Martin Luther King Jr. and wife Coretta Scott King (a singer herself), playing piano in their home with two of their children.
The 2020s have been nothing if not tumultuous. But it's during tumult that man's mettle is tested — and where the iron of his artistry is sharpened. Martin Luther King Jr. used his instrument of oratory to passionately but civilly call for a redress of grievances and appeal to the concept of the human experience as a shared endeavor, and he knew music to be an almost supernaturally powerful medium through which to reach humanity's sense of justice and fairness via its soul.
The following albums do talk tough, expressing an anger borne of genuine hurt, but I chose them because there is a disernibly aspirational component within each. These are works of honesty, but also of hope. And, musically, they are unforgettable. Part I of this two-part MLK Day 2026 series will revisit five such albums from the past decade, and Part II will revisit a second five. To me, these albums represent a modern manifestation of the values and ideals that served as the foundation of Rev. King's work.
10. Avery Sharpe, 400: An African American Musical Portrait (JKNM Records)
Sometimes in music, especially jazz, we call a particularly ambitious new album “a project,” especially when the music is something more, the perfect vehicle to deliver an impactful story. With 400: An African American Musical Portrait, bassist Avery Sharpe hasn’t just released a new album — he’s unveiled a serious project.
To say that the whole of 400 is greater than the sum of its parts (which it is) is really saying something, since the component parts are extraordinary. The core group comprises a sextet of heavy-hitters: brothers Duane and Kevin Eubanks (trumpet and guitar, respectively), Don Braden (tenor/soprano sax and flute), Ronnie Burrage (drums), and Zaccai Curtis (piano).
Most of these guys have been like family to Sharpe for years. You know who else has been like family to Avery Sharpe? His actual family — and they’re on the record, er, project, too! Appearing on four tracks, the Extended Family Choir, constituted in part by Sharpe’s nieces, nephews, and sister, is directed by Sharpe’s brother, Kevin.
All these pieces come together on the second track, “Is There a Way Home,” a veritable family reunion — the only thing you don’t hear is someone asking to pass the potato salad.
Don Braden’s solo on flute is searching and expansive, with just the right touch of hysteria, a stranger in a strange land’s plaintive call for help and answers. And then it’s Sharpe taking the lead, guiding us through the late 17th century life of African slaves with narrative lines of improvisation on bass, accompanied by Tendai Muparutsa on the djembe (a West African drum). The Extended Family takes us home, chanting beautifully and tragically in a Liberian dialect.
With “Fiddler,” Sharpe offers up a multi-movement musical tracking shot of the post-Revolutionary period. The first movement is an almost classical-sounding waltz, with guesting violinists, Kevin Zhou and Sophia Jeongyoon Han, playing over top of Curtis and Sharpe, producing the kind of Philip Glass-like minimalism that’s simultaneously somber and ennobling, the kind that makes you cry and ball up a fist at the same time. The second movement is a short and sweet little fiddling ditty of steadily accelerating tempo that’s meant to replicate the bluegrassy and zydeco-sounding tunes that slaves were often taught to play on the plantation for the purpose of entertaining slaveowners.
Even when, musically, the mood is light….this is heavy stuff.
From “Antebellum” through the Civil War, Reconstruction, the two world wars, and on through to the civil rights era, Sharpe uses the African-American music of each era to tell the epic, fluid story of those descended from the original Africans brought in bondage to America 400 years ago. Musically, the effort is pitch-perfect. Historically, too. It would have to be — lest Sharpe take heat from his colleagues in Williams College’s African Studies department.
These powers combine to make Sharpe’s 400 project many things at once: pastiche, musicology course, and American history colloquium. What it is most certainly not is just another new CD.
9. Ralph Peterson, Raise Up Off Me (Onyx Productions)
Drummer Ralph Peterson, the Art Blakey acolyte and former Jazz Messenger with a large-and-in-charge physical and musical presence on the bandstand and an outsize personality to match, died in early 2021, months shy of his 59th birthday; he’d been fighting cancer the last six years of his life. But you would've never known it.
In fact, some of his closest musical colleagues, like the brothers Curtis—longtime protégés Luques and Zaccai — didn’t know quite how dire his health situation was until the very end — like the very, very end. “Even in his last texts to us,” Zaccai Curtis told the Boston Globe, “some of the last words he said were, ‘We have work to do.’”
