Behind the tweet: The two horsemen of the revolution
The story of how two cars became iconic billboards for liberation
The following was originally published in Palestine in America’s 2020 Music Edition. Order a print copy or download a digital copy today!
In June, I saw a photo of a car on Instagram that caught my eye. It’s a silver and beige Buick with poked-out rims and a popped trunk displaying a purple neon sign that reads: BLACK LIVES MATTER. Being from Houston, I immediately identified this brand of car customization as a “slab.” Slabs are a specific type of car culture that originated on the south side of Houston in the 1980s and became popular in the 1990s. Long before MySpace bulletins, Facebook status updates, or tweets, some people in Houston, specifically some Black people in Houston, were looking for ways to make a public statement about their fallen friends, hoods, or even just personal existential philosophy. Slabs were the answer. A slab is an extension of its owner, and the message broadcast from its trunk is like the owner’s personal billboard. Over the years, there have been many iconic trunk displays, like Kornbread’s “THI5 WHY YA HOE MISSIN.” I had seen slabs my whole life, even before I knew they had a name.
But when I saw the Black Lives Matter slab, it made me think of a photograph of a car I’d seen on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram years ago. It’s lime green, lifted, and has massive matching green rims that have to be at least 24 inches. Friends would tag me in the comments and say , “Sama’an, your ride is here.” It makes me smile every time. And it’s always made me wonder whose ride it actually is. So, I tweeted out pictures of the two cars side-by-side with the caption: “the two horsemen of the revolution.”
Now, I thought it was a decent tweet, but I didn’t think it was GREAT. And my tweets never ever go viral, so I was not expecting much. 10,000 retweets and 40,000 likes later, I had the first bonafide viral tweet of my 10-year tweeting career. Most of the replies were positive, and knowing that so many people saw the interconnectedness of Black and Palestinian liberation filled me with so much hope for future Black-Palestinian soldarity. But then something else exciting happened: Someone replied saying that the BLM car belonged to their friend! Soon, I connected with the car’s owner, David Bradford.
Bradford, a fellow Houstonian, is a ninth-grade world geography teacher and the owner of the Black Orator Apparel clothing line. His profile picture at the time featured his head wrapped in a keffiyeh (our traditional scarf), and he was quick to tell me, “Free Palestine!” I asked Bradford if he would do a joint interview with the owner of that iconic, green car, so long as I could track them down. He agreed, and the search party was on.
I had remembered someone saying on Facebook that the car belonged to someone in Florida, so that’s how I started my search. Still,I was hitting dead ends, so I started to change my route. Eventually, I found this tweet.
Edmonton. Boom. That was how I was gonna find them.
Sure enough, after a little more searching, I found Ayman Rayan, the owner of a Canadian custom shop called CarTrendz in Edmonton, Alberta. I asked Rayan if he was the owner of the lime green vessel of liberation, which he confirmed to my very great delight. Rayan is very much Canadian and very much Palestinian and was very much down to do a joint interview with Bradford, bringing my tweet to life.
The following is a condensed transcript of our conversation:
Sama’an Ashrawi: I thought it would be cool if y’all could talk about the specs and customizations on both of y’alls’ vehicles.
Bradford: So you know it’s a slab, and it’s not a slab unless it’s got the swangers on it. So the first thing I did was save up, got the rims, got the vogue tires to go with it, just straight spokes. Naked car, just spokes. Second thing, you gotta have the bang in the trunk, so I went and got two 15s and a 6000 watt amp, tinted all the windows. Then I went and got some floor mats. My floor is cut with plexiglass that lights up. The front floor mats say, “Time Machine,” and then the back mats are cassette tapes, they glow purple. The front has a glowing purple Buick emblem with “Time Machine” in it. Right after that is when I got the trunk. The bottom lid is plexiglass. I pushed the 15s back, and got text that says “This my time machine,” which is a Big KRIT song because he was a big influence. Even the color was a KRIT influence, that purple.
Rayan: Nice. That’s Dope.
Ashrawi: Ayman, talk to us about your car and those rims.
