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      in Theater

      Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’

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      After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”Deadwyler with Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.”Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion PicturesDEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American Studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)Whoopi Goldberg, an Outspoken StarThe comedian and co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” is known for her provocative opinions — and controversies.‘The View’: Since 2007, Whoopi Goldberg has been the often-irascible moderator on the daytime talk show, helping it become one of the most important political TV shows in America.Holocaust Comments: Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from “The View” after she said repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about race. She later apologized.On Living Alone: After three marriages, Goldberg told us in a 2016 interview that she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house.”A Decades-Long Career: In 2019, the Times podcast “Still Processing” discussed  Goldberg’s career, from her days as a boundary-pushing comedian to her role as professional curmudgeon on “The View.”When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”Deadwyler in “Station Eleven.” The show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, said, “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”HBO MaxHER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesYet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”I ask what else people get wrong about her.There’s that laugh again.“Everything.” More

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      in Music

      How Atlanta History Shaped Lil Baby and Generations of Rappers

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      To hear his mother tell it, Dominique Jones always was a special child.Before he was Lil Baby, Atlanta’s latest international rap superstar — and even before he was known only locally on the southwest side of his city as a formidable gambler and precocious teenage hustler — Dominique tended to be a quick study.As a toddler, he was already helping his mother, Lashon, around the house, diligently folding laundry and straightening up the refrigerator without prompting. When Dominique was about 4, Lashon recalled when we spoke in 2019, she bought him a pair of in-line skates and was amazed when, without instruction or even a hand held for balance, her youngest child and only son had soon mastered his glide, tricks and all.“I look up, and he’s out there skating backward,” Lashon said. “He looks at it, he sees it and he can do it.”Dominique also revealed himself early on as a sponge for language. Before he could read, he was quoting the Bible, gaining a reputation as something of a local attraction among the Baptist preachers who visited the Black Southern hub of Atlanta to spread the word. “They would always look for him — ‘Where’s the young man that always gets so excited at church?’” Lashon has said. “Every time they came to town — ‘Where the little preacher man?’”After those verses came music. Once, when Dominique was still a small child, Lashon was driving with her younger sister while listening the local Atlanta bass rapper Kilo Ali. “Turn it up a little bit,” Dominique demanded from his car seat, according to his mother’s memory.After taking in the song for a moment, he called again toward the adults up front. “Turn it down now,” he said, considering what he had just heard. “That’s Kilo Ali?” Dominique asked, apparently knowing full well. “I went to school with him.”“It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV,” Lil Baby said of his hometown. “It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”Kevin Amato for The New York TimesLashon and her sister could only exchange confused glances. Dominique had never been to school a day in his life, and certainly not with an adult rapper from the nearby Bowen Homes projects. Yet somehow, the city’s sounds were already somewhere within him, as if through osmosis. “What’s your comeback after that?” Lashon said, reminiscing and still astonished. “We was blowed.”Some two decades later, the story of Lil Baby, 27, whose triumphant new album, “It’s Only Me,” was released last Friday, is both an individual tale of roundabout stardom by an idiosyncratic artist and also a recurring pattern. As the latest in a long line of Atlanta rappers to take a raw Southern sound to the top of the pop charts — from ’90s and early 2000s industry trailblazers like Outkast, T.I., Jeezy and Gucci Mane to the streaming stars Future, Migos, 21 Savage, Young Thug, Gunna and Playboi Carti — Lil Baby could only have come from one place.