Letter to the President
This feature-length documentary showcases hip-hop's close-knit ties to America's social and political policies in the last thirty years. Even before hip-hop, black musical artists of the past have been at the forefront of civil rights and black power movements of the late '60s and '70s. See how those movements were destroyed by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, and witness rap's birth from those movements and its own progression from being music heard at weekend block parties to its lyrics being debated in the halls of Congress. Letter to the President delves deeply into President Ronald Reagan's policies that negatively affected minority communities and inspired pioneer rap artists such as Grandmaster Melle Mel and Run DMC to tell the whole world about it in song. Then in the "glamorous" '80s, as some people prospered and many minority communities suffered, artists such as Russell Simmons struggled to get laws overturned that targeted those minorities.