Rayan: You know it’s mutated into a different machine over time. It used to be a lowrider when I bought it, with hydraulics. It needed work, it needed paint, so then I got it painted. It had 13-inch hundred-spokes on it at first, and then I went up to a 22-inch wire wheel, and then 24s, and then 26s. I had 26-inch blades on it at one point.
Ashrawi & Bradford: Wowwww.
Rayan: Yeah, I have pictures of that. And then from there it just kept getting bigger; I got 28s and then it jumped to 30s, and now we’re at 32-inch rims, and that’s when I started modifying the car.
Ashrawi: [laughs]
Rayan: So it’s on 32s and it has a full, custom 10-inch lift, with air suspension. So I can bring it down as well. We cut it so it can sit right over that wheel-well. Then it got painted and we got the lambo doors. The audio in it … it has a 24-inch B2 subwoofer in the back, about 6000 watts just to the one sub, and then I got another 2000 watts to my speakers in the front. A train horn. Pretty much everything has been done to the car, the next step is the interior. We’re gonna do a two-tone interior and some stitching in the headrest. Yeah, it’s been through a lot. It never ends, right?
Bradford: Nah it doesn’t. My homeboy told me that slabs is like a money trash can, dude.
Rayan: [laughs] Yeah, it is! Do people ask you how much you put into it? When people ask me I tell them I just don’t keep track any more.
Bradford: I would be embarrassed to tell ‘em.
Ashrawi: [laughs]
Rayan: There’s no budget.
Bradford: Nah, no budget.
Rayan: Exactly, you just keep throwing money at it. Right?
Bradford: It’s worth it.
Rayan: Oh yeah, you gotta love it. You gotta love what you do. I really like your car, bro. That’s a Buick, right?
Bradford: Yeah, a Buick Park Avenue. My first car was a LeSabre, and I knew when I bought the LeSabre, I was like, “Yeah, I’m definitely gonna get a Park Avenue.”
Rayan: You know, there’s only two Cadillacs out here in our province with swangers. We have a couple sets actually. We’ve got some 22s and some 17s, super-pokes.
Bradford: Man, I didn’t know they had slabs in Canada until the dude that sold me mine, Texas Wire Wheel Albert, he showed me pictures of somebody in Canada. I was like, “Texas dude in Canada … that’s crazy.”
Rayan: Oh yeah, we got a few sets out here. And out east, in Montreal and Toronto, there is a little bit.
Bradford: Are people used to it?
Rayan: No, here you’re gonna get mixed feelings with these types of wheels. Some people hate them, and some people just think they’re cool and nice. But it’s a culture thing, right?
Bradford: You know, down here in Houston we’ve gotten so long with [the pokes], like super-long pokes. The cops are mad.
Rayan: Do they ticket you for that?
Bradford: See, that’s the thing. Mine, it pokes, but it doesn’t poke to where I’m getting ticketed, so the cops don’t mess with it. But there is a length to where they’re gonna ticket you, and I’ve heard some of my homeboys who have the longest [pokes] you’ve got, they will ticket you up to thousands of dollars.
Rayan: Oh wow, that’s like the Gorilla Pokes.
Bradford: So, that’s the thing, I’ve got Gorillas, but now it’s past that.
Rayan: Oh so they have like Giraffe Pokes or whatever now, they’re going waayyyy out. [laughs]
Bradford: Dude, they come out with new ones I feel like every other season. They just keep getting longer. I feel like there’s an initiative from law enforcement to take them off the street. The guy that did my trunk, his pokes are like stupid long. It’s crazy, man. But you know, I respect it, I love it.
Rayan: Oh you gotta respect it, it’s a different style. It’s a totally different style.
Bradford: I respect anybody that does anything to modify their vehicle, I don’t care what it is.
Rayan: Exactly, exactly.
Bradford: I salute them, man.
Rayan: That’s how it should be.
Bradford: Facts.
07:40
Ashrawi: Ayman was saying he had a whole ordeal with the police up in Canada. Giving him shit about the car…
[The following is from a separate interview conducted with Ayman]
Rayan: Around 2014 [when Israel was bombing Gaza] we said, you know what, let’s bring the car to the [Free Palestine] rally and let’s throw “Free Palestine” on it. Because the car turns a lot of heads, right?
