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(09/12/07 2:48am)
Relatives of Sept. 11 victims bowed their heads in silence Tuesday to mark the moments exactly six years earlier when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.\nThe dreary skies created a grim backdrop, and a sharp contrast to the clear blue of that morning in 2001.\n“That day we felt isolated, but not for long and not from each other,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said as the first ceremony began. “Six years have passed, and our place is still by your side.”\nConstruction equipment now fills the vast city block where the World Trade Center once stood. The work under way for four new towers forced the ceremony’s move away from the twin towers’ footprints and into a nearby park for the first time.\nAs people clutched framed photos of their lost loved ones, Kathleen Mullen, whose niece Kathleen Casey died in the attacks, said the park was close enough.\n“Just so long as we continue to do something special every year, so you don’t wake up and say, ‘Oh, it’s 9/11,” she said.\nOn this anniversary, presidential politics and the health of ground zero workers loomed, perhaps more than on any other.\nThe firefighters and first responders who helped rescue thousands that day in 2001 and later recovered the dead read the victims’ names. Many of those rescuers are now ill with respiratory problems and cancers, and they blame the illnesses on exposure to the fallen towers’ toxic dust.\nFor the first time, the name of a victim who survived the towers’ collapse but died five months later of lung disease was added to the official roll.\nFelicia Dunn-Jones, an attorney, was working a block from the World Trade Center. She became the 2,974th victim linked to the four crashes of the hijacked airliners in New York, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pa., where federal investigators say the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 fought the hijackers on the rallying cry “Let’s roll!”\nA memorial honoring Flight 93’s 40 passengers and crew began at 9:45 a.m., shortly before the time the airliner nosedived into the empty field.\n“As American citizens, we’re all looking at our heroes,” said Kay Roy, whose sister Colleen Fraser, of Elizabeth, N.J., died when the plane went down.\nHomeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff also spoke to the mourners, telling them: “You have my promise that we will continue to work every single day to protect the people of this country, all in the name of those who perished heroically on Flight 93.”\nIn New York, drums and bagpipes played as an American flag saved from the collapse was carried toward a stage.\nFirefighters shared the platform with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who many victims’ families and firefighters had said shouldn’t speak at the service to keep from politicizing it.\nGiuliani has made his performance after the 2001 terrorist attacks the cornerstone of his presidential campaign, but the Republican has said his desire to be there Tuesday was entirely personal.\n“It was a day with no answers, but with an unending line of people who came forward to help one another,” he told those gathered.
(04/30/07 4:00am)
NEW YORK – It started with a clogged dust mask that fell onto the desk of Jan Ramirez on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. A friend had used the paper mask to breathe while fleeing downtown Manhattan as the air was filled with grit and smoke from the World Trade Center towers.\n“That dust mask is going to be an important artifact some day,” Ramirez recalled the friend telling her.\nToday, the mask has become a museum piece, one small part of the largest records trove ever assembled to document a single event.\nMillions of pieces of paper documenting government investigations, BlackBerry messages written by survivors as they fled, children’s finger-paintings and family photographs are also part of the archive, preserved in many different places including state offices, museums and on the Internet.\nSaving all things Sept. 11 was a mission embraced from the time of the attacks by professional archivists and grass-roots collectors.\n“Pearl Harbor, there are only so many pictures of,” said Nancy Shader, regional administrator in New York for the National Archives. “This, as we know, was captured in so many ways.”\nArchivists immediately set out to compile the most complete picture ever of one historic event, and they are already planning for decades ahead. They shared data with museum officials and individual collectors at a symposium last month.\n“Our goal is to make sure we all know who’s got what stuff,” said Kathleen Roe, a New York state archivist who is storing more than 1,000 boxes of government records – such as the 9/11 Commission report – in boxes in Albany.\nRoe said she and other major archivists met in New York two weeks after the terrorist attack to ensure that no piece of paper was discarded. \nMary Fetchet saved a 43-second telephone message left on the morning of the attacks by her son, Brad, who later died in the south tower. Brad Fetchet, 24, called his mother after the first hijacked airliner struck but before the second plane crashed into his building.