The title alone, Up South In Akron: Summer 1959, is enough to stoke the flames of curiosity: How can Akron — a modest Ohio metropolis up north known as the “Rubber Capital of the World” — be “Up South” when the South is, well, south? But Umar Bin Hassan, born in 1948 and one of three living members of the iconic spoken-word group The Last Poets, faced just as much racism growing up in Ohio in the 1950s and ’60s as he would have in Alabama or Georgia. Up South In Akron, Hassan’s recently reissued comic book, paints, in just a handful of meticulously detailed pages, a vivid portrait of what life was like for a young Black kid roaming the Akron streets.
Edited by former Def Jam Recordings publicist and journalist Bill Adler and illustrated by Nate McDonough, the comic was originally published in 2013 but found new life when Music Arkives volunteered to spruce it up with an updated cover, bios, the story behind the original publication, a hip-hop family tree, and photos of Hassan as a young Akronite.
The result is a charming — yet at times heartbreaking — account of Hassan’s formative years. Hassan was barely in the double digits when the story takes place, but had already been working as a shoeshine boy for two years, a job he would keep until he was 15. Running around Howard Street, he learned valuable lessons about how the world worked — the good and the bad.
“Growing up a young Black man in the projects, eight years old, I thought I had a story to tell about me getting out on the streets, hustling and trying to make sure our family, including seven brothers and sisters, always had something to eat,” Hassan tells the Voice over Zoom. “My father was a musician and he was always going through those musician changes — you never knew when or where or what was going to happen. It just fell on me. Now I ended up feeding my brothers and sisters. But it worked out. God was good, kept me in shape and protected me.”
The story told in the comic begins with the young Umar standing in the middle of Howard Street, better known in Akron as “Little Harlem.” Surrounded by the industrial smells of nearby rubber factories, beer-stained bar floors, and bad decisions, Hassan would look for anyone who needed a shoeshine and happily offer his services for a quarter. On one particular evening he walked into Benny River’s, a local club he says he’ll “never forget,” where his father was playing trumpet onstage. “He formed a quartet for that evening,” he writes. “As I walked around the club soliciting shines, he moved in my direction and played down at me for about three minutes. It was the greatest moment that he and I ever shared.”
It’s a memory Hassan has held dear for more than 60 years. As he explains in our interview, “Here I am in a bar, shining shoes and he comes down into the bar and plays to me. He didn’t do that at home when he was practicing. That was the only time he ever did that. I think it opened up my understanding of him and who he was, and it gave me a little more faith in his belief in me and how much he loved me. I understood him a little bit more. Maybe he just took his time to admit truths or say who he loves. It came over quite well.”
“I needed those white dollars, so I couldn’t get too stupid.”
But that wasn’t typical of a night on Howard Street. Hassan was more often subjected to the pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other nefarious characters who littered the street late at night. But, as he makes clear in the comic, he had protection — albeit not the kind one would expect. “The prostitutes became like my mothers,” he explains over Zoom. “They looked out for me all the time. If someone said something stupid to me or messed with me, the prostitutes would look out for me.”
As the comic comes to a close, Hassan recalls an incident that took place in front of the Green Turtle Cafe and Hotel involving the Akron police department, specifically, one of Akron’s only Black officers at the time, “Big J.” “One day in the summer of 1959 something happened that changed the way I looked at Big J and the Akron Police Dept,” he writes. “Two Black detectives were arguing with this white man in front of the Green Turtle Cafe and Hotel. The Green Turtle was the spot where the powers that be went to pick up their bag money for known criminal activity on the street.”
Ultimately, the two Black officers arrested the belligerent white man, but before they could haul him off to jail two white officers sped up in their squad car, sirens blaring, intercepted the man, took off the handcuffs, and drove away.
“And we all understood why Big J was so cruel and so callous for the rest of the night,” the comic concludes. “This was Akron, Ohio in the Fifties. This was America in the Fifties. No matter whether you were up South or down North, you were and always would be just another nigger to them.”
