'My Dream Was Being Used Against Me In Court'
Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden are the hosts of Louder Than A Riot, a new podcast from NPR Music that investigates the interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration in America.
On February 20, 2000, Mac didn't want to get out of bed. As a well-known wordsmith within his home state of Louisiana who was just beginning to teeter on mainstream fame as an artist on No Limit Records, Mac was supposed to perform a show at Club Mercedes in Slidell, La. that night, but as his parents recall two decades later, he slept late and had a cloud over him all day.
"It was just weird," Mac remembers. "It's hard to even pinpoint what my exact feeling was but I just know I wasn't feeling it."
Mac, born McKinley Phipps Jr., was scheduled to head out on a six-month tour the next day. The biggest hit he'd ever record was in the can, to be released in a little over a month. But he didn't like the venue, in a small town in St. Tammany Parish across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, where Mac grew up. "Growing up," Mac says, "it was just understood in New Orleans you know that the Ku Klux Klan was in St. Tammany Parish."
"That's one of the places where I would have never went had we not had that show," recalls Mac's brother, Chad Phipps. "When you're Brown, you're not welcome. It's sort of a racist area — get stopped a lot and, uh, harassed a lot in that area."
Mac's career was a family business. His dad, McKinley Phipps Sr., managed him and his mom, Sheila Phipps, booked him in local venues and took tickets at the door. Chad would occasionally run security. On that night, the whole family headed to Slidell and Mac, who couldn't set aside his bad feelings, carried a gun for protection.
The crowd at Club Mercedes that night was rowdy, and soon a fight broke out on the floor. "My brother, at some point, saw me in the middle of this ruckus that looked like it was about to happen," Chad says. "So he started walking up and I can see him walking up over my shoulder. Now, I'm still holding off two guys from fighting each other as my brother's walking up over my shoulder to see what was going on, and the next thing you know, it was like, a POW!"
In an interview years later, Mac described the confusion of the scene that followed. "I guess part of my brain was trying to process whether this pop was on the song or whether it was from a gunshot, but to take precautionary measures, I got low and looked around," he said.
When Chad looked up, he saw what several other people in the club would later say they saw: Mac holding a gun.
"He ... had it pointed at the ceiling and he was kinda ducking," Chad says. "Once people started running toward the exit, I was like, 'Oh, that must have been a gunshot.'"
When he got to the exit, Chad didn't see his brother, who had stayed in the club to find their parents. On their way out of the club, Chad and Mac's father, noticed a man on the ground with a woman standing over him. The woman, a first-year nursing student named Yulon James, began administering CPR on the spot. Mac Senior recalls that when he asked whether the man was hurt, she said he was okay but had been shot in the arm.
The family piled into two cars and drove the 90 miles back home to Baton Rouge. After they arrived home, in the wee hours of the morning, Mac got a phone call from detectives in St. Tammany saying he's wanted in connection with the shooting in the club. When they arrived at the house soon after, the police were in full force.
"I had like four policemen — three with pistols, one with a shotgun — come charging and running at me, telling me, 'Get on the ground, get on the ground, get on the ground,'" Mac's father says. The police told him that Mac was wanted for murder. "I told him, I said, 'Wasn't nobody dead when I left."
But the shooting victim that Mac's father saw lying on the ground — a 19-year-old man named Barron Victor, Jr. — had died from a single gunshot wound that went