“Onward and upward” became Peterson’s mantra, his signature sign-off to e-mails and daily, uplifting Facebook posts, and the title of his penultimate release as a leader in 2020, an album featuring Zaccai and a band of Blakey alums.
In a world of performative workaholism, of meme-driven “rise-and-grind” culture, Peterson’s prodigiousness was no fashion pose; the man had the track record to prove it. He spent formative years with Blakey and the Messengers. And he earned recognition and cache as one of the Young Lions of the 1980s, who heralded the resurgence of acoustic hard bop and, depending on the bent of the jazz critic, arguably saved classic-sounding, melodically accessible jazz from being swallowed by fusion and the avant-garde.
But Peterson didn’t have time to be consumed by political machinations and posturing; he just knew what and how he liked to play, and he made sure to do a lot of it. Despite or perhaps because of his diagnosis, Peterson was remarkably productive in his last several years, releasing multiple albums with both his Gen-Next Big Band — comprising his most talented students from Berklee College of Music, where Peterson was a longtime faculty member — and The Messenger Legacy, the Blakey alumni band he led.
The Pleasantville, N.J. native played on records led by generation after generation of jazz’s biggest and best — albums by Blakey, the Marsalises, the Curtises, and so many of those Young Lions. And more often than not, they returned the favor; Peterson released 25 recordings as a leader during his life.
His final recording as a leader, his 26th — and the 28th album produced by Onyx Productions, the label he founded in 2010 — was released posthumously, in May 2021, a day after what would’ve been Peterson’s 59th birthday. But Raise Up Off Me is really much more about Peterson’s life and how, through seemingly sheer force of will (friends and colleagues called him a force of nature), he resolved to cast off — or at least keep at bay — the myriad burdens that could have derailed him: drug addiction and struggles with mental health, cancer, and, in the very last days of his life, the social issues giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In this era where we still feel the foot on our necks, the pepper spray and mace that burns our eyes and face, the bullets and the batons,” said Peterson in the album’s press materials, “I find it necessary to remind you that Black Lives Matter… and for my life to matter, you have to raise up off me.”
Peterson was known to talk a lot of good-natured smack — something to which good friend and frequent collaborator Orrin Evans humorously and poignantly attests in the album’s liner notes. But the big man’s all business as he, joined by the Curtis Brothers, opens the record with the first of two bookending iterations of the title track. Still, don’t confuse “all business” with “business as usual.”
If you’ve listened to Peterson’s big band albums, you know he’s got a thing for precision and tight orchestrations. But here, with his most trusted bandmates, he’s opted for something uncharacteristic, an approach from the trio that’s largely improvisational.
“Ralph came to us with a concept,” Luques Curtis told the Globe, “He was like, ‘I want it to be open, but over this vibe. This is the vibe I want.’”
The Peterson-constructed vibe over which the trio improvises is strong willed but not uncompromising, propulsive and urgent, yet cool. The freeform nature of this particular pair of tunes — “Raise Up Off Me” and its companion, “Raise Up Off Me, Too!,” the closer — isn’t what the Young Lions movement was known for, but it squares the circle of Ralph Peterson: the large man in a suit, ascot, and shades — the personification of cool — who brought forth controlled fury, and just the right amount of finesse, from the back of the bandstand.
Zaccai and Luques shine on a version of James Williams’ “Four Play,” where Zaccai channels Monk with the kind of preternatural ease that induces much awestruck head shaking. Meanwhile, little brother takes the baton from Zaccai about mid-way through, paving the way for a Peterson solo that culminates upon the triumphant reprise of the Monk-like theme.
Zaccai’s “I Want to be There for You” and a reinvented version of Peterson’s “Tears I Cannot Hide” are ballads that prove that when friends call Peterson a “force of nature,” they could just as easily be referring to a sunset as to a hurricane. Even though we hear Peterson playing on the tune, it’s hard to envision the former as anything but a loving, sentimental, and, under the circumstances, heart-shattering tribute from Zaccai to his mentor.
