It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (11 page)

No movement is about beats and rhymes. Beats and rhymes are tools—tools that if held the right way can help articulate the world, a new world, in which we want to live. These tools are important to the post-hip-hop generation; however, more important are the ideas from the people themselves, not the ideas from an elite supposed to represent us. From the streets. From the schools. From you, from me. “People do not always need poets and playwrights to state their case,” declared Lorraine Hansberry, a Black playwright whose works included
A Raisin in the Sun
and
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
. “We all cry for freedom.” And because we all cry freedom, we must all, then, as Hansberry continues, concern ourselves

But the question I anticipated never came.

Instead, students articulated the ideas that we should embrace hip hop’s positive aspects, but it must be bigger than hip hop—bigger than any one medium and bigger than us. They made clear that rather than committing ourselves to any one person or medium, it’s wiser to commit ourselves to the promise and potential of tomorrow, employing hip hop and other forms at the service of change.

Over the course of our semester, it was revealed that all of the sociopolitical components needed for a new movement were in place and that it was up to us to solder them together. It was revealed that the struggle today was the struggle of yesterday and tomorrow; revealed that today is what today is because of what yesterday was; revealed that to change our societies, we must make serious efforts in understanding how our society works—and why it doesn’t work for so many. It was revealed that it’s going to take all of us, mothers, daughters, sons, fathers, scientists, rappers, painters, filmmakers, nutritionists, entrepreneurs, teachers, et cetera, each one of us, loving each other, which is only possible by loving ourselves, affirming our own self-worth, and realizing that we are all connected. It was revealed that I am because you are. It was revealed that all revolutions are birthed from love and that revolution, in this world, as Assata Shakur, ex-political prisoner and aunt of Tupac, tells us from Cuba, “means changing from the inhumane to the humane. It means everybody has a right to live, to eat, to have a house, an education, to be free from torture, from repression.”

On an individual level, we realized that the change we want
doesn’t end with us, but rather begins there. Indeed, the best we can do for ourselves is the best we can do for others. Our obligation as human beings, both to ourselves and our fellow sisters and brothers, is to resist and challenge all forces that seek to dominate, oppress, repress, silence, and destroy their spirits. When the weeds of doubt creep into our minds and tell us that we are too small, as individuals, to make a difference, let us remember what the Ghanaian proverb says: Try sleeping in a small room with a mosquito.

Sankofa, symbolized by a mighty
and mythic bird that soars forward while looking backward, is an Akan concept that means “go back to your roots in order to move forward.” That said, if we want to move forward, it is essential that we understand where we came from. The following time line highlights
some
of the key events—cultural, economic, political, and musical; good, bad, and ugly—that birthed, shaped, and molded hip hop into what we see, hear, and feel (or don’t feel) today.

Unlike other hip-hop time lines that focus exclusively on events related to the four elements of hip hop (emceeing, DJing, graffiti, and breakdancing), this time line aims to spray-paint a much larger representation of hip hop in a global context. In some senses, this time line is a loop if one considers, for example, it begins with the Watts
rebellion and ends with the spark that ignited the L.A. rebellions. It begins with the Vietnam War and ends with the Gulf War. “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it,” proclaimed Marcus Garvey. To that effect, this time line should also serve as a deterrent for the post-hip-hop generation.

Ella Baker, an African-American human rights activist who fought against Jim Crow, rallied against apartheid in South Africa, was a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement, and witnessed the birth of hip hop, once said, “Give light and the people will find their own way.” The events listed in this time line—from Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965 to Ice Cube’s St. Ides commercial in 1991—function as one of the “lights” that can help our generation part the darkness of our current times.

Malcolm X (Ei-Hajj Malik Ei-Shabazz)
, a Black Muslim minister, national spokesman for the Nation of Islam and founder of the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is assassinated while delivering a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on the first day of National Brother Week. Malcolm, like Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, quickly becomes an international symbol of liberation for oppressed people.

President Lyndon Johnson, delivering a speech at Howard University, frames the concept behind affirmative action, asserting that existing civil rights laws alone will not level the playing field. He pronounces:

African-Americans lead a race rebellion in Watts sparked by the brutal arrests of Marquette, Ronald, and Rena Frye. Their arrests served as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back in a Watts community where police brutality, including rape of Black women, use of racial epithets, and excessive force, was rampant. The rebellion, which lasts from August 11 to August 17, results in thirty-five deaths, more than eight hundred injured, and over $35 million in property damage. This rebellion occurs in the midst of a period of rebellions, beginning in Rochester, Philadelphia, and New York City in 1964, and continuing throughout the decade.

On March 8, thirty-five hundred United States Marines are dispatched to South Vietnam, marking the beginning of the American ground war in Vietnam. U.S. public opinion supports the deployment; however, their support is based on the premise that Vietnam is part of a global struggle against communism. Ho Chi Minh, president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, warns that if the Americans “want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea.”

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense
is founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California. The group was founded on the principles of its Ten Point Program, a document that called for “Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice, and Peace,” as well as exemption from military service that would utilize African-Americans to “fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America.”

A race rebellion erupts in the predominantly Black community of Hough in Cleveland, Ohio, spanning a six-night period from July 18 to July 23. The rebellion is sparked when a white store owner told Black patrons that “Blacks are not served here.” By the end of the rebellions, four people will be killed and thirty critically injured.

James Brown, often dubbed the “Godfather of Soul” and the hardest working man in show business, wins the Grammy for best R&B recording for “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” boosting his international popularity. His call-and-response, dancing, and rhythmic style would be influential to hip hop a decade later.

On September 27, the second race rebellion of the year breaks out in San Francisco’s Hunters Point, a Black neighborhood, when a white police officer shoots and kills a sixteen-year-old Black as he flees the scene of a stolen car.

Maulana Karenga, who founded the Black nationalist US Organization
a year earlier, creates the African-American cultural holiday Kwanzaa (celebrated from December 26 to January 1). The first Kwanzaa ceremony is celebrated by members of the US Organization in Los Angeles. The holiday would grow to become an international, pan-African holiday with over 18 million celebrants.

Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture
, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), popularizes the phrase “Black Power” in a speech delivered to an audience of sixty-five hundred at Garfield High School in Seattle. He defined “Black Power” as “the coming together of black people to fight for their liberation by any means necessary.” The concept was immediately endorsed by SNCC and Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), but not the NAACP.

Kool DJ Herc, considered by many to be the father of hip hop and the originator of breakbeat DJing, moves from Jamaica to the Bronx where he, together with Grandmaster Flash, would pioneer hip hop. In a 1989 interview with hip-hop historian Davey D, Herc said, “Hip hop, the whole chemistry of that came from Nigeria, Africa.”

Thurgood Marshall, civil rights activist and graduate of the historically Black Lincoln University and Howard University Law School, is nominated for appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States. On August 30, the Senate confirms his appointment, making Marshall the first African-American to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court.

The summer of 1967 is a tumultuous period in American race
relations. Racial confrontations escalate into full-scale race rebellions in Newark, New York City, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit.

Martin Luther King Jr., the most famous
and vocal leader of the Civil Rights Movement, is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4 while on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Prior to his assassination, King had become a harsh critic of the Vietnam War, U.S. foreign policy, and capitalism. In the following week, rebellions occur in more than sixty cities throughout the U.S.

The FBI launches COINTELPRO, a covert counterintelligence program aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. With the Black Panther Party as a primary target, the founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders. The methods of COINTELPRO included infiltration, psychological warfare, harassment through the legal system, and extralegal violence including murder and assassination.