'If you wrote a story like this, it would seem too on the nose,' says Jeff Weiss, a writer and cultural critic from L.A. The store and a large Nipsey mural in its alleyway is now fenced off but other nearby murals continue to draw local and visiting fans. In the wake of Nipsey Hussle's March 2019 death, many murals of the beloved Los Angeles musician were painted in the Hyde Park neighborhood near his Marathon clothing store. But the irony of his untimely death sheds light on the larger backdrop of inequality in his hood - the phenomenon of mass supervision in Black communities.Ī mural of Nipsey Hussle is ringed by flowers on Brynhurst Ave. The story of Nipsey Hussle's life has been retold into mythology, a hip-hop fairy tale, one that reinforces the illusion of the American dream: a self-made man who came up from the bottom, stayed connected with his community and used his art as a vehicle to change it. He's everything in between and he exceeded the expectations of what society thought.' 'Society's expectation is, 'Oh, he's just a quote-unquote gang banger from the Crenshaw district.' Not at all. society's expectations of what he should be,' says Karen Civil, one of Nipsey's former business partners. But he was also a community advocate for Crenshaw, and constantly gave back to his hood. Once his music took off, he repped his set in every song. Like Lisa P and many of the other young people who grow up in this neighborhood, he was a member of the Rollin 60s Crips, one of L.A.'s biggest sets, from the time he was a teenager. Looking out her car window at the sign that reads Slauson Supermall, Lisa P says that it was on this very site that she first remembers seeing a boy who would grow up to be one of Crenshaw's most celebrated – and most mourned – sons.īorn and raised in Los Angeles, Nipsey Hussle was the epitome of a hustler. Driving toward the Pacific Ocean down Slauson, Lisa moves one of her box braids away from her face and hits her joint as she passes one of the neighborhood's unofficial landmarks, Slauson swap meet. Slauson Avenue runs east-west through Crenshaw. She was born Ellisa McKnight but prefers the nickname she's gone by since childhood. She's 57 years old, and grew up running these streets. She has it all mapped out in her head, what it means to move from one block to the next. She knows all its avenues, all its corners. In the wake of Hussle's March 2019 death, many murals of the beloved Los Angeles musician were painted in the Hyde Park neighborhood near his Marathon Clothing store. Nipsey Hussle is part of a mural painted by Moses Ball featuring other local notable people on the wall of a bank in the rapper's Hyde Park neighborhood.

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