Michael Render, better known as Killer Mike, stitches together the wisdom and example of his great-grandmother, former community organizers, and the Dalai Lama to inform his music and his activism.
Story by Christina Lee | Photographs by Brinson + Banks
It all started back when Killer Mike was still young enough to wear boys’ husky jeans — long enough ago that the term “husky” didn’t have such an antiquated ring to it when describing a growing boy’s size. The young Michael Render lived in his native Atlanta with both his grandmother, Bettie Clonts, and his great-grandmother, Truzella Blackmon.
One day, Blackmon called for her great-grandson: “Fella, come over here.” Blackmon had developed dementia, a fact Mike was forced to confront during moments like this one. “Oh, she just don’t remember my name is Michael,” he thought to himself.
“Bring me that bag,” Blackmon ordered.
Killer Mike still doesn't know where the bag of fabric scraps came from. Maybe his mother had compiled the scraps first, from clothes that he and his two sisters grew out of: Easter dresses, cargo shorts, Mike’s old pants with a 32-inch waist, in paisley, twill, and denim.
But he can still remember how, in the course of a week, Blackmon stitched those scraps together into a quilt that Mike cherishes to this day.
“My 15-year-old daughter still throws it across her legs to watch television,” he says, “and it’s because my great-grandma said all of that fabric is important. I won’t throw any of it out by the wayside. It doesn’t matter if it’s the dress that my sisters had for Easter, or the nice clothes that the white folks my grandmother worked for had. It mattered to her that it all could be stitched together for the betterment of us all.”
It’s an instructive fable, one that Killer Mike points to as his guiding framework for how he operates as an artist, entrepreneur, and activist today.
A decade ago, it felt easier to focus on one aspect of his life at a time:
How his rap career has evolved from a breakout verse in OutKast’s “Snappin’ & Trappin,’” to anthems that solidified his reputation as the Ice Cube of the American South. How he found his Bomb Squad in producer El-P, with hip-hop duo Run the Jewels.
How, thanks to his name recognition in both rap and the greater Atlanta community, he’d open a new location for his barbershop, the SWAG (Shave, Wash and Groom) Shop, at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.
How the fiery political punditry in his lyrics led to campaigning for Senator Bernie Sanders and being part of an Atlanta mayoral transition team for Keisha Lance Bottoms.
How he has explored ideas about social change in not one, but two, TV shows: Netflix’s reality-show-esque “Trigger Warning With Killer Mike” and the public-television interview program “Love & Respect With Killer Mike.”
And then there’s Greenwood, the mobile banking platform he co-founded with Bounce TV exec Ryan Glover and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young. It launched earlier this year with backing from not only Bank of America and Wells Fargo, but media conglomerate Quality Control, whose record label launched the careers of Migos, Lil Baby, and City Girls.
In a conversation via Zoom one late-February morning, Killer Mike stressed how all these endeavors feel equally important and urgent. And that’s because they’re all part of Mike’s larger mission: to be like Blackmon.
“I wish to take fabric from here, and fabric from there, and say, we can do more together,” he says.
But as Mike has discovered, being what he calls a “connector” is tougher than ever to actually put into practice, especially when America’s political and cultural divides have deepened.
“I wish to be someone from the westside of Atlanta who keeps his community connected to hope and opportunity, and I don’t mean that in an abstract, vague way,” he says. “There’s a real hope in growing up as a Black person in America and seeing Black success. And there’s a real hope in seeing Black people and white people cooperate.”
Mike is invoking the storied “Atlanta Way,” an unwritten and informal code of conduct between Black activists and white business leaders that dates back to the Civil Rights Movement. Proponents of the Atlanta Way credit it with achieving gradual but steady reforms by putting business interests and entrepreneurship at the forefront of the march toward racial equality. But in the decades since its inception, the Atlanta Way has faced criticism, most recently from Black Lives Matter activists, for incremental and moderate reforms that actually slowed progress.
Still, Killer Mike remains a firm believer in the Atlanta Way. It’s a position that stands out at a time when increasing majorities of Americans — Democrats in particular — find it “stressful and frustrating” to discuss politics with those of opposing beliefs, according to the Pew Research Center.
On “Love & Respect,” Mike hosted, among other guests, right-wing shock-jock Erick Erickson. This shouldn’t have surprised some of Mike’s closest friends and associates, not after he featured a self-identifying white nationalist in “Trigger Warning,” though apparently it did.
“Why would you be surprised?” Mike says. “We should be speaking with people who we don’t agree with. I’m not trying to win an argument; I’m trying to understand. We’re really going for understanding, and understanding is an absence of ego. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with the person you’re disagreeing with, but you start to understand their perspective.”