“Honestly, I think there’s something in the water,” he said in an interview over FaceTime last week. “It’s the upbringing, it’s the culture, it’s the things we see, the people we watched on TV. It’s a repeating cycle of greatness.”That he and his forebears all happen to share geographic roots with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan, Uncle Remus and Spike Lee, “Gone With the Wind” and the Black spring-break party Freaknik is not a coincidence. It could only have been Atlanta.Long a site of collision — politically, racially — and contradictory cultural history, Atlanta was called “south of the North, yet north of the South” by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903. In the decades since, the city has been “a bastion of both white supremacy and Black autonomy,” according to one historian, and often “on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline,” in the words of another.Building upon this confluence of tension and opportunity is Atlanta’s constantly regenerating rap scene, which has become, over the last 30 years, one of the most consistent and consequential musical ecosystems in the world. The generations (and micro-generations) of local artists who have emerged from it have routinely exploded the expectations of what a Black man from little or nothing — and they have, until recently, tended to be overwhelmingly men — could hope to achieve in the wider American consciousness.Largely through music, Atlanta has become a conveyor belt of exceptions.LIL BABY IS nothing if not a product of the city’s extensive rap lineage, but he has been equally influenced by Atlanta’s nonmusical history. Now a mainstream figure and the father of two sons, he grew up the unruly teenager of a single mother on government assistance.Baby’s eventual descent into what he and his friends refer to as “the streets” — an amorphous world of violence, drug-dealing, camaraderie, rivalry, risk and reward — would go on to inspire most of his music. But even beyond the effects of Atlanta’s vast income inequality, or the neglect and destruction of its public housing around the 1996 Olympic Games, the harsh realities he raps about in semi-autobiographical detail also stem from how he was raised, rooted in his mother’s own story.Lashon grew up in a strict Baptist family in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, an area that had once been an upper-class white suburb but was 86 percent Black by 1976, following waves of white flight. Her father worked for Delta, fixing planes for the Atlanta institution that helped to make the city a worldly concern.But Lashon’s otherwise placid youth was rattled by what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, when more than 20 Black boys and girls were kidnapped and killed between 1979 and 1981. The sixth child to go missing, Jeffrey Lamar Mathis, 10, was one of Lashon’s best friends at J.C. Harris Elementary School. (The spelling of Mathis’s first name varies in the public record, from FBI files to news accounts, a detail perhaps indicative of the attention paid to the case.) She knew him as the class clown.In the neighborhoods directly affected, parents saw the lack of initial law-enforcement interest in the disappearances as neglect based on their racial and socioeconomic status. Children were no longer allowed to play outside, some were pulled from school altogether and the city eventually imposed a curfew.“We definitely couldn’t go anywhere,” Lashon recalled. “We could hardly go out and play, and we weren’t even really allowed to before that. But after, we never gonna have a childhood.”The writer James Baldwin, who covered the case for “Playboy” and later in a book, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” tied the violence and tragedy of those years to the area’s history, dismantling the fantasy that Atlanta, only 100 years on from slavery, represented any sort of sanctuary for Black people. “There is absolutely nothing new in this city, this state or this nation about dead Black male bodies floating, finally, to the surface of the river,” he wrote.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Lil Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up. But he is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesIn 1982, Wayne Williams, a local aspiring music mogul, was convicted of killing two adults, and blamed also for the child murders, although no one was ever tried in those cases. In the years that followed, skepticism remained, especially in the Black community, about the scope of Williams’s overall guilt.This was the backdrop against which Atlanta rap was born, and the sounds, words and beats that would come to define the city bore more than a trace of the chaos and pain of this era.André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, who would become known as André 3000 and Big Boi of Outkast, were 4 years old when the first children disappeared. Jermaine Dupri, the mastermind behind So So Def Recordings, was 6. Jeezy and 2 Chainz were toddlers. T.I. and Gucci Mane were right behind them. All were raised among the paranoia, the skepticism of institutions and the two-sided coin of parenting options — shelter versus exposure to the cold world — only exacerbated at that time.