Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“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., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was 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 that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
featuring Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01—and the Rose Hill campus

After five celebrated seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has come to an end. The fan-favorite comedy about a rule-breaking 1950s housewife turned raucous comedian featured Rachel Brosnahan as the title character, Miriam “Midge” Maisel, and Michael Zegen as her soon-to-be-ex-husband Joel, vice president of a plastics company and an aspiring comedian. Fordham’s own Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01, starred as Archie Cleary, who, along with his wife Imogene, is one of the couple’s best friends. Johnstone aside, the cast and crew were no strangers to Fordham, having filmed at the Rose Hill campus a couple of times. In fact, if you look closely at episode eight of the final season, you’ll notice something familiar in the background: Cunniffe Fountain and Edwards Parade (see above). In this episode, in which Fordham provides the setting for Midge’s college reunion, the characters engage in a lot of self-reflection, illustrated with some throwback clips, and Midge’s dad, Abraham (Tony Shalhoub), finally comes to appreciate the women in his life. Mrs. Maisel is far from the only production to be drawn to Rose Hill’s idyllic beauty. Since the 1940s, dozens of TV shows and films have been shot, in part, at Fordham—including 2015’s True Story, which starred James Franco, Jonah Hill, and Felicity Jones, and featured Fordham Theatre grad Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, in a supporting role.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Can You Dig It?
co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99

This past August marked the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and media outlets across the world have been looking back at the early days of the culture. In this audio series, though, the focus is on events that led to the birth of hip-hop—ones that took place not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Co-created by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, Can You Dig It? chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop. Through scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, it tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin, which resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music. For Master, the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company, the series is a tribute to the peacemakers and an open “love letter to the Bronx.”
—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

The Color of Family
a novel by Jerry McGill, FCRH ’92

In his latest novel, Jerry McGill, author of Bed Stuy: A Love Story (2021) and the memoir Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me (2012), shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume, especially when twins from France—the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs—arrive on the family’s doorstep. One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at football, the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between the two brothers— wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative. Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—all of them. They each may have moved on in their own way, but it’s only through forgiveness and by coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present. Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is less than 300 pages, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning read.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Can You Dig It? was released on August 10 by Audible, as part of a slate of original series celebrating this milestone year. The series, co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated and co-produced by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop.

Through both scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, Can You Dig It? tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin. Benjamin had been working toward a truce among rivals when he was killed, and his death resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

The series features documentary-style interviews with photographers Henry Chalfant and Joe Conzo, pioneering MC Coke La Rock, and a number of former members and associates of the Ghetto Brothers. These are interspersed with Chuck D’s narration, as well as dramatized portions, for which the series tapped into local voice talent from the Bronx’s community arts programs.

“It’s a love letter to the Bronx,” said Master, a composer who is also the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company.

In a recent interview with Fordham student Jay Doherty, a co-host of WFUV’s What’s What podcast, Master described the story of the truce at the heart of Can You Dig It? as a manifestation of the Jesuit ideal of being people for others. “We applied that mantra by being a vehicle for a story that inspires people, that gives hope to others. That’s what this is all about. Black Benjie, Yellow Benjy, the Ghetto Brothers—they were men for others.”

The series comes at a moment when hip-hop is being celebrated not only as a revolutionary musical force but also as a vital part of New York City history. In June, the Bronx intersection of East 165th Street and Rogers Place was renamed Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin Way, making the site of the murder a landmark—and a reminder of the positive action that came out of the tragedy. In recent decades, Fordham has also been preserving hip-hop’s Bronx legacy, though efforts to recognize 1520 Sedgwick as the genre’s birthplace and through oral-history interviews with seminal figures such as Yellow Benjy and Kurtis Blow as part of the Bronx African American History Project.

“During this 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we hold the attention of the planet,” Chuck D told SPIN in June. “Now is the time to bring out the stories of people who paved the way for hip-hop and shaped its earliest days.”

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

“Hip-Hop Biology is a class created to keep students engaged in STEM while embracing their love for hip-hop,” said Parker, an instructor at Fordham, who started using hip-hop as a teaching tool in his Fordham college-level biology classes in 2018.

One technique that Parker uses to engage his students is battle rap. Students come up with raps about course material and then compete against each other. To win a battle, Parker said, “One must have a semi-complex rhythmic flow, interesting content, and understand the culture of the audience they will be performing. Most importantly, the battle must be something the audience can react to and truly feel, even if it’s a personal story or a social issue.”