\n“We’re fine, we’re in World Trade Center Two. I’m obviously alive and well over here, but obviously a pretty scary experience,” Fetchet told his mother.\nMary Fetchet, founding director of the Voices of September 11th family group, says: “I want people 100 years from now to be able to listen to that message.”\nThe organization, with several thousand members, is dispensing advice to family members on preserving audio recordings, videotapes and photographs of their loved ones, as well as important papers, including condolence letters from the president.\nThe group is developing an Internet archive she calls a “living memorial” that will eventually hold commemorative information about all the 2,973 victims, as well as survivors and rescuers. So far, it has Web pages that pay tribute to about 300 victims.\nTom Scheinfeldt, a history professor at George Mason University, is one of the coordinators of the September 11 Digital Archive, which stores 150,000 items including paper, audio and photographs relating to the attacks.\nIncluded in that archive are e-mails from survivors who typed as they fled the towers, and the heart-rate monitor readout of a jogger who was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when he saw one plane crash into the north tower, causing his heart rate to spike.\nMichael Ragsdale, a Columbia University senior technician, roamed the city for more than a year collecting thousands of pages of “ephemera” such as fliers advertising anti-terrorism rallies, blood drives and other public announcements.\n“I stayed away from the grief,” he said. “I stayed away from the violence on purpose.”\nRamirez – who was at the New-York Historical Society when she received her friend’s dust mask and now is the curator of the planned Sept. 11 museum – said the collapse of the twin towers may have inspired people to save even the smallest remnants of that day.\n“There’s a preciousness that comes attached to anything left concrete from this event,” she said. “I think people seem to feel that it was sort of almost this sacred stewardship they have taken on in holding this material.”
(10/20/05 3:34am)
NEW YORK -- Visitors to the Sept. 11 memorial museum could relive the 2001 terrorist attacks in an "immersive" area that surrounds them with pictures of the falling towers, the sounds of police sirens and the last words of some of those who died at the World Trade Center.\nThe first piece of steel to be hit by a hijacked jet -- as well as lottery tickets and keys pulled from Ground Zero, and a contemplative area where visitors can leave personal messages -- are among other proposed exhibits for the museum.\nThe plans, presented in public workshops over the past month, offer the first glimpse of an institution that is likely to become one of the country's most visited museums. The ideas are also likely to prompt sensitive questions of how to tell the story of Sept. 11.\nRecently, a proposed freedom museum was removed from the space that had been reserved for it at Ground Zero, after the World Trade Center families and others bitterly complained that the museum could foster inappropriate debate about Sept. 11 at the site of the attacks.\nThe memorial museum would be built around the twin towers' footprints and a slurry wall that are the last remnants of the trade center. Visitors would view exhibits while descending to the footprints 70 feet below street level, and then walk up again.\n"The idea is to move people from devastation to renewal to recovery," said museum planner Jeff Howard.\nHoward, hired to develop exhibits by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency overseeing the rebuilding, said the museum would have an "iconic artifact" such as a large piece of steel from the trade center near the entrance. Family members who want to privately mourn their loved ones will be able to board an elevator directly to a separate room where victims' unidentified remains will be encased.\nOne exhibit would focus on a fact-based account of the attack in New York, as well as the crashes of hijacked jets into the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania, field. The other, "immersive" experience would try to make visitors feel as if they were in the towers, with the sounds of sirens and even voicemail messages left on Sept. 11 by those who died. The exhibit "is not necessarily appropriate for children," Howard said.\n"We are very, very concerned about revisionist history," said Charles Wolf, whose wife died at the trade center. "While we that lived through it are there, we want this thing nailed down in the next five years."\nWolf said he does not know yet whether he would like to go through the you-are-there exhibit. But he said it is important that the museum accurately depict the attacks.\n"You can't, in any way, shape or form, sugarcoat any of it," said Lee Ielpi, who lost his firefighter son at the trade center. "Reality is, probably 99.9 percent of the country didn't lose anybody there, except they lost a little piece of America, and they need to understand what happened that day."\nA separate room would allow visitors to "contribute one's own experience and impression" by leaving written messages or drawings about Sept. 11, Howard said.