It’s the latter, though, that hit Peterson’s emotional core hardest. Jazzmeia Horn sings the original lyrics she wrote for the occasion, totally transforming a tune that originally appeared on Peterson’s Subliminal Seduction (2002). Horn’s lyrics capture the spirit of the orchestration perfectly, and as Horn sings about going “on a journey through space and time,” you begin to understand how and why Peterson made a remark during recording that, at the time, shocked everyone, according to that aforementioned story in the Globe. “I want you guys to play this when I go.”
Don’t confuse yourself, however. Raise Up Off Me is far from a reboot of The Way We Were’s soundtrack, even if the nostalgia factor of several of the selections is undeniable. As it is on “Bouncing with Bud,” a tune the Curtis brothers have played with Peterson since their college days. But the nostalgia comes with a twist here; this arrangement, a Curtis brothers creation, is a staple of the brothers’ repertoire, but they’ve never recorded it — and they’d never played this particular iteration with Peterson. It’s a bit of a role reversal then, an inversion of the mentor-protégé relationship, students becoming teachers and vice-versa. The symbolism’s there if you’ve got a nose for it, but if literary-style abstractions aren’t your thing, simply use your ears to treasure Peterson as a master craftsman here.
He begins on brushes, then goes to sticks. But when Luques (bass) solos and Zaccai (piano) comps, Peterson returns to brushes, and it’s as though he and Zaccai become a single instrument in service of Luques. And then there’s what Luques is doing. Sometimes when a bass player plays out front he can make it sound like a deeply personal conversation between he and the listener. It’s rare, but that’s exactly what Luques accomplishes here.
But, as I was about to say before being waylaid by brushes and Bud Powell, this album’s more than a heartwarming passing of the torch, and Peterson would scoff at any idea of a victory lap; as far as he was concerned, there was always more work to be done. And in that spirit, there’s plenty of Peterson’s characteristic drum thunder here if you know where to look.
Start with “Blue Hughes,” a tune Peterson originally wrote in 1985 for the self-titled debut of a Blue Note super sextet called Out of the Blue. That group featured two saxophones (Ralph Bowen and Kenny Garrett) and a trumpet (Michael Mossman), and was arranged accordingly. Here, with the Curtis Brothers and the addition of Peterson’s Berklee faculty-mate, percussionist Eguie Castrillo, a high-energy Latin treatment was a no-brainer. Listening to Peterson work with a second percussionist is worth the price of the CD, the download, the vinyl, etc.
The thing about Peterson is that he brought it until the very, very end. And nowhere is that more evident from a raw power standpoint than on “Shorties Portion.” It’s Peterson as force of nature; to think that he remained capable of playing with this kind of muscle and precision while battling late-stage cancer is perhaps a testament to improving protocols of palliative care, but mostly you get the sense that it’s Peterson imploring, exhorting, beseeching that horrible disease to raise up off him, for just a few more minutes, so he could do his thing for us just once more.
8. Luke Carlos O'Reilly, I Too Sing America: A Black Man's Diary (Imani Records)
There’s a very simple concept that’s too often lost in contemporary public discourse: Two seemingly conflicting concepts can be true at once. The early 2020s demonstrated that a critical mass of Americans had come to believe that institutional biases and individual prejudices, even if latent and unconscious, had corroded the foundational dream of America. And yet, it’s often these same voices, the ones which have felt stifled, expressing the most hope in the dream this country has stood for since its founding. Protest and hope can co-exist. Grievance and patriotism are not mutually exclusive concepts.
And so, it was in this spirit that Luke Carlos O’Reilly released I Too Sing America: A Black Man’s Diary, on Independence Day 2021. It’s an album that takes its title from Langston Hughes’ brief-but-deep 1925 poem, “I, Too,” a piece narrated by a Black servant who, though constantly alienated by the family for whom he works, believes that the promise of America is like a sun that will eventually — inevitably — rise and illuminate his virtue and merit and humanity for his beloved country to finally see.
So, if O’Reilly’s album — his third as a leader and first on Orrin Evans’ Imani Records —strikes you as Langstonian, as a contemporary descendent of the Harlem Renaissance…there’s a reason for that.
The opener, “Black Lives Matter,” is not so much a statement of protest as it is a declaration of pride and self-worth, a validation of the musicians’ right to exist, to make a living in their chosen professions, to be recognized, listened to, and heard.
