Killer Mike is teaming up with Cadillac for their “Black Future” campaign, advertising the new Escalade V. Following the partnership, Mike sat down with HipHopDX to discuss why he felt starring in the new commercial was historically significant, and his feelings on the company’s complicated historical relationship to the Black community.
“Cadillac and my community have a long history,” he told the outlet. “There was a time where Cadillac, Chrysler and Lincoln in particular were in a war with who would be the big luxury automobile out of America. And Cadillac came out as a preeminent winner. And Buick, it was even a GM brand, but Buick was also a luxury. At one point, Cadillac’s independent dealerships had policies where they would not sell directly to Black customers. It created a whole secondary economy of people who would charge Black people to go buy the car for them and things.”
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From there, Mike called back to Nicholas Dreystadt, who served as the head of Cadillac’s service division in the 1930s and proposed ending discriminatory sales practices.
Mike explained: “But [Dreystadt] said, ‘This is silly. We could be selling more cars. This is desegregating; the prohibiting of people buying cars makes no sense.’ They got dealerships to cut that — not all — but the ones that did saw an exponential growth. Cadillac grew and grew past their competitors. Cadillac essentially was put in a higher place because Black people spent their dollars with them. And that’s a dope thing. Beyond that, Cadillac became a status symbol in American society and in Black American society.”
The Run The Jewels rapper also spoke about Cadillac’s role in the music industry, explaining that many artists have owned different variants of the car.
“Sometimes you would get a Cadillac when you signed a record deal back in the day. I think BB King owned Cadillacs. So Cadillac, in my place and in the Black community, has a very prominent place. I’m a car guy. Cars mean the world to me. So in the early 2000s, when Cadillac came out with the Cadillac Escalade, it set a new bar for an SUV.”
Check out Cadillac’s new commercial starring Killer Mike below. The video features an instrumental version of Mike’s forthcoming single “Run.”
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