Students learn more than biology from battle rap, said Parker. Competing directly against another individual encourages students to perform better than they would if they were performing independently. The student becomes better at communicating, performing, and interacting with an audience. They also learn self-control by not reacting if someone insults them in front of others. Another critical piece is the mental health aspect, he said. Artists can discuss trauma in their lives and bring personal experience to their rap.

The class is a perfect fit for STEP, Parker said, because it gets young people excited about college. STEP is a New York state academic enrichment program designed to prepare underrepresented minority and economically disadvantaged junior high and high school students for college and careers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, health careers, and licensed professions, like accounting, law, psychology, social work among other licensed fields. Fordham’s STEP program normally takes place at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, with some activities also taking place at local school and partner sites. The program continued throughout the pandemic when students attended virtually. 

Camila Diaz Rodriguez, a student from Cathedral High School in Manhattan, called the Hip-Hop Biology course “a different experience.” 

“Writing about STEM, It does help us bring together ideas and speak about topics that usually people don’t pay mind to, for example, our [rap]was on global warming,” she said.

Parker invited guest speakers to the course, like Papoose, a prolific rapper known for spreading knowledge through his rhymes.  In a Q&A, the middle school and high school  STEP students were able to ask Papoose advice on how to memorize rhymes and discuss STEM.

“You’ve got to know how to count your bars. You got 16 bars. Sometimes you want to say so much. And that’s the challenge for artists. How can you break it down and summarize it into 16 bars or sometimes eight bars?” He said, ” That can make you a better rapper because now, when you’re creating your rap, you’re calculating what you’re saying,” he told the students.

Parker said using hip-hop makes students feel like they are a part of something familiar. “We want this to be a space where people feel welcome, for them to be a part of it and want to be a part of it.  Sometimes in these spaces, you don’t always see individuals who look or sound like you, and so if we can at least have our own sound from our own voice and sometimes bring our own people into this space, maybe we’ll feel a little more comfortable.”

Just a few days after Floyd, a Black man, died during an arrest in Minneapolis, with protests and calls for systemic change sweeping the country, Carter began texting with his longtime friend and fellow rapper, Franco Obour, about collaborating on a song to highlight their lived experiences as Black men and the personal and structural racism they’ve been exposed to throughout their lives. After three days of sharing lyrics and voice memos with each other and choosing an instrumental from producer eeryskies, Carter and Obour recorded their verses at a friend’s studio in Manville, New Jersey.

The resulting song, “What Do You See?” was released on June 12 on all major streaming platforms after initially being posted on Instagram and Facebook. Since then, Carter and Obour—a Rutgers dental student who performs under the name juneyouare and who grew up with Carter in Hillsborough, New Jersey—have received press from outlets including BroBible, Karen Civil, and Forbes. As part of its release, the two decided to donate all proceeds from the song’s iTunes purchases this year to Color of Change, a nonprofit civil rights organization that “leads campaigns that build real power for Black communities.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBVgECApRDX/

Over a laid-back, hypnotic beat that recalls the G-funk sound favored by West Coast rappers of the 1990s—like the often politically minded Ice Cube and 2Pac—Carter rhymes about both the frustrations of seeing articles and social media posts that downplay the racism experienced by Black people in America (“I do not come to a wake to debate what you been through”) and questions of ancestry and intergenerational trauma (“Look at my lineage/I’m a descendant of slaves/Somewhere in South Carolina/but I cannot find ’em/’cause they don’t have graves”).

“People seemed like they were losing track of the ultimate thing that happened, where this man lost his life and that could have been prevented,” Carter says. “It just felt very frustrating. It’s like, you don’t go to a funeral if someone’s relative passed and talk about, ‘Oh, well, we should be mourning my relative too.’ It’s like, hey, let’s focus together on what’s going on and try to fix it and find a solution.”

An Internship Becomes a Career

Carter’s interest in music dates back to sixth grade, when he performed with friends in a talent show, but he says he began to take things more seriously while at Fordham, where he majored in communication and media studies. After landing in the Bronx, where his father, Anthony—a 1976 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate and current member of the University’s Board of Trustees—also studied, Carter set up recording equipment in his Loschert Hall dorm room (and later in O’Hare Hall and Campbell Hall) and earned a reputation as a musician on campus, getting invited to play at house parties, club events, and the University’s popular Spring Weekend concert.

While balancing his studies and music, in 2014, during his senior year, Carter also began an internship at the Robot Company, a sports and entertainment marketing firm founded by LeBron James and Maverick Carter. After completing his internship—the first one at the then-new company—Carter was offered a full-time position, and he has been with the firm ever since. In his current role as talent and influence manager, Carter works with brands, athletes, and influencers to find opportunities for collaboration.

