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  The Game made a poignant query on the song’s final verse that recycled a wild and unfounded rumor of Jackson’s complicity in King’s murder. “I wonder why Jesse Jackson ain’t catch him before his body dropped / Would he give me the answer? Probably not.” The negative comparison of Jackson to King mirrors Lil Wayne’s spoken coda to his 2008 song “Dontgetit,” where, over a sample of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Wayne reflects on the war on drugs and child molestation and offers a nasty, bitter tirade on Al Sharpton. “Uhh, Mr. Al Sharpton, here’s why I don’t respect you, and nobody like you. Mmh, see, you’re the type that gets off on gettin’ on other people.” He takes Sharpton to task for allegedly judging folk before he gets to know them, in particular Wayne himself. “You see, you are no MLK, you are no Jesse Jackson. You are nobody, to me. You’re just another Don King … with a perm. Just a little more political.” Sharpton shot back on the website The Fix that his crusade against degrading women in rap lyrics had led some rappers to despise him, but that a Gallup poll revealed that he had “a 50% approval rate among African Americans,” making it unnecessary to “dignify a response to one rap artist who doesn’t even say anything substantive.” Five years later, the publishing arm of Cash Money Records, home to Lil Wayne, released Sharpton’s memoir The Rejected Stone.

  The argument in hip hop circles and beyond that Sharpton doesn’t measure up to Jackson, and that neither of them measures up to King, reflects a deep chasm between memory and history, between perception and truth. Both ignorance and amnesia spur us to romanticize icons like King while heaping scorn on leaders today. If we knew more about past leaders, their flaws and frailties, as well as their courage and valor, we might appreciate current leaders more. The willingness to take a hard look at black icons in religion, politics, and entertainment would serve us well. Today we grapple with figures who test our racial loyalty, our moral limits, and our ability to call a spade a spade. Jay follows up his line about Sharpton on “Family Feud” with another equally provocative bar. “How is him or Pill Cosby s’posed to help me?” Simply by means of a satiric misspelling of Cosby’s first name, Jay signifies a complex web of interrelated arguments about celebrity, black protectionism, and the hypocrisies that stalk black life.

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  My own work over the last quarter century analyzing the lives of talented but troubled black men, from King to Bill Cosby to R. Kelly, has permitted me to reflect on the stakes and perils of telling the truth about black men in the presence of white America.

  As we have seen, a selfie taken by Reverend Sharpton, the leading contemporary civil rights leader of his generation, pointed to a deeper, longer history of engagement between the two men than that single photo suggested, spotlighting a bigger story than what we might otherwise see. The same is true for an iconic 1958 photograph of the young Martin Luther King, Jr., that offers us more than meets our eyes. The history behind the photo lurks beneath the image we see and invites us to think about how we view gifted but flawed black men. The photograph of King is striking. He is decked in a natty tan suit, a shiny gold watch bright on his wrist and a snazzy broad-banded snap-brim fedora snug on his head. A cop is twisting King’s right arm behind his back and pinning his shoulder down to the police station booking desk as another cop stands guard. For one of the rare times in King’s life, this arrest had nothing to do with civil rights. King was charged with loitering at the courthouse as he sought to enter the preliminary hearing of a case involving his closest friend and fellow civil rights leader, Reverend Ralph Abernathy. The case involving Abernathy had nothing to do with the movement. Abernathy had been attacked in his church and chased down the street by a hatchet- and gun-wielding black schoolteacher named Edward Davis, who claimed that the Alabama pastor had been having sex with his wife, Vivian Davis, since she was fifteen years old.

  The subsequent Davis trial caused a scandal in Montgomery’s black community. Salacious details leaked of oral sex between Abernathy and Vivian in a relative’s home. There were claims that Edward Davis had been recruited by hostile whites to bring down Abernathy and taint the movement. Davis was quickly acquitted and divorced his wife as Vivian fled town. Abernathy found solace in a black community that protected its leader, insisting that it believed him and assuring him that all would soon return to normal. It did. Abernathy’s plight reminds us that prominent black men accused of wrong, legally or morally, face a dual reality: a white world that often harms and sits in harsh judgment of black life, and a black world that provides balm for our wounds and nurture for our grievances, and sometimes, forgiveness, or even cover, for our sins. It is often difficult for black folk to grapple with the flaws of a famous figure because the context of their misstep, or downfall, is colored by the belief that the white world doesn’t play fair.

