The Black Power voices of my generation

A retrospective on voices that shaped the culture

Illustration by Jason Gorham

This story was originally published in BlackBoard's Winter '25/Spring '26 issue. Learn more about our print issues here.

As I sit in Northwestern Prison Education Program’s “dayroom,” watching the 2026 Grammy awards, Lauryn Hill comes to the stage. At the sight of the singer with her signature locks, my memory floats back in time. The year is 1997, and I’m in my bedroom. Getting ready for school, I am busy ironing my favorite Tommy Hilfiger hoodie. My radio blasts Lauryn Hill and Nas’, “If I Ruled the World.” When they get to the bridge, I stop ironing and sing along:

If I ruled the world, if I ruled

If I ruled, I’d free all my sons

Black diamonds, I love ‘em love ‘em baby

Black diamonds and pearls, if I ruled

If I ruled the world

If I ruled the world

I love ‘em, love ‘em baby!

The power of their combined rhythm flows through me like electricity through a circuit. Their words challenge my mind to stand up to a world trained to destroy people whose skin looks like mine. Their words, and the words of many other hip hop artists, are the Black power voices of my generation.

When most people think of Black power, they envision marquee names like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman and others. They think of social movements aimed at tearing down the white supremacist structures that exist hidden behind the guise of civilization.

However, for those of us who grew up in the 1990’s, the voices that attracted our attention were those of the rappers.

Tupac Shakur’s voice rhyming “Death Around the Corner” spoke to our generation’s ethos of surviving the maze of racism. “I see death around the corner/gotta stay high while I survive.” Pac’s words, spoke the simple truth of our experience. In a world where a Black person could be killed for breathing, instructions on how others maneuvered were like words from the Bible. While many criticized the messages of hip hop, those of us stuck in the twisted system saw rap music as a manifesto.

I remember my friends and I being desperate to survive the injustices of economic depravity, police brutality and overall poverty. Trudging through environments that promised us little more than death or incarceration, we wriggled through day by day. We fed off of rhythms and melodies, whose frequencies would aid our quest to endure a city’s frigidity that runs deeper than its weather.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once visited Chicago and reportedly said that Chicago’s racism was more vicious than anything he’d seen in the darkest woods down South. What Dr. King saw was the reality hidden behind the vertical plantations known as Chicago’s “projects.” What he saw was the segregation of Blacks on the South and West sides of Chicago from the whites who congregated up North. What Dr. King saw was that the winds of Chicago blow cold — so cold that it sinks into people’s souls.

Facing the obstacles of a world designed to view us as commodities destined for consumption, my peers and I saw rap artists like Nas as the modern-day messiahs. We listened as their rhyme plots pulled us above the limitations of our world. We were energized by the clever combinations and musical mastery through which they sketched our world and its obstacles. Through each song we heard one message: SURVIVE.

So, when I looked on that Grammy stage and saw a hip hop icon as legendary as Lauryn Hill, I remembered the power of the messages from back then rumbling in my spirit.