(09/30/05 4:14am)
NEW YORK -- Bowing to pressure from furious Sept. 11 families, Gov. George Pataki on Wednesday removed a proposed freedom museum from the space reserved for it at Ground Zero, saying the project had aroused "too much opposition, too much controversy."\nHe left open the possibility that a new spot at the former World Trade Center site could be found for the museum.\nThe decision followed months of acrimony over the International Freedom Center, with Sept. 11 families and politicians saying the museum would overshadow and take space from a separate memorial devoted to the 2,749 victims of the World Trade Center attacks and would dishonor them by fostering debate about the attacks and other world events.\n"We must move forward with our first priority: the creation of an inspiring memorial to pay tribute to our lost loved ones and tell their stories to the world," Pataki said in a statement.\nPataki said the Freedom Center cannot be part of a cultural building located near the proposed trade center memorial. But he left open the possibility that the center could find a home elsewhere on the 16-acre site.\nPataki said he would direct the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. -- the agency he created to rebuild the site -- to explore other locations for the center.\nA campaign by some Sept. 11 families to oust the museum from space reserved for it at Ground Zero had grown in recent months to include four police and fire unions, an online petition with more than 40,000 signatures and several politicians including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.\n"Goodbye and good riddance," said Rep. Vito Fossella, one of three congressmen who had threatened hearings on federal funding if the museum stayed where it was. "The IFC will not stand on the hallowed grounds of the World Trade Center site."\nIn addition to the terrorist attacks, the Freedom Center planned exhibits on such topics as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil rights movement, the Declaration of Independence and the South African constitution.\nThe museum would also include a section on the world's response to Sept. 11 and a film that links the victims' backgrounds to periods in history.\nSome families have opposed the museum as much for its location as its content; they said it would sit in a prominent part of Ground Zero that would obscure the memorial museum.
(09/09/05 4:56am)
NEW YORK -- The tourists from California peered through the slats of a metal fence surrounding the World Trade Center site, looking down into the nearly empty 16 acres for a sign of what happened here on Sept. 11.\nFour years after terrorists hijacked jetliners that destroyed the twin towers, Steve and Marta Pilling thought they would find a memorial, something more than the names of the 2,749 victims on panels attached to the fence.\n"This reminds me more of a construction site," not the Ground Zero etched in Americans' consciousness, said Steve Pilling of Murrietta, Calif.\nThe fact that the downtown Manhattan site is both -- a lucrative piece of real estate with grand plans for skyscrapers and museums, and the place where the nation's worst terror attack must be remembered -- has driven a rebuilding process fraught with delicate negotiations and often competing passions of politicians, developers, architects and family members.\n"It's the most emotionally charged building project in the world," said Robert Yaro, head of the Regional Plan Association advocacy group in New York.\nCommon ground at Ground Zero has been hard to find: Ambitious, thoughtful plans for everything from a 1,776-foot tower to a performing arts complex are on paper, but construction on most buildings has yet to begin.\nMonday, one day after a ceremony marking the fourth anniversary of the attacks, work is starting on one major project: a $2.2 billion transit hub that replaces a temporary station that opened in 2003.\nLeaders of the process say a remarkable amount has been accomplished, and that rebuilding a site like this is unprecedented.\n"The public has to understand, it's not just build some buildings," said Daniel Libeskind, the architect who created a master plan for the entire site. "I don't think there has ever been such a project with such urgency and such speed, given the complexity."\nOthers say the plans are unfocused and prioritize rebuilding office space with a tallest-in-the-world skyscraper over a memorial and more pressing community needs.\n"There's no demand whatsoever for commercial space" in the area, said Fred Siegel, a history professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, who said rebuilders have blown an opportunity "to rethink lower Manhattan in toto."\n"The memorial itself has been an afterthought," said Bill Doyle, whose son, Joseph, died at the trade center. "It's astounding to me that the only thing they have up there after four years are a couple of posters."\nThe Freedom Tower has suffered more setbacks and missed deadlines than other plans for the space, which include four more office towers, a memorial surrounded by a grove of oak trees, a performing arts center and separate museums devoted to Sept. 11 and to freedom.