Hip-hop roots run deep at Newark arts center for at-risk youth

Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and platinium hip hop impressario Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis were in the studio together once again on Tuesday, three decades after Baraka provided a spoken-word introduction and Duplessis co-produced The Score, the seminal 1996 album by the Fugees.

But instead of the basement studio in East Orange where The Score was recorded, this time Baraka and Duplessis were in the ground-floor control room of the new Ronald L. Rice Arts Center, a place intended to provide at-risk youths in Newark with arts-related alternatives to a life of violence and dead ends.

“I thank God for this day, I appreciate everybody coming out, showing love,” Baraka told about 100 city officials, youth counselors, and music professionals gathered under Tuesday’s chilly morning sun outside the center before a ceremonial ribbon cutting.

“I see Jerry Wonda out there,” the mayor said, before joining the producers inside the Rice Center. “Shout out to you, brother.”

Tuesday’s event included another Newark elected official at the intersection of art and government, West Ward Councilman Dupré Kelly, a founding member of the Lords of the Underground, who in 2022 became the first platinum-selling hip hop artists elected to public office in the United States.

The Rice Center, a one-story building at the corner of 14th Avenue and South 18th Street, six blocks from the Garden State Parkway, will offer classes in music recording, video editing and photography to Newark residents ages 12-24, starting March 1.

Built at a cost of about $1 million in American Rescue Plan federal grant funds, the center is operated by the Mayor’s Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery, whose outreach workers steer at-risk youth and adults to programs and services meant to prevent or halt a cycle of violence they might otherwise remain or get caught up in.

The West Ward neighborhood where the center is located is a violence “hot spot” that needs the kind of services the center will provide, said the prevention office director, Kyleesha Wingfield Hill.

Like three other violence prevention locations, the Rice Center will be staffed by social workers offering therapeutic services that include family counseling, which officials said was a badly needed service in a city where domestic violence has increased in recent years even as murders and other forms of violent crime have declined.

But the Rice center is the only one where arts technology classes will be offered, specifically intended to appeal to the area’s younger inhabitants.

“When the kids have guidance and they have better options, they can make better choices,” said Christial Holland, a violence prevention staffer who works with high-risk individuals, or HRIs.

Wonda, a native of Haiti who grew up in East Orange near Newark’s West Ward, said the Studiolive 64-channel recording console and mixing board at the Rice Center was perfect for aspiring producers, engineers and recording artists learning their trade.

“This is such a great set up, and a beginning set-up,” Wonda told NJ Advance Media in the Rice Center control room.

“It reminds me of when I first met the mayor. We had a studio in the basement, there was a set-up just like that, where we ended up doing The Score album, the Fugees album that the mayor w aa part of from the beginning.”

As he spoke, monitor played a video for “What We Want,” a spoken word piece written and recorded by Baraka and produced by Wonda.

Rice, who died in 2023, spent 35 years in the New Jersey Legislature representing parts of Newark, including 18 years as a founder and chairman of the state Legislative Black Caucus.

He was the longest-serving Black lawmaker in Garden State history, best known as an advocate for social justice and youth opportunities in New Jersey cities.

So officials said Rice was a natural choice as the center’s namesake, and his adult son and daughter, Ronald and Yuki Rice, were on hand for the occasion.

“He’d be proud of the community,” Yuki Rice, a health care official who now lives in Florida, said of the center.

The notion of achieving success in the record business is by no means abstract in the neighborhood surrounding the Rice Center, which has repeatedly proven itself fertile ground for artistic talent.

Kelly, the West Ward’s rapper-turned-councilman — known to ‘Lords fans as DoItAll — was born and raised a few blocks from the center site. So was psychedelic rapper Reginald Noble, a West Side High School alumnus better known as Redman. Naughty by Nature’s Treach, born Anthony Criss, grew up just over the East Orange border.

Addressing Tuesday’s audience, Kelly called the Rice Center, “a beacon of hope and opportunity,” noting that he was one of the youths that the late lawmaker had worked so hard and for so long to help succeed.

And as an elected official himself now, Kelly added, “I have to continue that legacy from him.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com