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Continued ...

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.

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