"Of All Our Studies, History Is Best Qualified to Reward Our Research": Black History's Relevance to the Hip Hop Generation

Each generation, depending on its problems and needs, must select and arrange the specific facts which form the best system for its own inspiration and guidance. It is because the past is a guide with roads pointing in many directions that each generation and epoch must make its own studies of history. Earl E. Thorpe, 1957 (1) Every generation has the opportunity to write its own history, and indeed it is obliged to do so. Only in that way can it provide its contemporaries with the materials vital to understanding the present and to planning strategies for coping with the future. Only in that way can it fulfill its obligation to pass on to posterity the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the past, which, after all, give substance and direction for the continuity of civilization. John Hope Franklin, 1986 (2) History inspires. History teaches. History also guides. We, as a Hip Hop people, must come out of the past and into our present. We, as a Hip Hop people, must re-create ourselves. True freedom for us Hiphoppas is to create and live a lifestyle that uniquely empowers us. True freedom is self-creation. We Hiphoppas will be busy at work creating a history that simply works better for our children. KRS-One, 2003 (3) The meaning, purpose, and function of black history as a field of academic inquiry, a philosophy, and "as a weapon in the fight for racial equality" has undergone a host of significant transformations and stages since the antebellum era and the professionalization of the black historical enterprise during the early 20th century. (4) Building upon the institutions and paradigms created by Carter G. Woodson and other contributors to the early black history movement, black and white historians and scores of black activists during the Black Power era significantly transformed the systematic study and day-to-day application of black history. Black Power era historian William Van Deburg has pointed out the manner in which the masses of young blacks from about 1965 to 1975 collectively drew upon black history as "a wellspring of group strength and staying power. " (5) Likewise, in their exhaustive study on the black historical enterprise, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick argued that by the late 1960s "Afro-American history had become fashionable, a 'hot' subject finally legitimated as a scholarly specialty. " (6) Challenging the widely accepted thesis of black history's unprecedented growth, centrality, and legitimization during the Black Power era, in his 1967 classic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, recently deceased cultural critic Harold Cruse indicted young black intellectuals for being tragically "uninterested in history. " On the last page of his mammoth study, Cruse concluded, "The farther the Negro gets from his historical antecedents in time, the more tenuous become his conceptual ties, the emptier his social conceptions, the more superficial his visions. His one great and present hope is to know and understand his Afro-American history in the United States more profoundly. Failing that, and failing to create a new synthesis and social theory of action, he will suffer the historical fate described by the philosopher who warned that 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. " (7) In the "Foreword" to a 1984 edition of Cruse's opus, Bazel E. Allen and Ernest J. Wilson pronounced that "the message of this book remains painfully apt today. " (8) Cruse's observations are still relevant and especially applicable to the Hip Hop generation. This essay concerns the relationship between the Hip Hop generation and black history and is written by a Hip Hop generation historian who shares Thorpe and Franklin's sentiments that each generation of African American historians must leave their distinct marks on the profession, the production of scholarship, and the debates surrounding the functions of black history. My discussion is guided by the premise that Hip Hop culture is the single most widespread preoccupation among today's African American and African diasporan youth and has the potential to play an important role in rejuvenating the modern black history movement and raising the Hip Hop generation's cultural and historical consciousness. …