In the wake of the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., politically engaged rappers like Killer Mike and Talib Kweli have been among the most passionate and vocal commentators on social media.
"We are human beings. We deserve to be buried by our children not the other way around," Killer Mike wrote in a moving, widely circulated Instagram post days after Brown was killed.
Talib Kweli is in Ferguson now and has been hosting a dialogue about race, activism, and police brutality on his Twitter page since shortly after the shooting.
Today both men made the leap from social media to national news. Here's Killer Mike on CNN talking about the over-militarization of police and a common double standard for black and white teenagers.
And here's Talib Kweli, who tell's MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid that he experienced aggressive behavior by police firsthand on his first night in Ferguson.
"I was told that I was going to have my head blown off, I had guns pointed in my face, I was put on the ground," he says. "I was there to show people that there was no looting. There was women and children out there protesting peacefully and the police acted aggressively."