Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 11, 1995 TAG: 9509110006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SONYA ROSS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
One wall is dominated by a portrait of Rosa Parks, smiling and serene. On a corner table banked by windows is a sculpted Sojourner Truth, the ex-slave suffragist, with clasped hands thrust forward on ebony-wood arms.
Just behind the desk, Coretta Scott King beams at Tucker from a photograph snapped while they shared the dais during a meeting.
Among the mementos of the legendary, there sits a rather ordinary pair of white plastic handcuffs from the Metropolitan Police Department.
Tucker wore those handcuffs to jail for protesting outside a local record store in late 1993. It marked her first stand against ``gangsta'' rap music that demeans women, glorifies violence and drugs and, Tucker says, tells little children it is OK - even heroic - to live lawlessly and die young.
``It's an abomination to all of us, after we were taught to sing songs of faith and hope and freedom in the days of slavery, to let this go on,'' Tucker says. ``I'd die before I'd let that music continue to be.''
To say that Tucker is on a crusade would be an understatement.
For nearly two years, the 67-year-old founder and vice chairwoman of the National Political Congress of Black Women has expressed her disdain for pro-violence, anti-woman lyrics through nearly every means and in virtually every forum imaginable.
Tucker is so zealous about this issue that she, a lifelong liberal Democrat, allied with former Education Secretary William Bennett, a conservative Republican, to pressure record companies to rein in the nastiness.
Their alliance is looked at with suspicion in the hip-hop community. Many think Tucker aims to boost conservative politicians to the detriment of rap artists.
``I hope and pray that it is as sincere as it appears to be,'' said Adario Strange, 25, senior editor of The Source, a magazine that focuses on rap and hip-hop culture.
``They're waging war, in newspapers and on television shows, in rallies. That's not the way to do it,'' Strange said. ``The best thing to do is try to reach those kids and interact with them.''
Tucker denied a political conspiracy.
``When people complained about Bill Bennett, I said, `Look. On political issues, I am absolutely opposed to his positions of not investing in our children. In that arena, I will deal with him,''' Tucker said.
``But in this arena, anybody who tells me they will stand up with me to stop the sale of pornographic smut and filth and misogynist insults, I will welcome them. One of my sad regrets is that a Bill Bennett did do that, and yet the other Bills I know, black Bills I know, weren't there.''
Tucker began her crusade by currying support from a range of black organizations. Lately, however, it seems she is a lonely voice.
``While they all wrote letters of support, I have been asked and embarrassedly had to defend why our leadership wasn't taking more of a role,'' Tucker says.
Frustrated in trying to meet with record company executives, Tucker purchased 10 shares of stock in Time Warner Inc., which owns half of rap labels Interscope Records and Death Row Records, and stomped into the annual shareholders meeting with a Snoop Doggy Dogg single.
She handed out printed transcripts of ``gangsta'' rap lyrics, urging Time Warner executives Gerald Levin and Michael Fuchs to recite them.
They didn't. But they did give Tucker the meeting she wanted.
``I told him, `Mr. Levin, you are head of the largest entertainment industry in the world. It's being used to destroy African-American people,''' Tucker said. ``I told him about the black males - 25 percent are either in jail or under some judicial regulation. I said, `Mr. Levin, how are we going to raise a race of people with no men?' This is the story that hasn't been told.''
Now, Time Warner is seeking to divest its 50 percent share of Interscope. Interscope, however, fired back by suing Tucker, saying she tried to coerce Time Warner into severing its ties, effectively destroying the distributor's business with ``extortion, threats and other unlawful acts.''
Tucker is unmoved. ``This is just another effort to cloud the real issue and discredit our efforts to stop segments of the music-record industry from pimping pornography to children,'' she said.
Meanwhile, her immediate goal is to thwart Time Warner's release of ``Dogg Food,'' an album by Tha Dogg Pound that Tucker calls ``the filthiest of them all.''
She credited her protest for delaying the release of ``Dogg Food,'' which was slated for Aug. 15.
``Wherever gangsta rap is, we're going to be there to take whatever action is necessary to stop it,'' Tucker says. ``Our children have suffered too much.''
This is the way things go when Tucker latches onto something. Being a get-it-done woman, it is rare that she doesn't get her way.
As secretary of state for Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1977, she instituted voter registration by mail and reduced the voting age from 21 to 18.
Tucker is a member of the Democratic National Committee. She helped establish the Bethune DuBois Fund, which aims to increase black voter registration and encourage candidacies among blacks. She dug into a different cause - salvation of the NAACP - with as much fervor as she has devoted to gangsta rap.
An NAACP trustee, Tucker railed against board chairman William Gibson upon hearing allegations that he used the group's money for personal gain and double-dipped on his expense account. She organized the Save Our Ship Committee and, through a relentless barrage of press conferences, letters, statements and lawsuits, battered Gibson until the board of directors voted him out of office.
At the same time, Tucker was encouraging her old friend, Myrlie Evers-Williams, to take over. When Evers-Williams was elected, it was Tucker who pulled together an inaugural for her that netted $1.7 million in donations.
That done, Tucker turned back to rap music.
``Her tenaciousness in pursuing that is, in my estimation, to be applauded," Evers-Williams said. "Someone needs to speak loudly and clearly in terms of the damage that those lyrics can do.''
It was one child in particular, a step-niece, who moved Tucker to take her stand. Once, when asked what she wanted to be when she grows up, the child replied, ``a mgangster,'' Tucker said.
Despite private schools, summers with relatives in the Bahamas and general intervention by Tucker and her husband, Bill, the child remained under the influence of ``gangsta'' music. Other parents curbed her contact with their children, Tucker said, because the gangsta influences in her life had made her unruly.
``She has the culture of a gangster,'' Tucker says. ``She's already a social leper and she doesn't know why.''
In a voice that teeters between worldly career woman and stern mother, Tucker can recite a range of rap lyrics from memory, sometimes even naming the artist and song title.
``I didn't know what `gangsta' rap was until I read a report of it in the newspaper,'' Tucker said. ``I saw these words: `Her body's beautiful. I'm thinking rape. ... Slit her throat and watch her shake.' I couldn't believe it.''
What Tucker finds more unbelievable is the fact that gangsta rap is dominated by black men who she believes are players in ``a genocidal plan to destroy the black male.'' She told this to Death Row Chairman Marion ``Suge'' Knight, 29, in a meeting earlier this summer. With the tone of an elder, she asked Knight not to glorify violence with the music he distributes.
Misogynist rap endures, she says, because black people won't rise up against it.
``The children are finding now the street for home and the gang for family. Therefore, they're on the streets, and that's why they're singing these songs. That's why they're calling the women whores, because that's what they've seen their teen-aged mothers do.''
by CNB