Askia's Books Continued

THE BLACK CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND THE ORIGINS OF HIP-HOP (A Speech given at Wesleyan University, Ct, January, 1999) " Larry Neal and Askia Toure' were my models in the mid-'60s. We wanted the oral tradition in our work, we wanted the sound, the pumping rhythm of black music... We wanted an art that was as black as our music. A blues poetry...; a jazz poetry; a funky verse full of exploding anti-racist weapons. A bebop and new music poetry , that would scream and taunt and rhythm-attack the enemy into submission. An art that would educate and unify black people in our attack on an anti-black, rabid, ra- cist America. We wanted a mass art, an art that could "Monkey" out the libraries and "Boogaloo" down the street in tune with popular revolution. A poetry the people could sing as they beat Faubus and Wallace and Bull Conner to death !"

--- Amiri Baraka on Black Arts Poetry and Cultural Revolution

As an Elder of what you would define as "Old School," it is imperative that I remind you of your Tradition, and inform you that the great Hip-Hop Youth Culture emerged from a historical period of massive attempts--efforts by literally millions--of Blacks to wage cultural and political Revolution in the United States. The Black Arts move- ment was the largest cultural movement in African-American, and U.S., history. It was the embodied Vision of thousands of committed artists, writers, musicians, poets, dramatists, journalists, critics, scholars, historians, actors, photographers, etc. What I want to focus on, however, is the "Griot/Djali" wing of the Movement, what one would call the "Fire Prophets" (from an article I wrote on Brother Malcolm X). The musically-inspired poetic visionaries, Amiri Baraka, Askia Toure', Larry Neal, Yusef Rahman, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans, Carolyn Rogers, Keorapretse Kgotsile, Haki Madhubuti, Kalamu Ya Salaam, Jayne Cortez, Eugene B. Redmond and others. Because it was from these Visionaries that the Prophets who inspired the Hip-Hop Youth culture emerged. I'm speaking of the Original Last Poets, the Muslim Last Poets, Marc Primus' Afro-American Folkloric Troupe, and the legendary Gil Scot- Heron and the Midnight Band. While many of these artists are unfamiliar to you, I'm sure that you're familiar with the "Old School" Last Poets (deemed the Original God-fathers of Rap) and the legendary Gil Scot-Heron, because some of the contem- porary Hip-Hop rappers and M.C.'s "sample" their albums and CD's. As a revolu- tionary poet/activist living and organizing in Harlem in the period from 1968 to '74, I was the mentor of the Original Last Poets, which included brothers Gylain Kain, David Nelson, Felipe Luciano, Abiodun Ayewole, and Umar Bin Hassan.

While in Harlem, we founded two cultural centers, the "East Wind" and the "Black Mind". It was from those revolutionary cultural centers on 125th Street, that the now legandary poet-griots influenced the thousands of youths of Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Metro New York/New Jersey, in league with Imamu Amiri Baraka's revolu- tionary center, Spirit House, located in Newark, N.J. Keep in mind, I'm not saying that we created Hip-Hop; I am saying that through our teachings and influence, we created the Black Consciousness and early models which paved the way for the Youth Culture to emerge. The early Black Arts Movement was deeply influenced by the clandestine, revolutionary oranization, RAM (the Revolutionary Action Movement). Ram not only worked with Brother Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, but--I think you'll find this fascinating--worked closely with the Five Percenters, under the leader- ship of the NOI dissenter, Clarence 13X, known by the Five Percenters as "Allah." In the late '60s/early '70s, the New York City police department expressed that, after Clarence 13X's death, RAM would recruit the young Five Percenters into a Black Liberation Army! Poet-revolutionary Larry Neal, and I, along with Bro. Muhammad Ahmed, were RAM organizers, as well as poets, cultural leaders and community educators. Why is this key to you? I will quote from former RAM scholar-activist, Ernest Allen's article " Making the Strong Survive: the Contours and Contradictions of Message Rap" in William Eric Perkins' Hip-Hop anthology, "Droppin' Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture" (Temple Univ. Press, 1996):

"This extraordinary growth of the Five Percent following Clarence 13X's assassination in June, 1969 remains, for the most part, an undocumented process. And it is, of course,the followers of Five Percent Islam who make up the great majority of Islamic rappers today: Grand Puba, Poor Righteous Teachers, Lakim Shabazz, King Sun, Eric B & Rakim, Movement X, KMD, Two Kings in a Cipher, A Tribe Called Quest, and many other lesser known groups."

So what am I, this "Old School" Elder, implying, young people? That your beautiful, dynamic Hip-Hop Nation emerged in a period of continuous, protracted political, cul- tural, spiritual and economic Struggle between racist, imperialist White America and colonized African America similar to the 19th Century Civil War and Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction which Dr.W.E.B.DuBois wrote so brilliantly about in his pioneering study, "Black Reconstruction in America." In her classic study, "Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America," cultural critic, Tricia Rose, after meticulously describing the global eco- nomic strategies and conflicts which led to the restructuring of the U.S. economy in the 1970s, describes the urban conditions of New York's Inner City poor thusly:

"In the 1970s, cities across the country were gradually losing federal funding for social services, information service corporations were beginning to replace indus- trial factories, and corporate developers were buying up real estate to be converted into luxury housing, leaving working-class residents with limited affordable housing, a shrinking job market and diminishing social services. The poorest neighborhoods and the least powerful groups were the least protected and had the smallest safety nets."

I would add that, from the Viewpoint of the Black Liberation Movement, the U.S. was destabilizing the black working-class and urban poor, by pulling major factories out of the Urban Centers, substituting them with fast food outlets, and organizing the first of a series of Domestic Holocausts: the Heroin Drug War to cripple the massive support of the Liberation Forces and turn the working-class youths into heroin addicts! This was part of the U.S. FBI/CIA Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) "to disrupt and destroy the militant Black Nationalist Movement." Harlem youth leaders Hannibal and Malik Ahmed questioned and challenged a conference of Black police officers stationed in Harlem about the sudden "blizzard" of heroin infesting the Harlem community, and why didn't they do something about protecting their community? They gave the chilling answer that the drugs, originating in the "Golden Triangle" of Southeast Asia, were being transported and supplied by "higher ups," and if they tried to to resist they would be immediately killed! So, in the words of the cringing black police officers, our Harlem, Brooklyn and Bronx youths (in addition to other urban areas) were being set-up for Genocide! And it was in this destabilized, deva- stated urban social landscape, that our African-American, Caribbean and Latino youths answered with the Hip-Hop culture which not only saved their immediate lives, but eventually turned U.S. popular culture upside down, in what I define as the dynamic stages of a continuing process of Cultural Revolution /Resistance began in the 1960s/ '70s Black Arts and Black Liberation Movements.