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
