![]() “You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” the Marine screamed in Jenkins’s face. A white Marine captain jumped out of his chair so forcefully that it flipped over. “But if you do have a God complex, then you’ve got to listen,” he added. “If you don’t have a God complex, then this doesn’t apply to you, now does it?” Jenkins told them. They accused Jenkins of playing music that would incite a riot. Jenkins remembers being pulled into a small room on the ship and questioned by a group of higher-ranking white Marines about the Harlem-based hip-hop pioneers’ spoken-word song, which touched on poverty, prostitution, drugs, the military-industrial complex, white supremacy and the killings of Native Americans and Blacks. “But playing ‘White Man’s Got a God Complex’ by the Last Poets really set the white guys off.” “I was playing ‘What’s Going On’ by Marvin Gaye, and I was playing ‘Bring the Boys Home’ by Freda Payne,” Jenkins recalls. Jenkins kept playing the newest records and tapes he could find by Black artists, many of which reflected the antiwar and Black-liberation movements happening at home, alongside country and western albums and hits by the Beatles. military establishment that treated people of color differently from white service members - starting with recruitment and induction, through combat deployments, right on through the charges and punishments that arose when conflicts boiled over. ![]() They were caught up in events that were not only about race but also about structural racism not just a matter of individuals and personalities but of a U.S. Others were at risk of being thrown out of the Marine Corps with discharges that would maim their job prospects in civilian America for the rest of their lives. Though nobody knew it at the moment, that song was about to set off a series of events that would leave three Black Marines facing charges of mutiny and the possibility of execution or lengthy imprisonment. Cause the white man’s got a God complex.” ![]() A voice is talking about who’s gonna die next. Some members of the crew were not ready for what they heard. Sumter was steaming off the coast of Vietnam, a Marine onboard dropped the needle on the turntable in front of him, sending music to the loudspeakers bolted to the bulkheads in the cavernous spaces where hundreds of sailors and Marines slept and hung out. One evening in late August 1972, as the American tank-landing ship U.S.S.
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