Ashrawi: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, already!
Rayan: So instead of turning the heads to just, “Oh, nice car,” you can do both. You can bring awareness at the same time. And should have seen the reactions. You get a lot of people that love it and honk, and then some people that question it. They say, “That’s pretty gutsy to do.” I’m like, “Why?” [laughs] You know what I mean?
Ashrawi: [laughs]
Rayan: Because they don’t understand the situation. So, it created a lot of dialogue. It was a dialogue piece wherever it went. You started seeing it online and stuff like that. And then after that, I had an incident, a run-in with the police.
Ashrawi: Oh shit…
Rayan: By this time I had taken the deco off. This is weeks after. The way I was stopped wasn’t a normal procedure. I was in the parking lot of a gas station and a police officer kind of nosed-up and stopped in the middle of the road as I was going to exit and put his lights on. So I pulled out my camera, I said, “Uh oh, what’s going on?” He stopped me and detained me for 45 minutes while he was on the phone with somebody. He kept looking at all the things on the vehicle saying things like, “This is illegal. You can’t have the bumper height this high.” Mud flap tickets, colored lenses, just really petty stuff. I got upset and started recording; I wasn’t mad at them, but I just started questioning. “Why are you guys doing this? What’s the main reason you pulled me over?” He wouldn’t answer. I felt like, after all that … we’re guessing it could be from the car being seen out there. Maybe it could have been a complaint. I have a feeling it was somebody who sent a complaint to the police saying, “This vehicle…” whatever.
Anyways, after that, he issued me six violations, and a paper saying I have this much time to remove certain conditions on the car, tinted windows and all this stuff, which most cars on the road have. The car is unique, it stands out, I understand, but it’s a show car, it’s for my business. I went and changed everything because the car was deemed “unsafe.” They deemed it unsafe until I “fixed” those things. To make a long story short, I did what they told me to do, and they actually pulled up in front of my house, an unmarked vehicle with a traffic inspector. They came by force onto my driveway and I told them, “What are you guys doing here? This is my house.” They were like, “Oh no, you work outta your house.” And I’m like, “No. Right now I’m not working.” He basically distracted me as the inspector started looking at my car in the driveway, he took the VIN number off the vehicle, and then he looked underneath it real quick, and then he goes, “Our job is done.”
Rayan: It was a big confrontation back and forth. We were trying to tell him, “What kind of harassment is this? You guys already harassed me before, now you’re coming to my house.” It was too much. A week later I get a paper from the Alberta government saying the vehicle is deemed unsafe [again], and I can’t drive it on the road until I go through a salvage inspection. That required me to bring my car to factory specifications. So I felt like it was a hit on my business. There was some profiling for sure. That happens here when you have something nice. If you’re successful in something, or you do something different, people tend to kind of hate on you. But I didn’t give up; I went to a lawyer and they threw out half the tickets.
Ashrawi: Good, good.
Rayan: The other part of it was a civil matter, which I didn’t wanna get into with the police. It’s not even worth it, it’s petty. So we rebuilt the car. It’s the same thing, just a different color, and as much as we can to [adhere the police’s] protocol so we don’t get bothered, no tint and all this stuff. So we’ve now been driving it on the road for about three or fours years because it was parked for a couple years until we could change everything. Now she’s back on the road and she’s known as the “Free Palestine car,” and everybody knows it now.
Ashrawi: People still recognize it, I’m sure.
Rayan: Oh yeah, they still recognize it. Maybe one day we’ll do a nice theme to bring it back. It’s just unfortunate that out here when you speak the truth, a lot of eyes are on you, and who knows what is the outcome after that. There’s a lot of profiling, too. But after that, to tell you the truth, brother, I never got bugged once while driving the car. And now we have our shop here in Edmonton, and we are, al-hamdulilah, successful with that and have been running for a while with that.
Back to group conversation
Bradford: Would you say there’s a lot of pushback as far as “Free Palestine,” where you are?