That explosive ending to the story was a normal day for Hassan back then. He was routinely referred to with the “n-word” and learned to live with it, since he knew he had to make enough money to buy groceries — which could be a loaf of bread, a pound of salami, a bag of Fritos, a bottle of soda — to take home to his family.
“We all are human beings and no matter what color,” he tells the Voice. “We have our differences, we have our beauties, but we are all human beings. I didn’t take it bad when some of the white guys called me nigger or not. They were going through human changes like some Black men were going through changes. Especially because I was in business, I needed those white dollars, so I couldn’t get too stupid. I always let ’em know when they went too far, but I needed to make more money. A lot of bad things were said to me that knocked me back a little bit. Then again, I’d jump up and make another quarter here and another quarter there because I had to take food home. Sometimes there was no food in the house, so I fed the family.”
Hassan’s work ethic was instilled in him at a very early age, through his parents, grandmothers, aunts, and uncles, who he describes as hard workers. Most of them were employed by the local rubber plants, whether it was Goodrich, Goodyear, Firestone, or Chrysler. During the day Hassan worked at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company; however, as described on the Last Poets website, “ … by night Umar was at the center of the 1967 Akron Riots. An uprising, which was sparked by the Black Power Movement that was taking the country by storm, the riots would become the backdrop of Umar’s revolutionary career as a poet.” The following year, his mother suggested he leave Akron to avoid further danger to himself or his family. The then 20-year-old Hassan found himself on a Greyhound bus headed for Harlem, where a hub of buzzing musicians had congregated. He knew he had to be there.
“Generally, we are a source for the younger people still coming up. Like, ‘Oh, man it was a pleasure to listen to you when I was a little boy. Daddy played you all the time.’ That’s an honor.”
“There was just more to look at and more to feel, so it was just a big place,” he explains. “Harlem just hit me because of all the great musicians came out of there, so I got fascinated with all of the musicians who came through Harlem. It was a joy.” The first person he met was fellow Last Poet Abiodun Oyewole (nicknamed “Dun”), who hooked him up with the rest of the group. They all shared a revolutionary spirit fueled by the assassinations of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. By the time The Last Poets released their eponymous debut album, in 1970, they had fully embraced the “n-word,” flipped it on its head and infused it into their poetry. The track “Run, Nigger,” for example, contained the controversial lyrics:
Time is running out on bullshit changes / Running out like a bushfire in a dry forest / Like a murderer from the scene of a crime / Like a little roach from DDT / Running out like big niggers, running a football field – RUN NIGGER! / Screwing your woman (RUN NIGGERS) […] Run nigger, cause time is running / Run like time never yielding or forgiving. Moving forward.
“Some people got upset about it, but then some people were happy,” Hassan recalls. “That was great news, because it was like we were giving people permission to use the word. Now nobody can say the word like us, so people won’t bother us too much. So we almost opened the gate for the word to be used amongst the community.”
Of course these days the word is routinely used in rap music and as a way among young Black people to address each other, granted without the hard “-er” (nigga). Hassan says he finds this adaptation of the word to be “silly and disrespectful,” but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think there’s a way to use it responsibly. “They should understand where it came from and try not to use it as much as possible in some of the music, especially where it doesn’t belong,” he says. “I’ve talked to some of them, and some of them have come to understand that. They’ve come and asked me, ‘Well, what do you think — should I put nigger here?’ I say, ‘Well, that’s up to you. OK, I’ve used the word, but if you think that you will use it in the right position, go ahead, man.’ I’ve given people permission to use it, but it’s not my word. This is a word that was invented by whoever, but sometimes they take it a little too far, talking about killing other niggers. See, I don’t like that. I can’t deal with that.”
