When Timothy Anne Burnside spent a day in Atlanta with Chuck D in 2012, the last thing she expected was for the Public Enemy rapper to send her home with the group’s prized boombox. The band bought it in New York in 1987, the same year as they finished their first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. The boombox came on tour with the guys in the 1980s then again in the 2000s, providing music for their travels and acting as a stage prop during their shows. For Burnside, a curatorial museum specialist at the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, the boombox was an invaluable treasure.

It was also a cumbersome addition to her baggage on her flight out of Atlanta.

Delayed at security becauseas comedy acts or party bands, Public Enemy’s best moments promise something far more dangerous and subversive: realism.”

For Reece, hip-hip comes out of community and acts as a voice for people rebelling against their circumstances. The music, especially as created by Public Enemy, was in dialogue with the social and political issues of the day—of which there were many. “Despite all the advances that the Civil Rights Movement gave us, there was still poverty and disenfranchisement in our cities,” Reece says. For the members of Public Enemy, who met at college on Long Island, the city of their focus was New York.

Dramatic, violent clashes characterized New York City in the years leading up to the release of Yo! Bum Rush the Show. In September 1983, graffiti artist Michael