When Dr. Marcyliena Morgan passed away in September 2025 at the age of 75, the world of hip-hop lost one of its most steadfast champions — not on the mic or the stage, but in the classroom and the archive. As the founder of the Hiphop Archive & Research Institute at Harvard University, Morgan built a bridge between the streets and the academy, proving that hip-hop was not only culture but knowledge.
A linguistic anthropologist by training, Morgan’s work was rooted in the power of language — in the ways people speak themselves into existence. Before she was a Harvard professor, she taught at UCLA and Stanford, always focused on how language, identity, race, and power intersect. In the 1990s, she began to notice her students turning in papers, projects, and stories centered on hip-hop. Rather than dismiss them, she listened. She saw in their work what so many institutions missed: a living, evolving system of art and communication — one that demanded study, respect, and preservation.
In 1996, Morgan pitched the idea of a dedicated hip-hop archive to Henry Louis Gates Jr. at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. From those early conversations grew the Hiphop Archive, the first of its kind in the world. It started modestly — with mixtapes, magazines, flyers, and oral histories — but under Morgan’s direction it became a center for research, fellowships, and cultural preservation. In time, it was renamed the Marcyliena H. Morgan Hip Hop Archive & Research Institute, a fitting tribute to the woman who built it from the ground up.
For Morgan, hip-hop was far more than music. It was an archive of its own — a record of how young Black and Brown people have used creativity, rhythm, and wordplay to speak truth to power. She treated MCs and DJs as linguists and poets, their lyrics as complex texts worthy of the same attention as Shakespeare or Toni Morrison. “Hip-hop is theory,” she once told a colleague, “you just have to know how to listen.”
Her work changed the academic landscape. Before her, hip-hop studies were often marginalized, seen as too informal for scholarly inquiry. Through her vision and persistence, she carved out a legitimate, respected space for it within one of the world’s most elite universities. The Archive became not just a repository of artifacts but a living lab for dialogue — connecting scholars, artists, activists, and communities across generations.
Morgan’s influence rippled outward. Other universities followed suit, building their own collections and programs inspired by her model. Artists who once saw academia as alien found a home in her work. And for countless students, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, she made it clear that their language, their culture, and their art were worthy of study and preservation.
As the beats and rhymes of hip-hop continue to echo across the globe, Marcyliena Morgan’s legacy endures — in every classroom that teaches hip-hop as history, in every scholar who cites rap lyrics as literature, and in every archive that preserves the stories she helped the world learn to value. She was, in every sense, the scholar who made sure hip-hop would never be forgotten.
