When 1520 Sedgwick Avenue—the Bronx building considered by many to be the place where hip-hop began—had fallen into disrepair, Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., contributed his research to community organizers who were trying to save it. He also led other Fordham efforts to preserve hip-hop’s past, including the University’s Bronx African American History Project’s (BAAHP) interviews with artists from the early days of the genre, which created an important collection of oral histories from DJs and MCs. Naison also teaches a popular class called From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop that spans past to present, drawing on artists like Cardi B, Nas, Run DMC, and onetime Fordham “rapper-in-residence” Akua Naru to help students understand the art form and its part in U.S. history.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., director of the BAAHP and professor of African American Studies and History.

The Party That Started It All

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, teenager Cindy Campbell hosted a back-to-school party in the community room of her building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue,  just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway. She charged admission and had her brother Clive, aka DJ Kool Herc—they called him Hercules because he was so big—spin some records. Herc had been practicing on his father’s sound system, jumping just to the hottest percussive grooves—the bits where dancers really got down—and stretching those out by manipulating two copies of the same record. He had two turn tables and a microphone, and played a mix of funk and disco that he blended with the talking-over style he’d grown up hearing in Jamaican dancehall music. While many have pointed out that the art form was developing in other places as well, that party is commonly celebrated as the birth of hip-hop.

Saving 1520 Sedgwick

Fast forward 40 years to the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. In a perverse inversion of the redlining that had devastated the Bronx at the time of hip-hop’s birth, 1520 was now laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Naison to put his scholarly acumen into determining 1520’s significance. Naison’s research—which later led to a lecture on C-Span and an appearance on PBS’ History Detectives —was among the efforts that helped convince city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building where hip-hop was born as a decent and affordable place to live. And in 2021 the U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop. 

In Their Own Words

Brian Purnell, FCRH ’00, former research director of the BAAHP and current associate professor of African American Studies at Bowdoin College, said hip-hop culture “exemplifies hallmarks of the long history of Black culture in the U.S.”

“Hip-hop turned the supposed blight of the context its creators lived in into something stunning and fantastic and beautiful—and this is tried and true to Black culture over the centuries,” he said.

In 2003, Fordham formed the BAAHP, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document the history of Black people in the Bronx. Naison said soon DJs and MCs were calling saying, “Aren’t you going to record our story?”

Over the next several years BAAHP built an archive of interviews with some of the first hip-hop practitioners like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, as well as Benjy Melendez —who in 1971 brokered a gang truce allowing the movement between neighborhoods that pollinated the music. The digital recordings have been accessed by scholars the world over, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris, and Berlin.

WFUV in the House

One of those early hip-hop DJs, Eddie Cheeba, spun both in downtown clubs and uptown parties. In the summer of 1978 he worked at Fordham’s radio station WFUV. He rapped about it at a legendary 1979 party with Melle Mel, Grandmaster Flash, and DJ Hollywood: “Cheeba’s gonna be the winner. I’m mean, I’m bad, I’m cool and smooth, so I know you’ll do it with me. I guess that’s why I ran my game on WFUV. (22-minute mark)”

‘It Was Black People Being Free’

Michael Partis, FCRH ’08, who grew up in the Bronx and has contributed to the BAAHP, said preserving that joy and experimentation palpable in the first years of hip-hop is crucial.

“I think it’s important that the history of hip-hop is documented, because it really shows Black freedom. In this country people of African descent are often tied down by segregation and racism, by respectability that says you can’t be a certain way,” he said. “And hip-hop in its earliest form kind of broke through all that stuff. It was Black people being free.”

While Partis was at Fordham, a student-led Hip-Hop Coalition focused on the politically conscious roots of hip-hop. They brought acts to campus that weren’t mainstream or corporate. “These were street guys who were talking about socioeconomic inequality, and how these working poor communities, Black and Brown working communities, responded to that,” he said. “I thought it was excellent political education for the Fordham kids,” he said.

Today, Naison is helping to continue that education at Fordham.

“I’m not a hip-hop scholar, rather I’m someone who works to have community voices heard,” he said.

The Power—and Reach—of the Music

“When students in my class study hip-hop, there are two things that make the most powerful impression on them: First, the power of the best hip-hop artists, like Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, and Wu-Tang Clan, to tell stories that can touch your heart strings as well as make you think. And second, the truly global impact of hip-hop, which includes dance and visual arts as well as music and is now deeply entrenched in Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as the Western Hemisphere,” he said.

“Hip-hop was a multicultural arts movement of the most isolated, marginalized, disenfranchised people in society and they created a movement that swept the world.”

–By Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98

When it comes to the digital humanities, like oral histories, they are archives that often live online. In the case of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), the archives have begun to reach beyond the streets of the Bronx to Berlin, Paris, and Italy.