Rayan: When you speak the truth or speak something real, you’re gonna get knocked, you’re gonna have people that hate, and people are gonna start questioning. You hear people talking, running their mouth, talking bad about it. Unfortunately there is a lot of racism and profiling here, especially with the vehicle you have. People profile you, they label you as something; it’s too bad because a lot of people are ignorant and don’t know about the car culture. It’s like a sport for us.
Bradford: Right, it’s a hobby.
Rayan: It’s a passion, it’s a hobby. You gotta love doing it. Some people don’t know that, they think, “Oh, this guy has flashy rims, he’s a drug dealer.” Or “Oh, this guy’s a criminal.” Like, not all of us are like that. Most guys love this stuff because they like doing it.
Bradford: Yeah, dude, you could have a 9-5 and have the flashiest car and it could be all legal. That’s literally me; I’m a teacher. I teach ninth grade world geography. I teach my students about Palestine; it’s a whole week or so lesson that I give them on that. And they know my car. They know I have the “Black Lives Matter.”
Rayan: That’s sick! [laughs]
Bradford: I pull up to school, pop the trunk, kids going crazy, they love it! And I got homeboys that do all types of things that got slabs. I know plenty of dudes who get into other stuff who have slabs.
Rayan: Of course, that’s part of it, right? You get a mix of everybody.
Bradford: Exactly. It is what it is.
Rayan: Exactly.
Bradford: You still gotta respect it and you can’t profile.
Rayan: Nope.
Bradford: I was profiled when I had just plain old 22s.
Rayan: Of course.
Bradford: So [profiling] is just one of the things you gotta work around. I got pulled over in my slab; in the last five years, I’ve been pulled over five times. It’s just what comes with it. Everybody knows in Houston, if you’re gonna hop in the slab, you need to have your stuff together.
Rayan: You gotta keep it legit so you don’t get hit, right?
Bradford: Yep.
Rayan: And when they find that you’re legit, they get mad, right?
Bradford: Super Bowl weekend was probably the most lit weekend for me to have my slab. We riding around, me and my friends. It’s like me, my homeboy, his sister, and this other chick; we’re just riding in Midtown and I think my tags had just went outdated. So I pull up to the club, and the cops flash me because I’m noticeable. Everybody outside of the club can see me getting pulled over. The cop comes to the car and he’s just like, “Yeah, you already know what it is; you got any drugs in here? You got something in here?” And me and my friends laugh because we know we don’t have nothing. But I do have my gun, right? So he took my gun to his truck, ran the numbers, and then he told me to pop the trunk.
Ashrawi & Rayan: [laughs]
Bradford: Looking back, it’s really no reason why I had to pop the trunk.
Rayan: But you wanted to!
Bradford: Aw man, I almost lit up when he said it!
Rayan: [laughs] It’s like, “Okay!”
Bradford: So in my trunk, I have a switch to turn the lights on and off, so I [told the cop], “It’s gonna take me a second to open it.” So I hit the light and [trunk opening noise] you can hear everybody going crazy, “Oooohhh!!” His face is glowing purple, and I’m looking in the mirror like, “Yo, this shit is crazy.”
Rayan: [laughs] You should have told him, “This is my drug!”
Ashrawi: Ayyy.
Bradford: He was definitely embarrassed. Like the other cops started to surround the trunk. And he’s like, “Yeah, close the trunk. Close the trunk.” [laughs]
Rayan: Yeah you’re gonna always run into these situations, but you gotta keep doing it. Some people give up or say “That’s too flashy,” thinking it’ll bring too much heat on the car, but if you’re legit and you’re good, don’t worry, do your thing. That’s what I believe.
Bradford: We all grown, dude. I used to be in the Navy and I remember this other sailor was talking so crazy about cars. He was like, “Why do you all have sound systems in your car so loud?” and “Why do y’all have rims?”
Rayan: [chuckles]
Bradford: Asking all these gaslighting questions, and I wasn’t trying to get into because I knew where he was trying to go with it. But since then it just seems like I always catch that energy of like, “Why?” And it’s like, “Dude, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”
Rayan: We get that a lot up here too, man. Like, “Why?” When they ask me that, I look at them, and I go, “Because I can.”
Bradford: And our messages are so real! You actually bolder than me because I just got a slab and when I pop my trunk then you see the message. But you got it right then and there.
