Last week the young people at Project HIP-HOP in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, took over the Dudley bus station:
I was lucky enough to get involved with Project HIP-HOP (which stands for Highways Into the Past, History, Organizing, and Power) over the summer. Originally started in order to teach youth of color about the history of the civil other movement, this is one of the few organizations in the area that explicitly names its combination of hip hop culture, art, and activism “cultural organizing.”
This summer the youth trained in movement, theater, writing, and outdoor performance, while bringing along their already developing skills as singers, dancers, poets, emcees, and visual artists. The final show, based on the idea of a flash mob, drew an engaged crowd of both acquaintances and strangers. As the youth explain in the video, the Dudley performance centered on knowing your individual history, and the collective history of your people (in this case largely the African American experience, beginning with the genocide of colonization and enslavement, or Maafa). Along the way, it touched on themes of unity, and art as an alternative to violence.
In carrying these messages to the community, these young people are continuing a long tradition of using hip-hop arts to engage issues of identity and violence, and to seek community transformation. Though hip-hop’s most widely consumed form — rap — is often better known for its glorification of violence, this tradition of positivity has much deeper roots in hip-hop’s history.
For instance, I recently ran across this video for the Stop the Violence Movement, an attempt in the late 1980’s to address similar issues. I remember having this cassette single back in the day. Check out these heavy hitters: From Chuck D to Heavy D…
The Project HIP-HOP youth learn this hip-hop history and draw on it, while bringing in their own more modern sensibilities. At Dudley you could see this perhaps strongest in terms of their dancing. The flash mob combined old-school-style breakdancing with the more recent trend of krumping — not to mention capoeira, a related art form from Brazil that has become intertwined in many places with hip-hop. This is a physical manifestation of both knowing your history, and knowing where you are now — brought together to create a vision of where you want to go.
(On a side note, Press Pass TV, who did the coverage above, is an exciting Boston youth-led media organization, though I don’t know a ton about it.)
