DETROIT – It’s the newest song from Detroit rapper and teacher Steven Banks. He named the song ‘Black Lives’ in honor of George Floyd and black men and women everywhere, “It just seems, like the title was fitting, from one of the lines in the song and what’s going on right now,” said Banks.
34-year old Steven Banks is not just a rappers, but a local history teacher. He said the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement is a beautiful thing and he wanted to express that in a creative way, “Musically, I wanted to use that voice as I had the opportunity. People have been shouting and marching, things like that and sometimes you have to hit people with something else,” said Banks.
Banks said in the song, he talked about his own personal experience with police brutality, “At any given moment, something like that can occur and I’m sure a lot of black men, if you have a conversation with them, they’ll say they may have had a situation where they felt like that might have been them. Feeling that the law is not on your side, for the most part, just how you look,” said Banks.
But he said as a black man and teacher, he wants to show his students that being black is powerful and their lives matter, “I think of me as a black man. I’m trying to infuse that, no matter what I’m going to find a way, they can hear themselves, and not just what we see in the history books,” said Banks.