On the night of August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell became the First Lady and Mother of Hip-Hop. It all started in the recreation room she rented inside of her apartment block at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the West Bronx, New York.
Campbell and her brother, Clive, an aspiring disc jockey going by the name DJ Kool Herc, threw a "Back-to-School Jam" that lasted into the early morning. The party’s purpose was to help Campbell raise funds for the purchase of a “fresh” back-to-school wardrobe. By the night’s end the brother and sister duo had grossed $300 after charging an entry fee of 25 cents for the ladies and 50 cents for the fellas.
The indoor space, which held only enough room for a few hundred people, was packed tight with high school kids entranced by the soul and funk mixes Herc played over his Kingston, Jamaican-style sound system.
The dance eventually poured outdoors into the neighboring Cedar Playground and that night when the music genre hip-hop was born, simultaneously the historical jam session became the first in a series of popular block parties.
By the following summer, Herc, the burgeoning DJ from Jamaica, who owned the loudest sound system in the neighborhood, had garnered fame and a local and loyal following. So Herc decided to headline a free party on the block.
“After the block party, we couldn’t come back to the rec room,” Herc explained to Jeff Chang, author of the award-winning 2005 book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.
On August 13, 2022, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) paid homage to the famous rec room jam session with its own star-studded “Hip-Hop Block Party.” The event celebrated the one-year anniversary of the debut of the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, a multimedia collection exploring the genre’s national and worldwide influence stemming from its early days in the parks of New York City.
Dwandalyn Reece, the museum's associate director for curatorial affairs, says the history of block parties as an urban phenomenon began in Black neighborhoods as a tool to bring people together.
“That spirit of community, which we all talk about as the roots of hip-hop, really originates in that block party concept,” says Reece, who defines block parties as a “community gathering where people come together to hangout, to talk, to celebrate, and just have fun together.”
The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap is a first-of-its-kind multimedia collection chronicling the growth of the music and culture from the parks of the Bronx to solidifying a reach that spans the globe.