It starts with the organic build-up of a jam session tune-up. There’s a frisson of anticipation as you hear fingers limbering, musical muscles stretching, instruments finding their own micro voice and negotiating the group’s macro voice into focus. Chris McBride (alto sax), Lee Hogans (trumpet), and Corey Wallace (trombone) join longtime O’Reilly collaborator Anwar Marshall (drums) and Nimrod Elab Speaks (bass) in announcing the group’s presence and ethos with authority, delivering the musical equivalent of a prideful flag planting.
Batting in the two hole is “Amerikkka,” which presents as a riff on the musical themes often associated with a national anthem. I like to think of it as the musical representation of aspirations for the oft-talked-about “more perfect union.” Caleb Wheeler Curtis (alto sax) and Josh Evans (trumpet) join the rhythm section led by an augustly snaring Marshall to form a union that’s close to perfect in a world where we’re told perfection is unattainable. I’m not so sure anymore.
Listening closely, one might sense inspiration derived from Copeland’s concept of America. Cleverly composed and arranged, the influence of the Shakers’ “Simple Gifts” is unmistakable, and the solos are bursting with genuine feeling but, refreshingly, never overplayed. O’Reilly once had a reputation for being an extremely talented musician who sometimes played more notes than necessary — that’s not the case here. I hear nothing superfluous.
Hogans and McBride return as the horn section on “Brotherman (In Blue),” a medium-tempo, noirish swinger where we hear O’Reilly stretch comfortably, never forcefully or overbearingly. Even when the message is heavy, the delivery remains as easy and cool as Speaks’ bass solo on “Good Trouble,” a reference to the purposeful button pushing which the late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis advocated.
Like Lewis, O’Reilly casts a wide net here, referencing music — like Copeland’s — that was once thought to embody the spirit of America’s multitudes, while also embracing the style of music that might be argued to be doing that today — hip-hop.
“Justice Delayed is Justice Denied” melds the production elements of hip-hop and R&B with jazz instrumentation in the manner of that great triad of Chicago rappers, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, and Chance the Rapper. Vocalist Shenel Johns will have you thinking O’Reilly managed to get Mary J. Blige for the record; the verses that she and rapper Khemist exchange are clever, artfully constructed, and likely to stick in your head if you replay this tune as much as I’ve been compelled to.
Elsewhere, “Stop and Frisk,” “Can’t Breathe,” and “Say Her Name,” sport titles that are explicitly sociopolitical, but the music itself sports sophistication that is more subtle. “Say Her Name,” with O’Reilly on both organ and piano, is tear-inducing, gorgeously textured, and makes its very powerful point in under three-and-a-half minutes, a radio programmer’s dream. Hogans and McBride state and restate the gospel-tinged theme both together and individually, in unison and in harmony. It’s an emotionally charged moment and they both step up to meet it.
Anwar Marshall — who’s now played on each of O’Reilly’s releases — is the unassailably strong backbone to this entire operation. He’s so dependable and unselfish, one can fall into the trap of taking him for granted. Resist that. The same can even be said about O’Reilly, as much of the music he’s written here gives the lead horns a lot of the shine. And they deserve it. McBride, Hogans, and Wallace are killer on the final two tunes, the percussive “Runnin” and the exalted, organ-drenched “Raise Them Up.”
But do not sleep on Marshall — take stock of the way he peppers the cymbals on “Runnin” and just shake your head in mystified appreciation, while O’Reilly noodles in a fit of focused playfulness on the Rhodes electric. This is a concerto of sorts, in five-and-a-half minutes. There are multiple movements climaxing with the aforementioned horn section executing an anthemic arrangement. With both loose improvisation and tightly constructed section playing, it’s proof positive of the premise that two seemingly incongruent things can be true at once — and often are.
7. Keith Brown Trio, African Ripples (Space Time Records)
In jazz, as in life, you are the company you keep. Perhaps unfair at times, it’s a truism that works out nicely for pianist Keith Brown. Casual jazz fans might not know him by name, but they might very well know him by sound; he's played on acclaimed records led by big stars— names like trumpeter Charles Tolliver, saxophonist Greg Tardy, and vocalist Jazzmeia Horn. With African Ripples, Brown’s third album as a leader, he’s again wisely chosen his company. Longtime collaborator Terreon “Tank” Gully reprises his role from 2015’s The Journey as drummer and co-producer, while playing on 11 of the 15 tracks, sharing the drum kit with Darrell Green. Russell Gunn (trumpet) and Anthony Ware (sax) constitute a small but mighty horn section over a small but mighty portion of the album (tracks 1, 5, and 12), while the consistently excellent Dezron Douglass (bass) anchors everything in the musical realm and Fats Waller anchors the spiritual essence of the entire production.
