This Ain't No Party

On June 11th, more than two dozen young people hopped on a bus in Minneapolis, headed for the historic National Hip-Hop Political Convention set to begin five days later in Newark, New Jersey. Some were activists hoping to inspire political engagement among their peers, some were rappers looking for a break and some were just trying to get out of town. Other than a love of hip-hop culture, they thought they had little in common.

The convention was an unprecedented effort to mobilize a sleeping giant – a generation of tens of millions for whom "politics" is but a profanity – to leverage its cultural power toward political power. Delegates would qualify by registering 50 people to vote, and would fashion the hip-hop generation's first national political agenda.

The bus ride, organized by St. Paul-based Nimco Ahmed, a petite 22-year-old Somali American firebrand, was designed to take this motley crew of youngsters – 80 percent of whom were aspiring rappers, according to one rider – through the 'hoods of the upper Midwest and Northeast to register 4,000 people to vote, which would mean 80 delegate seats at the Convention.

But the trip didn't quite go as planned.

A 23-year-old rapper named Kenneth Earl Crump, Jr., better known as "Neo", got on the bus when it reached the southside of Chicago, hoping to get to New York to meet some industry players and further his budding career. "Honestly, I was using it as a free trip to get to the east coast," he says candidly. "But by the time I got to New York I forgot to take care of my personal business. I got so wrapped up in the whole atmosphere." While registering people to vote at the housing projects in the northside of Kalamazoo, Neo was stunned to find the same conditions he saw at home: "Gentrification, gang violence, no trust for the police departments, no order, no law, and no respect anymore."

In Cincinnati, the bus pulled into the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood that had erupted in rioting in April of 2001 after the police shooting of black resident Timothy Thomas. There, things took a strange turn. "The pastor who was supposed to walk us through the neighborhood got scared and left us," Neo recalls. "It was wild. One of my Somali brothers, they tried to rob him, take his watch and his chains. A white guy who was with us, they came at him like nine, ten deep, just talking about, 'This ain't the place for you to be.' One of the 14-year-old guys, somebody pulled a knife on him, just for asking him to register to vote."

But the experience didn't scare these political neophytes. Instead, says Nicholas Cortez Al'Aziz Muhammad, a 26-year-old rapper from St. Paul who became the Minnesota delegation's chair, "They had seen the extreme of what could happen if you don't use your political voice. They actually got to see what this political process could do to our people at its worst.

"That's the point at which people started forgetting their music and started thinking about how they could help people in that type of condition," he adds.

For Neo, the ride was a revelation. It made made him believe that political activism – and unity – might be a powerful thing. "The same problems they were talking about in Cincinnati, we heard the same problems in Kalamazoo, we heard the same problems in Pittsburgh, we heard the same problems in Chicago, same problems in Harlem, same problems in Newark,' he says. "So I'm just gonna take the leap."

THE SKEPTICAL GENERATION

For many, the National Hip-Hop Political Convention was certainly a leap.

Pundits point to declining voter registration and participation numbers, especially in the 18-35 age bracket. Since Bill Clinton's 1992 election turned out a record number of young people to vote, politicians have ignored the concerns of young voters. "During our lifetime, the political system hasn't often shown and proved it can be a viable force for change," says James Bernard, executive director of the Hip Hop Civic Engagement Project, an organization that has registered tens of thousands of voters in 13 states. "That's what we're working against and what we have to overcome with our people."