\nThis May, city police forced rebuilding officials to order a third design of the building after police expressed concerns it was not secure enough to withstand a potential terrorist attack. After breaking ground July 4, 2004, with a 20-ton inscribed granite cornerstone at the site, developers now say that cornerstone will have to be moved several feet to be part of the redesigned Freedom Tower.\nDevelopment officials complained that police came forward at the last minute, while police said they had spoken up for months. The tower, which had first been scheduled to be "topped off" -- with its steel structure in place -- by 2006, is now set to open in 2010 or 2011.\nLarry Silverstein, the private developer who leased the trade center and is supervising building of the Freedom Tower, called the setback "a most unfortunate set of circumstances, a lack of coordination between various governmental entities." But he said the new design by architect David Childs, is "elegant, exquisite," and called the slender tower topped by a center spire an improvement over the last design, a twisting, glass and steel structure meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty.\nA second groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower -- and a groundbreaking on the memorial, "Reflecting Absence" -- will occur within six months, Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have announced.\nThe governor and then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani started the redevelopment process shortly after the attacks by creating the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. But it is Pataki who has taken more of a leadership role, calling downtown Manhattan's resurgence a top priority. He has also been assigned blame more often for the problems.\n"He sort of farmed this out and he didn't stay on top of it," said Siegel.\nPataki responded to the Freedom Tower redesign by appointing his chief of staff, John Cahill, in May to become the site's rebuilding czar. Though faced with some "uncertainty" by major players at first, he said he now sees "an awful lot of momentum."\nCahill started weekly conferences, which he said has helped better coordinate the separate developers, architects and agencies with stakes in the project.\nSilverstein's company is building office space. The site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is overseeing the transit hub. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and a separate, nonprofit foundation oversee building of the memorial and a performing arts complex for two theater companies, in addition to a memorial museum and a cultural center. A museum showcasing drawings and the International Freedom Center, which describes itself as a museum that would put Sept. 11 into a global context, are planned for the latter.\nIt is the cultural and memorial space that have provoked the most vehement, emotional responses of some family members of Sept. 11 victims.\nLeaders of several family groups recently started a "Take Back the Memorial" campaign, saying that including any museums other than one memorializing Sept. 11 is inappropriate on the site and overshadows the memorial. Some take offense at a design that places the memorial museum below ground.\n"I will never go underground to remember my Marine firefighter brother," said Rosaleen Tallon, whose brother, firefighter Sean Tallon, was killed at the trade center. "We are not doing the right thing at this sacred site."\nCahill and others have said that family members had requested underground access to the bedrock, the last remaining parts of the trade center's foundation and the place where many victims' remains were found.\nThere are no plans to move the memorial museum, but the status of the other two museums chosen for the site more than a year ago is in jeopardy. The Drawing Center is looking for a new home, and the Freedom Center will need to satisfy rebuilding officials with more details about its content before it can ensure its spot.\nLibeskind, whose master plan made room for culture at the site, has said he wanted to celebrate life while commemorating loss -- which has become one of Ground Zero's greatest challenges.\n"The tension here has always been between this site as a memorial to the people who died there on the one hand, and as a living, functioning part of the city on the other," said Yaro. "This clearly has to do both, and it's really hard to do both"
(11/20/03 5:32am)