Rayan: Oh yeah, buddy, we did it in military font, too! So it was like serious.
Ashrawi & Bradford & Rayan: [laughs]
Rayan: You should have seen the people’s faces. Oh my god. I was like, “I’m gonna get shot, but that’s okay!”
Ashrawi & Bradford & Rayan: [laughs]
Bradford: You gon’ put your cause right there so you can’t even run from it. Yeah, that’s sick.
Rayan: Yeah man, you should have seen the questions, man. They’re like, “Wow, that’s pretty gutsy of you to do that.” And then I question them, like, “Why?”
Bradford: Damn! It’s just funny to see people’s reactions. It’s some real shit out here. “Black Lives Matter” should not scare you, dude, you should know this!
Rayan: Exactly! It’s knowledge.
Bradford: You can politicize it, but when you look at it from a human rights aspect, this is real.
Rayan: This is what’s going on, this is what it is.
Bradford: You definitely gotta respect it. If you don’t understand it, at least respect it.
Rayan: Exactly. But there’s only this small group of us that understand, eye-to-eye, about the car game, right? We can relate to it. But then the outsiders … it’s just all ignorance at the end of the day. A lot of people, they don’t know. It turns their heads, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s cool,” and then they start asking and you start telling them about it, and some people start respecting it after [that conversation.] So you gotta just give the right knowledge to the people, tell ‘em what it’s about, and then they’ll understand. And then you’re gonna have the people who hate no matter what. That’s just a category: “No Matter What.”
Bradford: Like I was telling Sama’an, I used to live in Maryland, so I have a lot of friends on social media from Maryland who’ve never seen these types of rims in their life because this is really a Houston thing. At first when I would post on social media, my friends from Maryland would be like, “What the hell is that?” But, over the years, now everybody’s posting the flame emojis.
Rayan: Honestly? When I first saw [the slabs], I liked them. It’s the way you fit [those rims] on there, too, and the car has to sit right, too. But, when I brought ‘em up here, you should have seen the people when they walk in the shop. They were like, “You’ll trip people on the sidewalk with those things.” They were like, “What are these for?” They didn’t know what it is. But you have to have Vogue tires. It’s like with the hundred spokes, you gotta have the white wall.
Bradford: Everybody can customize their stuff, but there are rules. If you don’t have Vogues on your swangers, dude, I don’t even know where your head was at. I can’t even imagine it.
Rayan: We’re actually going to be building a slab out here. It looks good, man, I like it. It’s a totally different category; you have lowriders, you got the donk scene, you got the muscle cars, you got the imports, and now this, the slab. It’s totally unique. It’s your expression of who you are and what you love. Especially the music, right? The sound system.
Bradford: That’s where the trunk comes into play. Like when you open the trunk, I know a lot of dudes got something about they neighborhood or RIP Somebody, just something to brag about or talk shit about. But they know me, they know I’m super chill, so I had to put some real shit. Something that was real to me.
Rayan: Oh yeah, that’s the first [Black Lives Matter trunk] I’ve seen. It’s a good one.
Bradford: Yeah I just really wanted to turn people’s heads, like, “What the fuck?”
Rayan: [laughs]
Bradford: I definitely got that attention with the trunk. That’s why I feel like I’ve seen yours on social media, when it said “Free Palestine.” To me it’s so real because it’s a real situation, but you’re putting it in a culture where it’s about flashiness and customization, but you really put that together with a real message.
Rayan: And honestly, you know, we did it because there was a time where our country was being … it was a bad time in the Gaza Strip. It was being bombed [by Israel] really bad. We decided, you know what? The car turns heads, right? Let’s let the car turn heads, and at the same time let’s send a message. Because no matter what people are gonna look at the car, and then “bang,” they read it, and then they start asking. So it did its job. It’s something unique that we’re doing. It’s totally different, because we’re incorporating something that’s happening within our cultures, and putting it into something we like. That’s why the cars are unique.
Bradford: Let me ask you this real quick: As far as what’s happening in Gaza, is that still happening? As far as like being occupied?
