By Elizabeth Armstrong
“My very good friend Jeffrey Byrd and his brother are sitting there, and his brother looks up at this gunman, and the gunman hits him on the head with his gun. Blood starts spurting everywhere, and we just fix our eyes immediately back on the ground, drilling holes into the cement. It seems like forever before they collect all their money in the cliched brown paper bags, and the gunman who was my personal robber–like a personal banker or something–stands at the door and says: ‘All right. When you go home tonight, tell your mama you been robbed by some gangstas.’ And so they tear out of the store into a waiting station wagon and take off down the street. So, of course, after the way was clear I did get up and run home and tell my mama I’d been robbed by a gangsta.”
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Last year Dyson took on black America’s greatest modern icon: I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. confronts the civil rights leader’s plagiarism and extramarital affairs, challenging Americans to see him not as a deity but as a human being who, despite his personal flaws, became one of the great moral leaders of the 20th century. Dyson even draws a comparison between King and rapper Tupac Shakur, another voice for black America who was gunned down in his prime: “Tupac’s plea for divine guidance is cast in thugs’ terms. Still, it touches a universal nerve. Even if they had vastly different answers, such a perspective binds Shakur and other hip-hoppers to King. Both participated, in different ways, in a powerful tradition of reflecting on suffering and evil.”
Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, who began his political career with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told the Washington Post, “A lot of what Dyson is doing is just a fad. I think he does this to get attention. I heard him comparing King to one of these rappers, Doggy Doggy or somebody. I think it’s a disgrace. It’s shameful for him to put Dr. King on that level.”
“The aesthetics of poverty I found offensive, and we tried to fight against that, but it was really the violence that cluttered my social and physical landscape. Detroit was known as the murder capital of the world when I was growing up. We felt that very up close.” The Detroit riots of 1967 claimed the lives of 43 people, and Dyson still remembers the sound of gunfire, the sight of neighborhood children looting stores.
Dyson buried himself in books, often skipping school to read at the public library. After his flirtation with existentialism he returned to his church, Tabernacle Missionary Baptist, with newfound faith. The pastor, Frederick G. Sampson, was a tall and commanding man who could quote DuBois and Shakespeare but never lost touch with his congregation. “Sampson took a liking to me and let me hang out with him,” says Dyson. “He claimed that I possessed a mind like a steel trap. He’d go to meetings around the city and take me with him. I’m 14 years old, in the civic life of Detroit, and, of course, I’m feeling important, my eyes wide open and checking it all out. I felt like Tupac–‘All Eyes on Me.’ Sampson gave me a sense of what was achievable, what was actually doable.”
Dyson flunked out during his senior year–he says he couldn’t concentrate–and returned to Detroit, where he attended night school to earn his diploma. His new girlfriend, 26-year-old Theresa Taylor, got pregnant, and after what he calls a “shotgun wedding,” Dyson found himself a husband and expectant father at 18. He worked a series of jobs, from janitorial to fast-food to the auto industry, but his son, Mike, was born to a shabby apartment in a dirt-poor neighborhood. Dyson and his wife soon divorced, and he saw his son less and less frequently. The child prodigy had become what his neighborhood had always prepared him to be: a disillusioned black man with little hope for the future.