  Several years after Abernathy’s ordeal King confided to a fellow leader that he had known of some of Abernathy’s infidelities because he had taken part in some of them himself. King was a far guiltier adulterer than Abernathy. The FBI pummeled King with its voyeuristic surveillance of his sex life. The ugly venture was presided over by J. Edgar Hoover, whose obsessions with King highlight his own sexual hypocrisy, damning King’s sexual misadventures while enjoying quite a few of his own in his airtight closet as a gay, cross-dressing destructive figure. But none of Hoover’s proclivities forced him from office or subjected him to the kind of immoral Bureau scrutiny that King endured.

  “They are out to break me,” King declared on an FBI recording, and black folk agreed, whether “they” were the FBI specifically or white society generally. The white folk who found King’s consensual sexual behavior repugnant worried little about the same behavior among white leaders. To be sure, what set King apart from his white male compatriots was a brutal racial hierarchy that morally taxed black life while giving white people exemption. Still, both white and black society shared in toxic masculinity. King may have battled white supremacy with full force, but he gleefully waved the white flag to bristling chauvinism. He believed his talented wife, Coretta, should stay at home with the kids. He took full advantage of the erotic possibilities that endlessly swirled around him. And he once joined a raucous chorus of male staff laughter at the recounting of a party that boasted a prostitute and the near sexual throttling of a seventeen-year-old Southern Christian Leadership Conference secretary.

  I received a great deal of black criticism when I published my first book on King nearly twenty years ago. I discussed his plagiarism and adultery because I felt it my duty to reckon with his genius and flaws. King, to me, is the greatest American this nation has seen. He levied the moral authority of black protest against the scornful force of white resistance to make democracy sing in full-throated vibrancy. I also knew that black folk had complained that white folk could only see the moral beauty of their heroes, and not their faults. One of the most grievous faults of some white heroes is that they blocked black growth and diminished our achievements. Still, their faults were heedlessly ignored while their virtues were wildly overplayed.

  I thought King deserved better, that he could withstand the truth, and that his singular strengths meant that we should look history squarely in the eye and take note of his overwhelming greatness and his undermining failures. I did so not because I was perfect or blameless but because I witnessed how black folk damned youth culture for the same issues that plagued King: a fascination with sex, a delight in words sometimes not his own, an obsession with death. In a sense black folk repeated the sin of white folk: they loved their heroes but overlooked the flawed appeal of their own children. If King could shake loose from his mortal peril to embrace the future with determined hopefulness, so could they. But they couldn’t move forward looking at King as an icon of perfection while viewing their children and the culture they produced as pathological. Telling the truth about King was a way to insist on the hidden truth and obscured value of our kids.

  The urge to protect King and other black icons is understandab
le, but it is an impulse that is often misplaced and easily exploited. Moreover, not all black figures are equally deserving of such protection. When Bill Cosby began to berate poor black folk in public, he was widely hailed in black America for telling difficult truths. I saw it differently. Bill Cosby was part of an out-of-touch black elite—what I call an “Afristocracy”—that pilloried the black poor, the “ghettocracy,” for their moral failings and cultural deviance. Cosby in an infamous 2004 speech in Washington, D.C., lambasted black folks’ unique names (“names like Shaniqua, Taliqua, and Muhammad and all that crap, and all of ’em are in jail”), their use of black English (“I can’t even talk the way these people talk. ‘Why you ain’t, where you is go’”), and mating habits (“Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to … might be your grandmother”).

  I got huge blowback in black circles in 2005 for my criticism of Cosby, with people claiming that I was trying to pull a black man down. Many contended that I had no right to criticize a man who had done so much for black America, particularly his philanthropy in support of black colleges. I found it ironic that many black folk defended Cosby against my criticism while praising his vicious criticism of the black masses. I wrote at some length about the allegations of Andrea Constand and Lachele Covington against Cosby and faced stern rebuke in many barbershops and church sanctuaries. (One prominent New York City church refused to display my sermon topic criticizing Cosby on its outside billboard.)

