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Article: Who will be our leaders? Jeff Chang looks at how hip-hop tried to deliver leadership for a post-civil rights world.(culture)
- Article from:
- Colorlines Magazine
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Color Lines Magazine. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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PERHAPS THE MOST VEXING QUESTION of the post-civil rights generation raised on Sesame Street and "Roots," King's "I Have a Dream" speech and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and living within the coils of an unsleeping, omnipresent, icon-hungry media has been: "Who will be our leaders?"
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"In our hunger for a charismatic, post-King/Malcolm figure, a vacuum existed," Bill Stephney, one of the co-founders of the rap group Public Enemy, says. "I don't think that the times of the eighties were any less politically volatile than at any other point in history. The difference was the vacuum of leadership."
In an influential article ...