Wednesday, March 29, 2006

USA Today:The Stop Snitching Creed

• Don't snitch on others just to save yourself. "Stop snitching is for those guys out there ... selling more drugs than Noriega, and their only out is to tell on somebody. ... If a (criminal) wants to be a Good Samaritan, OK. But send (him) to jail. Don't give him immunity to do what he wants on the street."

• Stop Snitching doesn't mean stop talking to police. "It's always misconstrued by the public, or the powers that be, that we're trying to intimidate the regular people or the law-abiding citizens. That's not what it's about. ... If that is your only outlet, to call the police, that's what you do."

• But witnesses have no obligation to help police. "Do your job — you're the police. ... I've been wronged by the system. Do you think I would help the system? ... Do cops snitch on other cops?"

• The authorities can't protect witnesses. "What's happening to the innocent witness? They get dead or ... terrorized for life."

• Sometimes you must right wrongs yourself. "I'm a man, and I can handle my own situations like a man. ... I've done dirt. I'll admit that. So I can't run to the police."

From the USA Today article: Anti-snitch campaign riles police, prosecutors
Busta Rhymes is an a-hole!


I dont know whats wrong with some of these MC's. They need to learn how to treat their fans. I know that they are from the streets, they are hardcore, blah, blah, blah. But I am getting sick of hearing about rappers dissing their fans.

Like I been hearing alot about Busta Rhymes lately. I was listening to Russ Parr this morning, and now Im hearing another story about Busta going off on one of his fans. First there was the incident where he beat somebody who just wanted his autograph (see the story on MTV). Now I can't find the story of what happened most recently, but on Russ Parr show they said he was in a club filled with homosexuals and transvestites. Now, first of all, what was he doing there? The story goes that a homosexual fan came up behind him, tapped him on the shoulder, and then he said "Don't be coming up behind me man!" Then he goes to one of his bodyguards "I hate bleep bleep."

Now, not to diseminate mindless gossip, but I remember one time at Howard University, I saw Busta walking with his boys in the Leaders of the New School (his old group, if you didn't know) and then I said to my friends "Hey there's Busta." However, looking at him, he gave me this look as though to say, "What the f are you looking at?"

Now, maybe I read the whole situation wrong, but my thing is that some of these brothas need to stop acting like they are "Gods gift to hip hop", and recognize that the people who like them and admire them made them. They really all need to leave that street mentality behind.
It's Hard Out Here For a Ho?

Some commentary on the 3-6 Mafia Academy Award victory and its implications:

Pundits from coast to coast decry the win as rewarding a "coon show" and as yet one more example of how "the man" thrills in bestowing accolades to Blacks for portraying seedy characters.

These same pundits, scholars, etc., most of whom don't actually do what they critique made less than a whimper however, when MTV dropped "Pimp My Ride" into homes across the globe. Why? Because America co-signed pimp culture long before Three Six recorded their little ditty on the woes of pimpdom.

Read the rest on HeavyMentalist!

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

R.I.P Professor X


Professor X of X-Clan has died in a New York-area hospital after a bout with meningitis, sources close to the situation told AllHipHop.com.

As a member of X-Clan, Professor X gained notoriety for his catch phrases "Vainglorious" and dissed fools by calling them "sissies."

Additionally, Professor X, whose real name was Lumumba Carson, was the son of the late Civil Rights pioneer Sonny Carson, who produced The Education of Sonny Carson.

He also founded the grassroots organization BlackWatch.

Meningitis is a byproduct of bacterial or viral infections that overcome the body's natural immune system.

The aggressive entities can be transmitted from other people through sneezing, coughing, kissing, infected blood, or contaminated water or food.

In August 2004, Professor X, auctioned off his time on eBay for a night on the town in New York City.

X-Clan released a pair of critically acclaimed albums, To the East, Blackwards (1990) and Xodus (1992), but soon after the Brooklyn-based collective disbanded.

In December 2005, X-Clan announced a comeback, but it was unclear if Professor X was party to the reunion. In 1995, X-Clan group member Sugar Shaft died from complications related to the AIDS virus.

Funeral arrangements haven't been announced.

