ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 23, 1996 TAG: 9609230095
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
More than a thousand people, most of them young, black and fans of the slain rap star Tupac Shakur, braved heavy rains Sunday to attend a ceremony in Harlem that was less a memorial and more a lesson in the futility of ``gangsta'' values and the street violence that recently ended the 25-year-old rapper's life.
Organized by the Nation of Islam, the ceremony, formally called the ``Hip Hop Day of Atonement'' spent little time with fond remembrances of the Bronx-born rapper and his art, which at once celebrated and condemned violence, drugs and sexual conquests.
There were no funeral flowers or mourning music to greet the audience that crammed into the sweltering auditorium of the Oberia D. Dempsey Multi-Service Center, on 127th Street near Lenox Avenue.
Instead, speakers - including celebrity rap musicians, community activists and religious figures - used the occasion to draw attention to what many of them termed the immediate need to ``inform and uplift'' black America's youth.
Shakur died Sept. 13 in Las Vegas from wounds he suffered in a shooting six days earlier while he was riding in a car after watching the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon heavyweight title fight.
Arthur Muhammad, a hip hop personality on New York's Hot 97 radio station who is also a Muslim, challenged rap music's preoccupation with violence and drugs, and the traditional defense of that focus: that the music must reflect the violent life of the street.
He said that if ``keeping it real'' has to mean preserving such negative things in black life, than ``we need to change the reality.''
The audience agreed. Even the several hundred people forced to stand outside in the rain because there was not enough space applauded when they heard Muhammad's words carried over a public address system.
Muhammad also criticized the brewing hostility between East Coast-based rappers and West Coast-based rappers, which some suggest might have played a role in a 1994 shooting of Shakur and the fatal shooting in Las Vegas.
``There is no East Coast and West Coast in here,'' Muhammad said, telling the audience that practically all black Americans were taken from the West Coast of Africa and brought to the East Coast of the United States.
During a news conference after the program, a representative of Death Row Records, the Los Angeles-based record company that Shakur worked for, gave a Tupac T-shirt to Conrad Muhammad, the New York representative of the Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, in a gesture of good will.
In his remarks, Muhammad called for atonement for the death of Shakur in the same spirit in which Farrakhan called for a million black men to atone at last year's Million Man March.
The audience loudly approved.
``I just think blacks in general have to stop killing each other,'' said Zarifa Dyer, a 19-year-old pharmacist technician who flew to New York from her home in Pontiac, Mich., to be a part of the five-hour program. ``It's bigger than Tupac; the killing has to stop.''
Many speakers echoed the theme.
Malik Yoba, the actor who portrays the black detective J.C. Williams on the network television series ``New York Undercover,'' urged members of the audience to close their eyes and to follow him on a spiritual journey.
Strapping on a guitar, Yoba played and sang with two other musicians, as paper and pencils were passed out in the audience. In the end, Yoba, who as a teen-ager was nearly fatally wounded by gunfire during a fight, asked the audience to write down their prescriptions for peace.
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB