Arizona" had a music video. It opens with a white Arizona politician telling the press that Martin Luther King Day will never be observed in the state. Guest artist Sister Souljah then declares that paramilitary forces are being sent to Arizona so that it will be observed. Footage of the paramilitary committing assassinations is interspersed with black-and-white recreations of King and the Civil Rights Movement receiving violent abuse. The video was directed by Eric Meza, who had previous credits with N.W.A. The video was criticized by some scholars of King, and older black activists, for its violent scenes. His widow Coretta Scott King condemned it. The video was removed from MTV's regular rotation. According to Rybacki and Rybacki, the synthesis in the video between the violence towards King and the Civil Rights Movement, and the fictional retaliatory violence by black Americans against Arizona politicians, creates a verbally violent "thromise" – separate from both King's peaceful activism and violent resistance. Chuck D said on the day of its MTV premiere that the video is a fantasy to show white viewers the importance of a public holiday honoring a black leader; he also said that in the modern era King would be a more radical "Martin Luther King Farrakhan". Public Enemy spokesman Harry Allen concurred that King would have radicalised if he survived being shot: "we wonder what he would have stood for, if he had been able to stand after that bullet ripped violently through his neck. Being assassinated, it’s been said, will often change your political viewpoint". Chuck D reiterated in 2011 that he did not see a problem with a violent video to honor a non-violent activist: "I’m for peace, but I can make a visual statement about how I feel about what happened. The actuality is that I shot a video in rebuttal to something that happened in real life". Reception and legacy A 2020 list in the Phoenix New Times named it among the 27 best songs about Metro Phoenix, calling it "harshest critique of Arizona, and with good measure". In February 2014, around the time of controversial LGBT-related Arizona SB 1062, Christopher Federico of The Washington Post chose the song for "The week in one song". Chuck D and academic Gaye Theresa Johnson co-authored a 2010 article for The Huffington Post in which they said that the anti-black racism decried in the song still existed in