Source: All Hip Hop
See also: MTV, Nobody's Smiling, and Vibe
Check out this BlackWatch Movement site.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

2 Black 2 Young?

BETTER OR VERSE

By DAVID ANDREATTA Education Reporter

March 13, 2006 -- YOUNGSTER'S BLACK-POWER POEM RILES SCHOOL


A 7-year-old prodigy unleashed a firestorm when she recited a poem she wrote comparing Christopher Columbus and Charles Darwin to "pirates" and "vampires" who robbed blacks of their identities and human rights.
Hundreds of parents of Peekskill middle- and high-school students received a recorded phone message last week apologizing for little Autum Ashante's poem, titled "White Nationalism Put U in Bondage."

"Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse," the aspiring actress and poet wrote. "They took the gold, the wisdom and all the storytellers. They took the black women, with the black man weak. Made to watch as they changed the paradigm of our village.

"Yeah white nationalism is what put you in bondage. Pirates and vampires like Columbus, Morgan and Darwin."

Autum was invited to speak at the Westchester schools on Feb. 28 by Melvin Bolden, a music teacher at the middle school who advises the high school's Black Culture Club and is a member of the Peekskill City Council.

Autum, whose résumé includes several television appearances and performances at the Apollo Theater and the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, told The Post that her poem was meant to instill pride in black students and to encourage them to steer clear of violence.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with my poem. I was trying to tell them the straight-up truth," Autum said. "I'm trying to tell them not to fight because they're killing the brothers and sisters."

Autum, who is home-schooled in Mount Vernon and speaks several languages, prefaced her performance at the high school with a Black Panthers' pledge asking black youngsters to not harm one another.

It did not sit well with parents.

In a telephone interview with The Post, Bolden said Autum has been "unofficially" banned from performing in a district school again and that school officials would review transcripts of future speakers.

"It's unfortunate, because some teachers said they wanted this little girl to explain the things she said to their students, but some parents don't want her on school grounds," Bolden said.

"[The poem] might have been a little too aggressive for what the middle-school kids are ready to handle," Bolden added.

Kimberly Greene, a mother of children in the high school and middle school, said she was shocked when she got the recorded phone message.

"If there are people who are upset about what she said, the schools should have talked about and analyzed it rather than send a message to everyone saying this little girl was offensive," Greene said.

Autum's father, Batin Ashante, said he can't believe the fuss over his daughter's poem.

"She's a little girl who does poetry about real things. She doesn't do poetry about cotton candy," Ashante said. "She's a serious little person."

Source: NY Post via Davy D

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

She Watch Channel Zero (but skipped Flavor of Luv)

Once again, my heros in Public Enemy dissapoint me with another contradiction. Back in 1988, PE released the classic "It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back". Over a intense guitar riff (from "Angel of Death" by Slayer)and pulsing beat, they railed against women obsessed with TV soap opera fantasies in the jam "She Watch Channel Zero". In the song Flavor Flav insists that you "Stop watching that garbage" in his ad libs.

Does that garbage include the "Flavor of Love", the show that just wrapped up with a finale just last Sunday. Granted, at first when I heard the idea, I was like thinking this was totally stupid. However, later on I got addicted to it. I was at the edge of my seat as I watched the white ghetto girl Pumkin spit at the sassy actress called New York.

However, I could not get over the obvious; this show was stupid. From all the contrived drama to the non-climatic disappointing finale, this show had absolutely no redeeming value at all. It was so bad that if you read the lyrics to "She Watch Channel Zero", like these:

7, 5, 4, 8 she watched she said
All added up to zero
And nothing in her head
She turns and turns
And she hopes the soaps
Are for real - she learns
Is that it ain't true, nope
But she won't survive
And rather die and lie
Falls a fool - for some dude - on a tube


you just realize she wouldn't be diggin' Flav like that. I mean, come on, Flav's cool and all, but here is a list of his accomplishments besides being the hype man for Chuck D:

1. Punching his girlfriend in the face (1991)
2. Installing flashing lights around his license plate - almost daring the police to pick him up for outstanding warrants (1992)
3. Firing his gun at a neighbor (1993)
4. Drying out in rehab (1993)
5. Assaulting a woman who took a photo of one of his many children (1994)
6. Toting around vials of crack cocaine (1995)
7. Possessing pot while riding a bicycle (1996)
8. Canoodling with Brigitte Nielsen in a hot tub (2004)
9. Evading payments of child support for his families - in public (2005)


From the weblog The Trades

Good thing about the show was that you learned a lil more than the above about Flav. He is just a character and a half. But, on the flip side the idea of these young dumb cluckhead girls fighting over him (and they literally did)and just the Channel Zero aspects of this show make me wonder if PE was really down for theirs or if they were just full of s--t.

