James 'Juju' Scurlock: why you should say his name, too
Six years ago, when James Scurlock asked his 16-year-old son James Reginald, AKA Juju Da Fu, aka Little James, to attend a rally in Omaha following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Juju shrugged it off.
“I’m not into that,” he told his dad. “When I get older, maybe.”
But last November, everything changed.
“She looks just like him,” his older brother Nick Harden says. “Hella chill and always smiling.”
Her name is Jewels, and she’s seven months old. Juju once jokingly said he wanted 18 kids, but now, with his daughter cradled in his arms, he was wholly absorbed by just the one. Suddenly the world seemed bigger, the future longer, the politics more personal.
“He started worrying more about what was going on in the world today,” his father says. “I think it started to weigh in on him like, whoa, this is really what’s out here?He was like, ‘Dad, I’m gonna have to have the black talk with her, huh?”
Juju hired on with the landfill in nearby Bennington, Nebraska, but his dreams – bigger than he’d dreamed before – lay on the horizon. He planned to earn his commercial driver’s license through Omaha’s Metro Community College. Maybe follow in his brother’s footsteps and become a tattoo artist, too. Maybe go to business school. Maybe chase the heels of his idol Kevin Gates, spinning his lyrics into the next great rap album.
And when the country erupted in protest over the death of George Floyd, Juju paid attention. Like his father after the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles, Juju was beginning to wake up. When Omahans protested for the second night in a row, Juju was determined to participate, and on Saturday afternoon, he and his sister attended a peaceful gathering at 72nd and Dodge.
His sister eventually left, but when night fell and the crowd moved downtown, Juju followed. He met up with several cousins and a few more friends, and when they hit the historic Old Market, they scattered. Video obtained by the Omaha World Herald reportedly shows Juju and another individual entering RDG Planning and Design, an architecture firm, through an already shattered window around 10.15pm. They destroy several computer monitors, a desk phone, some drywall, lift their facemasks and move on.
“He was probably in the heat of the moment,” Harden says. “Felt some type of power fighting for what he believes in.”
Roughly 40 minutes later, grainy surveillance video shows Juju and another individual approach two adjacent bars called The Hive and The Gatsby, both owned by 38-year-old Jake Gardner, a self-declared “libertarian exmarine” who, earlier that day, wrote on Facebook: “Just when you think, ‘what else could 2020 throw at me?’ Then you have to pull 48 hours of military style firewatch.”
Gardner has a checkered history with law enforcement. In 1997, aged 17, he faced a third-degree assault charge that was later transferred to juvenile court. In 2011, he was arrested on suspicion of reckless driving and carrying a concealed weapon. (The first charge was later dropped, and the second downgraded to “disturbing the peace”.) In 2013, Gardner pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and theft of services after an altercation. The original charges included two counts of assault and battery and failure to inform an officer about a concealed handgun. And last year, he was issued a verbal warning by Nebraska’s Liquor Control Commission after two separate reports of fighting at his bar.
Gardner first sparked online controversy in Omaha in 2016 when he posted a message to Facebook suggesting transgender women shouldn’t use the women’s restroom unless they have their “appendage” removed. “It is well-known in the bar scene in Omaha that Jake Gardner is not a good person,” says Derek Stephens, a local bartender who also participated in the Saturday night protest. Stephens says he came across as a racist, transphobic person. “There’s a large, large, large group of us that do not like him and disdain him and we do not frequent his business and we try to persuade people to not go there.”
Back at the scene, Gardner now stood with his father David on the sidewalk outside his bars. Both were armed, though Gardner’s concealed carry permit had expired.
David can be seen in one video twice shoving a member of Juju’s group, after which David is pushed to the ground. Moments later, with Juju and another man approaching, Jake Gardner lifts his shirt to reveal the handgun in his waistband, then draws the weapon to his side.
“The mood of the situation changed instantly,” says 40-year-old Robert Fuller, a bystander who briefly tried to break up the confrontation. Around the same time, he says, David also drew out his gun, further escalating the situation.
A man and woman then tackle Gardner, still brandishing his weapon, in an apparent attempt to restrain him. They land together in a puddle of water beside some construction equipment, after which Gardner fires two shots. All but his father and Juju, who previously appeared to be in a standoff, flee the area
Four seconds later, as Gardner attempts to stand from the puddle, Juju jumps on his back “to try to prevent another shot”, Fuller says. Juju keeps Gardner in a headlock for roughly 20 seconds before Gardner fires one more time over his shoulder, hitting Juju in the neck.
Juju died at the Nebraska medical center shortly after.
“They’re talking about how it was self-defense, because Gardner was scared for his life,” Fuller says. “They never once mentioned the fact that James was scared for his life. I was scared for my life. Everyone around us was scared for our lives. The only two people there with no reason to be scared for their lives were named Gardner.”
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Within 36 hours of the shooting, #jamesscurlock and #justiceforjamesscurlock were trending on Twitter alongside hashtags for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. By the end of the week, several large murals had already been erected in Juju’s honor, and community leaders were calling for a grand jury investigation.
“I’ll be honest: James [Juju] is a hero to me,” says Precious McKesson, president of the North Omaha Neighborhood Alliance. “I feel after watching that video that James was stopping an active shooter.”
On Wednesday, the Douglas county attorney, Don Kleine, announced that he would support a grand jury investigation, though his own view of the shooting – that Gardner had acted in self-defense –had not changed.
“It’s like a fucking dream, like a movie,” Harden says. “From the Trayvon Martin stuff to George Floyd all the way up, all the people in between, I would have never expected my brother.”
