"No matter how dark the days," she says, "we can sing songs of hope, songs of love."

Tucker was appalled by the lyrics they cited, words she cannot bring herself to say out loud -- words, she points out, that cannot be printed in a family newspaper. To her, the issue was simple: These lyrics are unacceptable.
Tucker makes frequent admiring references to the work of Frances Cress Welsing, a D.C. psychiatrist known for anti-Jewish views. Welsing maintains that, to the extent Jews are involved in the production of gangsta rap music, they are consciously or subconsciously acting out what happened to them during the Holocaust.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has asked Tucker to dissociate herself from Welsing's theories. "She seems to have a clear view and direction in terms of what she sees as right and wrong. And yet when it comes to the issue of seeing Jews as responsible for gangsta rap, it's like a blind spot," he says. "She's not able to divorce herself from this conspiratorial, antisemitic view . . . which in the end says, Blame the Jews.' "
Tucker strongly denies any bias. Pressed to clarify, she says: "There are forces that were present in Nazi Germany where some groups were interested only in the Aryan race and would use stereotypes with which to diminish a people. The Jewish communities have been our greatest allies. What happened to them is what is happening to us.

The tall, stylish woman who orchestrated the uplifting event was C. DeLores Tucker. And during the course of the morning, the dignitaries also applauded her own crusade: to clean up "gangsta rap." The emcee, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), recalled that struggle. "We were astonished to hear this filthy, lowdown music, and it was about us," she said. "And we looked to the right and looked to the left, and there was silence -- until one woman said something and did something."
And when singer Anita Baker stepped forward to present a $10,000 check to begin the C. DeLores Tucker defense fund, the room erupted in jubilation.
Leaving one question: Why does this woman need a defense fund?
C. DeLores Tucker, 68, entered the fight for civil rights more than 50 years ago and never left. She is a glamorous, well-to-do master of fund-raising -- for black causes, black mayors, Democrats, anyone whose needs matched her own need to make a difference. She says she's motivated by "a passionate love affair for God and my people," but she's ready to give it up. "I wish other people could do what I'm doing so I could step back and retire," she says.
Instead she finds herself in deeper than ever. Through the National Political Congress of Black Women, an organization she co-founded more than a decade ago, Tucker has waged her latest and perhaps loudest battle -- the one against gangsta rap, the one that has made her the target of two lawsuits.

Opponents say her attack on this music shows she's out of touch with young people and far removed from inner-city concerns. Tucker almost sputters her answer: "Look at this," she says. It's a letter she received from a young Lorton inmate who traced his crimes to gangsta rap: "They made it sound so good and look so real I would drink and smoke drugs like on the video," he wrote. "The guns, money, cars, drugs . . . became reality."And there are suggestions that Tucker has an anti-Semitic tendency to blame the record industry's flaws on Jewish executives. "It's greed-driven, drug-driven and race-driven," she says. "A Jewish child would never get a contract with that garbage. A white child would never get a contract. And it all contributes to a genocidal condition."