When Public Enemy Took On Arizona for Martin Luther King, Jr.
Why “By The Time I Get To Arizona” still resonates in 2024
On November 6, 1990, spurned on by the actions of their racist former governor Evan Mecham, Arizona voted against the ballot proposal to turn the birthday of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into a recognized state holiday.
Three years prior, in 1987, Mecham canceled the holiday by executive order, moving it to an unpaid Sunday instead of Monday and declaring, “I guess King did a lot for the colored people, but I don’t think he deserves a national holiday.”
Mecham was impeached from office a little over a year after his dastardly decision, charged with obstruction of justice and misuse of government funds. But sadly, a margin of 17,000 votes in the Grand Canyon State would uphold their disgraced former governor’s decision to cancel MLK Day as a paid holiday, which drew a swift and forceful backlash on a national scale. Concerts and conventions scheduled in the state were canceled, costing $190 million in losses, while the NFL moved Super Bowl XXVII from Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe to Pasadena, CA, as a result of the decision.
But perhaps the most scathing response to Arizona’s choice to undermine MLK Day came from Public Enemy, who addressed the situation on their classic fourth album Apocalypse ‘91… The Enemy Strikes Black with the single “By The Time I Get To Arizona.”
“Public Enemy, Security of the First World, and all allied forces are traveling west to head off a white supremacy scheming to destroy the national celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday,” PE affiliate Sister Souljah declared on the track’s intro. “Public Enemy believes that the powers that be in the states of New Hampshire [who didn’t recognize MLK Day as a state holiday until 2000] Arizona have found psychological discomfort in paying tribute to a black man who tried to teach white people the meaning of civilization. Good luck brothers, show ’em what you got.”
The song, propelled by a beat that mashed together Mandrill’s “Two Sisters of Mystery,” “Walk On” by the Jackson 5 and The New Birth staple “Two Kinds of People,” seethed with frustration and fury as Chuck D spat fire at Mecham for spreading bigotry to his constituents: “The sucker over there/He try to keep it yesteryear/The good ol’ days/The same ol’ ways/That kept us dyin’.”
“Before we came along there was this sort of intention to keep rap and Hip-Hop hop into this urban box that only talked about adolescent dance things,” Chuck told Rock The Bells in 2021. “And at the end of the day, you can ask Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs all the questions about how the world works and what’s hypocritical in the world, or even CSNY, why couldn’t rap music make the same commentary about what we saw wrong?”
Further exacerbating the song’s sentiments was its accompanying video, aired only once on MTV, which depicts Public Enemy taking over government buildings in the state capital, crescendoing with Chuck D detonating a car bomb that kills Mecham.
“Dr. King died a violent death and I was answering that,” Chuck D told SPIN in 2011. “As a child, I was pissed off that they killed Dr. King and I was answering that. Regardless of what Dr. King believed, the act of his life being taken was not a passive thing. So I don’t feel any contradiction to this moment. Look, I’m for peace, but I can make a visual statement about how I feel about what happened. The actuality is that I shot a video in rebuttal to something that happened in real life.”
Yet despite becoming a target of conservative media in the wake of “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” the song did prove to be a change agent in concert with the boycotts levied against the state. The issue of making MLK Day a state holiday went on the ballot again in 1992 and this time was approved by voters.
Unfortunately, 31 years later, the forces of hate within the entire country have only grown more incendiary since the rise of MAGA Nation in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory. And, in turn, has only increased the issues breached in the lyrics to “By The Time” in ways neither MLK or PE ever imagined.
We can only hope, in this crucial election year, people across this divided land will come together to ensure that Dr. King’s dream will stay alive during these most turbulent times.
And that a racist scoundrel like Evan Mecham never sees any form of state or federal power ever again.
VIDEO: Public Enemy “By The Time I Get To Arizona”
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May 15, 2020
I seem to remember PE’s hilarious, black power clad goon squad hanging Mecham in effigy in front of my fellow 75,000 strong U2 fans. But I was tripping and laughing my arse off with Flavor Flav and piles of t.v.’s piled up on stage, flooding the zone with shitte, right in front of my tenth row seat. Most over the top and greatest show on Earth. Still can’t believe the sugar cubes proceeded Public Enemy only for both to be topped off by the greatest band of the 80s.