Bambaataa. Photo by Joe Conzo
That was a time when people were fighting for their civil rights and their human rights. We had great leaders that were waking us up. From Malcolm X, Minister Farrakhan, the most honorable Elijah Muhammad, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis, Richie Perez, Pablo Guzman. They showed all the things that the community was going through, the life and times of the struggle. So when the drug epidemic hit, messing many of our people up, people unified against it. They were together to move the drug dealers out of the community. All this led to the movement called hip hop. Hip hop saved a lot of lives, and brought the unification of many different people together under the banner of hip hop culture.
There was my group, which became the Zulu Nation, and we went out and started organizing the people. I used to speak to the different leaders, the gang leaders and the warriors for the community, and asked them to join this thing I was making. Once you get the leaders in, you start getting the followers and the members behind you, and that’s how we started getting larger than the Bronx, stretching into Manhattan and the rest of the city, then to other states and the rest of the world.
powerHouse magazine #2