But I can't front, I will be watching the Jerry Springer-ish reunion show in a couple of weeks. But shame on you Flav! Shame!

Written by Chuck D in 1988:

Trouble vision for a sister
Because I know she don't know, I quote
Her brains retrained
By a 24 inch remote
Revolution a solution
For all our children
But all her children
Don't mean as much as the show, I mean
Watch her worship the screen, and fiend
For a TV ad
And it just makes me mad


What does Chuck D think of "Flavor of Love"?

Got into a big thing on Flav's new show FLAVOR OF LOVE on VH1. I actually dig this show, keeps me laughing. I mean I wasn't a fan of those Fantasy Island shows, nor The Bachelor but this show has me in ironic stitches. Again some folks say its not in line with PE, but FLAVOR's line is a different drum. Always. I never and don't expect Mr. Drayton to be an ad-libbing, second voice, hype man character for the sake of paying his billings. He must expand and do his thing, as long as he doesn't disrespect his family, something that I did my best to keep VH-1 from airing.

From the Public Enemy site

Oh well....so much for the "revolution".......

Saturday, March 11, 2006

From Playhata.com:Teachers Gone Wild!! Stanford Hip-Hop Conference Goes Awry Under Weight of Unchecked Egos


Many people dismissed a movie about a Memphis pimp going through a mid-life crisis who turns to rap for his salvation. It was called ‘trite’, ‘exploitative’ and corny. But it was one of the best movies of 2005. The film’s title song “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” had heads boppin’ in movie theatres, but no one would’ve guessed that the song, by Three 6 Mafia would’ve won an Oscar.

I know I didn’t.

In recent years “Crunk” and all aesthetics attached to it have been the Willie Horton of modern day hip-hop. Black intellectuals and hip-hop purists alike have singled this sub-genre out for being the cause of everything that is wrong with hip-hop today. The grillz, the bling, the tats, the white tee’s and the country slang have all been made symbols of everything that ails the hip-hop movement. In a lot of corners the mind set is: if they would go away we could have our hip-hop back.

In a perfect world maybe, but we live in a world that is far from perfect.

Hats off to Three 6 Mafia they did their thing, they represented their hood in the best way they knew how. Hip-hop is all about expressing who you are to the greater world. Whether it’s Crazy Legs kicking his legs around at 60 miles per hour, or D.J. Roc Raider on the cross fader, or an MC from Tennessee spittin’ a hot verse into a microphone, or Futura 2000 tagging a wall; it’s the artists way of expressing the following mantra: I AM. I BE.

Whether or not you agree with the subject matter of the song, you still have to take off your hat to those brothers, they didn’t start rappin’ last week, these are some guys that have been on the grind, for many years now, they deserve that award.

But what’s sad about all of this is that while Three 6 Mafia were being celebrated on one side and dismissed by the other, a whole other scene, a truly sad scene was being played out on the campus of Stanford University.

Hip-hop pioneers Busy Bee and KRS One hijacked a recent panel discussion on hip-hop to the shock and awe of all that attended. They called journalists and scholars to task for not really representing the culture. They angrily questioned the legitimacy of a panel that discussed hip-hop, but without the presence of any Bronx pioneers. They constantly uttered the refrain: “I am hip-hop”, as if no one else in attendance had any connection to the culture as well.

What was more shocking than KRS One’s repeated outbursts were his threats against my colleague and brother journalist Adisa Banjanko. To everyone’s surprise he threatened Adisa with bodily harm, called him a “FBI agent”, “a traitor to the movement” and “a fraud”.

I know Adisa and I’ve known of Adisa’s work for many years now, if there is a pioneer hip-hop journalist, Adisa - among a few others, is surely it. I remember when the brother used to write into The Source magazine, you could find his comments, religiously, on the ‘letter to the editor’ page. It would always say “The Bishop of Hip Hop”. Speaking of those days, here’s a mission for you true believers, find the The Source cover with Ice Cube on the front in 1991 and look at the letters to the editor page and tell me what names you find there. If you look hard enough, you’ll see the first scribblings from yours truly.