NEW YORK -- The eight designs unveiled Wednesday as finalists for a World Trade Center memorial remember the dead with quiet gardens, reflecting pools, inscribed names and lights for lost lives.\nAll eight designs, selected from a pool of 5,200, list the names of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, as well as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The names are inscribed on granite walls, glass panels and stone columns, some alphabetically and others according to where the individuals died.\n"We have sought designs that represent the heights of imagination while incorporating aesthetic grace and spiritual strength," the jury that chose the finalists said in a statement.\nThe finalists, whose identities were made public for the first time Wednesday, range from local artists to international architects. The eight proposals were picked by a 13-member jury, which will choose the winning design by the end of the year.\nJohn Whitehead, chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is overseeing the rebuilding of the site, praised the organic connections shared by all the entries.\n"Their designs draw upon the elements of light, water, earth and life itself," Whitehead said at a news conference where the proposals were unveiled.\nAll of the designs preserve the huge wall that once formed the trade center basement, the only surviving remnant of the original complex.\nThe eight proposals, accompanied by videotaped interviews of finalists talking about their designs, were displayed at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, near where the towers stood.\nWhitehead said the jury "identified the best work of highly creative individuals and teams from around the globe."\nFamily members of those who died were shown the designs before the unveiling and said they mostly approved of the plans.\n"I thought they captured the essence of what the memorial should be," said Christine Huhn-Graifman, who lost her husband in the attack.\nOne design proposes an open air structure with cathedral-like vaults and a glass walkway overhead where thousands of lights illuminate engraved names of the victims. It groups the rescuers' names separately in a ribbon that loops through the other names.\nAnother suggests votive lights suspended over a reflecting pool, with each light representing a victim.\nOne design includes a park sloping from street level to 30 feet below, a garden where the south tower stood, and a structure where the north tower stood with a staircase waterfall.\nThe proposals include private areas for relatives of the victims and a tomb for unidentified remains of people killed when the twin towers were hit by hijacked planes and collapsed. One design envisions a blue light projected upward from the place where the unidentified remains are entombed.\nThe remains of about 60 percent of the 2,752 people killed in the twin towers attack have been identified.\nBut some said the plans did not provide enough access to the bedrock level of the trade center site. As it stands now, the redevelopment plan preserves the approximate circumference of the towers, but construction would encroach on the twin towers' footprints at bedrock level.
(08/11/03 1:03am)
NEW YORK -- Those who have seen Mel Gibson's film about the final hours of Jesus Christ have called it beautiful, magical, a great and important work.\nThose who fear "The Passion" could fuel anti-Semitism, however, until now hadn't been allowed to see the film. Seven months before its release, this extraordinary vanity project is stirring passions over Gibson's exclusionary screenings and the potential for a negative depiction of Jews.\nOn Friday it was shown in Houston to an audience that included for the first time an official from the Anti-Defamation League, which fights anti-Semitism. Audience members signed confidentiality agreements before attending the screening.\n"We still have grave concerns," Rabbi Eugene Korn, director of the ADL's Office of Interfaith Affairs in New York, told the Houston Chronicle in Saturday's editions.\nNot just Jews are concerned -- the film was first questioned by a nine-member panel that included Christians. Gibson is a member of an ultraconservative Catholic movement which rejects the Vatican's authority over the Catholic church.\nGibson has said the film is faithful to the account of the crucifixion in the four Gospels and is meant "to inspire, not offend."\nThe star of the blockbuster "Lethal Weapon" movies and Oscar-winning director of "Braveheart" has spent nearly $30 million of his own money to produce, co-write and direct "The Passion," starring Jim Caviezel as Jesus and Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene. Filmed entirely in the languages of Aramaic and Latin, it has yet to secure a distributor.\nIn recent weeks, the actor-director had been building support with invitation-only screenings for film industry insiders, conservative commentators, evangelical Christians and sympathetic Jews.\nTrailers of the two-hour movie have turned up on some Web sites. A four and one-half minute preview was shown Friday for thousands of people attending a Christian festival at Anaheim, Calif.\nTed Haggard, president of the National Evangelical Association, saw a screening in late June with about 30 evangelical scholars. The scholars are very strict about adherence to scripture, so Gibson "had no assurances that we would be friendly toward that movie."\nBut Haggard said he loved it. "I thought it was the most authentic portrayal I've ever seen," he said.\nCal Thomas, a conservative syndicated columnist, called the film "the most beautiful, accurate, disturbing, realistic and bloody depiction of this well-known story that has ever been filmed."