It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (17 page)

Clarence Avant, music industry veteran and former president of
Motown, crystallizes this point and reinforces the notion that we must take seriously what scholar Harold Cruise called a “community point of view”:

Today that wrong attitude can and must be
righted
. “The Black economy is a myth only because a truly viable Black economy does not exist,” writes Cruise.

Chuck D warned, “If we don’t get up on the good foot—I’m talking to my people—then we’re going to be behind the eight-ball again…. White businesses have built themselves up and blacks are still working for the white businesses.” When Nas rhymes “Hip-hop been dead, we the reason it died / Wasn’t Sylvia’s fault or ’cause MC’s skills are lost / It’s ’cause we can’t see ourselves as the boss,” he follows up with an even more astute analysis of Black pathology:

Despite criticism of white, corporate, or Jewish influence in hip hop, the Jewish model, with respect to Hollywood, is one African-Americans
can learn a great deal from. As Neal Gabler writes in
An Empire of Their Own:

Our history is filled with African-Americans overcoming a great number of obstacles and achieving what was thought to be impossible. The logical, necessary, and vital next step for the post-hip-hop generation is simple: ownership over its cultural creations.

“No justice, no peace!”
a sparkling crowd of hundreds chanted in front of Morgan State University’s Soper Library in a student-led rally to support the Jena Six. With students clad in varying tones of black, the scene at Morgan mirrored scores of similar events across the country
including in Jena, Louisiana, where tens of thousands of people, also dressed in black, gathered to participate in the biggest civil rights demonstration since the 1960s. In many ways, the coordinated protocol to wear black clothing symbolized not only solidarity, but a kind of funeral—one that marked the death of an apathy that had become emblematic of this generation. And with that memorial “a new movement was born,” as one student reflected.

I recalled Jordan, the young man in prison who explained to me that although there was a mattress in his cell, he didn’t sleep on it, because the comfort of a bed would numb him to the brutal reality of where he really was. Just as the frigid floor reminded him of where he was, the six Black teenagers sentenced to a total of more than one hundred years in prison for a schoolyard fight revealed to the post-hip-hop generation where we are today: a day, born yesterday, grayed with the evidence of things unseen.

Thirty years
ago, a rash of posters began smothering the brick and mortar of walls throughout Brooklyn. The posters pictured a young woman whose face, which was the color of the earth, was crowned by a spectacular wheel of black wool. Just below her high cheekbones
WANTED
screamed out in violent typeface. The posters claimed that the woman, whom they called “Joanne Chesimard,” was a “murderer” and was “armed and dangerous”—assertions that not only stood in stark contrast to the radiant figure who floated above the brazen words, but to the woman who was loved by her community, the woman whom they called Assata.

“They made her sound like a super-villain, like something out of a comic book,” rapper and actor Mos Def remembers of the posters that tattered his Bed-Stuy neighborhood. “But even then, as a child, I couldn’t believe what I was being told,” he adds. Mos Def’s position was reflected in the actions of his Brooklyn community when, time
after time, the
WANTED
posters were yanked down as fast as they were put up and replaced with colorful posters that read:
ASSATA IS WELCOME HERE
.

The community, unremitting in their support despite what outside forces may have thought, remembered that the same external forces have dubbed most of their heroes and sheroes, at one point in time, as criminals. Assata’s community remembered what the “authorities” said about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., about Fannie Lou Hamer, about Paul Robeson, about Rosa Parks, even ‘bout Jesus. As a result, they were (and still are) skeptical about what the authorities say. That is why when the authorities called Assata a criminal, her community—who often mentioned her in the same breath as Harriet Tubman—was unfazed because, after all, Harriet Tubman was a “criminal,” too. So instead of turning Assata in, they honored her as they did Harriet, knowing that by honoring these women, they were honoring the best in themselves, ourselves.