  While Cosby lashed out against black youth for their sexual and social perversions, he was allegedly engaged in an astonishing and extended rampage of sexual assault that sharply contrasted with his comedic genius and humanitarian endeavors. Cosby exploited black paranoia about white efforts to bring down prominent black men. The racist impulse to check black power and progress surely exacerbated the tendency among black folk to embrace conspiracy theories about wide-ranging and orchestrated attempts to harm black life. While he rebuffed the black poor for conveniently resorting to race to explain their troubles, Cosby willfully leaned on race to gin up the eruption of black protectionism for himself. That protectionist sentiment has failed to die down even as Cosby now sits in a prison cell.

  Similarly, black protectionism seems to have allowed R. Kelly to cast a spell on black America for decades. (Early on in his career, JAY-Z collaborated with Kelly for two albums.) The 2019 Surviving R. Kelly documentary—produced by longtime JAY-Z collaborator dream hampton—has finally brought to a fever pitch the effort to hold the enormously troubled superstar accountable for his alleged sexual abuse of mostly teenage black girls. It was long rumored that in 1994 twenty-seven-year-old Kelly married R&B star Aaliyah when she was fifteen, a marriage that was quickly annulled. Kelly has since been charged with child pornography, including making an infamous sex tape with a thirteen-year-old girl, and sexual abuse and other predatory behavior; most recently he has been hit with twenty-one charges of sex abuse in Illinois, prostitution and solicitation charges in Minnesota, and federal charges of sex trafficking. The lure of Kelly’s musical genius kept black folk willfully ignorant and awkwardly silent for decades. I wrote about Kelly extensively in my book Mercy, Mercy Me, and interviewed him in his Chicago compound in the wee hours one October morning in 2003. I have always believed that Kelly should suffer the consequences of his actions as well as seek therapy to confront his demons. But it would be too easy to hold Kelly accountable—as he unquestionably should be—and let other black men who exploit and prey on teenage girls and young women off the hook. The problem of black girls and women being ignored, taken for granted, or abused is an ongoing plague we have barely addressed.

  Muting R. Kelly, at least until he comes to grips with the horror he has caused, is one necessary thing. But picking and choosing who to mute is trickier than it may appear on the surface. Marvin Gaye, at the direction of his barren wife, impregnated her sixteen-year-old niece. Later, he had a public relationship with a high school girl, and he got her pregnant four months after they met. Should we mute him too? Miles Davis was brutally abusive to his wives, and Michael Jackson is alleged to have sexually abused children. Should they be muted too?

  The monstrous and brazen nature of Kelly’s offense may seal his fate. Torn for most of his career between the flesh and the spirit, Kelly has bluntly begged people in his music to intercede with God on his behalf: “Instead of you all throwing them stones at me, somebody pray for me,” he pleads on “I Wish.” Yet Kelly is unwilling to meet the Almighty or believers halfway. Absent an acknowledgment of his wrongdoing, a confession of his sin, Kelly is unlikely to receive either the grace of God or the forgiveness of the people. Kelly told me in an interview more than fifteen years ago that, “When I put out stuff like ‘I Believe I Can Fly,’ the real true God warriors are gonna start praying for me. And intervening for me. Because they know I got a monster at me.”

  Believing that God will somehow overlook one’s failures and flaws because one has offered the world a gift is hardly unique to R. Kelly or the millions who, because of his genius, dismiss his predatory pedophilia or his sexual abuse. Abernathy found consolation in the arms of black believers who were willing to forgive him or look the other way because of his valor in the face of evil. He later made an odd confession—not of his own sin, but that of his fallen comrade Martin Luther King, Jr. When King lived it made sense for Abernathy to speak for him as his second in command and a chief interpreter of his social and moral aims. But after King’s death, presuming to do so, especially on such an intimate matter as sex, was more troubling. Abernathy contended that the night before King died, King, after delivering his last and arguably greatest speech, had sex with two women at different points of the night and in the early morning physically fought a third female “friend.” It was tragic to many folk that Abernathy had talked about King’s secrets and sins, something King had refused to do to his best friend.

