The Political Education of Killer Mike
As a child, William Murray would finish his work so fast that his elementary school teacher would send him out on illicit errands, including picking up the teacher’s lunch. Later on, he says, that same teacher tried to spank Murray, as was allowed at the time, but the boy was clever: He was saving receipts from his errands all the while, and the spanking was averted. That, says Mr. Murray, is how he learned to organize.
On the way to our next stop, Mike explains to me how Mr. Murray taught high school art for decades despite owning a successful funeral home. Over the years he mentored Mike and scores of other students, teaching them painting, photography, history, and how to grow their own food. “He didn’t invest five years into me for me to fail or be silent in a time of need,” says Mike. “He ain’t teaching me gardening just so I can grow food in my yard. He understands I have a podium.”
One of the more interesting contradictions lurking inside Killer Mike is that he is a proud “compassionate capitalist”—a small-business owner and landlord with multiple barbershops, a restaurant, and about $2 million in property across Atlanta. But he’s also backed democratic socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders, who, Mike has said, operates in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. Killer Mike says he has “love and respect for police officers,” but on songs like “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck),” from Run the Jewels 2, he rhymes, Where my thuggers and my Crippers and my Blooders and my brothers? / When you niggas gon’ unite and kill the police, mothafuckas? / Or take over a jail, give them COs hell / The burnin’ of the sulfur, goddamn, I love the smell.
The most infamous example of Mike’s mixed messaging came in 2018, when he decided to sit down with NRATV, the former online broadcasting arm of the pro-gun organization. The conversation, which, he says, was supposed to be about Black gun ownership, devolved into an exchange about the National School Walkout and youth-led anti-gun protests following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. “I told my kids on the school walkout, ‘I love you, [but] if you walk out that school, walk out my house,’ ” Mike says during the interview. “We are not a family that jumps on every single thing an ally of ours does, because some stuff, we just don’t agree with.”
He didn’t know it yet, but the NRA would use that short sound bite to blast protesters, posting it on Twitter a little past noon on March 24, 2018, as the student-led March for Our Lives took place in D.C.
Mike apologized soon after. “I do support the march, and I support Black people owning guns. It’s possible to do both,” he said. “To the young people that worked tirelessly to organize, I’m sorry adults chose to do this. I’m sorry NRATV did that. I’m sorry that adults on the left and the right are choosing to use me as a lightning rod.”