“The music, storytelling, folklore and culture that emerge from the poor and marginalized communities of Atlanta — what we call ‘trap’ — are built on the generational, psychological, linguistic and ideological roots that grew from the traumas of the Atlanta Child Murders,” wrote Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, who has used hip-hop to teach social justice.FOR LASHON, THE crimes were decidedly local, close at hand. “The crazy part was, we knew Wayne Williams,” she said. He had worked with one of her aunts. “It took me a long time to get over it.”Yet it was only later that Lashon realized how directly she could trace that foundational thread of her life through the decades to the kind of mother she would become.As Dominique grew into a mischievous and independent teenager, earning the nickname Lil Baby from the older boys he hung around with in the nearby Oakland City neighborhood, her initial instinct was to smother him the way she had been smothered by her parents.But Lashon soon realized that this was futile — a mother’s desperate helplessness in the face of her son’s unwieldy ambitions. “Skipping school, smoking weed — I was rebellious,” Baby said. On “Shiest Talk,” from “It’s Only Me,” he raps, “Of all my mama’s children, I’m the bad one/I admit that.”But Baby knows now that his success in music may have rearranged those rankings, and finally being able to make his mother proud — and financially secure — is a sentiment that occurs over and over again in his new songs. “Mama, I got rich/look at your dropout,” he raps on another track.“I was the bad one, but now I’m the good one,” Baby said with a smirk during our recent interview. “Look how life changes.”Lashon had warned her son all along about “the streets,” to the extent that she could. “When you make the decision to get in them, know that it’s consequences for being out there,” she told him. But she knew he had to find out for himself.“At first, I didn’t let him do nothing or go nowhere,” she said. “But I felt guilty for keeping him in, ’cause he’s a boy — they supposed to get out, do stuff, have friends. I don’t know if that was because of my childhood — sheltered because of the Wayne Williams thing. But I knew that boys, once they get out there, they get out there.”Lashon was confident that her son was bright, self-possessed and excelling at the things he was putting his mind to, even when she was forced to confront what exactly that was. She realized that Baby’s drug-dealing and gambling money was serious when she heard him going up to the attic repeatedly. One day, unable to quell her curiosity, she went to see the gains for herself and found stacks of dirty bills, smoothed out and carefully rubber-banded.But by the time he was 20, following arrests for guns and marijuana possession, plus some failed diversion programs, Lil Baby found himself in a maximum-security prison.IT WAS WHILE incarcerated that he finally decided he would give rap a try. After his release in 2016, he started working with Quality Control, an Atlanta label that specialized in stories like his, joining the flock of the local executives Kevin Lee, or Coach K, and Pierre Thomas, who had shepherded acts like Migos and Lil Yachty to stardom.In his first two years as a rapper, Baby showed his commitment by releasing seven mixtapes and albums, ultimately leaving his old life behind. In 2020, his breakout LP “My Turn” became the most-listened-to release of the year in any genre, topping even Taylor Swift.“I moved on from slanging drugs and pistols/can’t be thinking simple,” he declares on “Real Spill,” the opening track from “It’s Only Me.”But first, in prison, Baby learned the extent of the Atlanta area’s small-town feel, the way that his mother’s life folded into his. “That’s one of the most craziest things she’s ever told me,” he said of her connection to the child murders. “But I actually ended up in prison with Wayne Williams. In the same dorm.” Williams worked around the facility, so they saw each other every day.“My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta,” Lil Baby said.Kevin Amato for The New York TimesThat, to Lil Baby, was the essence of Atlanta — his ties to the city’s darker side as omnipresent and relevant to his story as his pre-fame relationships with rappers. “There’s so much of a deep-rooted connection,” he said. “Even the artists. If it wasn’t for the Young Thugs, the Migos, the Peewee Longways — I was around a lot of people, and I’ve seen them come from where I come from. That gave me a lot of inspiration.”Today, Lil Baby has been nominated for eight Grammys, winning once, and earned corporate endorsement deals, an Amazon documentary and a spot performing at the 2022 World Cup.On “It’s Only Me” — his 10th release since 2017 — Baby sounds further than ever from the neighborhoods where he grew up, something he expresses not just with boasts, but with survivor’s guilt and ambivalence.“Youngins out here wildin’ with no guidance/all they care about is who they kill,” he raps on “Heyy.” “I was tryna keep that [expletive] in order/it got harder ’cause I was never there/it’s a better life out here/I promise, brodie, I’mma keep it in they ear.”There is even a song called “California Breeze,” with lyrics about private dinners in Malibu.But Baby is adamant that Atlanta will always be a part of him, his roots there inseverable and his essence inextinguishable. “The main thing that I do still keep with me from Atlanta, when I go everywhere, is me,” he said. “My upbringing, my manners, my way of thinking, my way of living. Everything comes from Atlanta. No matter where I go, I’ll never be able to get distance from Atlanta.”“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story” will be published on Oct. 18 by Simon & Schuster. More