  In his own way, King confessed his own sins, warning his congregation not to think of him as perfect when he declared in a sermon, “You don’t need to go out saying Martin Luther King, Jr. is a saint.” (In 1968 he confessed to his wife that he’d had a mistress since 1963 who meant the most to him of all the women he saw outside his marriage, a married woman who lived in Los Angeles. But the timing was disastrous. Coretta was recovering from a hysterectomy, and King was bitterly scolded by Abernathy’s wife, Juanita, who told him he should take his guilt to God or the psychiatrist.) Of course, Abernathy’s confession of King’s sins might have been read as Abernathy finally breaking ranks with the poisonous patriarchy that clouds black culture. And yet, for that to be true, Abernathy would have had to tell on himself as well, to give account of his own flaws. And about those flaws he remained deadly silent. It is a hypocrisy that too many of us know all too well.

  In the spring of 2019, noted King biographer David Garrow said in the conservative British publication Standpoint that he’d got hold of newly released FBI documents that take fresh aim at King’s sex life. These are based on memos of alleged transcripts and audio recordings that are sealed in the National Archives until 2027. Garrow had written in his King biography Bearing the Cross about what he termed King’s “compulsive sexual athleticism,” figuring that the civil rights leader had ten to twelve girlfriends over four to five years. Now it seems that King had from forty to forty-five paramours over that time period. There are also claims that King engaged prostitutes; fathered a child outside of his marriage; and participated in orgies, including one with a female gospel legend. Most damning of all—though far less reliable—he had, according to a note scribbled on the FBI file, “looked on, laughed and offered advice” as a ministerial colleague raped one of his parishioners. On another occasion, King is said to have told a reluctant participant in an “unnatural” sex act that it would “help your soul.”

  These claims have been challenged by historians, who have good reason to doubt their veracity. The FBI, after all, was hardly a neutral observ
er of King and meant explicitly to destroy him. But I proceed here as I always have, with an eye to figuring out the most damning thing that might be true about King, and then working back from that premise. Thus, should extremely compromising and damaging revelations be found to be true about him when the files are unsealed, we will have already wrestled with the most egregious and harmful claims.

  If the most serious charges are true, that King witnessed and found humor in rape, that he coaxed a woman to agree to troubling sex, it is tragic and shows just how deeply entrenched King was in the toxic masculinity and rape culture that have poisoned so many men for so long. Garrow concludes in his Standpoint article that “a profoundly painful historical reckoning and reconsideration inescapably awaits.”

  Yet many books on King, especially works by Garrow, Taylor Branch, and me, have grappled at length with King’s sexual appetites and proclivities. What the trove of FBI documents does show is the rabid racism of the FBI and their pornographic preoccupation with King’s phallus. There is an erotics of white supremacy that Garrow seems to miss, a psychological resentment of black virility that fuels the insanity of surveillance. The FBI bugged King’s hotels and home to determine if he was hanging out with communists, but the surveillance quickly became a referendum on his bedroom behavior.

  The files may give us a greater sense of King’s behavior, but will likely also reveal our government’s willingness to destroy and obscenely invade the life of a private citizen who posed no threat to the nation. What King challenged was white supremacy; what he opposed was the fierce bias against blackness; what he wanted was justice for all folk. And for that desire he was hounded, harassed, harmed, and then shot and killed. He lived daily with the threat of death. He had uncontrollable hiccups brought on by fear. The government that was supposed to shield him from harm made him more vulnerable to attack. Perhaps King drank and sexed so much because he realized just how disposable his black body was in a culture that hated his skin and despised his breathing. This is no excuse at all for laughing at a woman being raped. But to divorce King’s sex life, and the toxic choices he made, and the great harm he may have caused from a logic and culture that made those choices seem reasonable or acceptable is to settle for symptoms not sources, for effects and not causes. Rape and race culture alike have polluted the nation’s moral mainstream.