Tough Notes: Letters to Young Black Men.

• Author: Kitwana, Bakari

Tough Notes: Letters to Young Black Men by Haki Madhubuti Third World Press. 150 pages. $15.00.

There is a civil war going on in Black America. The divide between the hip-hop generation (black people born between 1965 and 1984) and the older civil rights/Black Power generation (black baby boomers) is steadily widening. It is a divide that is as vast as the one exhibited inside white America in the 1960s, when radical white youth culture made a major break from the mainstream and swept across the country.

Whenever those on either side of Black America's generational abyss meet, the older generation usually maintains that remaining in leadership for four decades without nurturing a new generation of leadership is not a problem. The younger generation, for its part, is quick to say that the older generation failed us, while benefiting every day from the struggles of the '50s and '60s.

If Black America's divided generations are going to understand each other better, a good place to start is with the recent publications Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, edited by Kevin Powell, and Tough Notes: Messages to Young Black Men, by Haki Madhubuti. Step into a World gives the older generation a glimpse into issues that have shaped the younger generation. And Madhubuti--unlike too many in his generation--obviously has taken the time to listen to some of these concerns.

Powell, a hip-hop generation poet and author, is heavily influenced by issues of his time, such as globalization, the prison-industrial complex, America's war on drugs, police brutality, and rap music. Powell became famous through two artifacts of his age: reality TV and hip-hop. Powell's appearance in the early episodes of MTV's reality TV program The Real World in the early 1990s made him a household name among twenty-somethings. He solidified his place as an in-the-know writer for Vibe magazine by the mid 1990s. Powell co-edited another anthology of young writers, In the Tradition (Writers & Readers, 1992), with Ras Baraka, son of Amiri. Then he became a TV icon and hip-hop writer, and wrote Keeping It Real in 1997 (One World).

Haki Madhubuti gained notoriety in the late '60s Black Arts Movement as the fiery poet Don L. Lee. Still fiery in the '70s, '80s, and into the present, he made his mark as the nonconformist and noncompromising advocate of independent

black institution-building. He founded Third World Press in 1967 and co-founded New Concept...