Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968; The Sugar Hill Gang released their wildly successful hip-hop single, "Rapper's Delight," eleven years later in 1979. This period, marked by the thirst for equality of the civil rights movement and the social conservatism of the 1980s , was the first example of an America fundamentally transformed for its black youth. Amid the nascent years of the "post-soul generation," as author Nelson George refers to post-civil rights African Americans, raged a fundamental identity crisis that forced African Americans to reconcile a history of marginalization and second-class citizenship. with a newly instilled sense of equality. As the blood of fallen civil rights leaders finally dried in the early 1970s, the focus shifted from a decade of social progress to how that progress would be understood; “[no] more intelligent or more dignified than their parents,” the African-American of the Post-Soul era was, however, “ready to confront more nuanced frustrations than African-Americans had ever faced.” . No longer primarily striving for political action or social equality, African Americans strove to become more integrated into the once racially restricted privileges and culture of the white middle class. Yet by the late 1970s, blacks' desire for greater social integration produced a fundamental schism within the Post-Soul generation. “The new black middle class,” George writes, “[were] the product of tokenism, affirmative action, and their own hard work,” whose superficial equality overshadowed (but did not obscure) the still relevant construction of black inequality in America. Conversely, black poverty rates remained extremely high while ghetto culture, drug culture, and gang violence became an African American child other than Roosevelt or Kennedy. Hip-hop culture began to embrace other subversive forms of expression, such as graffiti, which exploded in popularity in the mid-1970s throughout the South Bronx. After a decade of trying to curry favor with a supposedly "upper" white middle class, African Americans turned to hip-hop in direct response to this apparent incompatibility of whites with black culture. It's no longer an inequality, but by the late 1970s it became clear that there was no reason to fashion black racial identity into an easily digestible package for white middle-class America. This method of forgetting, which resulted in another decade of black marginalization, was therefore largely rejected, as America's African-American urban youth turned to hip-hop to remember, preserve and create a new narrative of black historical identity..