\nInternet personality Matt Drudge told MSNBC: "It depicts a clash between Jesus and those who crucified him and speaking as a Jew, I thought it was a magical film that showed the perils of life on earth."\nBut critics of "The Passion" -- who have not seen the film -- worry that the popular Hollywood superstar will attract millions to see a violent, bloody recounting of the crucifixion that portrays Jews as a frenzied mob eager to watch Jesus die.\n"For too many years, Christians have accused Jews of being Christ-killers and used that charge to rationalize violence," said Sister Mary C. Boys, a Catholic professor at the Union Theological Seminary who read an early draft of the script. "This is our fear."\nBoys and others on a committee of nine Christian and Jewish scholars that reviewed the script said Gibson may have been skewing public opinion by screening the film primarily for conservatives.\nPaul Lauer, marketing director for Gibson's Icon Productions company, said the committee obtained a stolen, outdated script that is completely different from the rough cut of the film being screened. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an apology this spring after learning a staff member had obtained a draft, and the script was returned.\nBoys said an Icon employee provided an intermediary with the script.\nWhile Gibson said "The Passion" will be the most authentic account ever of the crucifixion, Boys said the script she read presented the Jews as more culpable for Christ's death than the Romans who executed him.\nIt only recounts the last 12 hours of Christ's life, she said, and therefore lacks the context to explain the Jews' portrayal. "It seems to me that the film looked on Jews as antagonists, Jesus as this perfect victim," she said.\nBoys and others said they have received anti-Semitic hate mail after being quoted in news reports criticizing "The Passion." Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said the center has received several dozen letters related to his criticism of the film.\nGibson said in a June statement that he and his film are not anti-Semitic. "My intention in bringing it to the screen is to create a lasting work of art and engender serious thought among audiences of diverse faith backgrounds (or none) who have varying familiarity with this story."\nBut what is Gibson's version of the story? His traditionalist religion rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which in 1965 rejected the notion that Jews were collectively responsible for killing Jesus. The actor is building a traditionalist church in Malibu, Calif., for about 70 members, and intends to hold Sunday services there in Latin.\nHis father, Hutton Gibson, was quoted in a New York Times Magazine article in March as denying the Holocaust occurred.\nMeanwhile, film industry observers are wondering whether this film can find an audience.\nLauer said the film has not sought a distributor, but that at least three major studios are interested. Also, although the recent screenings have included English subtitles, Icon hasn't decided whether to include them in a major release.\n"I don't know that he will be able to find a studio that will distribute this," said Kim Masters, a film columnist for Esquire magazine.\nMasters said industry people who have seen the film respect its quality, but said it is disturbingly graphic.\n"It's not a family film, from what I understand," she said. "It's a really difficult film"
(11/01/02 5:09am)
NEW YORK -- Jam Master Jay, a founding member of the pioneering rap trio Run DMC, was shot and killed at his recording studio near the New York neighborhood where he grew up, police said. \nTwo men were buzzed into the second-floor studio shortly before shots were fired inside its lounge at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, police said. As of early Thursday, police had made no arrests. \nThe 37-year-old disc jockey, whose real name was Jason Mizell, was shot once in the head in the studio's lounge and died at the scene, said Detective Robert Price, a police spokesman. \nUrieco Rincon, 25, who was not a member of Run DMC, was shot in the leg, police said. About five other people in the studio at the time were not hurt. \n"Rest In Peace Jam Master," Run DMC's official Web site (http://thadweb.com/rundmc) read early Thursday, underneath a picture of Mizell. \nMizell served as the platinum-selling group's disc jockey, providing background for singers Joseph Simmons, better known as Run, and Darryl McDaniels, better known as DMC. \nThe group is widely credited with helping bring hip-hop into music's mainstream, including the group's smash collaboration with Aerosmith on the 1980s standard "Walk This Way" and hits like "My Adidas" and "It's Tricky." \n"We always knew rap was for everyone," Mizell said in a 2001 interview with MTV. "Anyone could rap over all kinds of music." \nMizell is the latest in a line of hip-hop artists to fall victim to violence. Rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur were murdered within seven months of each other in 1996 and 1997 -- crimes that some believe were the result of an East Coast-West Coast rap war. \nBut Run DMC and their songs were never about violence. The group promoted education and unity.