With “African Ripples Epigraph,” Brown kicks off with an amalgamation of stride piano and hip-hop meant to underscore the album’s conceptual theme of acknowledging Black music and the ways it has “rippled out in so many different directions” while remaining simply “different variations of the same impactful shared experiences.”
Musically, the partnership is another example of the winning combination of stride and hip-hop (see Emmet Cohen's Future Stride from earlier in the 2020s). Riffing on a Waller theme— you’ll notice variations on Waller throughout — Brown doffs a cap to ’30s stride then hops on the Fender Rhodes and sets the time circuits for the mid-90s, a basement house party, and a band with ties to the Native Tongues’ brand of thoughtful, jazzy hip-hop.
In this time travel fantasy, Douglas and Gully are keeping the dance floor packed and maximally sweaty, while looping, punching riffs from Gunn and Ware ensure that all hands are up and keeping time and feeding energy right back to the band. And while all that’s going on, spoken word artist Cyrus Aaron interjects, laying down thought provoking verses in a manner that calls to mind early-2000s André 3000. This music really does ripple through several generations; at times you may know where you are, but you may not know when you are.
A tune meant to expand listeners’ perspectives, “Truth and Comfort,” follows next. Brown says in the album’s notes that he wrote this one with the hope that people can “…open themselves up to truths beyond their comfort level.” My sense is that Brown is referring to the issues of unconscious biases that have been a central part of the 2020s conversation — namely, idea of considering that, perhaps, you don’t know all that you don’t know.
But the music — throughout the record but most especially on “Truth and Comfort” and “Nafid” — also reveals a second strata of truth: the dialogue between jazz and hip-hop is here to stay, as the younger generation of musicians is eager to communicate idiomatic fluency in both. Gully is the pied piper of that message here, the quintessential contemporary jazz drummer.
Perhaps the warmest tune on the album is “512 Arkansas Street.” Meant to give the listener a glimpse into gatherings of Brown’s extended family in Knoxville, Tenn., this one communicates the glow of easy summer days uncompromised by business or obligation.
Gunn and Ware return on trumpet and saxophone, respectively; collectively, they are a spot of sun shining through partially closed blinds and resting lazily on your cheek, a cup of mild coffee that gets you sitting up in bed but puts no pressure on you to get vertical. Cloaking you in safety, comfort, and nostalgia, this one compares favorably to Ahmad Jamal’s “Saturday Morning” or any number of the mild mood enhancers from Grover Washington, Jr.’s catalogue that prioritize relaxed contentment over strained striving. Add it to your weekend — or even weekday — morning routine as needed.
Also not to be missed are Brown’s two updated takes on Waller’s “African Ripples” that define the album’s core and permeate the record in every direction. Though quite different musically, Brown’s treatment of the Waller canon might remind some of Brad Mehldau’s approach to Bach on his After Bach recordings. As in Mehldau’s case, we’re talking about a nearly total recontextualization here — nearly. Brown’s additions are not empty adornments; they’re compatible with the evolution of the music’s soul.
That’s why for an album with seemingly disparate individual components, the whole of African Ripples is surprisingly cohesive, rippling out in all directions but true to its core.
6. Robert Glasper, R+R=NOW LIVE (Blue Note)
An explosive live recording from the jazz supergroup R+R=NOW, a collective formed by the prolific pianist, composer, arranger, and producer Robert Glasper.
It feels strange calling Robert Glasper’s R+R=NOW a “supergroup” because every group Glasper leads seems worthy of that appellation. Yet, there is something particularly relevant about this one, which was named out of Glasper’s desire for the group’s music to be both an accurate reflection of the times and an effective and immediate response to them.“When you reflect what’s going on in your time and respond to that,” Glasper said in the liner notes of the band’s first album, Colagically Speaking (2018), “you can’t not be relevant. So ‘R’ plus ‘R’ equals ‘NOW.’”
