The Baltimore Mixtape Project

From The Wire, to the Limit – The Story of the Baltimore Mixtape Project

That Baltimore's poor have been plagued by social problems will come as no surprise to most, as these problems have been chronicled in detail on the HBO series The Wire. Now, almost five years after the end of The Wire, these social problems not only persist, but have been exacerbated by chronic budget deficits and Black Baltimore being disproportionately hit by a great recession which, according to some estimates, has wiped out 50% of the accumulated Blacks nationwide, nearly 40 years of progress washed away in a little over 40 months. 

Unfortunately, the increase in the visibility of Baltimore’s problems never materialized into an outpouring of material support, and thus one of Baltimore’s most needy populations, it's Black youth, continues to languish in broken neighborhoods, overcrowded and dangerous jails where 85% of inmates are African American, and schools, as segregated as the prisons, remain light on constructive activities and heavy on leaded water pipes.

Many watched, but few did anything to help after the credits rolled, and Baltimore's youth, already push into a corner, were pushed to the limit.

But a funny thing happened on the road to this story's seemingly inevitable tragic ending; Baltimore's youth began to push back. In basements and one mic concert halls, Baltimore's youth have used hip-hop in an attempt to articulate the conditions of their reality, to put their pain on paper, and thus, maybe, find strength to bear that reality.

The Baltimore Mixtape Project (BMP) is an attempt to build and channel this energy, creating a structure which incentives youth to use hip-hop as a tool to raise the social consciousness of themselves and their communities. A unique collection of

academics (Lester Spence- Johns Hopkins, Jared Ball, Morgan State) ,

community organizers (The Intersection),

political activist (Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle),

and nonprofit service organizations (The Baltimore Urban Debate League),

it seeks to create a space where individual youth can feel that their creative efforts are value by sponsoring contests where youth produce hip-hop and spoken word pieces around specific local political issues, and then compete for cash prizes at concerts which serve as a community showcases for youth artistic talent. After the concert, the work collected by the BMP will then we transferred to CDs and disseminated, for free, around the city as a political education tool, harkening back to classic cassette mixtape as a tool not only of artistic expression, but grassroots journalism. 

The BMP operates under the assumption that, as opposed to demanding intellectual conformity and docility from youth, fostering creative and constitutive expression can allow youth to be the architects of their own education and liberation. The BMP is using kickstarter to ask you to support our efforts, specifically, to show Baltimore's youth that there are those out their who value their work enough to pay for it, as this kickstarter was created for the express purpose of raise the prize money for our first contest, asking students to produce work critiquing the “School-to-Prison-Pipeline”.

To find out more about the Baltimore Mixtape Project

To Donate to the Baltimore Mixtape Project

The Corporate King Memorial and The Burial of a Movement

The Corporate King Memorial and The Burial of a Movement

by Jared Ball | Black Agenda Report

Dr. King and the liberation movement he represents will again suffer a brutal blow this week when all are permanently entombed under the violent euphemism of “memorial.” The dedication of this $120 million stone sculpture is to be a national tribute to a man whose entire body of work was designed to destroy the very structure that now claims to honor him. It is no honor. It is a burial. The very entities against which the movement that produced King have struggled for centuries have now attached themselves to him as if to claim victory over, rather than along with, that man and that movement. This memorial should be seen as the hostile, disingenuous aggression against Dr. King that it is and should continue to be a reminder of the absolute absence of sincere change in this society.

Deborah Atwater and Sandra Herndon have written about the meaning of memorials and museums saying, in part, that they serve the “nation-state” by communicating an “official culture” whose job, “through sponsorship,” is to “retain loyalty” and the “virtue of unity.” Atwater and Herndon describe memorials as helping the state develop a “ collective American public memory” and a “shared sense of the past.” Museums and memorials become “the spaces in which that [public] memory is interpreted.” Perhaps most importantly is that memorials are said to also “give meaning to the present.” But given the vicious re-imaging King suffered before his assassination, the vitriol he withstood from a nation determined to resist the change he represented, and given the post-assassination routine destruction of his advancing radical politics, it is simply not hard to determine just what this memorial intends to convey or the present meaning it intends to define.

Listen Here

Complex-ED: The Secret Relationship Between the Music and Prison Industries.

A film by Real Talk Media featuring Professor Jared Ball

AlJazeeraEnglish: Malcolm X: Who was the Man Behind the Legend?

from AlJazeeraEnglish

Malcolm X: Who was the Man Behind the Legend? 

Until now: With the publication of a warts and all biography that disturbs the widely accepted story of the Muslim leader's life, including controversial insights to his political contradictions and sexual deviations. Some critics have condemned the book as a twisted biography, others say it is a timely reassessment of African-American history.

On Monday's Riz Khan, we are joined by the book's leading researcher, Zaheer Ali, by Jared Ball, a professor of communication studies at Morgan State University, and by journalist and historian Todd Burroughs.

Samuel Yette and The Choice: Black Survival in the United States

Samuel Yette and The Choice: Black Survival in the United States
by Jared Ball

Sam Yette chose to speak and write as a Black man and a professional, thus making himself no longer employable at Newsweek magazine during the Black Freedom Movement. In his book, Yette concluded that “black Americans are obsolete people.” It is up to Black people to refuse to accept America’s verdict – and dare to make our own verdict on America.

Read the Full Essay @ Black Agenda Report