As a broke graduate student, Dr. William Jelani Cobb wrote music reviews to earn extra cash. “I had this naive idea that no one from my academic life would ever read anything I wrote as a music reviewer. I ran into this really esteemed historian and before I could say, ‘I love your work,’ he said, ‘You wrote a music review about the Wu-Tang Clan,’” Cobb remembers.
When his two worlds collided, Cobb started thinking about the connections between history and hip-hop, and his book To the Break of Dawn emerged.
Cobb’s name is recognizable both in and outside academic institutions because he writes for mainstream publications from Essence to The Washington Post. His collected essays are in his popular book, The Devil & Dave Chappelle. “One of my interests has always been in stepping outside the ivory tower and talking to people in the communities,” says Cobb, an associate professor of history at Spelman College.
“When I look at conversations we have in scholarly circles that are impenetrable to people who don’t have doctorates — I feel it’s antidemocratic.”
He wants everyone to be able to participate in imp o r t a n t d i s c u s s i o n s . Raised in Queens, N.Y., Cobb was the first member of his family to go to college. When he entered Howard University, Cobb intended to go to law school. But a history class freshman year changed his plan.
“It amazed me the extent to which the world came into focus in one semester,” he says. “I was thinking about the world as a movie that we walked in the middle of. History is our only attempt to find out what happened in the early scenes and what the plot points are now.”
Studying African history, Cobb renamed himself. Born William Anthony Cobb, he chose to replace his middle name with Jelani, which means “great and powerful” in Swahili.
