasn’t Sly and the Family Stone pushing you to “Stand!” or Gil Scott-Heron forecasting the revolution. It wasn’t even the music from Kendrick’s own backyard: Dr. Dre’s “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” from his classic 1992 album, The Chronic, captured the mood of pissed-off black people who’d had enough of the Los Angeles Police Department and were ready to fight back. Ice Cube’s “We Had to Tear This Mothafucka Up” could’ve been a sequel to N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police,” a song that he cowrote. “I can’t trust a cracker in a blue uniform,” Cube proclaimed on the track. In fairness, Dre’s and Cube’s protest songs addressed an issue that hit very close to home: brutality from their own LAPD. And while Kendrick wasn’t directly affected by the issues in Ferguson, Cleveland, and Staten Island, and of course there’s nothing wrong with expressing love of self, “i” felt like a tone-deaf softball from one of the world’s most gifted lyricists. Whether Kendrick saw it or not, he was an artist whom people looked up to, with the kind of critical voice that was needed as racism escalated in 2014. To drop “i” at that time felt like a misfire. There was concern that Kendrick was going pop and started to feel himself a little. “i” perplexed those used to Kendrick’s navel-gazing introspection, and his jovial side would take some getting used to.

  Kendrick heard the criticism. “I would hate to stay stagnant,” Kendrick told Fader. “I would hate for you to say there’s no growth. You’re supposed to innovate and not only challenge yourself but challenge your listeners and wow your listeners, and let them catch on. ’Cause when you’re an artist, nobody should dictate what you should do, you should just do it.” Indeed, there’s an unfair expectation on musicians to retread their best work, so when listeners heard “i,” some worried that Kendrick’s forthcoming album would stray too far from the brilliance of good kid, m.A.A.d city. In fans’ eyes, he had to top that record, or at least come close to it. We found out later that “i” was more than a re-created Isley Brothers song; Kendrick was emerging from a dark place that we didn’t even know about. If good kid addressed the trauma he endured as a teenager, “i” let us into the survivor’s guilt he suffered through as an adult. “I done been through a whole lot / Trial, tribulation, but I know God,” Kendrick rapped. “As I look around me / So many motherfuckers wanna down me.” We learn that he’d contemplated suicide in recent years, and that the now-famous musician was dealing with perceived mistrust in his circle. With his success came heightened expectations and new friends with their hands out.

  As a result, the already-reluctant star recoiled even further. On the song, he mentioned his life as a story for younger kids to study (a direct request from his mom via voicemail on good kid, m.A.A.d city). It seemed Kendrick was thinking of his own mortality and took steps to think about a future he or others might not see. In an interview with Hot 97, Kendrick said he wrote “i” “for the homies that’s in the penitentiary right now… for these kids that come up to my shows with these slashes on they wrists, saying they don’t want to live no more.” Kendrick had been under this kind of pressure since the ascendance of good kid, m.A.A.d city: he was no longer just the voice of Compton, he was now the voice of his generation, just like his idol Tupac Shakur before him.

  So yes, “i” was noble in that regard, but it simply wasn’t the right time for it. The families of Trayvon, Eric, Mike, and Tamir needed our love first. A major blow came on December 3, 2014, when a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death of Eric Garner. By then, after a year of letdowns and injustice, the decision wasn’t surprising, it was just the latest reminder that the American justice system doesn’t value black life. Then, in 2019, five years after the incident, federal prosecutors determined that Pantaleo would not face civil charges in Eric Garner’s death. He was fired soon after. Meanwhile, Esaw Garner vowed to keep seeking justice for her husband. “As long as I have a breath in my body,” she said, “I will fight the fight until the end.” Then, in what many perceived to be retaliation for filming Garner’s murder, New York police officers harassed Ramsey Orta for capturing the viral video. Orta, Garner’s friend, had been arrested before the 2014 incident, and ever since that day, he was targeted by law enforcement for holding them accountable. “The cops had been following me every day since Eric died, shining lights in my house every night.” In 2016, Orta pleaded guilty to various drug and gun possession charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. At the time of this writing, he is still awaiting release.

  In 2017, the police officer who shot Tamir Rice was fired by the city of Cleveland—not for his conduct in Tamir’s killing, but for allegedly putting false information on his job application. A year later, this same officer was hired by a police department in the small Ohio village of Bellaire.