A Growing Musical Platform, from NBA 2K to Australia

Meanwhile, Carter’s music career has continued to flourish. In May 2018, he independently released his debut album, Roadtrip, which has garnered more than 300,000 streams across major platforms. And this past December, two of the songs off Roadtrip, “G.N.S.L.” and “Pull Up,” were chosen to appear on the soundtrack for the hugely popular NBA 2K20 video game, appearing alongside both up-and-coming artists and established stars like Drake, Travis Scott, Cardi B, and Carter’s current favorite rapper, J. Cole.

“I grew up playing the game, and it’s still exciting every time [I] turn it on and hear my song come on shuffle in the background,” he says. “I would say almost every day, there’s someone new who DMs me like, ‘Yo, I heard your song on 2K. I live in London,’ or ‘I live in Australia,’ all these different places. So it’s cool to see that aspect.”

Looking ahead, after already releasing three new singles this year—“Made Men,” “Gassed Up,” and “What Do You See?”—Carter says he wants to continue to put out a new song every six to eight weeks. With what he calls “a vault” of unreleased music he’s been sitting on—and the marketing skills he’s acquired through his education at Fordham and his work at the Robot Company—he foresees having a promotional plan for each new song in order to gain continued traction with listeners. Having the ability to create his own media kits and knowing how to promote his music, Carter says, has made being an independent artist a viable path.

In writing and releasing “What Do You See?” Carter says he and Obour “had complete control of how we wanted to do it, where we wanted to put it out,” including the decision to donate proceeds to Color of Change.

With that kind of artistic control and freedom, Carter hopes that he can continue to inspire productive dialogue, saying that by releasing the song, he and Obour wanted to “make a statement and hopefully ignite a conversation.”

“It was just sending a message,” he says, “something I would talk about with close friends or keep to myself and trying to amplify that, knowing that there’s a platform that I have—and people, I think, would want to hear it.”

Tina Maschi, Ph.D., an associate professor at GSS, said that Tyson’s work filled a gap in the scientific literature, particularly as it related to African-American young men processing grief.

“He found a way to talk to young men in a language that had meaning to them, and he used quantitative research to validate the work,” said Maschi.

She said that Tyson’s experience of growing up in the projects of Paterson, New Jersey, in the 1980s played no small role in his work. He confirmed as much in a 2011 interview with Inside Fordham.

“One of the key things in social work is having empathy, and an understanding about where a person is coming from,” Tyson said. “By the time I left Paterson, I had seen a lot. My first goal became to work with youth, because I saw too many of them land in jail, strung out on drugs, or dead over a dice game.”

Maschi said that Tyson understood that applying Freudian talk therapy in a classic manner wouldn’t work with his young clients. But he could get them to talk by using rap.

“He was way ahead of his time,” said Maschi.

Tyson’s ability to communicate on an empathetic level went beyond his young clients; it also applied to fellow academics.

“He was a very down-to-earth guy who could speak via the academy using its language and speak to an inner-city youth using hip-hop,” she said. “He just found the humanity in anyone he spoke to, he didn’t seem to have a hierarchy.”

Nevertheless, understanding how to defend an academic argument in academic language didn’t necessarily mean that the academy would immediately accept his theories, said Larry Farmer, Ph.D., director of the doctoral program at GSS.

“He was looking at the impact that race and racism have on individuals, and that tends to be the kind of work where people question the legitimacy, in terms of its focus,” said Farmer. “But clearly his work was not focused on the negative aspects of hip-hop, like misogyny or the promotion of violence—but its ability to contribute to healing and wellness.”

Both Farmer and Maschi noted a “perception scale” developed by Tyson to measure the way the young people understood their experiences through rap, which further shored up the quantitative aspects of his work. His 2006 paper, “Rap Music Attitude and Perception Scale,” that introduced the studies that found a disproportionate amount of media attention accorded to gangsta rap. Tyson wrote that the scale represented a “necessary step toward a meaningful dialogue on how people from different groups, cultures, and countries interpret and construct the meaning of rap music.”

Farmer said the work represented a culturally responsive practice to engage youth within their own experience.

“It was an important kind of strength-based approach,” said Farmer. “It looked at what was valuable within the young African-American male and could be leveraged to help them address their own healing and wellness.”