Rayan: Personally I was there recently and the Gaza area is completely separate from the West Bank. Gaza has their own government and their own system, the Palestinians do. That’s why Israel is really on them if anything happens, they attack them, and it’s a very closed off part of the region, very densely populated. It’s not like, everyday. It’s usually quiet most of the time, but then sometimes something happens — an [Israeli] missile or a kidnapping — then they send out the army. But their situation is bad because they’re closed off from everything. You can imagine, all those people in a very tight area, and then [Israel] is flying F-16s and bombing them. You don’t know where that’s coming from and you can’t run even.
Bradford: I wanna ask you this to get even better context. As far as the West Bank, would you consider it occupied by Israel?
Rayan: We do have a home there, and it is occupied, yes. They have more freedom to travel within their towns, but not all the time because [the Israeli army] will close things. For example, my town, Hebron City, there’s only one road entrance to get in, and it’s barricaded by the army. And there’s soldiers standing in Jeeps all the time, and if anything happens, they will close that gate. So the whole city, you can’t leave. Every region, the way they’re occupying it is that they have full controls. They can shut down all the cities, all the entrances, and then they can do what they want. So, yes, it is a hundred percent occupied. There are Israeli settlers illegally living in the West Bank.
Bradford: I heard about that. It’s like you’re enclosed in this area, but then the [Israelis] have picks on where they wanna live and do business.
Rayan: Exactly. So imagine you’re in a city, and on separate hills and mountains, there’s pockets of Israeli settlements and they’re all walled up and gated and secured so you have to have Israeli IDs to get in the gates. And they usually build on the hills, for security, so they’re taking all this land within our area, the West Bank, which is not considered the Israeli side. So every year they’re taking more and more land. Definitely a hundred percent occupied.
Bradford: I’m definitely glad I got to hear that from you so I can tell my students. I give my students a lot of resources. I show them the picture of how much land Palestinians had over the decades, and it’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Rayan: Yup.
Bradford: On YouTube there’s this video where these Israelis and Palestinians are having a discussion and arguing each other’s sides and what not, so I show ‘em to my students every time this lesson comes up, and then I give them a couple questions. One of the questions is like, “Who do you agree with?” And I shit you not, every single student says, “Palestinians.”
Rayan: Common sense, right?
Bradford: It’s as clear as day. I don’t give ‘em any kinda influence; I just step back.
Ashrawi: That’s so important that you do that.
Bradford: The kids see it without me pushing any narrative. I literally just show ‘em a video where it’s two groups talking with each other, disagreeing and debating. I show [my students] that, and everybody is on the Palestinians’ side. It’s just one of them things, man.
Rayan: It’s very, very, very clear what’s happening, and now you have social media. Everybody’s now getting more knowledge and understanding that this has been happening for years, and it’s not getting better. It’s come to a point now where something has to happen. Every year there’s an uprising, people go and protest, and then it quiets down. But now, it’s like, “Enough is enough.” Just like what’s happening in the U.S. with that brother [George Floyd] who got killed by the police officer, and all the events that happened prior; it’s oppression. We’re all going through that oppression. Because of who you are, your culture, your race, you’re being penalized for it and you’re being. It’s a very similar situation. Now people are stepping up; they’re starting to talk; they’re starting to speak truth. So, hopefully there is something that does change from it all.
Bradford: I’m definitely hoping for that. You know what it was? I remember why I was drawn in so much on the whole issue of Israel and Palestine. I was working at the mall at this shoe store, and this girl named Fatimah … we were just choppin’ it up, chillin’, and I don’t know what I said, and all of a sudden she was like, “You have no idea what’s going on in Palestine.” And so I was like, “What are you talking about?” So I went home and Googled; it was clear as day. I was like, “Yo, that’s fucked up.” You know what I mean? That was way before I was a teacher, so now I get to teach my students and tell them what’s going on. I like to tell them, “What happened there can happen here.” It’s the same thing. So I definitely respect your car and you putting it in their faces.
Rayan: Man, that’s appreciated, and likewise. It’s good to have this connection. We’re both kind of doing the same thing in different regions of the world, which is nice, and I support all types of movements that are against any types of oppression. Full respect. Hundred percent.
