a strange sense, rap was born long before its time. My first memory of rap was when Muhammad Ali (aka Cassius Clay) came on the television scene as a young twenty-one-year-old boxer talking trash and talking pretty. And in this sense it was born out of the resistance to the draft by Muhammad Ali, who argued that he was a pacifist—a conscientious objector to the violence of war. Ali’s resistance to American hegemony and the violence of the Vietnam War made him the focus of the news media. He was a new Negro who did not fear the white man. He did not hold his head down when he talked to white people. He looked them directly in the eyes and spoke his mind without apology. In many ways Muhammad Ali became the new symbol of Black manhood and Black pride. He was the voice of resistance and hope, so much so that every Black male I knew exhibited a new confidence because of this young, handsome, self-assured high school graduate from Louisville, Kentucky. He was strong and could fight for the system and against the system and could still talk pretty. In the language and spirit of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, hip-hop music, and David Sedaris: “We Talk Pretty One Day, yes we does. Dad blame it!”
Thinking about Ali now forced me to reckon with hip-hop and rap music and the way these Black rappers talked. One thing led to another. Reading Huckleberry Finn caused me to think about contemporary issues and how young Blacks also use the forbidden word. The reading raised a lot of questions, and a lot of anguish and a good bit of ambivalence. I began to think more about growing up as a Black boy.