After 10 years of practicing hip-hop therapy, Tyson began a textbook that outlined interventions using a model he called Hip-Hop Critical Consciousness Circles, or H2C3 for short. His fiancé Millicent Champaign said he was hard at work on the project well past midnight on the night he died.

“He was such a hard worker,” said Champaign.

She said that, in addition to his research and writing, he was a loving father to his three children, he volunteered for workshops at Rikers Island, and he “touched everyone he knew.”

“My nephews would come and visit us in Florida and he’d talk to them about being a young black man in society now, how to carry yourself and how to respect others,” she said. He talked about hip-hop with them, too. “He’d say ‘Some of what’s in the music may pertain to you, but you don’t have to go that route.’”

Flowers and tributes may be sent to First First United Methodist Church, 145 Paulison Avenue, Passaic, New Jersey 07055.  Cards or notes may be sent to Tyson’s sister: Yveles Tyson, 77 Pennington Avenue, Apt. G2, Passaic, New Jersey 07055.

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.

“I’m very much into this idea of identity performance and construction,” he said.

“What are the things we pull from to become who we are? What are the things we learn through heritage, embodied experience, or education that make us?”

A Chronicler of Hip-Hop Royalty

Poulson-Bryant earned his doctorate in American Studies from Harvard University in 2016, but he’s been exploring the issue of identity for the better part of two decades as a journalist. In 1993, Quincy Jones tapped him to co-found Vibe magazine, where he profiled artists such as Will Smith, Bobby Brown, Boyz II Men, and Dennis Rodman. His 1993 profile of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Excellence in Music Journalism.

He later branched out into nonfiction with Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2005) and fiction, The V.I.P.s (Broadway, 2011).

Returning to Academia

In 2008, he returned to Brown University to finish the bachelor’s degree he’d walked away from when he was 20. He was so taken with the experience that he applied for, and was accepted to, Harvard, where he completed his doctorate dissertation on, “Everybody is a Star: Uplift, Citizen, and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970’s U.S. Popular Culture.”

“I left Brown for a year and ended up staying in New York for 15 years. I left New York for a year to go back to Brown, and ended up teaching at Fordham 10 years later, so I clearly can’t leave things,” he said. laughing.

Transitioning to academia was relatively easy, he said.

“I’d interviewed everybody I wanted to interview, I traveled the world, I’d gone to see U2 at Yankee Stadium with Quincy, I’d done the things I felt like being a journalist commanded me to do. In writing books, I also found a different voice that I’d built on as a journalist,” he said.

Echoes of that voice live on at Fordham. In his creative writing class, Flawless/Freedom/Formation: Writing about Race and Popular Culture (Yes, that’s a nod to Beyoncé), Poulson-Bryant, a native of Rockville Center, New York, has students read his Puff Daddy profile.

“Students don’t have to just read theory or the vaunted history texts. They should read journalism, they should read memoirs, and they should read essays,” he said.

“I figured, why not give them one that I wrote and kill two birds with one stone by introducing them to a history that I’m a part of, and also contribute to their education?”

Examining a Tumultuous Time in Black History

When it comes to future research, Paulson-Bryant is editing “Everybody is a Star,” with the goal of submitting it in September for publication. It was inspired in part by “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the 1976 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Joseph Rakes, a white teenager, assaulting Ted Landsmark, a black man, with a flagpole bearing the American flag.

He said the image, which was taken in Boston during school busing protests, is a visual representation of the tensions that existed between white ethnics and African-Americans at the time.

“As a kid, I remember hearing about the busing crisis and Irish kids throwing rocks at black kids in Boston,” he said.

“And I was curious that that tension was happening at the same time when, say, disco is happening, when black people and white people are creating culture together.”

Poulson-Bryant argues that, historically, African Americans existed as both central to American culture and also marginal to it, particularly in interactions with what historians dubbed white ethnics: the Italians, Irish, and Jewish. At the same time that the series Roots was playing on television, and Blaxploitation films were playing in theaters, young generations of white ethnics were returning to narratives of heritage and the “Old Country” via films like The Godfather.

“There was all this cross-racial exchange going on in a lot of these spaces. Saturday Night Fever, I argue, is as much about blackness as it is Italian-ness, if you really think about what’s going on. A text like The Wiz is as much about classic Americana literature,” he said.

The title “Everybody is a Star,” refers to the hierarchies of power that can be found in these pockets of ethnicities, particularly in New York City, said Poulson-Bryant. He plans to take the summer off to finish the book. But for now, he’s enjoying his second career act as a professor.

“I loved teaching, running discussion sessions in graduate school, and being in the room with students,” he said. “Without sounding too new age-y or too spiritual about it, I have always trusted my gut. It just felt right.”