Adisa is a guy who loved hip-hop and Black Nationalism and found a way to carve out a niche for himself in this culture of ours. None of us that write about hip-hop do it out of anything less than a total and complete love for the culture. It is hard to do something for little to no money when you don’t love it. I’ve told many a young and aspiring journalist that if you’re going to write about this thing of ours, the man you should look to for inspiration is Adisa Banjanko. To call Adisa a ‘fraud’ and an ‘enemy to our movement’ is not only counter-productive, but its as wrong as the day is long.

At one time KRS One was the standard bearer for what a hip-hopper could be.

For Busy Bee and KRS One to dismiss the journalists and scholars who write about and study hip-hop is counter-productive. We all need each other in this thing of ours. Without writers who are passionate about the culture artists stories go undocumented. What many people don’t know or forget is that before the Internet, Source magazine, XXL or any other media outlet, hip-hop got poor coverage. You could count the number of media outlets on one hand that accurately reported on hip-hop music.

I can understand why a guy like Busy Bee would be frustrated, beyond his appearance in the movie “Wild Style”, and being the first brother in hip-hop to be lyrically ambushed on stage in 1980 by Kool Moe Dee, the only other noteworthy credit in his career was a hot record he did back in ‘88 called “Suicide”. Before 1990 guys like him were luckier than a four-leaf clover if they got two inches of column space on a page.

KRS is a different story all together. He has graced every magazine cover in hip-hop for the last 20 years. Throughout his career KRS has made statements to reporters that not only left writers speechless, but readers as well. Like many of us, he is a study in contradictions: Afrocentrist, Humanist, scholar, poet, teacher, scientist, hard rock and many other things.

Kris Parker, the man, the artist grew up in public. I’ve heard him on numerous occasions say things that baffled me to no end: “George Bush is a great president”, “I am a scholar”, “Don’t vote”, “I am the God of Rap”, “I was a seminary student”, ‘I am the living embodiment of hip-hop”, “@#%$ education” and so many other things that I’ve walked away in disbelief each time.

This latest public outburst is helping to destroy the credibility of a man who once lectured at prestigious universities all over the country. It’s like standing across the street watching a reckless driver and a voice inside your head says, “Yo, he’s about to crash.”.And then it happens. As a fan and as a brother in the struggle I think it’s time for KRS to take a break and take stock of what’s going on around him.

With all of the passion we all have for hip-hop, we often times come off, individually and together, as if we had divine ownership of her. Many of us act like because we heard or were into the music before someone else, that it means that we somehow love it more than anyone else does. Hell, I tell people all the time that the music found me in 1978. God reached down out of the clouds and said, “Mark, you are hip-hop…”

It’s kind of like sibling rivalry, the oldest brother feels like he is inherently closer to the mother because he was born first, that makes him somehow or another more special that the rest of the children. The middle children always feel like they have to fight for attention and the younger ones, forget about it, they’re spoiled.

It’s time we all grew up and got passed our beefs over who’s real hip-hop and who’s rap, who’s living it and who’s not. There are more pressing issues that we as adults have to confront that affect our community than something as trivial as who loves hip-hop more. Hip Hop belongs to the world, not to one man, or one city, or town or borough; but the whole world. We are all hip-hop.

MarkSkillz[at]aol.com from PlayaHata.com

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

America isn't ready for the Dirty Dirty


Check out:Oscar Winner Hits Angry Chord:'Pimp' Song Denounced for Exploiting Negative Stereotypes

With the song from the Hustle and Flow soundtrack causing alot of outrage this week, I guess what this represents is the crossing over of the whole grimy, stripper and pimp, Southern fried, Murder Dog, dirty dirty culture into the American mainstream, and guess what folks? America doesn't like it!How suprising is that? LOL.

Below is an interesting essay from the Washington Post by Philip Kennicott:

At dinner, say a month from now, perhaps it will be your very unhip great aunt who says it. Someone skimps her on dessert, so she looks plaintively down the table, waits for a moment of silence and then delivers the line -- "It's hard out here for a pimp."

Witness the explosion of a new hip-hop meme into "white culture." Yes, it was a memorable Oscar moment when Three 6 Mafia won the best song for their musical contribution to "Hustle & Flow." And yes, the song has a catchy tag melody. But this is a cultural brush fire. Oscar host Jon Stewart seemed to know it, and started the jokes rolling.

