Bakari Kitwana kicked off Martin Luther King Jr. week events at
Grand Valley with a speech Monday that drew connections between
activists from the civil rights era and activists from the hip-
hop era. Kitwana’s latest book is Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama
Era. He is a senior media fellow at the Jamestown Project, a
Harvard Law think-tank, and CEO of Rap Sessions, a company that
conducts townhall meetings around the country on difficult
topics facing the hip-hop generation. Kitwana told an audience
in the Kirkhof Center that hip-hop music emerged from
generations of artists who sought ways to convey their political
messages. “In the 1970s, hip-hop’s political message was found
in songs about how globalization had impacted urban
communities,” Kitwana said. He continued describing the decades
and said by the 1990s established artists like Public Enemy and
Queen Latifah were using music as tools to mobilize young people
to activism. Kitwana said the 2008 election of President Obama
was the first political victory