An entrepreneur empowers young women and girls through hip-hop

A native of Ohio, Kathleen Adams was excited to attend college in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop, having grown up on the music of female hip-hop artists like Queen Latifah and Lauryn Hill.

But she soon realized that female hip-hop artists were often overlooked. So, in her sophomore year, she decided to do something about it. Teaming up with Lah Tere, then a member of the hip-hop group Rebel Diaz, she organized Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen, an event showcasing female hip-hop artists—especially women of color—and providing a forum for women’s health issues.

They expected 75 people. Five hundred showed up. “We were shocked,” Adams says. “We kept hearing, ‘Make this an annual thing. Make it a movement.’”

Attendance grew to 1,000 the next year, and the event celebrated its 10th anniversary last March.

“Hip-hop is liberating,” says Adams, who double-majored in women’s studies and urban studies and also earned a master’s degree in urban studies at Fordham. “You’re offering a sense of freedom. I wanted to put a feminist tinge on that.”

Over the years, the event has focused on topics including violence against women, educational inequality, and overcoming obstacles through faith. Adams and Tere are now looking into spinning off Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen to other cities.

Adams also has a full-time job as a strategic planning manager at the digital marketing firm SapientRazorfish, and is a founding partner at Angel of Harlem, a restaurant in Manhattan. She discovered her entrepreneurial and activist streaks early, starting a dog-walking service at age 10 and, in her teens, successfully lobbying her bosses at a grocery store to let female employees bag groceries so that they, too, could earn tips.

“That was powerful,” she says. “Identify the problem, propose the solution, and implement the solution. That’s Business 101.”

—Mariko Thompson Beck

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

But the gathering at Tuff City Styles, across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, had a scholarly purpose. In keeping with the 2016 theme of the Association of Practical Theology conference, which took place April 8 through 10 at Fordham, the off-campus excursion was meant to exemplify the intersection between migration and theology, said Tom Beaudoin, PhD.

“We live in a world with boundaries and borders, which means we have to pay careful attention to who those borders benefit—who gets to have life and who doesn’t as a result of them,” said Beaudoin, the association’s president and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Practical theology in particular has a responsibility to be part of the living experiences of the neighborhood—to find out what brings joy and pain in the local environment, and how those are connected to the larger world… This starts with symbolically and literally going outside of the gates.”

Tuff City is an art supply store and tattoo and piercing parlor that also houses a professional recording studio. Street artists from around the world are drawn to its backyard graffiti lot, where they paint over its walls on a daily basis.

“Not engaging with and serving the neighborhood—including the arts—is to all of our detriment,” Beaudoin said. “There are resources to be shared, [and]this is a relationship that could be life-giving on both sides and utterly essential to the mission of this University.”

In addition to giving association scholars from around the country a glimpse of the Bronx, Tuff City provided an apt milieu for a talk by alumna Tamara Henry, PhD, GRE ’14, an assistant professor of religious education at New York Theological Seminary.

Against a backdrop of a graffiti murals and life-sized replicas of subway trains, Henry offered an introduction to the world of hip-hop and how urban art—including rap music, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing—pertains to the world of practical theology.

“Hip-hop is an art form that is hewn out of hardship—specifically, the hardships of young people in the 1970s and 80s living in the throes of postindustrial economic and social distress,” said Henry, who is the youth minister at Lenox Road Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

“These art forms become a way in which young people can ignite resistance to the moral and social ills that are plaguing their community … whether it’s pervasive forms of housing discrimination, racial discrimination, unemployment, or the dwindling quality of education systems.”

Hip-hop can serve as a pedagogical resource to illuminate themes relevant to both theology and hip-hop, such as “speaking from the margins, speaking truth to power, and contesting injustice,” Henry said.

The art form can also provide religious educators a window to their students’ world, Henry said, helping them to better understand how urban adolescents and young adults relate to their social and religious environments.

“Hip-hop has become a grammar of young people all across the nation,” she said. “We can begin to view it as an equally meaningful avenue through which religious identity is being formed and through which a new approach to religious education can be engaged.”

The conference initiated what Beaudoin hopes to become an ongoing partnership with Tuff City.

“They are interested in working with students to teach them about urban art, and I’d like to find ways to support and appreciate the Tuff City artistry within our gates and to deepen the partnership Fordham has with our neighborhood,” he said.

“There is a lot to engage with, not only around religion but also other aspects— art, urban life, racial diversity and justice, and local economic issues.”