That sentiment was inspired by a quote of Nina Simone’s that Glasper discovered while co-producing Nina Revisited, a companion album to Liz Garbus’ fantastic documentary on the High Priestess of Soul, 2015’s What Happened, Miss Simone. “An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned,” Simone says, “is to reflect the times.”
Glasper has accepted that mandate from the High Priestess and has run with it, though not in the way you might think. R+R=NOW Live, the second recording from this group of all-stars is not overtly political; their response to the social and political tumult of the 2020s is certainly more abstract than one we’d expect from Miss Simone if she were still alive.
But the seven-song set, recorded during Glasper’s month-long residency at the Blue Note in October 2018, does accurately reflect the state of the gap between jazz and hip-hop, which Glasper and company continue to close. And this live set does offer musical response. Five of the seven tunes here originated on Colagically Speaking, but while they share the same DNA as their forebears, they’ve evolved and expanded conceptually — to the point where they’re retreads in name only.
Case in point is the opener, “Respond,” which presents as both darker and more ethereal here than on the studio recording. Justin Tyson (drums), Derrick Hodge (bass), and Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah (trumpet) again conspire as the primary sound-makers here, but Tyson has dialed back the adrenaline on the snare while the calls of aTunde Adjuah’s trumpet, filtered through distortion, feel far more plaintive, as though being issued into an infinite void.
Meanwhile, “Been on My Mind,” Colagically Speaking’s closer and the second track here, is actually more obedient of gravity’s dictates than its studio-produced doppelgänger. Terrace Martin’s extraterrestrial-sounding work on the vocoder notwithstanding, this one’s a pretty standard Glasper-driven R&B slow-jam that might do well on a planet that’s just like Earth, except, like, maybe 25 years behind so that it might feature prominently on that world’s version of the mid-’90s MTV mainstay, The Grind.
If your goal here is to find the most dazzling improvisational work from Glasper and let that envelop you in a rocket-fueled pod bound for a place where the concept of time works differently, check out “Change of Tone.” And take note of the incredible work put in by Hodge and Tyson to keep the whole thing anchored while Glasper tinkers with different modes and motifs in a manner that would leave many other competent soloists — and their rhythm sections — in irretrievable interstellar limbo. That Glasper doesn’t burn up upon re-entry, but instead resolves things so seamlessly and humbly, is almost miraculous.
Similarly miraculous is Tyson’s drum work on “Needed You Still.” His beats per minute will raise your beats per minute. The guy’s technical chops are insane; what’s more, it’s all in service to the music. Tyson keeps it steady at supersonic speeds while Taylor McFerrin, the oldest son of NEA Jazz Master Bobby McFerrin, flies over the top and dazzles on synthesizer.
The truth of the matter, though, is that while the foregoing are often spectacular, they’re all appetizers in service of two principal entrees: the fully instrumental take on Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost” and the 25-minute version of “Resting Warrior” that serves as closer.
Both Glasper and Martin played significant roles in producing Lamar’s celebrated album, To Pimp a Butterfly. From a commercial standpoint, it’s the perfect first single to release from this live album for obvious reasons, but it’s also the perfect front porch for the record because it’s so anthemic. Martin on alto saxophone and aTunde Adjuah on trumpet interlock for heraldic harmonies and separate for solos that soar individually until they encircle each other in the stratosphere high above Glasper’s foundational piano.
And then there’s “Resting Warrior,” which at a quarter of an hour is sprawling, symphonic, and cinematic. At times, listeners might sense nods to the great fusionists of the ’70s; textures of both the late Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and early Weather Report are perceptible. And at other times, there’s the unmistakable feel of film noir, where aTunde Adjuah’s distortion infused trumpet soars above the low-lying fog below in a manner reminiscent of some of Terence Blanchard’s best work for Spike Lee or on his Jazz in Film album.
A mesmerizing and delirious synth solo from Martin propels this symphony through its third movement, while, ultimately, it’s the battery, the rhythmic bulwarks of Tyson and Hodge, who deservedly get the last licks.
Combining jazz, hip-hop, and jam-band sensibilities, this album is sure to win fans from all three categories and maybe alienate a few from those respective groups in the process. But it does reflect a significant graying of the boundaries between the genres and responds with a disdain that they should ever have existed in the first place.
Proceed to Part II: Five more of the 2020s' most impactful fusions of Black artistry and activism.
