Fight the Power: How Public Enemy Triggered an Educational Revolution

by • August 17, 2016

Elvis never meant shit to me. Mutha fucka was simple and plain. Mutha fuck him and John Wayne.”

Public Enemy’s seminal song “Fight the Power” came at a generation of young people with a belly full of guile and a healthy disdain for the establishment. One such young person was a man living in Gainesville, FL circa 1989. That man is now the principal of a high-performing middle school in Jacksonville,  FL, and a transformative force in public education in an area of the country that is starving for educational transformation.

The man was born into a middle-class family. His parents worked hard running a small chain of grocery stores. They were never rich but busted their asses and more than made ends meet. Then the corporate head of the chain’s parent company embezzled a bunch of money and the family lost it all.

His introduction to music was not exactly Public Enemy. It was not even music in the traditional sense. The initiation came in the form of a record that came as a cut-out on the back of a cereal box. You could punch out the back of the box and have a playable LP. On that record was the audio of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Being the only record the man owned, he wore it out on the phonograph in his room.

Let freedom ring from the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain in Tennessee. From every mountain and molehill in Mississippi.”

He sits in his room playing King’s most recognizable speech, listening as the talk builds in tension like a great Led Zeppelin song, an almost sensual experience. King’s voice clipping along in his trademark cadence and coming to a controlled frenzy of a climax, black and white alike cheering and celebrating the feeling that a sea change is in the air. Seeds of anger were sown. But those seeds would lay dormant until many years later.

The man was in college at the time his parents lost their grocery stores due to corporate greed and found himself in a milieu. He grew up middle class and suddenly found himself poor, working full-time, and taking classes that did not interest him. He was a smart kid who breezed through middle and high school. He spent most of his time messing with substitutes in hopes that they would eventually break down in tears.

College brought more of the same apathy. And then he heard “Fight the Power.” Chuck D put the establishment — big government and big business — on blast for oppressing minorities and ignoring their calls for change. The video for the song depicts an army of black faces displaying controlled, organized anger — a nightmare for the white establishment.

Public Enemy awakened a dormant fury in the man. In his political science classes, he saw other white people being taught by white professors talking about white figures in history. There were no black folks, anywhere. Frustration built to the point where school seemed futile. Why should he continue to perpetuate an establishment he was growing to despise?

Feeling like he was going to a university just to get a piece of paper that would say nothing about who he was as a worker or a person, the man dropped out of school and started cooking. He was good at cooking, and his life as a chef, although difficult, paid the bills and provided a creative outlet for his restless mind.

Still, the seeds of anger sowed by Reverend King’s speech and watered by Public Enemy’s bone crushing tune needed germinating. We naturally wait for the opportune time to do transformational things. If we could just get a couple of weeks off we would paint more. If we had a month we would travel and write a memoir and call mom two, maybe even three times. But of course, that rarely plays out as planned. Getting time off is tough, and when we get it, life gets in the way of productivity.

The man’s time off came involuntarily. A serious car accident messed up his back so severely, he was forced to spend a year on the couch recuperating. In that year his anger simmered, then boiled, and finally exploded. He was no longer content to complain about inequality. Simply listening to Public Enemy and Dr. King was not going to change the world. It was time to fight the powers that be.

Which sounds romantic until you start to consider logistics. Pushing against the grain is rarely popular and always difficult. The man could have continued making a good living as a chef and no one would have faulted him. Instead, he went back to school, finished his degree, and started teaching middle school outside of Atlanta.

Teaching is one of the most difficult professions in the world, and certainly among its most important. Perhaps the most difficult teaching you can do is in middle school, with kids from underserved communities. Kids who constantly see images of brutality in their neighborhoods. Kids whose own music glorifies misogyny and crime, not meaningful revolution. The man took that challenge head on, in a regular public school with few resources and little support from the people around him. He excelled, and as a result was asked to move to a new KIPP school that was opening in Atlanta.

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a high performing nationwide network of public charter schools. Students have longer days and a longer year than their peers from the same neighborhoods. Character education is emphasized and the whole person is developed. The model works. KIPP students come from communities where as few as 8% of people go to college. As a group, KIPPsters, as they are known, go to college at a rate north of 80%.

The man worked in Atlanta for a few years before accepting an opportunity at a new school in Jacksonville. With Chuck D’s likeness tattooed on one shoulder, King on the other, and Frederick Douglass adorning his forearm, he does not exactly cast the stereotypical visage of a middle school principal. But that anger, that fire, burns eternally within him. He was born to fight through service. The establishment may be able to look at Public Enemy and disparage them as something misunderstood. Hip hop is an easy target. Like the man’s students, hip hop’s practitioners are mostly black, mostly from poor neighborhoods.

A mobilized, educated mass of young people is not so easy a whipping boy. A new school year is upon us. The transformative power of education is once again full of promise. Warren Buck believes in the potential of every kid who walks in the door of KIPP Impact Middle School on Jacksonville’s Westside. He has surrounded himself with like-minded educators, and together they will “shut ’em down.”

Fight the Power: How Public Enemy Triggered an Educational Revolution by Jason Earle, edited by Matthew Weller.

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