A Rallying Try For Young Voters

Many of the groups are working together. The hip-hop summit has teamed with Rock the Vote, World Wrestling Entertainment's Smackdown Your Vote and others in an effort aimed at getting 20 million young voters, ages 18 to 30, to the polls. Before that, they want to register 1 million voters. (More than 300,000 voters have been registered since January.)

"I think we're going to have the largest youth voter turnout in American history," said Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, the former president of the NAACP and a Nation of Islam leader who presides over the hip-hop summit. The group registers young people at summit concerts and plans to follow through with e-mails and phone calls to get out the vote, Muhammad said.

Are the campaigns paying attention? "Suffice it to say," Muhammad said, "that all the major candidates have called." Rock the Vote is trying the latest in campaign weaponry, partnering with Motorola to use text messaging to remind young people to vote and to tell them how and where. The campaign takes its cue from recent international campaigns such as one in South Africa, where nearly 200,000 people used text messaging to register to vote. In Iran, candidates fought for votes in parliamentary election campaigns with competing text-message ads.

"The one thing that every young person owns is a cell phone," said Jehmu Greene, Rock the Vote's president. "We're also using it to poll people. And the most important thing as we get closer to the election is using it to tell people where they go to the polls. This is where the cell phone has revolutionized politics."

The League of Independent Voters (best known for its book, "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office") is spending time at clubs, pubs, concerts, cafes -- wherever young people congregate. "Phone banking and door-to-door canvassing doesn't work with young people," Khanna said. "Young people are transient and don't keep regular hours." The League, which was started last year, has 25 chapters, with more forming. "People are so ready to get involved right now; I would say for the most part, we don't have to sell anything at all. We just sit here, and people come to us and say, 'What can I do?' "

That was the rallying cry at the National Hip-Hop Political Convention. The conference was organized by 40 political activists, academics, writers and artists from across the country who met in March 2003 in Chicago to figure out how to mobilize disenfranchised young people. The convention aimed to get them to start thinking about getting involved in issues in their communities. Participants in workshops kept asking how they could make a difference or change the way things work. The collective answer: organize and begin at home.

"This is creating a formal network for young people to take home," Kitwana said. He is the author of "The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture," and he helped popularize the term "hip-hop generation," which he loosely defined as African Americans 18 to 35 years old who have turned rap music, fashion and language into a cultural phenomenon. He has since broadened the definition to include young people of different ethnic backgrounds, reflected by the participants in the conference.

Angela Woodson, a Cleveland political organizer who co-chaired the hip-hop convention, said that the aim was to create locally active citizens. "There are a lot of home-grown concerns," she said. "So when people say, 'it doesn't matter who gets elected,' we say, it matters for your local council races; it matters for judicial races. We tell them look at the totality of what you're voting for and how judicial elections can affect your society."

Political researcher Brian Faler in Washington contributed to this report.