Jackson Free Press

Sure, summer is not officially over. In fact, it is nowhere near being over in any real sense of the word. As those of us who have spent sizeable amounts of time in Mississippi know, our relief will not come until October—if we're lucky. But, for us teachers and other summers-off people, the summer ended in the middle of August when weekday sleep-ins gave way to 6 a.m. stumbles out of bed.

I, of course, was sad to see my lazy days end, but I was glad to get back into the grind of work and responsibility. I do not, however, wish to give the impression that my summer break was one of complete and utter laziness. Truthfully, I had one of the most productive vacations I have ever had.

I finished my master's degree at Jackson State University in May and temporarily joined the ranks of the over-educated and under-employed. But all was not lost. With the stress of looking for a real job weighing heavily on my constitution, I watched one of the hottest Junes in history roll in. Instead of sitting back and just taking it, though, I joined some of Jackson's finest in the hip-hop scene to take our message to the children.

From June 6-10, PyInfamous, Coke Bumaye, 5th Child, Skipp Coon, Ulogy, DJ Young Venom, myself and others created, organized and ran a hip-hop summer camp for a group of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders at Brown Elementary in midtown. We taught the students about the history of hip-hop, guided them through a project that ended with the creation of an original graffiti piece, and helped them write original raps about the positives and negatives in their communities. The kids then performed them in front of a full auditorium of parents and fellow students on the last day.

On July 9 and 10, I participated in the 4th Annual ACLU Mississippi Youth Hip-Hop Summit at Jackson State University, which brought together nearly 600 youths from around the state to not only learn about their rights as members of the hip-hop generation, but also to learn ways to be more proactive in their communities.

We taught the participants about hip-hop's roots in social-justice movements while also conducting workshops where they got hands-on experience with all four elements of hip-hop (DJing, Breaking, MCing and graffiti) from Jackson's purveyors of the culture.

Hip-hop catches a lot of slack and, in some ways, that's understandable given the version of the culture that mainstream music presents. As hip-hop activists and educators, it is our job to fight those misconceptions and misrepresentations and arm youth with the knowledge they need to navigate a world that tells them that their culture is somehow less important than the dominant one.

To do that, we show kids how hip-hop culture is rooted not only in movements for social justice, but also in deep, rich musical and artistic legacies that stretch all the way back to Africa. Those African legacies moved all around the world, eventually stopping off on the Caribbean islands before Kool Herc brought them to the Bronx in the 1970s.

The rest is history.

And it is that history that is so vital to our understanding of hip-hop as a culture and as a movement. This summer, Jackson's hip-hop community put its money where its mouth is and took the message to the people. And, just so you know, the fall and winter, whenever they might come around, won't cool us off at all. We've got a lot more on the way.