By 9:17 a.m. yesterday, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a poster on the National Review's conservative The Corner Web site, said it best: "The worst part about the Oscars last night, of course, is that I can't get 'It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp' out of my head this morning." Not surprisingly, by midafternoon, http://technorati.com , a Web site that tracks mentions of anything and everything in Web logs, posted an explosion of hits. In nifty visual form, a 30-day graph of the number of times, daily, the song has appeared on Web sites shows what it looks like when a song sneaks in under the radar, then ignites. It looks like a ski jump from hell.

For a brief moment, the song had a double status. Within hip-hop circles, according to Elliott Wilson, editor-in-chief of XXL magazine, the Oscar nod was affirmation for a rap group known as uncompromising (even if they cleaned up the lyrics Sunday night and put "witches" where the other women used to be). At the same time, a vast new audience got hip to the song --"It's the talk of the town," Wilson said -- and sent it down the long road of appropriation and misreading that almost inevitably accompanies cultural objects when they cross over into the world of Whiteness.

Why this song? Why now? When "white" culture borrows from "black" culture, it doesn't necessarily borrow what it thinks it's borrowing. The real meaning of the song, its reference to pimps, its role within a movie documenting the often pathetic efforts at stardom of a pimp who also makes music, isn't particularly relevant. When a piece of cultural stuff makes the transition into the mainstream, it often does so on terms entirely different from what it originally meant.

In this case, it's because the song's most catchy line, "It's hard out here for a pimp," captures the peculiar quality of complaint without merit in American cultural life. We all complain, and complaint has so cluttered our rhetorical landscape that we mostly tune out the din of gripe -- except, of course, for our own complaints, and the egregiously unmerited complaints of people we don't like. Despite the evolution of the word "pimp" to loosely embrace all manner of "playahs," and a celebration of "pimp style" (see: "Pimp My Ride"), most of us still don't like real pimps. So pimps who complain that "It's hard out here" can stand for all those people who complain willfully, scandalously, about things they have no right to complain about.

For instance, the ultimate egregious complaint: "It's not easy being beautiful." Or a close second, "Being rich isn't everything it's cracked up to be." These are complaints from people we envy, and belong to one category of self-delusion. The pimp complaint comes from another place, from someone deluded not by his success, but by his antisocial status. But all of these gripes elicit a sense of bemused outrage because they are complaints from someone who has no right to complain.

Perhaps the line has resonance because so much of American political discourse is about determining who is allowed to feel properly aggrieved. Is it Muslims offended about sacrilegious cartoons, or defenders of free speech seeing their high holy delimited? Daytime talk radio has essentially evolved into a vast trading floor for the commodity of complaint. And slowly we drift to a new understanding of the basic social contract: Your liberty ends where my outrage begins.

A pimp complaining that "It's hard out here" has, in a single outrageous leap, passed by the issue of whether he has any right to grievance, and is demanding -- so shamelessly that it's funny -- all the perks and merits of someone who legitimately feels wronged.

The musical setting of the line, a deliciously catchy and melodic tag, confirms the scandal. The line that the conservative Kathryn Jean Lopez and a zillion other people can't get out of their heads is essentially a melodic ending, a sequence of notes that seems to conclude a musical thought. Yet it keeps repeating, as if the person who insists that it's hard out here for a pimp is continually saying, "Case closed." I'm right, end of argument, or as Samuel Johnson (who also had an infuriating habit of shutting down debate) might say, "It is hard out here for a pimp, Sir, and there's an end on it."

It's also the sexiest line of the song -- and was made even more so in the version heard for the mainstream Oscars audience. In the film, it is the addition of a female vocalist adding what might, in church music, be called a descant -- a line that floats above all the rest of the noise -- that completes the song, that proves that the rapper might, in fact, have what it takes to be a star, even at the cost of the people around him.

Melody and femininity are intricately allied, and the union of melody to another element, words in a song, or rhythm and harmony in a symphony, has suggested sexual union throughout music history. For an attractive woman to sing "It's hard out here for a pimp" suggests that the pimp has found sympathy, against the odds, in the form of a woman who will articulate his complaints for him.

But are we meant to take this complaint seriously? The line sounds so clean, so pure in relation to the thickets of hip-hop rhythms underneath it, that it has the stylized sense of being purely ornamental, almost baroque in its detachment from everything else around it. Like a swirl of sumptuous fabric draping from an unnecessary angel in a painting by Tiepolo, it's funny by virtue of its excessive prettiness.

