Farrakhan had been an avid supporter of Jesse Jackson during the 1984 campaign. To many of us, Farrakhan appealed to the more radical vision of Black political thought that we embraced at the time. When he and Jackson stood together during the campaign, they helped us imagine new possibilities beyond the historic integration versus separation divide.
Other influential voices inspired our search for a new Black political center that made sense for our time. Reaching out from college campuses to the grass roots were individuals like Julian Bond, Maulana Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, Kwame Touré, Naim Akbar, Bobby Seale, Haki Madhubuti, and Nikki Giovanni.
The 1986–87 school year jump-started a series of National Black Student Unity Conferences: the first featured keynotes by Jackson and Farrakhan and topped seven hundred attendees. Conferences would follow in 1987–88 at Howard University and at Columbia University the following school year.
All these developments, including Jackson’s presidential campaign, helped shape our political consciousness. But the most significant development that captivated our generation was the emergence on the national scene of hip-hop with conscious messages of resistance.
Hip-hop in those days was not yet fully embraced as mainstream culture. It was still largely an underground phenomenon and a lived folk culture that we saw as our own. Wherever hip-hop showed up, we saw it as the source of our own entry. But even more, this convergence of Black Power generation politics with hip-hop’s emerging political impulse gave our generation agency.
In 1987, on the heels of their debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, Public Enemy sampled Malcolm X’s speech “Message to the Grassroots” on their single “Bring the Noise,” which would become the lead single for their second album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988). Malcolm’s haunting words at the start of the song hung in the air and captured the tone of the moment: “Too Black, too strong.”
Similar to It Takes a Nation of Millions, KRS-one’s By All Means Necessary sent Black youth scrambling for books he referenced, such as Message to the Blackman in America by Elijah Muhammad, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and How to Eat to Live, also by Elijah Muhammad. His album laid the groundwork for the Stop the Violence movement. 1988 also saw the release of Eric B and Rakim’s Follow the Leader on July 25, one week after Jackson’s second address to the Democratic National Convention. Talib Kweli recently called Follow the Leader “the most important hip-hop record ever.”
1989 mirrored 1988 as a year of essential conscious hip-hop music. Few can remember the year 1989 and not recall Chuck D’s words “1989, the year, another summer.” Those words capture that singular moment in time when nearly everyone in hip-hop was fighting the power: Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing; The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation reprinted inside the jacket of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet; Queen Latifah’s album All Hail the Queen; and Reginald Hudlin’s film House Party (all of which placed front and center hip-hop’s Afrocentric aesthetic such as crowns, African prints, Africa-shaped leather medallion necklaces, and African hairstyles epitomized by Kid and Play).
The hip-hop generation shaped American history for decades to follow. The Million Man March in 1995, for example, was heavily supported by the hip-hop community. The 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention—inspired by the Gary, Indiana, convention of 1972—brought over four thousand young Black people to Newark, New Jersey. Black youth political participation witnessed a surge during the elections of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. These young Black voters were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine. At the core of each of these moments is what it has meant for the hip-hop generation to come into its own.
1989–1994
ANITA HILL
Salamishah Tillet
Every evening when my family enters our comfortable three-bedroom townhouse in downtown Newark, a large, limited-series, fire-truck-red-framed poster greets us. Originally made by the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, the poster is a reproduction of a full-page ad taken out on November 17, 1991, in eight of our nation’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times.
On that Sunday morning, the ad headline, “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves,” appeared one month after law professor Anita Hill testified before Congress with allegations that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1981 to 1982.
Before I received my own copy as a gift, I’d seen the poster only two other places. The first was in the foyer of Gloria Steinem’s home, hanging high like mine, in spaces traditionally reserved for photographs of presidents, prime ministers, or religious symbols. The second time was in the hallway of Spelman College’s famed Women’s Research and Resource Center, founded by Beverly Guy-Sheftall in 1981. During both visits, I’d lose myself in a trance parsing through and memorizing the names of the more than sixteen hundred Black women who—organized by feminist scholars Barbara Ransby, Deborah King, and Elsa Barkley Brown—made history by declaring their unwavering public support for Hill.
“We were all Anita Hill at that moment,” Barbara Ransby told The Washington Post in an interview in 2018 about the ad’s origins. “Elsa set up a bank account,” she recalled. “Someone had a husband who worked at an ad agency in New York. We collected lots and lots of small checks.” Combining word of mouth and a 1-800 number, they raised the $50,000 necessary for the ad campaign. “Now we tweet or text,” Ransby opined.
I was sixteen years old when I saw Anita Hill for the first time. In my memory, I sat glued to the television, trying to interpolate every detail of Hill’s statement into my newly forming Black feminist consciousness. But the truth is, I didn’t watch it live. At the actual time of her testimony, I was finishing my senior year at my predominantly white private high school in Livingston, New Jersey, and spent the hours between English class and soccer practice arguing about the merits of her allegations.
I knew many of my white classmates looked at Hill as an oddity because most of the Black women with whom they were in regular contact were their nannies at home or our school’s cafeteria staff. In their suburban enclaves, Yale Law School–educated Black women did not exist. That Hill dared to stand before the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee was even more confounding.
The summer before Anita Hill testified, in her now-iconic teal linen skirt suit, with her left hand slightly hidden behind her back, her right hand held high to be sworn in, I had undergone my own political conversion. I spent the summer in Boston with my dad, first street canvassing for the National Environmental Law Center, then volunteering for the NAACP. But I also read three books that changed my life: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. Because of these narratives, I learned to see how my racial and gender identities were interlinked. That if my Blackness overdetermined my past and future opportunities, my experiences as a girl heightened my vulnerability and my likelihood to be a victim of misogyny and violence.