And so I threw myself into my music. Theory. Music history. Ear training. Piano. I distracted myself from the news with scales and arpeggios. With Bach and Ellington and Monk. And I forgot about Mr. King. I low-key forgot about the whole damn thing until one day near the end of second semester, I came out of my composition class and

Jay!

Scooter, hey! Don't you have class across campus?

Did you hear?

Did I hear? Did I hear what?

Not guilty

Not guilty? What are you talking about?

They were found not guilty

Wait, you mean?

Yeah.

Not guilty

All four of the cops

That beat Rodney King.

You can't be serious? You can't be!

Not guilty

Not guilty

Now ain't that the damn-dest thing?

How is that even possible?

All white jury.

Yeah, no, but that shouldn't meanI mean, what about the video? We all saw the video! We all saw what they did!

I'm sorry, man.

I know this is dumb... like really super dumb... but you know that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black and white to color? And you're like whoa, right? Like whoa. That's what hearing about the acquittal was like. Like I thought I was living in one world, you know, a fair, just world... and it turned out that I was living someplace else entirely.

Not guilty

Found not guilty.

Shit!

Not guilty

Not of excessive force

Or brutality.

Not guilty

Not guilty

Not guilty of a single wrong thing.

And I thought, WHAT?

They hate us (Not guilty)

Folks like me

They hate us (Not guilty)

So much so

That they can watch a crime (Not guilty)

Captured on video

Screened for the nation (Not guilty)

And say there's no crime

Then let the guilty off scot-free

They hate us (Not guilty)

Folks like me

They hate us (Not guilty)

So much so

That they can watch us rage (Not guilty)

Captured on video

Screened for the nation (Not guilty)

And denigrate our rage

To little more than a felony

It's not right.

I know. A bunch of us do. And we wanna do something about it.

What? Like fly to LA?