Assata was a—

Perhaps it is most appropriate for her to introduce herself, in her voice, with her words:

On May 2, 1973, Assata was pulled over by the New Jersey State Police, shot twice, and then charged with murder of a police officer. After spending nearly seven years in prison under torturous conditions, she escaped in 1979 and moved to Cuba.

Even with political asylum in Cuba, Assata’s struggle still persists. In September 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives bloodthirstily passed a resolution that called upon Cuba to extradite Assata—a call that Cuba ignored. Then, in the summer of 2005, thirty-two years later, the FBI classified Assata as a “domestic terrorist” and increased the reward for her capture to an unprecedented $1 million.

“She is now 120 pounds of money,” snarled New Jersey State Police superintendent Rick Fuentes. In echo, Colonel Williams of the New Jersey State Police announced that his department, in desperation, “would do everything we could to get her off the island of Cuba, and if that includes kidnapping, we would do it.” All of this despite an overwhelming mass of evidence that demonstrated Assata’s innocence.

In the same spirit demonstrated thirty years ago, Assata’s community came out in full support, launching several initiatives dedicated to protecting their courageous Black rose. Most visible among these campaigns is the Hands Off Assata Coalition, a “collective comprised of activists, artists, scholars, elected officials, students, parents, attorneys, workers, clerics, and concerned community members who are standing against the latest attack upon Assata Shakur.” The hip-hop
community, whose interest in her was heightened upon the discovery that she was Tupac Shakur’s aunt, praised her on T-shirts, Web sites, and in rap lyrics. Common retells her story in “Song for Assata,” which he prefaces with a soulful libation:

In Havana, President Fidel Castro reminded Cuban citizens that “They [the U.S. government] wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie,” and that Assata had been “a true political prisoner.”

Amnesty International, the nongovernmental organization that campaigns for internationally recognized human rights, defines a political prisoner as “any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner’s acts, the acts themselves, or the motivation of the authorities.” Political prisoners are often arrested and tried beneath a veneer of legality, where false charges, manufactured evidence, and unfair trials are used to disguise the fact that an individual is a political prisoner. Assata was a political prisoner, joining a long legacy of African-American political prisoners whose “acts” have had a “significant political element.” In 1927, scholar, activist, and Black Star Line founder Marcus Garvey was imprisoned and deported after being criminalized on a bogus charge of mail fraud. In 1951, scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois, who was Garvey’s rival during the 1920s, was imprisoned during the height of the Cold War for advocating world peace. He was officially charged with “failure to register as an agent of a foreign principle.” While imprisoned, DuBois realized that he was connected to all African-American prisoners, writing, “We
protect and defend sensational cases where negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused Black folk have no defense.”

The events in Jena demonstrated to young people that fifty-six years after DuBois was falsely imprisoned, “the great mass of arrested or accused Black folk” still “have no defense” and that the racism our parents and grandparents fought against is still alive and well. Since many of our parents have long put away their marching shoes, the marches to support the Jena Six and to stand up against injustice, orchestrated primarily by this new generation, represented a passing of the mantle.

This new generation of concerned citizens, diverse in race, gender, orientation, and class, understands that while methods and programs change with time, the objectives that the previous generation struggled to achieve—freedom, justice, and equality—remain the same. While there is no doubt that the Jena rallies illustrated this generation’s commitment to social justice, a fundamental question arose: Where do we go from Jena?

“This is bigger than Jena—much, much bigger,” a high school student, who left his school to attend various Jena rallies in Baltimore, tells me as he exits a rally held at Coppin State University. “Jena is happening everywhere,” he adds. “And that’s why I’m here.” He tells me that his cousin is imprisoned at a federal correctional institution (FCI) in Fairton, New Jersey, where he joined thousands of Black men who represent a fraction of the more than 1.5 million imprisoned Black men and women. To fully understand what 1.5 million means, consider the horrifying reality that no other society in the history of the world has ever incarcerated so many of its citizens—not even the Soviet Union at the height of the Gulag or South Africa during the brutal regime of apartheid.