Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop by Jeff Chang
If you don’t get the hip hop references, Jeff Chang’s survey history of hip hop’s beginnings will probably help, but it also talks about the concept of “benign neglect” and how public policy, politics, and social conditions helped create hip hop. One of the key players in that scenario is Robert Moses. For more on him, there’s Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
Free Stylin’: How Hip Hop Changed the Fashion Industry by Elena Romero
At this point, hip hop has left its mark on fashion. The documentary Fresh Dressed shows how hip hop artists invented their own fashions out of necessity and have become trendsetters in elite circles. Free Stylin’ is the scholarly take on how hip hop changed fashion.
Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence by Geoffrey Canada
In one scene, Cottonmouth Stokes mocks his cousin Mariah for wanting to go “the Geoffrey Canada route.” Canada is best known for his book Fist Stick Knife Gun and founding Harlem Children’s Zone. Another book about Canada and his work is Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough.
Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem between the Wars by Shane White
Wealth-building in Harlem was also part of an underground economy that allowed some Black business owners to support local artists, athletes, and other businesses, even if they ran numbers, prostitution rings, prohibition-era night clubs, and racketeering in movies like Hoodlum or The Cotton Club. There are other history books that, like this one, mention Stephanie St. Clair, a woman very much like Mama Mabel in Luke Cage. Another book worth reading next to this one could be Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo José Vergara.
Diamondback, one of Luke Cage’s adversaries, touts The 48 Laws of Power and carries around a heavily annotated edition of the Bible that his mother gave him.
Negroes and The Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms by Nicholas Johnson
Another nod to Diamondback is when he insists to Mariah Dillard that the history of guns in America is built on creating fear towards Black people after Reconstruction, when the Ku Klux Klan rose to prominence and Jim Crow began to thrive. Johnson’s book not only relates to Diamondback’s point, but also reveals the tension between self-defense, politically radical violence, and the nonviolent practices of the Civil Rights era.
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