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      in Television

      Two Black Comedians Sue Police Over Search at Atlanta Airport

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      Eric André and Clayton English said they were two of hundreds of Black travelers who have been stopped and questioned by officers just as they were about to board flights.Eric André cleared security at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, gave the gate agent his boarding pass and was moments away from stepping onto a plane when he was stopped by officers with the Clayton County Police Department.The officers questioned Mr. André, who is Black, about whether he was selling drugs and what drugs he had in his possession, he said in an interview and a court complaint.They asked to inspect his bag. When he asked if he had to comply, the officers said no, and Mr. André was eventually cleared to board, he said.During the interaction with the police, other passengers had to squeeze past Mr. André and the officers on the jet bridge, the narrow passageway that connects the gate to the airplane during boarding. He said he was allowed onto the plane but left shaken by the interaction.“I knew it was wrong,” said Mr. André, the creator of “The Eric André Show,” a stand-up comedian, actor, producer and writer. “It was humiliating, dehumanizing, traumatizing. Passengers are gawking at me like I’m a perpetrator as they’re like squeezing past me on this claustrophobic jet bridge.”Mr. André’s encounter in April 2021 echoed another one in October 2020 by Clayton English, another Black comedian, at the same airport.Mr. André and Mr. English filed a lawsuit this month against the Police Department, saying they were unfairly targeted for drug checks, according to the complaint. Their lawyers said the department’s practice discriminated against Black travelers who had already been cleared by Transportation Security Administration agents.The Clayton County Police Department runs a jet bridge interdiction program at the airport and made stops between Aug. 30, 2020, and April 30, 2021, according to the suit.Court papers say the stops resulted in a total of three seizures: “roughly 10 grams (less than the weight of one AAA alkaline battery) of drugs from one passenger, 26 grams (the weight of about 4 grapes) of ‘suspected THC gummies’ from another, and 6 prescription pills (for which no valid prescription allegedly existed) from a third.”Two passengers — those who had the roughly 10 grams of drugs and the pills — were charged, the suit said.In that time, a total of 402 stops were made. In cases where race was recorded, more than half of the 378 passengers who were stopped were Black.The Clayton County Police Department declined to comment, citing pending litigation. In April 2021, when Mr. André shared his experience on Twitter, the department denied wrongdoing.“This type of interaction occurs frequently during our officers’ course of duties, and is supported by Georgia law and the U.S. Constitution,” a 2021 department statement said. The department added, “Our preliminary findings have revealed that Mr. Andre was not racially profiled.”The Atlanta Police Department — not the Clayton County Police Department — is the primary law enforcement agency at the airport, the airport said in a statement. “APD has a robust drug interdiction program but, unless otherwise required, does not engage in jet-bridge stops of passengers,” the statement said.From September 2020 to April 2021, the police seized about $1 million from passengers, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.Richard Deane, a lawyer involved in the suit, said the purpose of the stops appeared to be to seize money and that the stops were made largely, if not solely, based on race.The suit maintains the police violated the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and the equal protection clause, which guarantees racial equality and prohibits racial discrimination, said Barry Friedman, founding director of New York University’s Policing Project, and another lawyer on the case.“We have a great concern about police acting when there’s no policy in place, particularly democratically accountable policy that guides the discretion of police officers,” he said at a news conference this month. “When there’s undue discretion, we get what you have here, which is severe racial discrimination.”Drug interdiction programs at airports started in 1975 with a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operation in Detroit and expanded to other airports, said Beth A. Colgan, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.“I think it’s a strong suit,” she said. “In terms of the Fourth Amendment claims, it seems clear that they were seized and that searches did occur and it would be difficult to describe these as consent searches.”Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to seize cash, property or vehicles based on probable cause that those involved are associated with criminal activity, Professor Colgan said. This is a low standard, she said, and people often do not challenge forfeitures because the process to get the money back is costly and time-consuming.Courts have favored law enforcement in cases of consent versus coercion, said Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a fellow and visiting professor at Harvard Kennedy School.“People may feel the need to say yes, and it’s a coerced sense of giving consent as opposed to a freedom of saying no and then feeling like everyone is going to suspect they had drugs on them,” she said.Mr. English, who lives in Atlanta, was the winner of NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” competition in 2015 and has headlined in clubs, colleges and festivals.He said he spent his three-and-a-half-hour flight in 2020 wondering what he had done wrong and whether he would be arrested upon landing. When the police took his boarding pass and identification and searched his bag, he felt he had no choice but to comply.“I felt completely powerless,” he said at the news conference. “I felt violated. I felt cornered. I felt like I couldn’t, you know, continue to get on the plane. I felt like I had to comply if I wanted everything to go smoothly.”Mr. André lives in Los Angeles but travels through the Atlanta airport often for work and has recently taken to hiring a service that brings passengers directly to the plane after they’ve cleared security because he’s afraid of repeating his experience from last year.“It’s not just about me or what I went through,” he said. “It’s about the community I identify with. It’s about Black and brown people being discriminated against and being treated like second-class citizens, being treated as if they’re already suspicious and they don’t belong in this country by their own government and the trauma that comes with that.” More