He adds, “I ain’t got no crusade about nobody using the word because it’s been done now. As long as it’s done in an appropriate way where it expels some badness or tries to uplift somebody, I’m OK. We understand these were young Black kids trying to find an identity and trying to find something they could connect to make them a little more bountiful. I’ve never been upset about that. I was never going to go out and shoot nobody ’cause they use ‘nigger’ in a poem or a song. No, I just let it happen.”
While The Last Poets have been embraced by hip-hop royalty such as Nas, Biggie, and Common (and rightfully so), Hassan feels that the younger rap generation shows a lack of respect for their elders. Even so, he has an infectiously positive attitude about it. “These are young people, most of them weren’t born when we came out,” he says matter-of-factly. “They were getting information from other people who listened to us. And some of them came up with ideas or thoughts on how they should approach what we did, but I’m not going to be mad about it because when someone says we respect The Last Poets, I’m happy about that. I wish they’d give The Last Poets some money, but I’m happy with the fact that they do recognize who we are. Generally, we are a source for the younger people still coming up. Like, ‘Oh, man it was a pleasure to listen to you when I was a little boy. Daddy played you all the time.’ That’s an honor, and I’ll take that gratefully and sincerely. I’m still here and people still remember. Only I do wish that I could come into some of that money [laughs].”
Hassan’s daughter, Sabriyah, who’d been quietly listening to the Zoom conversation in the background, notes, “I don’t think he ever looked at poetry as a way to get rich. It was a way to amplify his voice and the message of the time.”
The Last Poets have released well over a dozen albums over the course of their career, but there was more than one occasion when music just wasn’t lucrative enough to support Hassan and his family financially. “One year money can be decent and then another, you can be broke,” he says. “But I always worked too. I was a cook so I always knew how to get a job in a restaurant. When things weren’t going too well for me, I went and got a job working at restaurants. I was going to make sure I didn’t find myself in that position.”
In 1993 Hassan released his debut solo album, Be Bop or Be Dead, via Axiom Records, which continued The Last Poets’ message of unity. Although it didn’t make much of a commercial splash, it showed those who did listen to it that Hassan had remained true to himself and to what the Poets had always been about. As he professes on the single “AM”:
Cocaine has become the law and order of big business and corruption / Rioting through the streets on the crowns of rookie cops who relieve their frustration in the cold-blooded antics of shoot to kill
An observation he could’ve made in the ’70s.
“We were talking about just trying to get things better for our community,” explains Hassan. “That’s why we became The Last Poets. We were just trying to wake people up to the condition our community was in. We wanted them to try to come together, whether they were Christian, Jewish or what. We were trying to make the community better for the younger ones that were coming up. We used our minds instead of going out to sell drugs or pimp women. We used our minds to try to uplift the community. We knew we weren’t going to make the kind of money everybody else made, but we have received the love of people who listened to us and appreciated what we did.”
Like any self-deprecating artist, Hassan still has trouble believing just how profound and influential his work is. He admits, “I still haven’t realized that. Everybody would tell me, ‘Hey man, that’s a great poem, that’s a great line.’ But to me, it’s just something I wrote down, something I felt. I wasn’t trying to find greatness in it or be put on a pedestal, it’s just what I felt.
“But I am so proud of what The Last Poets have put into the world. I know ain’t nobody can touch that. No matter how young they are or how much they use the word ‘nigger’ or who they have backing them, ain’t nobody can touch that entry into America’s world. That’s what we did.” ❖
Up South In Akron: Summer 1959 is published by Music Arkives LTD.
Kyle Eustice is a veteran music journalist with a focus on hip-hop. After a stint at The Source, she spent six years at HipHopDX. She is now a senior editor at Hits magazine and simultaneously maintains freelance gigs at Thrasher, Chuck D’s RAPstation, and High Times. Other bylines include Rolling Stone, Spin, Variety, Rock the Bells, and Wax Poetics.
The post The Last Poets’ Umar Bin Hassan’s Comic, ‘Up South In Akron,’ Gets a Reboot appeared first on The Village Voice.
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