She is an intellectual at heart and that’s hard to miss. "People in this country de-contextualize hip-hop all the time; they de-contextualize race," says Alexis McGill. This is a quiet assertion, with no ire attached, and serves only as a slip into her larger argument at despite its ubiquitous materialistic elements and often misogynistic image, hip-hop as an art form has roots in struggle against oppression.

"People see the 'bling"and other things that I, as a woman, certainly have problems with, but where this started was with people talking the conditions of their lives and it is rooted in a larger discussion of how race and gender and class affect the way you live. And hi-hop is a space where you're grappling with some of these problems. That is a political process." And if it is a political process it could be a political movement.

But McGill also possesses the soul of a revolutionary, if that means a basic belief that things can change and people can change them. During her undergraduate days at Princeton, where she studied Latin American social movements, she moved to Bogotá, Columbia for a few months." We sat around in bars drinking aguardiente and talked about The Revolution," she says, with a laugh that admits to the cliché, but the experience of organizing and helping the disenfranchised was invaluable.

"That was first my glimmer really of the power and excitement of being on the ground and trying to reach out to people."

Why She's Making History

Today, McGill is engaged is a work that is unprecedented. As executive director of Citizen Change, the voter registration lobby started by Sean 'Diddy' Combs, she is on the cutting edge of an idea that threatens to completely re-engineer the political landscape. If their effort to convert the demonstrated economic and cultural power that is the hip-hop generation into a politicized, motivated voting bloc is successful, American politics will never be the same again. The contingent if here is, of course, a huge one.

McGill remembers the calls she got early in the morning Election Day from Cuyahoga County, Ohio "Someone called to tell me that there were all these young people lined up to vote, that they were wearing the t-shirts and were just ready to go," she recalls, "and that was the moment I realized that all the work we had done was paying off."

Cuyahoga County is largely the City of Cleveland and its suburbs. It is a Democratic stronghold in important swing state, and even though Citizen Change is a non-partisan voter registration group, the bulk of the people fall most comfortably into their target demographic vote Democratic. At the end of the day, not enough of them showed up in Cuyahoga County in 2004, and George Bush got re-elected.

It is a bedrock truth of American politics that participation among young people will be reliably low. Candidates and campaign that assume they can benefit from the participation of young people have often been disappointed by the lack of turnout. Those that have worried that a surge of young energy would overwhelm them, have, more often than not, been pleasantly surprised that that the large and threatening army on the other side was never really mobilized. Again, Ohio, 2004 is the best recent example.

But McGill not buying into to assumptions of complacency and disinterest: "To say this that this is a population that is not interested in politics is to misread them completely. Because if politics is broadly defined as in civic engagement and involvement in their communities, then they are very involved," says McGill.

The problem, she says may be one of context: "I have actually found that they are very interested in politics, but that they have not had anyone come in and explain to them why this is important, and make politics relevant to their life."

She believes that young people need to understand how social change happens, and then they need compelling reason to want create that change. But the obvious models of the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements do not resonate in the same way, because the institutions that created that change, the black church for example, have changed.

"I think the most important thing you need is a coherent idea around which to organize," she insists, "and the institutions are going to have to be converted to fit this new space. You can’t do this in church. It's going to be in the communications realm." It’s going to be hip-hop, she believes.

Imitation is The Best Form of Flattery

McGill grew up in Morristown, N. J. Her mother worked at the ATT's Bell Labs; her father is a physician. She graduated from Princeton in 1993, but she would not tell her age except to say she's a Leo, born in August and is in her early thirties. She received a Masters from Yale and began teaching there as a grad student. She recalls seeing Condoleezza Rice, then on the faculty at Stanford, on television in 1990 talking about Russia, and being drawn to the idea of international work. "We had this family friend over for dinner, who said to me, "I could see you doing that some day.' That day completely changed things for me."

The friend in question, Bruce Coleman says of McGill: "Alexis was smart from the git-go. I remember thinking that her thoughts about the political process were deeper than the average person even then."

McGill says much of what she's done since 2004 has been research, searching for that "coherent idea"" around which to organize this new movement. And it needs to be a new race and gender will not hold together. "Class has never been an effective way for us to mobilize," she says, "because the American ideology of self-help, of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, has been so dominant that it is hard to fight it."

But she is determined to find an answer so as not to have the hip-hop generation "fall back into their narrative" of non-relevance and complacency. And she is hopeful.

Words to Live By

McGill recalls a rally at Temple University in Philadelphia in the day leading up to the last presidential election. “It was the same energy as if they were going top a concert, except there was nobody singing. It was this screaming about voting,” she says. “It was not the ‘We just love you.’ They were just screaming about their own empowerment.”