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      in Music

      California Bill Could Restrict the Use of Rap Lyrics in Court

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      The bill, which applies more broadly to other forms of creative expression, has unanimously passed the Senate and Assembly and could become law by the end of September.A California bill that would restrict the use of rap lyrics and other creative works as evidence in criminal proceedings has unanimously passed both the State Senate and Assembly, and could soon be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom.The bill, introduced in February by Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer, a Democrat who represents South Los Angeles, comes amid national attention on the practice following the indictment of the Atlanta rappers Young Thug and Gunna on gang-related charges. Prosecutors have drawn on the men’s lyrics in making their case.The California measure, however, would apply more broadly to any creative works, including other types of music, poetry, film, dance, performance art, visual art and novels.“What you write could ultimately be used against you, and that could inhibit creative expression,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said Wednesday in an interview. He noted that the bill ultimately boiled down to a question of First Amendment rights.“This is America,” he said. “You should be able to have that creativity.”Mr. Newsom has until Sep. 30 to sign the bill into law. If he neither signs nor vetoes the bill by that date, the measure would automatically become law. The law would then go into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, Mr. Jones-Sawyer said.When asked whether Mr. Newsom planned to sign the bill, his office said that it could not comment on pending legislation. “As will all measures that reach the governor’s desk, it will be evaluated on its merits,” it said.Though the bill’s genesis is in preventing rap stars’ lyrics from being weaponized against them, the measure loosely defines “creative expression” to include “forms, sounds, words, movements, or symbols.”It would require a court to evaluate whether such works can be included as evidence by weighing their “probative value” in the case against the “substantial danger of undue prejudice” that might result from including them. The court should consider the possibility that such works could be treated as “evidence of the defendant’s propensity for violence or criminal disposition, as well as the possibility that the evidence will inject racial bias into the proceedings,” the bill says.“People were going to jail merely because of their appearance,” Mr. Jones-Sawyer said. “We weren’t trying to get people off the hook. We’re just making sure that biases, especially racial biases toward African Americans, weren’t used against them in a court of law.”The bill would require that decisions about the evidence be made pretrial, out of the presence of a jury. For decades, prosecutors have used rappers’ lyrics against them even as their music has become mainstream, with critics and fans arguing that the artists should be given the same freedom to explore violence in their work as were musicians like Johnny Cash (did he really shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die?) or authors like Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote “American Psycho.”In other cases, though lyrics were not used as evidence, they were discussed in front of the jury, which “poisoned the well” by allowing bias to enter the court, according to Mr. Jones-Sawyer’s office. It also noted that while country music has a subgenre known as the “murder ballad,” it is only the lyrics of rap artists that have been singled out.Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, who has extensively researched the use of rap lyrics in criminal proceedings, said that the way prosecutors have used defendant-authored lyrics in court was unique to rap.The practice, she said, essentially treated the lyrics as “nothing more than autobiographical accounts — denying rap the status of art.” The California bill is significant, Dr. Kubrin said, because it would require judges to consider whether the lyrics would inject racial bias into proceedings. “This is bigger than rap,” she said.Among the first notable times the tactic was used was against the rapper Snoop Dogg at his 1996 murder trial, when prosecutors cited lyrics from “Murder Was the Case.” The rapper, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was acquitted.Snoop Dogg entering a Los Angeles court in 1996, where a prosecutor cited his lyrics during a murder trial. He was acquitted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressMost recently, the charges against Young Thug and Gunna have called national attention to the tactic. Both men, who have said they are innocent, were identified as members of a criminal street gang, some of whom were charged with violent crimes including murder and attempted armed robbery.Young Thug, whose real name is Jeffery Williams, co-wrote the Grammy-winning “This is America” with Childish Gambino and is one of the most influential artists to emerge from Atlanta’s hip-hop scene.In November, two New York lawmakers introduced a similar bill that would prevent lyrics from being used as evidence in criminal cases unless there was a “factual nexus between the creative expression and the facts of the case.” It passed the Senate in May.In July, U.S. Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Jamaal Bowman of New York, both Democrats, introduced federal legislation, the Restoring Artistic Protection Act, which they said would protect artists from “the wrongful use of their lyrics against them.”The California bill is supported by several other music organizations and activist groups, including the Black Music Action Coalition California, the Public Defenders Association and Smart Justice California, which advocates criminal justice reform.In a statement of support from June, the Black Music Action Coalition, an advocacy organization that battles systemic racism in the music business, said that prosecutors almost exclusively weaponized rappers’ lyrics against men of color.“Creative expression should not be used as evidence of bad character,” the organization said, maintaining that the claim that themes expressed in art were an indication of the likelihood that a person was violent or dishonest was “simply false.”Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the Recording Academy, which runs the Grammy Awards, said that the bill was intended to protect not only rappers, but also artists across all genres of music, and other forms of creativity.“It’s bigger than any one individual case,” Mr. Mason said. “In no way, at no time, do I feel that someone’s art should be used against them.” More

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      ‘Hamilton’ Cancels Atlanta Performance Over Covid Concerns

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      After some members of a touring company tested positive for the coronavirus, Wednesday night’s show did not go on.“Hamilton” canceled a performance in Atlanta Wednesday night after some members of a touring company tested positive for the coronavirus, and the show was unable to get test results for other company members before curtain.The cancellation, of a touring production at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, is a reminder that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to remain a disruptive factor as large-scale theater resumes performances across the country this fall. Throughout the pandemic, returning performing arts events around the world have been canceled or postponed because of health concerns; now, as Broadway shows reopen in New York and on tour, producers say they expect occasional incidents like this.A “Hamilton” spokesman said he expected the Atlanta production to resume performances Thursday night. The show is adding a performance next week for those patrons who held tickets to the Wednesday night performance and are willing to be rescheduled; refunds or exchanges are also available.“We received some positive cases last night in the company, and needed to confirm that everyone else was negative,” said Shane Marshall Brown, the “Hamilton” spokesman. “The turnaround time for the P.C.R. tests were unexpectedly delayed and we were unable to get them back in time to continue with the show.”On Broadway, where nine shows have begun runs since June, none has yet canceled a performance. At “Waitress,” a cast member tested positive a few days before the first performance; she was replaced by an understudy while she recovered from Covid, and the show went on. More