Just so we’re clear: In “Untitled,” the second track off 2012’s “R.A.P. Music” that doubles as a personal manifesto, Killer Mike makes his political affiliations — or rather, his lack thereof — known: “I don’t trust the church or the government / Democrat, Republican / pope or a bishop or them other men.”
In both his art and his activism, Mike bears no particular love or loyalty to any politician or institution. But he is willing to invest his blood, sweat, and tears into advocacy for anything that helps improve the material well-being of the causes and people he cherishes.
As far as Mike’s prescription for what ails America, Atlanta Hawks owner Tony Ressler may have put it best: “He talked about — and this is something my grandfather would say — the opportunity to have a good job, the opportunity to buy a home (because wealth is defined by the ability to own land), and the opportunity to start a business.”
But you can’t talk about the story of Killer Mike without first exploring the working-class Atlanta neighborhood where he grew up and personally witnessed how this bedrock promise of the Atlanta Way could bear fruit.
In Collier Heights, one of the first modern Black neighborhoods to be added to the National Register of Historic Places, Mike had neighbors like Cynthia and James Edward “Billy” McKinney, the first simultaneous father-daughter Georgia congressional representatives, and Herman Russell, whose construction and development company’s portfolio includes the Georgia Dome, Turner Field, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Collier Heights is also where teenage Mike came under the mentorship of figures like the Rev. James Orange, a Civil Rights organizer who worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “I just found a picture of me being 16 years old at his birthday [party],” Mike says.
Collier Heights was also where Killer Mike learned the importance of community. While the Greenwood app is named after the Black financial district that was nicknamed Black Wall Street (before it was demolished during the 1921 Tulsa Race Riots), the platform’s origin story dates back to when Mike was 5.
That’s when Mike’s grandmother broke open his plastic The Amazing Spider-Man piggy bank where his grandfather stashed spare bills he won at gambling houses. Bettie Clonts used them later to open Mike’s first checking account. More specifically, they walked over to Citizens Trust Bank. “When a Black builder is building your house, and you know of a Black bank like Citizens Trust, you have a different respect for the Black coin,” Mike says. “You purposefully put it in places where it’s going to regenerate and grow for the next person.”
Everything that Mike knows, he learned first from his grandparents, who raised him for most of his childhood. His grandfather was a dump truck driver, avid fisherman, and the titular inspiration behind the “R.A.P. Music” track “Willie Burke Sherwood.” Mike’s grandmother, Bettie, was a nurse, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the inspiration behind 2008’s “Grandma’s House.” Willie was the individualist; Bettie, the pragmatist.
“He would say, ‘You shouldn’t have to get a license to do that,’” Mike says. “And she would say, ‘You’re absolutely right, but because you have to get a license to fish, you’re able to keep the lakes clean, because someone has to get paid.’”
Mike has come to realize that, in order to build districts and movements and make progress, there needs to be a constant exchange of ideas, just like the ones between his grandparents. Between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and SCLC. Between Civil Rights leaders and the Kennedys. Between King and President Lyndon B. Johnson, who ultimately passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Between Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who posited in the 1960s that America might see its first Black president in 30 to 40 years, and writer James Baldwin, who scoffed as if that was supposed to be considered imaginative and progressive. When Mike invites guests like Erickson to “Love & Respect,” he’s inspired by these examples of dialogue.
“No one believes in creating a more perfect union than [Black Americans], because we’ve been here every step of the imperfect way,” Mike says.
Last spring, Mike joined the likes of other change-making artists like Buffy Sainte-Marie in a one-hour live-stream event seeking advice from the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama’s official website states that Mike asked “why so often fear prevails over love.” But Mike remembers his question being more specific:
“How do we get people of all races and ethnicities to operate within a place of true collaboration and cooperation?”
“The answer he gave me was the same answer my grandmother gave me: putting your ego aside, putting your differences aside, and moving and generating from a place of love. This opportunity to talk to the Dalai Lama — man, I was so excited to even be asked to do it. And he gave me the exact same information that my grandmother gave. What I realized in that moment was that I’ve had the wisest teachers in the world, in my life.”
“Rap is Black America’s TV station,” rapper Chuck D said to SPIN magazine in 1988, one year after his group Public Enemy first evangelized the idea that hip-hop should be a force for social change. Over time, Chuck D has been quoted instead to have said that “rap is Black America’s CNN.” Either way, 26 years after that proclamation, Killer Mike was in the midst of a contentious appearance that prominently featured in both Black America’s CNN and the actual network itself.
CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin had invited Mike to her afternoon news show after ex-police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in August 2014. Among his qualifications as a subject matter expert was “Reagan,” a song in which Mike thundered about the terrorizing police brutality that the war on drugs had foisted upon “mostly Black boys, but they would call us n-----s, and lay us on our belly with they fingers on they triggers.”
On CNN, Mike stressed that Wilson should be arrested. But he also said, “I hold police in a high and honorable position.” This was no “Back the Blue” chest-thumping. Mike’s father was a cop, and he learned firsthand how militarized policing could become a danger to the communities they were supposed to protect.
“We have essentially gone from being communities that were policed by people from the communities, to being communities that are policed by strangers,” Mike said. “That’s no longer a community. That’s an area that’s under siege.”
A few short months after the CNN interview came the album “Run the Jewels 2” — technically, Killer Mike’s third time working with rapper-producer El-P, after “R.A.P. Music” and their 2013 self-titled debut as Run the Jewels. “RTJ2” became the most critically acclaimed album, possibly, of either Mike’s or El-P’s careers. It wasn’t just proof that a sequel could be better than the original. It was that everyone he meets will know exactly where he’s coming from.
They might not know that his hip-hop act is a persona, or what Mike calls a caricature: “The Wolverine to my Logan.” Or how he arrived at his political views, which are informed less by party affiliation and more by the long arc of Black history.
Or that for the man himself, Mike’s cultural prominence is still taking some getting used to.
Killer Mike can vividly recall the exact moment when he realized that arguing on Twitter, especially over the issues he cares about most, was a total waste of time.
In 2018, Mike, a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, sat down for an interview with Colion Noir for the National Rifle Association’s streaming network NRATV. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students in Parkland, Florida, had yet to kick off their historic march for gun control, what they called a March for Our Lives.
Not only did the network time the release of Noir’s interview with Killer Mike to just days before the March for Our Lives, but the network posted a snippet in which Mike explained that if his own children participated, they should “walk out my house.” Noir even prefaces this segment by saying, “What are you really marching for? Because from where I’m standing, it’s a march to burn the Constitution and rewrite the parts that you all like in crayon.”
When Killer Mike broaches the subject, he’s careful to defend Noir and not to mention the NRA by name. “I did an interview with a Black man, about Black gun ownership in America, that was viewed on a white corporate website,” he says.
But he’s still more than happy to expound on the relationship between America’s long struggle for Civil Rights and firearms ownership. Private gun ownership was crucial to protecting Black voters, Mike argues, during a time when terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan were intimidating Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Or, as Mike sums up: “When Malcolm X said, ‘By any means necessary,’ [he] meant by any and every means necessary.”
In the immediate aftermath of Noir’s interview, Killer Mike apologized on Twitter to the March for Our Lives organizers, for how the NRA timed the release to “disparage a very noble campaign that I actually support.”
“I do support the march, and I support Black people owning guns. It’s possible to do both,” he added.
But Mike still doesn’t care for how El-P had to come to his defense amid calls to “cancel my rap group,” and how “white liberals” and “Black folks who work with those people, particularly the Democratic Party” disparaged him for appearing on NRATV, of all places.
“I don't argue a lot with people publicly anymore, especially in the media, because it serves no purpose but to polarize people like they're cheering for the [Atlanta] Falcons or the Dallas Cowboys,” he says.
So if Killer Mike wants to boost Georgia’s trade schools and increase minority participation in state contracts, he knows better than to turn to Twitter. Instead, he meets with Georgia’s governor, regardless of whether he agrees with the politics of the person who’s in office. That’s exactly what he did in 2020 by meeting with Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, just two years after his contentious and narrow victory against Democrat Stacey Abrams.
“I don't want to waste four years arguing over who stole the election and who should be governor,” Mike says. “Whoever I got is who I got. How do I help in the next four years people who look like me and make up 35 percent of this state?” (The exact percentage is 32.6, though his point still stands.) “How do I help them advance and enjoy the fact that even in a pandemic Georgia's economy grew — even in a pandemic?
“My family got here in 1950 from Tuskegee, Alabama,” he says. “We’ve labored to make this state a financial hub, an economic success, have an international city in Atlanta. That labor deserves something. What we deserve is the reciprocity of the hard work our parents and great-grandparents put in.”
It’s easy to imagine Mike speaking to Kemp as he does now, from Georgian to Georgian: “If I go to Frederick Douglass High School, Booker T. Washington High School, George Washington Carver High School, the level of education should be taken as seriously as the men those schools are named for. I want those opportunities to abound. So I don’t care what the polls say so much as what we’re doing.”