  By 2019, Samaria Rice said race relations in Cleveland hadn’t improved at all. The police officer who shot her son lobbied to get his job back. And in Ferguson, Mike Brown Sr. opened a museum to honor his son’s memory. In the five years since Brown Jr.’s death, six men tied to the Ferguson protests have died under mysterious circumstances, each one either shot and his remains found in a torched car, or—in the case of Bassem Masri, reportedly found unresponsive on a bus following a fentanyl overdose. Others supposedly took their own lives, though the mother of Danye Jones believes he was lynched. On August 9, 2019, Mike Brown Sr. asked the state to reopen the case and find justice for Mike Jr. But because of the city’s history with police and the incident with his son, he is still having a tough time trusting the cops. “It’s the uniform that makes us cringe,” Mike Brown Sr. tells me. “I still tense up. I’m trying to stay positive, but the system needs to be torn up, burned, and started again with new policies.”

  * * *

  In December 2014, singer D’Angelo set the bar for what black protest music was supposed to sound like in the modern era. Black Messiah, his long-awaited and often-delayed third studio album, was released on the evening of the fifteenth, and through it came the anger, helplessness, and misery of being a black person in 2014, and watching your brothers and sisters be gunned down in the streets. Just like Kendrick, D’Angelo had been dubbed the savior of his genre (in this case R&B) after his 2000 album, Voodoo, was released to widespread acclaim. With its grainy black-and-white cover—a crowd of uplifted black hands—Black Messiah responded directly to the uprising in Ferguson and the grand jury decision in Staten Island. Also like Kendrick, D’Angelo spoke only through his music; you were unlikely to hear from him if he didn’t have music to promote. Black Messiah wasn’t entirely protest music; the songs “Really Love” and “Another Life” were sugary soul ballads akin to what he’d performed in the mid-1990s as a laid-back crooner with a leathery voice and cornrowed hair.

  Elsewhere on the album, though, D’Angelo spoke to the pain that black people felt everywhere. On “The Charade,” he sings: “All we wanted was a chance to talk / ’Stead we only got outlined in chalk.” Then there was “1000 Deaths,” a murky, psychedelic rock track about being sent to, and being prepared for, war. The battle itself was up for interpretation; it could refer to a fight in a foreign land or one closer to home. And with lyrics like “I won’t nut up when we up thick in the crunch / Because a coward dies a thousand times / But a soldier only dies just once,” it was perhaps the most revolutionary track in the singer’s discography. At that point, musicians were releasing Ferguson-influenced songs here and there, though not a full-scale record that addressed the wide-ranging despair within the black community. “When was the last time someone of [D’Angelo’s] stature came out with a
political record?” Russell Elevado, a recording engineer and frequent D’Angelo collaborator, once asked Red Bull Music Academy. “No one is talking about any social issues. Let’s bring that back, too.” Black Messiah harkened back to records like Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis, as meticulous funk and soul with black plight at the center. Musicians like Sly, Curtis, and D’Angelo spoke to us and for us. They created music in which we could see our full, beautiful selves, and they helped us remember that we weren’t second-class citizens, even when the world tried to render us invisible. America can beat you down if you let it, but through Sly’s howl, Curtis’s falsetto, and D’Angelo’s hum, you felt the beauty and bleakness of black culture. Sometimes that’s what protest is. It isn’t solely about picket signs and clever chants, it’s about the full breadth of the experience, about wading through the misery and finding light through it all. Black Messiah would be the first in a trio of albums, released between winter 2014 and spring 2015, that were shaded by the deaths of unarmed black people at the hands or guns of police. Kamasi Washington’s sprawling opus, The Epic, was the third record of that set. Through its mix of gospel, jazz, and soul, Washington’s album emitted the spiritual essence that Black America needed. Songs like “The Rhythm Changes,” “Askim,” and “The Message” were meant to heal a community of people and help us move forward from the pain and outrage we felt on a daily basis. “There’s a deeper level of healing that needs to happen for the world in general,” Washington once told me for a Washington Post profile. “There’s a mass of people who are broken.” While Black Messiah and The Epic were critical darlings, Kendrick released an album around that time that was going to shake the musical landscape and have a profound effect on Black America for several years. It would be even more audacious than good kid, m.A.A.d city and push projects like Overly Dedicated and Section.80 even further to the background. For his next act, Kendrick had a word for his entire race.