I remember going to one of those hot, summer night tent revivals, when I was young. The one where the preacher would transform a crowd of Black folks, who were quietly complaining about the heat and mosquitoes into a shoutin� congregation, so filled with the spirit that if the rapture came that night, they would all be ready to go.

As the preacher concluded his two-hour sermon, he would warn the crowd that the end was near and now was the time to get right because "tomorrow might be too late." I remember Sista Ruth Ann running up to the altar confessin� her sins and Brotha Johnson sinking down in his seat hoping that she would not remember that warm August night in 1969. ...

My sister-in-law recently told me of a dream that she had where overnight, the hardest, bling-blinginest, gangsta rappers became born again Black freedom fighters, dedicating their lives to uplifting the Black community and repairing the damage that they had done. I started to give her that look that is usually reserved for that crazy aunt who is always seeing the ghost of Abraham Lincoln in her basement. But hold up, wait a minute, rewind that back. Why can�t it happen?

We have not gone that far down the road of destruction that we cannot make a u-turn and come back home. We just need a few brothas and sistas with the unshakable FAITH that this will happen and a Black community willing to make things happen in order to facilitate this change.

Flow with me a moment before you call me crazy, deranged. Suppose the Black community chose one day to stand up and say NO! to the negativity that has taken over the Hip Hop culture? What if we had one big Hip Hop Revival and opened the doors of the Black Nation and allowed all the gangsta rappers, ballas, thugs, etc. to walk down the aisle and become part of a new Black Power Movement. I can see it now. As the final chorus of Bob Marley�s "Redemption Song" begins to fade, a "g" drops his gun on the floor and with tears running down his face, apologizes to the young mother whose son was killed trying to imitate the life that he saw in his video.

Can you imagine the amount of guilt that some of the brothas and sistas in the rap game are carrying? Unless, you are totally without a conscience, I am sure that it is impossible to sleep at night, knowing that your lyrics and hyped up lifestyle have contributed to the escalation of Black on Black crime and the furtherance of the global oppression of African people.

The problem is most of us who consider ourselves "conscious" have not created the proper atmosphere for those who have done wrong by the Black community to "repent."

Most of those critical of Hip Hop have parroted a conservative right wing agenda instead of Black Nationalism. So from the standpoint of our young people, an attack on negative rap became an attack on Blackness.

At a time when we should have been pulling the youth closer to us, we pushed them away. Instead of talking too them, we talked at them.

It�s kind of like the drug dealer or prostitute who comes to church geared up and receives so many dirty looks from the saved folks that they walk out of the door before the end of the opening hymn. We missed an opportunity to reach our youth and allowed them to go back into the streets instead of becoming part of the family.

We must now correct two wrongs.

First, the failure of the older generation to see the revolutionary potential of Hip Hop and secondly, the failure of artists to use Hip Hop as a force for the LIBERATION of African people.

This Memorial Day should be forever remembered as a day that the conscious brothas and sistas spoke. This May 27th was "Hip Hop Reformation Day," a day when community activists, conscious rappers, and spoken word artists across the country united to promote a new age in Hip Hop.

One of the excuses that has been used by the entertainment industry is that there are no positive rappers and if there were, no on would listen to them, anyway. Conscious rappers must start flooding radio stations and record companies with their best material. Then the Black community must back them up by calling radio stations demanding that positive voices be heard.

What will DJ Silk do when he gets 1000 calls asking to hear Dead Prez instead of Jay Z. Can you imagine what the reaction of the owners of Bump and Grind CD�s and More will be when we request CD�s by "The Black Consciousness Collective" and the CD by "Killa Kip and the Blunt Brothas" gathers dust on the 99 cent bargain table?

So email your emails, fax your faxes, get on the phone and holla at ya folks in Mississippi that you haven�t talked to since the last family reunion, go wake your grandma up! Do whatever you�ve gotta do to make this happen.

While we must appeal to the negative rappers, the bottom line is that it is not really about them, it is about us, the masses. Memorial Day 2002 could go down in history as the day the masses of Black people seized the time and declared a new day for Hip Hop and the Black Nation.

To borrow from Nas�s One Mic "We need some soul searching; the time is now."

(Minister Paul Scott is founder of the Durham, N.C.-based New Righteous Movement, which teaches Afrikan Liberation Theology. For more information contact: [email protected].)