Last spring, Killer Mike and Senator Sanders, for whom Mike campaigned in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, flew into Bessemer, Alabama, to rally for warehouse employees trying to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center. Like Sanders, Mike was there to address the crowd.
But first, behind the scenes, he spoke with employees one on one, with those who supported unionization as well as those who were skeptical. Mike knew that he shouldn’t speak on their behalf without first doing a lot of listening.
He can’t help that Americans trust celebrities, especially during times of distrust of the federal government. America has elected two celebrity presidents, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. And the latter empowered America’s first rapper presidential candidate, Kanye West, to run in 2020.
Mike also isn’t responsible for how — in a 24-hour news cycle propelled by cable news and social media — less prominent but equally important voices, like those of Amazon employees, might get drowned out.
So to whoever will listen, he is committed to making the absolute most of his newfound social capital, whether he’s at the top of the billing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival or demonstrating for workers’ rights.
“I am a mobilizer there,” he says. “I don’t claim to be an organizer anymore, because to be an organizer, you gotta be showing up at those weekly meetings. You gotta be there on a daily basis with the people, and that is a tremendously overwhelming job at times. I’m not arrogant enough to believe that is what I do. I’m informed by the organizers. I’ve listened to organizers. I’ve learned from organizers, and I help them mobilize.”
Mike was reminded why this distinction is important when, in late February, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens launched the city’s first-ever Peace Week amid concerns over the city’s crime rate. The itinerary included panel discussions on emotional wellness, lessons on meditation and yoga techniques, and a prayer service with the Rev. Dr. Bernice King.
To help kick off the week of building awareness, Mike headed back to his alma mater, Frederick Douglass High School. There, he was an esteemed guest, posing in pictures with Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Herring. This is all part of how Killer Mike has long operated — among a staggering list of names, of people and institutions, that are hyper-specific to the city that raised him.
Frederick Douglass interim Principal Forrestella Taylor was addressing the students: “I don’t intend to organize for y’all, I intend to organize with y’all.” That’s when Mike had a moment of déjà vu.
One of his earliest mentors was Alice Mary Johnson, whom he’s previously credited for having “taught me how radical Martin Luther King was.” Johnson was executive director of the Atlanta-Fulton Commission on Children and Youth, which launched in 1990 to address issues facing children countywide.
Two years after the commission’s founding, Johnson nominated Mike, a high school senior, along with other students, to be part of its board. For two weeks, he and the advisory group reported their concerns about education, drugs, and AIDS, during two weeks of public hearings called “It’s Time to Listen to Kids 4 a Change.”
“We as kids were accepted on that board because she said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think we should be organizing for children, I think we should be organizing with children,’” Mike says.
Killer Mike couldn’t have predicted how he’d remember this today. “People assume I want to be an artist,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1992. “I want to go to a four-year college. I want to study religion and theology ... to be a minister for the Nation of Islam.
“When was the last time you saw gang members, ‘A’ students, Blacks, whites, Muslims, Christians, and Jews all working together for a common good?” 17-year-old Mike added.
But this period in his life is an example of how, above all else, he's dedicated to lending his platform to those who feel unheard.
“For the rest of my life, I’ve carried that. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert. I’m not going to land in your city and tell you what to do. I’m going to be informed by you. That forever changed my view around activism.”
Killer Mike prizes being a connector, like his great-grandmother stitching fabrics together. He understands how empowering it feels for someone to feel they have been heard. He never wants to deprive anyone of that feeling, especially when their voice might otherwise not be counted.
Christina Lee is a journalist based in Atlanta, whose work appears in Atlanta magazine, NPR Music, The Washington Post and more. She co-hosts Southern hip-hop podcast "Bottom of the Map" with Dr. Regina N. Bradley.
David Walter Banks and Kendrick Brinson met and fell in love with photography and storytelling at the same time and place in photojournalism class in college, eventually falling in love with each other two years later. They began their professional careers as community photojournalists in the South, then expanding to national magazines, and eventually joining forces to create moment- and color-driven work as a team for some of the world's leading advertising agencies and editorial publications. Their bylines can often be seen under their documentary and portraiture images in The New York Times and National Geographic. Together, their clients range from Fortune Magazine to Apple and Red Bull. They recently relocated from Los Angeles — where they still have a crew and return to work often — back to their roots in the South, where they live in Atlanta in a 1916 bungalow with their pack of animals, Tux, Tia, and Rex, and a big vegetable garden.