A small global community of academics and artists have met through BAAHP. They continue to share research and insight that goes well beyond the borough’s borders and the academic parameters of the archive.

Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African American studies, said that hip-hop music, an extensive part of the oral histories, has global significance. Since 1984, the music has spread from the Bronx to marginalized communities everywhere, including Turkish communities in Berlin and African and Arabic communities in Paris. It is recognized as the voice of the disenfranchised.

The Power of Networking

For academics researching these global communities, the archive has become a touchstone, said Naison.

As far back as 2005, Naison began to network with scholars from Berlin and Paris who were interested in BAAHP.  One researcher, Susan Stemmler, Ph.D., at  Leiterin College at Volkshochschule Aachen, Germany, is a German hip-hop scholar who now works on migration issues.

“I wanted to show how people can relate to the place where they live by using hip-hop as a global language.” said Stemmler. “I was interested in rap in different languages, rap in local languages. There’s an area in France where young people rediscovered the local dialect used by older people. They used the accent in their rap lyrics in a very contemporary way.”

Stemmler lectured at Fordham on her findings in 2007. She said that along the way she met hip-hop artist LA Sunshine, one of the great MCs from the genre’s early years. She introduced LA to Naison, and his history is now part of Fordham’s archive.

“The exchange was exciting. Many people work on very different topics but the common reference point is the Bronx as an area,” said Stemmler.

Naison said Noel Garcia, Ph.D., a sociologist with his own social policy company in Spain, found out about Stemmler’s and Naison’s efforts and later invited the two to lecture in Barcelona on hip-hop culture as a global phenomenon.

And Simone Cinotto, Ph.D., an Italian scholar and professor of modern history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, has spoken several times at Fordham about the Italian/black collaboration in popular music.

Inspiration from Italy

“I found out about [the archives]while doing research related to the Bronx,” said Cinotto. He said his first book, Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City (University of Illinois Press, 2013), sparked conversations with Naison about creating an Italian-American version of BAAHP. The end result was the Bronx Italian American History Initiative, launched last year.

“My music is about black women’s stories—what happened, and how that informs us right now,” said Naru.

Having once been an artist-in-residence at Fordham, Naru said that the program introduced her to other artists and thinkers whose work she admires and with whom she continues to stay in contact. They include poet Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Ph.D., and Clifton Watson, Ph.D., director of the African-American Male Initiative at The Children’s Aid Society.

She said she found Fordham, the BAAHP, and Naison in the first place through an academic based in Cologne, Germany.

Fordham has had many artists and poets-in-residence, but Akua Naru may be the University’s first-ever “rapper-in-residence.”

A doctoral student at the University of Cologne, Germany, Naru was brought on as a visiting scholar and artist for the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). The 27-year-old, who hails from New Haven, Conn., will complete a four-week stint at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus on Sept. 27. So far, she has performed at a couple of cultural events, sat in on select classes and even lectured in Dr. Mark Naison’s “From Rock and Roll to Hip Hop” class while he was in Berlin, leading a group of Bronx youth on a hip-hop exchange trip.

“I was so excited about her research on women in hip-hop and also about her music, which I see as up there with Lauren Hill,” said Naison, professor and chair of the African and African American Studies department. “Listening to her lyrics, you get a vision of history and a real juxtaposition of language and imagery, and I thought we would benefit greatly from having her here.”

It was Naru’s musical career that inspired her to pursue an advanced degree with the goal of one day joining the world of academia, she explained.

“I’m an emcee first and a scholar second. I’m actually just a poet,” she said. “I figured, who better to tell the story than people like us?”

Naru is in the North American Studies program at the University of Cologne. Her dissertation will focus on women in hip-hop.

“In the scholarship you don’t find much on women in hip-hop. It’s more so about how men construct women within hip-hop discourse,” she said. “I’m a woman in hip-hop and I started thinking, if I were ever to have the opportunity to be noticed in the same way these [well-known] women [in hip-hop]are, then I would probably also be overlooked because of the same thing.”

Naru has set out to change that by focusing her research on the issues surrounding female rappers, from sexual liberation versus sexual objectification to the notion of female sexual agency, and whether it is even possible within a patriarchal context.

“I definitely want to teach about this, but I just finished an album, so I’m trying to balance,” Naru said. “I sort of put the research on the back burner while working on my album, hoping to come here and gain inspiration from the discussions I’m having with the faculty here. And that has definitely happened.”

—Gina Vergel

Part of the following video for Akua Naru’s song, Tales of Men, was shot while she was on a month-long trip to Ghana. For more information on Naru, visit www.facebook.com/akua.naru.

https://www.youtube.com/feature=player_embedded