Killer Mike tells Atlanta: it's "not time to burn down your own home"
Killer Mike has given an impassioned speech to the residents of Atlanta after violence began on the city’s streets following the death of George Floyd.
Floyd was a 46-year-old black man who died on May 25 after being apprehended by a white police officer. Officer Derek Chauvin has since been sacked and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
Earlier this week, Killer Mike previewed some poignant lyrics from his upcoming Run The Jewels album ‘RTJ 4’ following the death of Floyd. Now, during a new press conference alongside the mayor of Atlanta, Mike told residents that now is “not [the] time to burn down your own home.”
“We have to be better than burning down our own homes because if we lose Atlanta, what else we got?” the rapper said. “It is your duty to not burn your own house down for anger with an enemy. It is your duty to fortify your own house, so that you may be a house of refuge in times of organisation. And now is the time to plot, plan, strategise, organise, and mobilise.
The whole country needs to stop right now and listen to Killer Mike. He’s verbalizing what a lot of us don’t know how to express pic.twitter.com/yiBEaicRGT
— ment (@mentnelson) May 30, 2020
“It is time to beat up prosecutors you don’t like at the voting booth. It’s time to hold mayoral offices accountable, chiefs and deputy chiefs.”
He continued: “I’m mad as hell. I woke up wanting to see the world burn down. I’m tired of seeing black men die. He casually put his knee on a human being’s neck for nine minutes as he died like a zebra in the clutch of a lion’s jaw, and we watch it like murder porn, over and over again.
“That’s why children are burning things to the ground — they don’t know what else to do. And it’s the responsibility of us to make this better, right now. We don’t want to see one officer charged, we want to see four officers prosecuted and sentenced. We don’t want to see targets burning, we want to see the system that sets up systemic racism, burn to the ground.”
“We need to get ahead of it,” Mike added. “We don’t need an officer who makes a mistake once, twice, three times… finally, he kills a boy on national TV and the next thing you know the country is burning down.”
He then referenced controversial recent tweets from President Donald Trump, saying: “We don’t need a dumbass president repeating what segregationists said: ‘If you start lotting, we start shooting.’”
Taylor Swift this week called out Trump’s tweets, saying: “After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence,” and threatening to “vote [Trump] out in November”.
Elsewhere, rapper 6LACK has spoken over the high-profile deaths of Floyd as well as Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, while Bon Iver has led a new $30,000 donation to the George Floyd Memorial Fund.
