As the only black and only black female in Congress’s upper chamber, the Illinois Democrat found herself compelled, at the fire-and-brimstoning insistence of self-appointed National Congress of Negro Women spokeswoman Dolores Tucker, to examine the music industry’s dirtiest linen in the most publicly microscopic light indicting hip-hop culture. Although joined in the forefront of those hearings by the white New Englander male voice of her then independent Senate colleague Joe Lieberman, the congressional quizzing touched off the type of pop culture response unseen in Chicago since the ‘68 Democratic National Convention and usually reserved as a campaign tactic in Greater Chicagoland’s suburban elections.

The letter was subsequently published in a Sunday issue of the Chicago Tribune, where it raised blistering questions on Moseley-Braun’s enthusiasm for organizing the rap hearings but lack of it toward honestly addressing recurring allegations that her then South African aristocrat fiancé and chief of staff had sexually harassed female campaign workers repeatedly as far back as her electoral dash to make congressional history. Despite a rebuttal from a Moseley-Braun operative in the Trib that ran shortly after the impromptu hip-hop correspondence committee’s letter and although National Organization of Women cofounder Gloria Steinem maintained that her organization found themselves empty-handed on the sexual harassment issue after the deepest digging, the damage to Moseley-Braun and Tucker’s cause had been wrought.

On emerging out an arrival gate at O’Hare International Airport from a trip abroad on what amounted to a premarital honeymoon for her and her fiancé, Moseley-Braun found herself mobbed by teen-agers and pre-teens resounding with pleas of “Please don’t take our music away from us.” Moseley-Braun hastily called a press conference shortly afterward to nervously clarify that she merely wanted to explore and study rap’s suggested and even blatant messages of woman baiting and street violence and was not out to tread on hip-hop’s First Amendment rights. Ultimately, despite Tucker’s amplified haranguing and congressional lobbying, Moseley-Braun dropped the hearings.

T.J. Crawford was a student at Atlanta’s Morehouse College when that forgotten group of Chicago hip-hop revolutionaries struck their prosaic blow for hip-hop democracy. On his return to Greater Chicagoland around the turn of the 21st century, the need for empowering hip-hop beyond words and rhetoric had been on the front burner of his political organizing, beginning with his founding of the Chicago Political Action Committee in 2002. Crawford is now laying the groundwork for a hip-hop equivalent of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as chairman of the Chicago Local Organizing Committee, the hosting and organizing body for the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which is meeting Jul. 19-23 at the Chicago State University campus on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side.

“The convention’s theme, ‘Money, Power, Respect,’ is derived from an economic, political, and social construct,” Crawford told fresh convention organizing recruits during a Chicago LOC meeting Tuesday evening at Northeastern Illinois University’s Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies in the Oakwood neighborhood on Chicago’s Near Southeast Side. The National Hip-Hop Political Convention, similar to the Niagara Movement, or the series of annual conferences of primarily black leaders from 1905-1910 leading to the NAACP’s founding and that launched an organized civil rights movement, seeks the creation of a national organization for advancing and empowering hip-hop. “Power is political, the general nature of how large groups interact. Power also identifies how private and public interest interact. Basic knowledge and full participation in state, local, and federal government are viewed as our best opportunity for a fair and balanced society.

“The 2006 National Hip-Hop Convention will operate from this lens, working to empower people also engaged in civic activities while introducing these concepts to those who are not as involved. Trainings, workshops, and seminars will be key to the delegates, while positive entertainment and civic education will be used as a means to explain concepts to the general public.”

The biannual National Hip-Hop Political Convention first met in 2004 at Newark, N.J., to which Crawford was a founding Chicago LOC delegate. For ‘06, Crawford’s local organization is very resolved on getting the biggest bang for the buck out of showcasing Greater Chicagoland as a world center of hip-hop culture. A key Chicago LOC goal for next year is to generate $10 million in tourism spending during the convention, which will occur during the fourth annual official city observance of Chicago Hip-Hop Heritage Month. Healthy signs that the Chicago LOC can pull that feat off are reflected by more than $1,000 in spending Labor Day weekend at the business expo of the African Festival of Arts’ first Hip-Hop Pavilion that the Chicago LOC organized and hosted in Washington Park on the city’s Southeast Side and some $500 raised during a Chicago LOC-hosted social Sept. 18 at Douglas Park on the city’s West Side.

Another key Chicago LOC goal for the ‘06 convention is to multiply ten times the combined attendance of 3,000 for the Hip-Hop Pavilion, social, and an author-studded Jul. 9 panel discussion of race, politics, and hip-hop at Concept School/Betty Shabazz International Charter School that aired on C-SPAN 2 and C-SPAN.org. The Chicago LOC is already stumping for those expanded numbers with a Money, Power, Respect campaign relying heavily on the Internet and traditional urban street marketing while partnering with public and private sector to offer such potentially irresistible convention events as a b-kid summit, stage drama, and a noncompetitive film festival.

From a hip-hop standpoint, Chicago State University is a logical choice for the ‘06 National Hip-Hop Political Convention beyond the affordability and availability of space on its 161-acre campus boasting unlimited possibilities. As metropolitan Chicago’s oldest public university, founded in 1867 as a teacher training school, CSU boasts a primarily Hip-Hop Generation student population predominately non-white enough for the school to achieve the unofficial designation of an historically black university. Among the student body of 7,250 from around the world are hip-hop producers, rappers, more skilled mic-controllers, and R&B vocalists.

Toward the end of her life, Chicago hip-hop’s grandmom and Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks regularly lectured at the CSU. Now her protégé and one of Chicago hip-hop’s lead dads, activist poet and book publisher Haki Madhubuti, runs the Gwendolyn Brooks Center there. The center is the official repository for Brooks’ works.

Several of Chicago’s most notable filmmakers from the so-called Hip-Hop Generation—including Parris Reaves, Deri Tyton, and Coquie Hughes—studied video and film production there. Kanyé West’s mother was also once a member of CSU’s faculty.

If Crawford and the Chicago LOC have their way, the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention will repeat the century old feat from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition of establishing Chicago as a Windy City of Broad Shoulders, one long in persuasive world shaping rhetoric and made to be venerably tapped and not butted.

Visit Chiloc.com and HipHopConvention.org for more information about the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention.

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