9 Listening to music in cars while black: Popular music, automobility, and the murder of Jordan Davis Amanda Nell Edgar On November 23, 2012, four teenagers pulled into a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, to buy some gum and a pack of cigarettes. Only three would live to see the next day. Te fourth, seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis, was gunned down while the car’s hip-hop soundtrack played in the background. Te trial’s collective testimonies reveal that Davis and his friends were listening to music in his friends’ SUV while they waited for the driver to return from making the purchase. Michael Dunn pulled in next to the vehicle and asked the teenagers to turn their music down. Tough the teenagers initially complied with Dunn’s request, a verbal disagreement ensued, and Dunn responded by drawing his gun, fring ten shots into the vehicle. Davis was hit in the legs, liver, lungs, and aorta; he did not survive the shooting. Dunn claimed the shooting was in self- defence, arguing that he felt threatened by the teenagers, but in 2014, a jury rejected this argument. Tey convicted Dunn of frst-degree murder and several counts of attempted murder and sentenced to life without parole (Ohlheiser, 2014). Many news outlets (for example, see Reed, 2014; Scherer, 2016) referred to the shooting as ‘the “loud music” murder,’ naming the music as sufcient provocation for Dunn to justify taking Davis’s life. Davis’s murder highlights and complicates the disproportionate dangers African Americans, and particularly black male teenagers, face on the open road. Te term ‘driving while black’ has been used to refect a national conversation about the disproportionate likelihood for black US Americans to be pulled over by police as compared with their white peers; African Americans are also more likely to be shot and killed by police during the interaction (Sides, 2018; Gabriel, Sagara, and, Grochowski Jones, 2014). Tis case, however, ofers an unusual Popular Music and Automobiles, edited by Mark Duffett, and Beate Peter, Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ohiostate-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5987154. Created from ohiostate-ebooks on 2020-02-13 11:30:22. Copyright © 2020. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. All rights reserved.