Kendrick was first introduced to creative writing as a seventh grader at Vanguard Learning Center, where he met Regis Inge, an English teacher who brought poetry into the curriculum. Tensions were especially high in the school: a gang war had broken out between blacks and Latinos in a county jail, and those ill feelings made their way to the streets of Compton, then to the Unified School District. The friction seemed to intensify overnight; one day, the students were cordial with one another, then they weren’t interacting at all. Inge introduced poetry as a way to de-escalate the intensity. As he saw it, if the kids wrote their frustration, they wouldn’t need to express it through physical violence. They were dealing with heavy issues at home, not just gang tension. Some of them were food insecure or had problems with self-esteem. Others trekked to school just minutes after law enforcement stampeded their homes and arrested family members. “Poetry was a way for them to write their emotions down so they wouldn’t come to school so angry,” Inge recalls. “They’d be ready to fight at 7:30 in the morning.”
Still, the poetry lesson wasn’t an easy sell for the neighborhood boys, who assumed the balladry was all about fluttering hearts and red roses. They weren’t comfortable expressing feelings of love, so Inge connected poetry with hip-hop, and let the students know that it isn’t always so cloying, that their favorite rappers were simply talking about their lives by putting poetry to music. The kids had a breakthrough: black, brown, red, and blue no longer mattered in the classroom; they started seeing each other as humans and not just rivals. “It broke the color lines down,” Inge says. “Hearing poetry from a person of another race helped the students realize that they aren’t so different.” These weren’t just poetry lessons, they taught students how to survive the turbulence. The class had a profound impact on Kendrick, who, in middle school, was still incredibly shy with a noticeable stutter that arose when he got excited. Though that made public speaking difficult at first, he eventually got over it by talking to people more often.
Kendrick was a solid student who earned good grades and put his all into creative writing. Finally, he had an avenue to unpack his feelings—and Mr. Inge would play a major role in his intellectual growth. Kendrick had to work hard to perfect his craft, and Inge didn’t take it easy on him. When Kendrick submitted his work in school, Inge would often send it back with visible prompts for the budding poet to dig deeper. Basic language wouldn’t cut it; the young man needed to strengthen his lexicon before his prose could truly shine. “I would always circle something and say, ‘Kendrick, change this, move this right here,’ ” Inge says.
Not one to be defeated by hard work, Kendrick took it as motivation to improve. He didn’t just want to get by, he wanted to be the best, and that meant tapping into a level of focus he hadn’t before. It meant pouring everything into his creative being and doing what he could to protect it. If he forgot to do his poetry assignment at home, he’d get to school early and do it there. Kendrick became obsessed with the written word, scribbling rap lyrics on notebook paper instead of finishing assignments for other classes. The lyrics were profane—all “ ‘eff you’ and ‘d-i-c-k,’ ” his mother reportedly said—but that was Kendrick mining the seedy aspects of his upbringing to arrive at something more positive. “He was rapping about things he wasn’t supposed to rap about,” Jeezy says. “He was rapping about what he knew at the time—and that was drugs, gangbanging, and the streets. As we got older and started maturing, I saw him take the craft more seriously.”
Kendrick started writing poems about the changes he went through as an adolescent beginning to understand the social dynamics of his neighborhood. His understanding of the world grew exponentially as he began to study other cultures and compare their experiences with his own to strengthen his art. Kendrick stopped writing to make others feel comfortable; instead, he chose to elevate his thinking and make people catch up to him.
By the time Kendrick got to high school, his career path was set. He was going to be a rapper, and nothing could make him veer off the course. One day in particular, Matt Jeezy and Kendrick were walking home from Centennial High School when the budding MC just couldn’t stop rapping. He started coming up with rhymes off the top of his head, and he didn’t stop until four or five blocks later, when he and Jeezy were close to their respective homes. “It was about twenty minutes’ worth of rapping,” Jeezy recalls. At that moment, his friend knew that Kendrick had what it took to be a star. All he needed to do was stay away from the pitfalls of street life. “I was like,
