Rosa Clemente

Community organizer, journalist and political Activist Rosa Clemente was nominated by the Green Party as a Vice Presidential Candidate in the 2008 election. Along with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, the pair became the first women of color ticket in American History.

For over 15 years, Clemente has been a community organizer and activist, and a featured keynote speaker, panelist, and political commentator across the United States. In 1995, she developed Know Thy Self Productions, which has since produced four major community activism tours and consults on issues such as hip-hop activism, media justice, voter engagement among youth of color, third party politics, intercultural relations between African Americans and Latinos, immigrants’ rights as an extension of human rights, and universal healthcare.

Clemente's academic work has been dedicated to researching national liberation struggles inside the United States, with a specific focus on The Young Lords Party, The Black Panther Party, and the Black and Brown Liberation Movements of the 60s and 70s, as well as the effects of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) on such movements. She has also written extensively on Afro-Latino identity and politics, sexism within hip-hop culture and hip-hop activism, media justice, and African American and Latino unity.

While a student at the University of Albany, she was president of the Albany State University Black Alliance and was appointed Director of Multicultural Affairs for the Student Association in her senior year. At Cornell she was a founding member of La Voz Boriken, a social political organization dedicated to supporting Puerto Rican political prisoners and the independence political movements of Puerto Rico. She graduated magna cum laude and wrote her masters thesis on the political development of the Young Lords Party from 1969-1974. In 1998 she joined the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and began organizing around issues of police brutality, the Prison Industrial Complex and the freedom of US political prisoners and prisoners of war.

In 2001, Clemente was a youth representative at the first ever United Nations World Conference against Xenophobia, Racism and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa where she sat on the reparations committee and coordinated the Black August South African Hip-Hop Tour, starring Dead Prez, Jeru DA Damaja, Black Thought of the Roots, Boots for the Coup, and Talib Kweli. After returning from South Africa she began co-hosting and producing the show Where We Live. In 2002 she was named by RedEye magazine “one of the top 50 hip-hop activists to look out for.” In 2003 she co-founded and coordinated the first ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention that brought over 3000 activists together to create and implement a national political agenda for the hip-hop generation. In May, 2003 Clemente traveled to Vieques, Puerto Rico to document the US Naval withdrawal from the island after 67 years of US military control. In 2005 she co-founded the R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop Coalition, a hip-hop generation based media justice organization, and in September 2005, ten days after Hurricane Katrina and Rita ravaged parts of the New Orleans and Mississippi, Clemente traveled to the devastated areas as an independent journalist and her on-the-ground reports were distributed to radio stations all over the world.

Clemente has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships and is a frequent contributor on On the Real with Chuck D, Democracy Now!, The Bev Smith Show, Hard Knock Radio, Make It Plain and CNN. She is at work on her first book: When a Puerto Rican Woman Ran for Vice President and Nobody Knew Her Name, and will soon begin pursuing her Doctorate in political science.