The Launch Of The Hip-Hop Express And It’s Importance To Education [Podcast]
Bakari Kitwana, News One | December 15, 2010

Click here to listen to podcast

In this week’s edition of Rap Sessions, NewsOne contributor Bakari Kitwana speaks with Dr. William Patterson about a new hip-hop and civic studies project modeled after the early 1900s Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver’s Jessup Agricultural Wagon. Whereas Washington and Carver brought Tuskegee University via a horse-drawn wagon to sharecroppers in the South, Patterson’s In Search of Hip-Hop Express brings civic studies from the University of Illinois Urban Champaign to Black youth around the US through a mobile airstream trailer retro-fitted with the latest technology.

Hip-hop Express teaches Black youth civic engagement and community-building while investigating and archiving the Black experience from a hip-hop perspective.  Patterson emphasizes here that his focus is to engage descendents of the sharecroppers: “Booker T Washington believed if sharecroppers were better educated about finance and the science and technology of agriculture then it would improve their quality of life.” (Read more)