Al Sharpton Speaking @ Howard University's "Refresh Black America" on Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday: 19 January 2009

January 19th, 2009, was truly an amazing day. It marked the observance of Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday, who would have been 80 years old (his birthday is actually January 15th). It was also the day before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of The United States. This historic confluence of events not only boggles the mind, but it reinforces the words of Dr. King, who quoted abolitionist Theodore Parker; "The moral arc of justice is long...but it bends towards justice."

When Politics Became The New Hip Hop (The Ballot of a New Rap Language)

(reprinted from The Huffington Post: 15 October 2008)



by Barry Michael Cooper


The definition of Hip Hop has always been a political one: at the heart of democracy lies the aorta of free speech. Be it George Orwell, V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx, or Donald Oliver Soper shooting the gift (of gab) in London at Speaker's Corner of Hyde Park, or KRS-One and Chuck D voicing their opposition to Reaganomics and a Dickensian New York in the late '80s, or Jay-Z, Puff, and Kanye describing their Brave Rich World from Gulfstream-V windows 40,000 feet above Monaco in rhythmic iambic pentameter, Hip Hop is the vox of the common man speaking to power.