The Rev. Lennox Yearwood had learned from experience that getting more members of the hip-hop generation to be politically active was difficult. He knew it wasn’t enough to get them to turn out to vote for one election – because they might not show up for the next one. And he believed that creating change required more than voting.
So last year, the group he founded in 2004, Hip Hop Caucus, changed its strategy for mobilizing young Black fans of hip-hop. Rather than telling everyone to go to the polls on Election Day, they helped members of the hip-hop generation place a measure on the Michigan ballot this November. The campaign secured about 200,000 more than the nearly 360,000 signatures required for the measure, known as Proposal 2.
After decades of struggling to mobilize the hip-hop generation to be more politically active, Black political organizers are trying some new approaches. They are changing the messaging they are targeting at the Black Millennials and Gen Z voters who make up roughly 40% of Black eligible voters, and they are changing their calls to action.
Typically, this group of young voters, who are 18 to 45 years old, has lower levels of political participation across the board, from voter turnout to public meeting attendance.
But real inroads have been made in getting such voters to participate in politics: In this midterm election cycle, Black hip-hop millennials have been on ballots across the country, most notably U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crocket of Texas, who campaigned with artists such as Cardi B regularly appearing beside her, before losing her primary in March. But organizers in Indiana and across the country said it is still vital to connect with potential young voters by highlighting the stakes for them.
To do that, organizers say the message that the hip-hop generation receives needs to focus more on the financial hardships that many of them are undergoing. And they need to be asked to do more than vote – they need to be invited to be part of a campaign for change.
“Involvement beyond the polling place is what we want to see,” said Yearwood, 56, a resident of Shreveport, Louisiana.
Lessons learned from ‘Vote or Die’
Yearwood and other organizers have learned a lot since the 2004 “Vote or Die” campaign, one of the first to market voting like a brand. The Vote or Die slogan appeared on T-shirts that seemed to be worn by every major artist in hip-hop, on billboards, and all over BET and MTV.
The major force behind Vote or Die was the now disgraced Sean Combs, who was convicted in 2025 on two federal prostitution-related counts and sentenced to 50 months in prison.
At the time, his nonprofit, Citizen Change, set out to reach the roughly 42 million 18-30 year-old Americans who were eligible to vote that year. Whether because of the campaign or other factors, turnout of that demographic increased substantially that year. The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement reported that 4.6 million more Americans under 30 voted in 2004 than in 2000, a 9% increase.
But the campaign never became a movement.
Vote or Die stressed the urgency of turning out for Election Day, but it lacked sufficient civic education to drive sustained engagement. Some of the new voters who turned out did so without knowing the answers to basic questions like what a particular office does and how a ballot connects to rent, a power bill, or a courtroom, the organizers said.
Hip Hop Caucus flips the script
Yearwood, an architect of Vote or Die, founded Hip Hop Caucus, a nonpartisan group that mobilizes young voters and communities of color through hip-hop culture, to carry the Vote or Die momentum past Election Day.
In the years since then, he has made environmental justice central to the group’s work, arguing that climate justice can’t be separated from racial justice. In 2015, the minister and Air Force veteran was named a White House Champion of Change for climate leadership.
The group’s “Respect My Vote” campaign has run since 2008, launching with rapper T.I., and has used artists to register and turn out young voters, particularly those who didn’t go to college.
“If you don’t fight for the things that you want, you can’t complain,” JaRel Clay, Hip Hop Caucus’ associate senior director of digital and production, told Capital B Gary.
In recent years, the group has expanded its focus from voter turnout to encouraging people to get active in policymaking.
In Michigan, its organizers have been engaging the hip-hop generation to fight against rising electricity costs. The measure that hip-hop voters in Michigan helped get onto the November ballot aims to bar political spending by regulated utilities and others.
“Everybody got a power bill,” Clay said, explaining that people are motivated to fight injustices that they personally experience.
Michigan regulators approved two rate hikes earlier this year, leaving some customers with bills that jumped $200 a month, he said, without knowing why.
“We’re giving them the information so that they can make the best decisions for themselves,” he said.
Voting is only half the work, he added. In Georgia, the group organized voters and first-time commenters to speak during hearings for the Public Service Commission, which regulates Georgia Power.
Candidates and mobilization
Mobilizing hip-hop voters is a big topic of conversation this election season not just for organizers, but also for Democratic candidates and cultural influencers.
At the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., last month, U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Indianapolis, brought Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed onto a panel titled “Hip Hop and Politics” with artists and organizers. The panelists talked about how they need to change their approach to motivating and engaging the hip-hop generation.
El-Sayed, who won Michigan’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in August, opened with a thesis that went sideways.
“Hip-hop is about language, and language is about power,” he said. “It’s almost never used to obfuscate. It’s almost always used to clarify. It’s important for us to be thinking about politics of, by, and for the people, and for the street, and it should only deal in the language that clarifies.”
Good politics should work the same way, he said, with plain talk about where power sits and how it should be used.
Minutes later, Damon “Dame” Dash, co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, stopped mid-answer to ask him about the word obfuscate, which means to make something difficult to understand.
“Obfuscate,” El-Sayed repeated.
“Because you definitely confused me,” Dame replied, to laughs from the packed conference room.
Dash then clarified El-Sayed’s point. He described conversations around the political process as boring to most potential voters.
“The language it takes to pass a law, he said, “makes us daydream.” He added: “We have to figure out how to make passing a law cool.”
What reaches people, Dash said, is what they feel everyday: frustration over diesel at $6 a gallon and the price of eggs.
What difference does voting make?
In Indianapolis, Bryan Chatfield, a member of the hip-hop generation himself, underscored how important it is to talk to young Black voters about how policy connects to their paychecks and financial well-being.
Chatfield, a Gary native who now serves as chair of the Wayne Township Board, said hip-hop shaped how he understood politics. He credits Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” and Nas’ “Project Windows” with giving him the words to describe what he saw growing up in Gary.
“They were street journalists back then,” Chatfield told Capital B. “Trusted street journalists.”
When he talks politics now with family and people outside his circle, he hears distrust and a sense that everything is “already set up.” He added: “People talk about how a candidate dresses or the latest gossip, not what the office does.”
In Marion County, Democrats’ debriefs of the 2024 election showed the party struggled most with voters roughly 18 to 30, he said. At the barbershop where he works, Chatfield looks for openings to deliver civics lessons. If someone complains about child support, he explains that the county clerk handles child support payments and records.
“Point the finger at the right person, the right institution,” he said.
He tells people that the stakes of voting also show up in his township’s budget. Senate Bill 1, passed in 2025, will cut revenue for local governments across Indiana, including in Gary, where the Common Council is wrestling with it this budget season.
Chatfield said the loss of funding is the difference between his township being able to help 3,000 people with eviction prevention and other aid versus 2,000 or 1,000.
“These elections do have consequences,” he said. “When we have little turnout, then this is what we end up with.”
How are hip-hop voters reacting?
Clay says the Hip Hop Caucus’s messaging lands well with Gen Zers on college campuses, particularly at HBCUs in the South, but has struggled to connect with millennials. The weakening of the Voting Rights Act has been a wakeup call for some millennial voters, however, leading to greater engagement, Clay said.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais made it harder for anyone to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Clay said Millennials who never had to fight for the ballot are now seeing what it takes to keep it.
“One of the challenges that we have had, honestly, is with more of our millennial crowd,” he said.
“When you’ve lived long enough, you start to get a little bit discouraged,” Clay said. “So a lot of what we’re trying to do is to make sure that folks who are in that millennial age understand that they also have power.”
