41st Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Public Memorial Lecture

This lecture takes place on Tuesday, March 26 at 5:30 p.m. in Shaffer 121 and via Zoom in Sims 219. The keynote speaker will be Bakari Kitwana. His presentation will discuss “The Bigger Picture: Hip-Hop’s Fight for Black Political Power.”

The reception will take place in Sims 219 from 4:45 – 5:15 p.m.

About the Speaker: 

Bakari Kitwana is an internationally-known cultural critic, journalist, activist and thought leader in the areas of Hip-Hop and Black youth political engagement. The Executive Director of Rap Sessions: Community Dialogues on Hip-Hop, which for the last nineteen years has conducted over 200 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the millennial generation, Kitwana has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, the Editorial Director of Third World Press and co-founder of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Political Convention. In 2020, during the height of Covid-19 Pandemic, he co-founded the Hip-Hop Political Education Summit, which convened two major virtual gatherings.

The author of the groundbreaking books The Hip-Hop Generation (2002) and Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop (2005), Kitwana is co-editor of Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government For the People (The New Press, 2020) and the collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim’s memoir Sweat The Technique: Revelations on Creativity From The Lyrical Genius (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2019).

Currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Buffalo, Bakari has been the 2019-2020 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago and a visiting scholar at Kent State University. A former Columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Kitwana has contributed writing to numerous publications and anthologies, including the 2021 New York Times best-selling anthology 400 Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (Edited by Ibram Kendi and Keisha Blain, One World/Random House, 2021).

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