BY JACOB "34" KOERTGE • MAY 4, 2019

This week (May 3) Killer Mike wrote a powerful open letter to one of his Hip-Hop heroes, Roxanne Shanté. “This is a photo from my grandmother’s photo album of me and my accomplishments and moments. This is an actual photo of a hero of mine. On a trip to [New York City], my mother told her cousins I was crazy about Rap, and a particular rapper. My mom told them about this teenage girl her son was going on and on about. He thought she was beautiful and fly. She was a dope-ass rapper! That lil’ boy who was all of nine or 10 said he could be a rapper too even tho he was from the South, and all rappers were from [New York, because] this girl was doing it and killing the guys,” Mike’s Instagram post begins.

The teen photographed on a bus, reportedly on her way to a local group home would turn out to be Roxanne Shanté. Since her adolescence, the fierce MC was an early and galvanizing force in the Juice Crew, alongside Mr. Magic and Marley Marl’s squad that eventually included Biz Markie, Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, Masta Ace, and Craig G, among others. Around her 1984 breakthrough run, Shanté learned about nine-year-old Michael Render’s infatuation. She reached out to the Rap hopeful. The Run The Jewels co-founder continues in his post, “That girl’s ‘God Mom’ of some sort (the streets give you family when yours fails you) was a friend of my mommy’s cousins, and when she heard about that kid who loved her she sent him her real photos and a signed album. Her photos were not press-shots, but rather film photos she had taken in the hood, and she sent those to a kid she never met who’s mom was a ‘dope girl’ running wild in [New York] chillin’. The lil’ boy loved and treasured them, and they affirmed his belief that he could be an MC as [tough] and dangerous as her on the mic.”

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