And so "It's hard out here for a pimp" enters white culture, as so many black memes do, with a wink and a nod. Of course your great aunt sitting down the table complaining in an impeccably white way that it's not easy for a pimp isn't thinking about real pimps. She may not even know what real pimps do. But that doesn't matter. Black memes in "white culture" are vaguely scandalous, used with a wink and nod that say, "I know this is transgressive, but I'm not going to learn anything more about it."

Curious, then, that as news of the song's big win starting racing around the Internet, there was some confusion about the exact line. An Associated Press report began, "The Oscar people showed they were ready to embrace a song called 'It's Hard Out There for a Pimp.' " But the line was, "It's hard out here for a pimp."

Here, there. Inside, outside. The slip of the pen captures exactly how these things play out when appropriated across class and race lines. No one would ever say, and mean, "It's hard out there for a pimp," which would suggest actually sympathy for pimps, and for people out there, on the outside. But it's hard out here for a pimp, appropriated into white culture, becomes a way both to borrow the outsider's inherently cool status, while completely denying that any complaint from that place has value.

Monday, March 06, 2006

What I saw on "BET News"

It's been a long day of working like 2 jobs and I got home, tired and just wanting to watch something to stimulate my mind. These days, you can't get that from BET (formely known as Black Entertainment Television, they should change their name).

I remember before Robert Johnson sold his network out to Viacom they used to attempt to have intelligent shows, with one show where Tavis Smiley hosted, and they used to (but not any more) have a really good news show. I really don't watch BET that much, but I didn't realize that it all went down hill until today.

On my computer list for my cable box it said "BET News". A show with pro chicken head Lil Kim went off, and the next show came on. Sometime the listing is wrong, so I started watching this show, where this dude name Toure starts interviewing Jay-Z and Nas. I thought that my channel listing was wrong. This couldn't be the "News".

But oh yes it was. BET News presents it said over the Jay-Z and Nas title. I was like, huh? This is news?

I guess I was expecting too much in thinking that BET would have a show about well, maybe like real news that affects the black community? How about dealing with issues that affects the black community, something.

But that's the old BET. Some ol' white suits are really dictating whats on BET now. A real news show....nah, that'll bore those simple negros. Put on the back to back reruns of "In Living Color".

Scheduling is one thing, but "BET News presents Jay-Z and Nas"? News? WTF?

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Who was Crispus Attucks?


On this day in history,Crispus Attucks joins the ancestors after becoming the first of five persons killed in the Boston Massacre. Historians have called him the first martyr of the American Revolution.

Crispus Attucks was born in 1723. His father, Prince, lived in Africa but was shipped to New England to become a slave. There he married a Natick Indian of North America named Nancy. His sister, Phebe, was born shortly after. He was born two years later. He had a younger brother who died young.

He grew up a slave. He worked with his father on the farmwhile his mother and sister did housework. They were treated with kindness and respect by their master. He began to desire his freedom and became a problem, so his master sold him. Although his new owner allowed more freedom, he wanted to work on ships. At the age of 27 he went on a business trip to Boston where he secretly applied for a job as a whaler. He knew that this trip would not be returning to Boston soon, so his master would not be able to find him.

In the fall of 1769 Attucks, now 46, returned to Boston. King George III was trying to rule the colonies and this was making the colonists upset. To take control of the situation King George sent British officers over to enforce the laws. The particular situation between Parliment and the colonies' leaders added a lot of tension between the British troops and the townspeople. Attucks left to go on another voyage and returned February of 1770. At this time a British soldier had shot a boy while being taunted by a group of townspeople. Attucks walked onto a platform in front of a large crowd and spoke briefly but effectivly about striking back against the British. His speech prompted colonists to fight for their freedom.

On March 5, 1770, the townspeople heard fire bells ringing and as they walked out into the street they saw Attucks leading a small group. He said it was a signal calling the townspeople to the town square to solve the problem with the British. Attucks gathered a large group of colonists and challenged the British troops to fight without their guns. Suddenly, someone yelled fire and a British soldier shot and killed Attucks.

At the end of the shooting, four other people had been shot: Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr. At the memorial service many speeches were given about the bravery of Crispus Attucks. The fact that he was not treated equally and still had the courage to fight for his country became one of the greatest inspirations for the colonists. This incident has been named the Boston Massacre.

From the website Father Ryan