The album has earned Grammy nominations for best rap album and album of the year based on its strength as a well-executed concept record that grapples plainly with one artist's search for political authenticity. Lamar's third full-length album, To Pimp a Butterfly, didn't so much announce his arrival as his generation's fiercest political artist as it did cement it. "In that particular moment, it felt like we we're losing a lot of battles, we're losing a lot in this movement because of the perniciousness of anti-black state violence, but in that moment, we felt it," Lindsey said. But while those demonstrations were loud, constant and sometimes violent, they didn't necessarily have a soundtrack - until now. They had happened in Baltimore, Ferguson and New York City as protesters confronted law enforcement to demand accountability for several high profile deadly shootings of black people. How did a movement with such a contentious relationship to an artist come to embrace his work as its theme song?Ĭapturing the moment: To the activists attending the Movement for Black Lives conference, protests were nothing new. Easily his generation's most celebrated rapper, Lamar has been openly criticized by activists. It was a moment of revelry that broke the tension of the day, but it was also confounding. Overjoyed, the crowd, which now numbered close to 200 people, began chanting the refrain from Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-nominated song "Alright." Soon, she was there talking to police, and the boy was released into her custody. Amid the chaos, someone asked the boy for his mother's phone number and called her. The police responded by pepper spraying the crowd, causing a scene that drew even more protesters to the scene.
According to several witnesses who spoke to Mic and news accounts from the time, scores of conference attendees gathered to confront the police about the boy's arrest. What happened over the next hour made headlines across the globe. "We saw this encounter happening, saw this young man being arrested and so a number of folks went over to talk to the police to see what was happening," Treva Lindsey, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who witnessed the altercation, told Mic. Until they spotted a 14-year-old black boy being questioned by police for allegedly carrying an open container of alcohol onto a bus. Despite taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, a city recently in the national spotlight for the deadly police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the week had gone by without any direct confrontations with police. After three days of talking about the the police violence that had roiled black communities, they were saying their goodbyes to one another and boarding buses back to their respective cities. They had all just wrapped up a conference called the Movement for Black Lives, the first formal convening of Black Lives Matter's official and unofficial network of activists. It was a warm Midwestern day during the last week of July and hundreds of activists were gathered at Cleveland State University.
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