Dr. Marcyliena Morgan, the founding director of Harvard’s Hiphop Archive & Research Institute, which now bears her name, died September 28 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. The linguistic anthropologist was 75.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, which houses the hiphop archive, once called Morgan the “scholar queen of hip-hop.” Her suggestion to create a first-of-its-kind hip-hop archive and academic research center at Harvard has helped make hip-hop the world’s most popular music genre by most commercial measures, according to her profile on The Harvard Gazette.
Gates Jr., who was also Morgan’s longtime colleague and friend, told the platform that “Marcy will always be remembered as the genius who conceived of the world’s first hip-hop archive and research center.”
To recognize that legacy, Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recently approved a new name for the hiphop archive and research institute at the Hutchins Center — the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute.
Born on May 8, 1950, in Chicago, Morgan was the third of six daughters. She graduated from Englewood High School in 1968 and headed to the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in communications anthropology in 1972. She went on to receive master’s degrees at the University of Illinois in 1973 and the University of Essex in Britain in 1978 and a doctorate in anthropological linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, according to the New York Times.
While teaching a course on urban speech communities at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the 1990s, she realized that students were presenting to her essays about innovative patterns of speech used by West Coast rappers, including Ice Cube.
“That drew her attention to this enormous creativity with language on the one hand, and this very powerful youth culture on the other,” said Lawrence D. Bobo, a fellow UCLA faculty member at the time who later became her husband. “She ended up dedicating much of the latter part of her career to studying hip-hop culture while trying to preserve and make more broadly understandable its material and cultural production.”
Morgan began the hip-hop archive in her office while at UCLA, collecting recordings, magazines, concert posters, and any material linked with hip-hop.
She eventually established the archive at Harvard in 2002, when she joined the faculty. Her aim was to chronicle “the rise of hip-hop from the rubble-strewn streets of the South Bronx in the 1970s to the global juggernaut it became,” wrote the New York Times.
In 1996, when she pitched Harvard administrators the idea of a hip-hop archive, it was seen as bizarre.
“Hip-hop?” Gates Jr. recalled responding. “Isn’t this just a passing fad?”
“I’m an R&B and soul guy,” he added. “But Marcy said, no, no, you’re an idiot. Hip-hop is here to stay. It’s a phenomenon.”
She also told him hip-hop “was our youth vernacular language, manifesting itself in a completely new form of music, not only from coast to coast of the United States, but spreading all around the world,” Gates Jr. recalled in a 2024 symposium at the university that celebrated her work.
“At the time, no one could have envisioned that hip-hop would become the lingua franca of youth musical culture worldwide,” Gates Jr. said. “The equivalent would be if W.E.B. Du Bois or Alain Locke in 1925 had thought to document the evolution of this new musical form called jazz.”
Morgan’s archive moved with her and her husband, Bobo, to Stanford University from 2005 to 2007 when they left Harvard after Morgan was denied tenure during the presidency of Lawrence H. Summers.
But years later after Summers left, Morgan and her husband returned to Harvard. She was offered a tenured professorship at Harvard and her husband is now the university’s W.E.B. Du Bois professor of social sciences.
Her archive’s current location at the Hutchins Center opened in 2008, not too long after she returned to Harvard.
“There were so many people, including many artists, who visited the archive over the years and instantly burst into tears,” Bobo said to The Harvard Gazette. “They regarded hip-hop as central to their creative and personal development and were profoundly moved to see it treated with such respect and seriousness.”
Harvard’s archive became a model for other institutions like Cornell University; the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; and Georgia State University.
Two years ago, at a symposium to mark Morgan’s retirement, her 2009 title “The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground” was praised by colleagues, friends, and students for exploring innovative uses of language at a time when most scholars viewed hip-hop through the lens of political science or sociology, as reported by The Harvard Gazette.
“These young people were writing in a form of musical poetry about their feelings, their hopes, their own wisdom, or the wisdom they had received from others,” said colleague and friend Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. “Marcy writes about it as this intergenerational dialogue. They use the art form not only to articulate the world they’re in, but the world they want in the future.”
Colleagues also commended Morgan’s work on hiphop’s activist elements, including looking at the genre’s artists who were helping to promote safe sex during the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Morgan also helped highlight the contributions of the genre’s female pioneers; she did this largely through her course at Harvard on hip-hop feminism.
Before her death, Morgan also introduced the Classic Crates project, placing seminal hip-hop albums alongside Beethoven and Mozart at the University’s premier music repository known as the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library. The collection features liner notes by great academics, including Harvard Professor Brandon Terry on Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly” (2015) and City University of New York’s Dionne Bennett on “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” (1998), as reported by The Harvard Gazette.
“She’s one of the first people, if not the first person, to give validation to the intellectual importance of this new form,” said Higginbotham. “You now have courses on hip-hop not just at Harvard but all over the country. You have Kendrick Lamar winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. You have the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History announcing a multiyear initiative to collect elements of hip-hop art and culture in 2006.”
Morgan, who was the emerita professor of social sciences and of African and African American Studies, is survived by her husband and sisters, Madeline, Muzette and Marla Morgan.
