That Time I Met Chuck D

When I was in law school, I had taken a course with Dr. Donald Tibbs regarding criminal investigations. The course was focused on 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment Constitutional law. It was billed as “The course which will make you afraid to be in a closet in your own home.” It was, as advertised, terrorizing. The story began with Terry v. Ohio, a 1968 case that obliterated the warrant requirement for stops and searches. It replaced it with a “reasonableness” requirement. Before 1968, which was embroiled in the mesh of the Civil Rights era, a police officer would need to have a warrant or probable cause to stop and arrest you. After this date, they did not. The text of this amendment is as follows:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” 4th Amdt. (Emphasis mine).

The transition from making the law focused on the term “unreasonable,” rather than “probable cause” had a dramatic and immediate effect. It began the transition from the “Jim Crow” era to the “War on Drugs” era, and gave the existing power structure yet another excuse for perpetrating and perpetuating slavery in America. Slavery, as you may (or may not) have learned in school, is an institution that made people who had high melanin content in their skin obey the orders of those who didn’t. They could literally be owned — crazy, right? Imagine being a person born as a slave of another — you had no citizenship, no rights, no recourse, or reason to complain — you were the property of your master, and the first refrain of anyone whom you interacted with was, “Who owns you?” That was the experience of these people. It was a policy, as you can imagine, inhumane, immoral, irrational, illegitimate, and ill-conceived for cultivating the universal and public good of the nation.

But we moved on from slavery in a cautious way — afraid to harm the interests of capital-holders whom had a stranglehold on the national economy. The whole Civil War (the first one, as I’m sure as you read this, the second has already happened), was predicated on the preservation of this perverse institution. Slavery was an evil conceived in ancient times, and carried on to the modern day. Though fits, and fights, and furrowed brows, we made a pact at the end of the war to end the practice of slavery. We moved along and dressed it up as an improvement on the situation. “Jim Crow,” as it was called was a system of segregation, sharecropping, and substantial woe for many of its victims. It had white and “colored” persons using different bathrooms, fountains, eateries, and places on the bus. Through half a century, we kept this regime intact with Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and only abolished it with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. That decision ended Jim Crow, and began the “War on Drugs,” which was really a war on Black communities. That movement began with Terry v. Ohio, as mentioned before, and continues to this day.

“How does this have anything to do with us though,” you may be asking. Terry was the case that began the long march toward the dismantlement of 4th & 5th Amendment rights, and enabled the War on Drugs. That war brought with it a lot of mission creep, and terrible negative externalities. Terry’s the way the government tracks you, stalks you, and makes you uneasy. It’s how they use your words against you without you being Mirandized, because you’re only “detained,” not arrested. It’s how they keep you quiet, and in your place. There’s a doctrine of things that we have wrought, thinking them harmless — though they’re not — because we believed that safety was the highest virtue. It’s not. “Safety“ is the word that people use to scare you and make you fear a litany of things which may never appear. It’s a word so terrible and fraught that only after ages we’ve been taught that danger only follows. “How does this affect you?” Intimately.

After I finished the criminal investigations course, I took another two courses taught by Dr. Tibbs — one on Black Power movements throughout history, and another on Hip-Hop and Constitutional law. It’s in that latter course that I was educated on the history of hip-hop, and how deeply entwined it is with our nation’s jurisprudential history. It was at the apex of the War on Drugs that hip-hop began to be developed in New York Burroughs during the 1970s. Artists like KRS-One rapped about the evolution of slavery through the Jim Crow era, and into the War on Drugs.

“The overseer rode around the plantation

The officer is off, patrollin’ all the nation

The overseer could stop you, “What you’re doing?”

The officer will pull you over just when he’s pursuing

The overseer had the right to get ill

And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill

The officer has the right to arrest

And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest

(Woop!) They both ride horses

After 400 years, I’ve got no choices” - KRS-One, Sound of Da Police (1993)

The War on Drugs ravaged America’s inner cities in a way that can’t be overstated. The prison and jail population hovered around 360,000 in the early 1970s. By 2024, over two million people were in jail or prison, with an additional three million under some type of court supervision.1 Of those incarcerated, Black people made up around 60% of our prison population, while accounting for only around 14% of the population.2 This disparity doesn’t exist because Black people commit more crimes — they don’t. It’s because police officers (overseers) selectively target predominantly Black communities and people. The goal of this system, of course, is to force Black people into slave labor, which is permitted via a loophole built into the 13th Amdt., Section 1 of which reads:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”. - 13th Amdt. To the United States Constitution, (emphasis mine).

All of this is to give you some context for why a law school would hold a seminar on Hip-Hop and Constitutional law. While they may seem entirely separate, they’re actually inseparable and causally intertwined. Chuck D was a member of an infamous hip-hop group, Public Enemy. With tracks with titles like “Fight the Power,” “Public Enemy No. 1,” and “State of the Union (STFU),” their art is inherently political. The law evolved throughout the 1990s and 2000s to keep the War on Drugs going, leaving us in a place where, by the 2010s, our civil liberties were greatly eroded. That process ultimately hurt everyone, as we saw with the Wikileaks case and the Snowden affair. By the time I began writing this memoir for you, Americans had basically given up on civil liberties altogether. This attitude eventually gave rise to ICE, a new, “America First” version of the Nazi SS that rampage through American cities in 2025-26.

Chuck D saw all of these developments coming. He was our keynote speaker for that seminar, and arrived to much jubilation from students, whom were not told who our keynote lecturer would be beforehand. He gave an hourlong lecture covering the topics I’ve just summarized for you supra, and we had an excellent discussion about how the legal and political climate of the times had impacted his art. People say that art imitates life, and that life imitates art — a self-devouring, endless ouroboros — constantly turning outside and inside of itself, the image of history unfolding cyclically over time. Slavery gave way to Jim Crow, which gave rise to the War on Drugs. Hopefully by the time you read this, the cycle will have come to an end, although in truth, I doubt it will have. Bigotry will continue in myriad forms, always recasting the characters and reinventing the scenes, while the plot remains the same.

I’m not going to tell you about the cocktail party afterward, nor about the offer he made to have me work on one of his websites, nor the excellent conversations that were had. You’ll have your own conversations with friends and colleagues, and will certainly have a wider view of the history of these times in which I lived than I ever had living in the thick of the moment. But I will tell you this: When you hear people loudly and enthusiastically deriding and downplaying the quality or influence of a piece of art, know that piece is likely of the highest quality and most influence. Nobody who grew up in white, middle-class America would have expected a hip-hop artist to give a lecture on how their art form intersects with Constitutional Law. Fewer would have expected it to be such an important, insightful, and influential lecture. The law school did a good job correcting those misperceptions. And what less would you expect of Drexel University, which invited the likes of Barack Obama to give his famous Speech on Race there in 2008?