The influence of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on hip hop: "… success and prosperity for the majority of black Americans in the 21st century only will be achieved by a strong coalition of Christians and Muslims who are dedicated to the values of democracy and social justice."

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2004 by Richard Brent Turner

After Mecca, he traveled extensively through North and West Africa, establishing important religious anti political linkages with the Muslim world. These profound international experiences deepened his Pan-African political perspective, which connected African-American Islam to global black unity and West African cultural and political roots. When the new El-Shabazz came back to the U.S., he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity in New York City on June 29, 1964, to promote his political perspective which linked the African-American straggle for social justice to global human rights issues.

He hoped to interact and work with King in political and economic activism and articulated a cogent plan for black liberation that included a separation of religion and politics, open expressions of disgust with the American system, and a United Nations initiative to expand the civil rights movement into an international black alliance for human rights.

During the final weeks of his life, he began to talk about the African-American freedom struggle as an aspect of "a worldwide revolution" against racism, classism, and sexism, Utilizing the political lessons that he had learned from his Muslim contacts in the Middle East and Africa, he constructed a model of black liberation that appealed to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Aspects of his radical black nationalism drew in African-Americans throughout the black political spectrum from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the black left. Because of his potential (if he had lived) to unite many black Muslims and Christians in the U.S. and abroad in a global liberation struggle that could have involved the United Nations, there seems little doubt that the American intelligence community had the incentive to be involved in Malcolm X's murder.

The emergence of hip hop

Musician Grandmaster Flash defined hip hop as "the only genie of music that allows us to talk about almost anything. Musically, it allows us to sample and play and create poetry to the beat of the music. It's highly controversial, but that's the way the game is." Hip hop culture began in the 1970s in the Bronx, N.Y., among African-American, Latino, and Caribbean youth who created intercultural crews ("new kinds of families") of MCs/rappers, disc jockeys, break dancers, and graffiti artists whose art and style expressed resistance to postindustrial conditions and the destruction of jobs, affordable housing, and support systems in working-class black and Latino neighborhoods at the beginning of the Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush era. These conditions became the norm for black America in the 1980s and 1990s. The rise of a new prison industrial complex eventually jailed nearly one-third of all African-American men in their 20s.

Drawing on subjects such as racial profiling, a new underground economy generated by widespread drug addiction in America, youth deaths from police brutality and torture, AIDS. and new assaults on affirmative action, rap music became the primary medium for documenting and protesting the hardness of life for black youth in the 'hood. The music, poetry, rhythms, style, clothing, language, and life experiences of hip hop artists reflected black peoples' encounters with Islam, Christianity, prison life, death, violence, dings, love, sex, hope, and despair in their urban communities. Soon, rap poetry was being composed by young people across the globe. Black Americans once again had created profound music, art, and spirituality out of the rains of their daily lives.