A volatile vibe gripped Seattle in the late 1960s when the city's African American community found itself fed up with being the targets of an inordinate amount of police brutality and insidious pockets of racism within public and private organizations. Angered by the long standing tradition of oppression in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the country, a socially conscious faction of the city's African American youth culture, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, imported the self-protection techniques and survival programs taught by Oakland, California's Black Panther Party (BPP) to Seattle.
Soon, the local chapter of the BPP organized armed patrols of the police to make sure officers stopped violently abusing their power. More than that, Seattle BPP members established an impressive array of free food, health care, housing, and legal assistance programs based in the South End and available to children and adults, no matter the color of their skin, who needed help.
More than 35 years have passed since the young Panthers struck out to make the Emerald City a just and equitable place to live, and on May 13 and 14 a group of original Seattle BPP members held a forum aimed at passing on their disciplined methods of community organizing to today's young crop of social-justice minded activists.
"When I was young, I always saw my dad doing stuff in the community that counted: starting the Sydney Miller Health Clinic (now know as the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center) and the free breakfast program," said Moorpheus Johnson, the 32-year-old son of Seattle BPP member Ron Johnson. "Those were the things that made my childhood pleasant. Just people treating you nice without treating you like you were a criminal all the time. I've made it my duty to make sure I do the same thing."
Around 400 people, many of them deeply involved in the city's youth-driven hip-hop culture, attended the recent BPP forum at Seattle University and the Garfield Community Center. According to Johnson and Greg Lewis, the young crowd seeking guidance illustrates a growing movement within the youth culture that seeks to use the grassroots hip-hop aesthetic to help spread awareness of various social justice issues.
"The most disparity we saw [in the 1960s and 1970s] was in the black community, so we started there," said Johnson when recalling survival and educational programs he was exposed to as a boy growing up in a BPP household. "But by doing that, and by talking and networking with people, we found out the same things were going on in other communities. So we put our heads together, we put our bread together, and we got fed together."
Both Johnson and the 34-year-old Lewis are members of the local hip-hop group called dRED.i. They describe their sound as "a powerful, bass-driven mix of soul-laced crunk beats" performed by a socially active collection of musicians and intellectuals striving to transform the way hip-hop is both perceived and used.
Bum rush the political show
If the Civil Rights movement was a rallying point for young Seattle activists to seek social equality and justice in the late 1960s through the late 1970s, then what's the rallying point for today's young activists?
For both Johnson and Lewis the answer is simple: hip-hop.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in the early 1970s, the cultural phenomenon known as hip-hop has always revolved around street savvy artists and fans enthusiastically embracing do-it-yourself ethics. Today, hip-hop is a multimillion-dollar industry that sells everything from soda pop to luxury cars, and it often seems devoid of any kind of motives outside of selling the latest drink, vehicle, television show, or movie. However, below this patina of party-driven conspicuous consumption still grows the urban culture's deep-set and upstart grassroots of social justice activism.
"What we're saying is that we want to be the ones, and not just us but others like us, to define [hip-hop] and say what it is and what it is not. You take the word hip. If I hip you to something that means I make you aware of it. If you then hop, you elevate. So hip-hop is awareness and elevation," said Johnson, who noted that hip-hop is often tapped by people actively using oppressive business and political methods to gain wealth and power.
"[BPP Minister of Defense] Huey P. Newton said power is the ability to recognize phenomenon, define it, and make it act in a desired manner. So the phenonmenon we're talking about is hip-hop, but it's not acting in a desired manner. It's acting in our opressors best interest."
Lewis to this a step further by noting that once you become elevated in your thoughts about the condition of your social, economic, and environmental realities, the glamour-filled and consumption-driven images portrayed by commercialized, mainstream hip-hop begin to dissolve like sand castles in the rain.
"What do you really want? Do you live for your creature comforts?" Lewis asked hypothetically. "People are starting to come out of that daze now. They're saying, 'Wait a minute, what am I doing? I'm out on this job grinding, or in the street grinding, x-amount of hours each week. I have this stuff, and I can be jiggy, but it's nothing.'"
This notion of hip-hop serving as a viable political force has been gaining momentum in the last several years. In fact, an event called the Hip Hop Political Convention occurred from June 16-19 in Newark, New Jersey just before the 2004 presidential election. It was the first of its kind, and the four-day gathering drew an estimated 3,000-4,000 people, including activists, elected officials, political pundits and hip-hop artists from all over the country.
The convention sought to gel the hip-hop community's burgeoning power by discussing the current challenges in electoral politics, rethinking grassroots activism, art and responsibility, and mobilizing the religious community. The event also featured a forum similar to the one hosted here by the Seattle BPP members where a dialogue was opened between the Civil Rights generation and the hip-hop generation in an effort to learn from each other's strengths and weaknesses. Overall, the Newark convention sought to form a political agenda for, while simultaneously developing leadership within, the hip-hop generation.
"We don't have art that imitates reality. Our art is reality. It is our reality," Johnson asserted. "We don't tell it to you how we think it should be, we tell it to you how it is now, and it's up to you to change it. If you're not dissatisfied, there will be no change because dissatisfaction produces change. Satisfaction produces more laziness."
The home stage
One of hip-hops obvious appeals is its abundance of upbeat, fun energy, but focusing this in effective, socially active and political directions proves challenging.
"As far as what we do out here, we network with people, that's really the key," Lewis said. "It's not about coming out there saying, 'We're here to lead you!' Because the folks that talk like that, they're probably in a cult, straight up. Really, it's about going out there and taking the pulse of the community."
Lewis pointed to a recent example where one of their friends was facing some custody challenges involving his children. Lewis and the dRED.i crew rallied to the man's aid when he asked by writing letters to the judge and even showing up for the custody hearing.
It's interpersonal, community-building acts like these that Johnson, Lewis, and their dRED.i cohorts, now in their third year of existence, strive to achieve on a daily basis. However, it's the dRED.i crew's desire to organize themselves, their fans, and their supporters in effective ways so they can reach beyond such personal, family-level activism into larger social issues. For example, Johnson hopes his group will work to re-launch local survival programs emulated after the BPP's achievements, formulate action committees designed to address issues such as media monopolization and control, and, of course, continue to use their hard hitting lyrics and fun-loving beats as a means to shed light on local and national social justice issues.
"Hip-hop is the new Civil Rights movement. Hip-hop is the new Black Power movement. Hip-hop is the new world movement, and the thing that makes it so powerful is that it's not one person," Johnson asserted. "It's an energy. It's a force that's moving across the planet at a rapid speed that George Bush, Cheney, nobody can stop."
Curious about the local dRED.i movement? The group's latest release is the self-released "Revolutionary Crunk Muzik" EP with their album "Guerilla Scrillah" due this summer and featuring one of Seattle's top r&b and jazz vocalists Felicia V. Loud.
Check out what they're up to on the music and community activist scenes by visiting www.myspace.com/dredimovement or calling their information line at 206-600-1307.
Better yet, catch them throw down live on June 8 at The High Dive in Fremont for KEXP 90.3 FM's live Street Sounds hip-hop broadcast hosted by KEXP DJ Redskin and featuring dRED.i along with Kim of Central Intelligence, DJ Roc' Phella on the ones & twos, and Ciphaalliance.
Erik Hansen may be reached at editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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