Abiodun Oyewole

Umar Bin Hassan hasn’t even hit 70 yet, but he walks with difficulty and there’s sadness and fatigue in his eyes. As a member of The Last Poets, a group of performance poets who expressed the progressive spirit of the times starting in the late 1960s, he was a major influence on later hip-hop artists. In one of his best-known pieces, "Ni****s Are Scared of Revolution", he criticizes his black brothers’ destructive, macho behavior. SCARED OF...