Harvard Hosts a Conference on the Rap Murders

Original: “Harvard Conference To Tackle Recent Rap Murders” · MTV News · no byline · April 16, 1997

Two of rap’s biggest stars had been shot dead within six months. Five weeks after the death of The Notorious B.I.G., one of the world’s best-known universities stepped in: Harvard University’s Black Students Association announced a one-day conference. The date was May 3, 1997, on campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

An Album Title Becomes the Conference Theme

The title was “Life After Death: Rap, Reality, and Social Responsibility,” an allusion to Biggie’s album Life After Death, which had been released two weeks after his death. The report from MTV was brief and sober, yet its core lay in the occasion: the university wanted to speak openly about what rap, violence, and responsibility have to do with each other.

Three major panel discussions and a performance by an artist yet to be named were planned. Prominent voices from the scene had confirmed their attendance: rappers Chuck D (Public Enemy), Chubb Rock, and Vinny of Naughty by Nature, along with cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson and hip-hop journalists Reginald Dennis and James Bernard.

Universities Step In

The conference was part of a whole series of reactions in the spring of 1997: calls for a truce, peace appeals from Snoop Doggy Dogg and Sean “Puffy” Combs, murals for both deceased artists. That universities were stepping in was new. In September 1997, UC Berkeley offered a course on Tupac’s poetry, the University of Wyoming followed in 1998, and in the year 2000, Oakland was already hosting the second conference devoted specifically to Tupac.

Michael Eric Dyson, one of the guests at Harvard, later wrote Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (2001), one of the most important books on Tupac.

How the conference unfolded on May 3 and who actually performed is not documented in the sources. The original MTV report is no longer available online; the account here is based on a surviving transcript.