Just two years after Juju was born on 15 February 1998, his father “caught a felony case” and landed in the Nebraska state penitentiary. “Instead of letting my ex-wife Rajeanna struggle”, he says, he sent Juju and his six other children to Denver to live with his mother. With his father incarcerated and his mother now enrolled with the Job Corps in Utah, Juju and his siblings hopped from one Denver suburb to the next with their grandmother, a registered nurse.
Despite his scattered family, Juju kindled moments – rock wars in the backyard, live-action Mario Kartdown the back alley, his stubborn refusal to wear a shirt or shoes–that still make his siblings howl with laughter today.
“We just had a good time growing up,” Harden says. “One time he thought he was gonna run back away to Omaha, and this guy loaded up a box of cereal and a gallon of milk in a stroller and went walking down the street like he was going home.”
Juju and his siblings stayed in Colorado for roughly seven years before his mother brought them back to Omaha, a still heavily segregated city of roughly half a million people.
During the Great Migration, Omaha’s meatpacking district – one of the largest in the world – lured thousands of African Americans from the south; the boll weevil beetle had decimated the cotton fields, leaving many without work, and Jim Crow laws prevented many from finding employment elsewhere. But decades of discriminatory housing policies ultimately fenced Omaha’s burgeoning black community into a two-square-mile box north of downtown. Though it has produced an astonishing number of brilliant athletes and intellects – from Malcolm X to Bob Gibson, arguably the greatest pitcher of all time – for such a small community, North Omaha today struggles with educational achievement gaps, high crime and drug rates, and other challenges tied to more than a century of white supremacy.
And yet, because the state is overwhelmingly white, Nebraskans often have “a false sense of normalcy, a false sense of peace, a false sense that these things don’t really exist”, says Preston Love Jr, a longtime community activist and adjunct professor in the Black studies department at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
Juju’s father knows the disparities well, has protested them before, and is doing so now in the most painful of scenarios. But while Juju’s life was far too short, he says, the time he spent was good, surrounded always by loved ones.
In total, Juju would claim 22 siblings: full, step and half. Growing up, he and his younger sister Rajeanna, were inseparable, like “siamese twins”, says April Whiteman, Juju’s stepmother. In the Scurlock extended universe, the genealogical technicalities don’t count for much. It isn’t that they never disagree, Harden says, or that it’s always perfect. But they unite when it matters most. Cousins are brothers. Stepmothers are mothers. Aunts are mothers, too. When any one of them needs help, the others step in. And for Juju, that family meant everything. In Hebrew, he tattooed “father” above one eye, “mother” above the other.
“That’s the big thing about Juju: he’s always with some type of family,” says his cousin Jamal Thompson. “If he wasn’t with us, he was with his daughter. I’ve never really seen him without one of his relatives.”
He was always high energy, with a laugh “like lightning”, his aunt says, and an uncanny ability to lift the mood of the entire room. “His personality is like the weather,” his father says. “One minute you would think he’s dead serious, and then you’d get the biggest joke in the world.” He loved a good prank. He used to hide stray dogs under the bed. Chickens too. Ducks from the neighborhood park. Despite Juju’s often bold attempts at a rough exterior, his brother says, the numerous illustrations and murals trending online in the wake of his death reveal the bright spirit he truly was.
“I love seeing him in the pictures people have drawn – the cartoon pictures,” he says. “He just looks like a nice kid. A big ol’ smile.”
Though Juju’s parents had long been separated, they had never legally divorced. When the siblings slowly began to divide themselves between homes, Rajeanna moved them all to Norfolk, a much smaller community two hours north-west of Omaha. Juju was 16. They stayed for less than two years, but while there, Juju found himself one evening playing lookout for his brother and two much older men during a home invasion.
“It’s like when you start sports, and then you go to band, and you’re just looking for your pack, you know?” his father says. “He started hanging out with the wrong crowd for a little while, trying to find his place. High school is a big transition.”
He pleaded guilty to burglary and served just under a year at the Nebraska correctional youth facility. He earned his GED inside.
“I don’t want to look like I’m dumb,” he told Harden. “I just didn’t like school.”
But when he did attend, his grades were “immaculate”, his father says. He was a whiz at math, his stepmother adds. A skilled drawer, his friends insist, with handwriting “like calligraphy”. And though he abhorred formal writing, loathed his English classes, he often roused the party with spontaneous freestyle raps.
“The lyrics are where it was really at, though, because he could break some shit down to you and piece it back together again,” Harden says. “He beats on his chest or snaps his fingers and that’s all he needs.”
In January 2019, Juju was charged with assault and battery and spent 23 days in the Douglas county jail. And earlier this spring, he served 57 more for third-degree domestic assault. He pleaded guilty to both – “you did it, you own,” his father taught him – and he spent the bulk of both stints penning lyrics and letters to his friends. Upon his release last month, he told his family: “Just call me Juju, but don’t call me Da Fu no more, because I’m not that person.”
“He just got influenced by the streets, so he started getting into some bad habits … But he wasn’t a criminal criminal,” Harden says. “He wasn’t out there just looking for something to do. That’s why it hurt so much, because he really was trying to get something started for himself.”
Juju always had that natural rhythm, had always been musical, but his time in prison helped him find his voice, his family says. He hadn’t rec
orded professionally – not yet. But he dreamed about it. He grew up listening to his own father’s album, to Biggie and Tupac and Public Enemy. “You could always catch him listening to whoever was the hardest rapper telling the truth,” his father says. He loved Kodak Black. He loved NBA Youngboy. But no one rapping today enthralled him half so much as Kevin Gates, especially the song Great Man:
“Music was the way that Juju talked,” says Diamond Davis, a close friend who lived with Juju and his family for several years. “He was never recorded, but he’ll rap for the family. And in one of his raps, he said, ‘I’m gonna die a legend.’ And my best friend died a legend.”