His family was on and off welfare, but they didn’t let their circumstances keep them from putting food on the table and gifts under the tree on Christmas Day. At times they were impoverished and ran out of food, but those were the moments when family meant the most: Kendrick, Paula, and Kenny loved one another, and that sustained them. They wouldn’t have been as close without those moments. In 1992, when Kendrick was just four years old, he witnessed the smoke billowing from the streets of L.A. following the massive riot that ensued after the acquittal of four police officers who assaulted an unarmed black motorist named Rodney King. As Kendrick told Rolling Stone, he and his father were riding down Bullis Road in Compton where he saw people “just running.… We stop, and my pops goes into the Auto-Zone and comes out rolling four tires. I know he didn’t buy them.… Then we get to the house, and him and my uncles are like, ‘We fixing to get this, we fixing to get that. We fixing to get all this shit!’ I’m thinking they’re robbing.… Then, as time progresses, I’m watching the news, hearing about Rodney King and all this. I said to my mom, ‘So the police beat up a black man, and now everybody’s mad? OK. I get it now.’ ” That was Kendrick’s first brush with the racism that would fuel songs like “Alright” and “The Blacker the Berry,” and his first step toward understanding his own identity and racial disparity in the United States.
Kendrick’s childhood runs parallel to the heightened tensions in L.A., and on his seventh birthday, retired football star O. J. Simpson—who had spent the past twenty years becoming a global media darling—transfixed the city by cruising through it, from the San Diego Freeway all the way to his house in Brentwood, with a gun pressed to his head. He was wanted for murder, and as his trial unfolded over the next year, L.A. would be strongly divided along racial lines. O. J. was acquitted of the crime, and that was seen as payback for the Rodney King verdict and the decades of brutality and discrimination at the hands of the city’s police and justice departments.
The city of L.A. has a long history with such events: In August 1965, a riot escalated in Watts after a traffic stop turned into a massive scuffle between angry residents and white police officers. More than 14,000 California National Guard troops were brought into South L.A. to stabilize the area; in the end, 34 people died, roughly 1,000 were injured, and 4,000 were arrested. In 1991, almost two weeks after the videotaped beating of Rodney King became public, a black teenager named Latasha Harlins was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American woman in a Vermont Vista liquor store. The woman, Soon Ja Du, had accused Harlins of trying to steal orange juice, a claim that the teenager had vehemently denied before the two tussled at the counter. Du fired the kill shot as Harlins walked away. Though a jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence of sixteen years, the judge did not accept the jury’s sentencing and instead gave Du five years of probation, four hundred hours of community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. The punishment was considered much too light for an offense of that magnitude, and it reinforced the bitter reality that black life simply wasn’t valued in the United States. The incident escalated tensions between blacks and Korean-Americans in South Central; many of the businesses targeted during the 1992 riot were Korean-owned.
When Kendrick was five, he saw a teenage drug dealer gunned down in front of his apartment building. “A guy was out there serving his narcotics and somebody rolled up with a shotgun and blew his chest out,” Kendrick once told NPR. “It [did] something to me right then and there. It let me know that this is not only something that I’m looking at, but it’s something that maybe I have to get used to.” Then, at the age of eight, Kendrick was walking home from Ronald E. McNair Elementary School, past the Tam’s Burgers on Rosecrans Avenue, when he saw a man get shot and killed in the drive-thru as he ordered his food. As a child, Kendrick toed a fine line between morality and street shit. Too many wrong moves, and Kendrick—the same guy whose music has traveled the globe several times over—would not have made it out of his hometown. Although one could say in retrospect that Kendrick’s ascension was ordained, he also needed some luck, a ton of goodwill, and a lot of support from family and friends to pull through.
Kendrick needed a friend like Matt Jeezy, whom he met in the third or fourth grade as a fellow student at McNair Elementary. They lived in the same neighborhood and played basketball with other young kids. Eventually, some of those same friends would kill each other due to their respective gang affiliations. But Matt and Kendrick weren’t thinking red or blue; they simply wanted to have fun playing games they both loved. They weren’t gangsters at all, just naturally affable children who knew everyone around the way. “Me and Kendrick used to get picked on because we weren’t big bad gangstas,” Jeezy recalls. “We hung out with them, we associated ourselves with them, but they knew we weren’t gangbanging or anything like that. The girls would pick on us, the fellas would pick on us, but that was part of
