Go-go music’s heartbeat has always kept a steady pulse running throughout Howard University. From go-go’s early days to its 1980s commercial peak to its place today as the official music of Washington, D.C., Howard has stayed in the mix. 

The university has always held space for go-go in key and impactful ways. Look no further than the Go-Go Museum & Café in Anacostia, the force of the “Don’t Mute DC” hashtag, or the lineup of go-go bands, past and present, featuring Howard alumni cranking it up to see the university’s influence in creating, popularizing, and cementing the distinct percussive sounds. 

Projects such as the new book “Soul Searcher: Life and Legend of Chuck Brown, Godfather of Go-Go,” (Sun Ra Publishing, 2026) written by Howard University Hospital staffer Sundiata Ramin, is believed to be the first comprehensive book solely focused on Brown’s legacy. Go-go was recently used to help spread awareness of colorectal cancer when the university’s Department of Community and Family Medicine and the Howard University Cancer Center participated in a March 28 event at the Go-Go Museum & Café that featured on-site health screenings and go-go performances. 

Howard’s curriculum has incorporated go-go into academics with courses such as Multimedia Audio Production and Music in Media. The Traditional Arts D.C. project at the university has hosted Go-Go Preservation Week on campus with partners that included the Go-Go Museum & Café and the District of Columbia Public Library. 

Howard alumna Cherie “Sweet Cherie” Mitchell-Agurs (B.A. ’94), musical director for all-women go-go band Be’la Dona, took home a Best Keyboardist trophy at the 2026 Go-Go Awards. Dr. Nina Angela Mercer (B.A. ’95), the inaugural Eleanor Traylor postdoctoral fellow in Literary and Cultural Theory at Howard, said “Sometimes with our HBCUs and amongst academics, we can claim cultural authority when it really belongs somewhere else. But since Howard is inextricably linked to the Black community unlike a PWI, our HBCUs really are cultural pillars and spaces where culture can be cultivated, protected, and archived, and that connection (to go-go) exists.” 

Dr. Natalie Hopkinson (B.A. ’98), an alum and former assistant professor in Howard’s Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies, is one of the strongest links between the university and go-go. Hopkinson helped shape D.C. Law 23-71 officially designating go-go as the official music of the District of Columbia in 2020.  Hopkinson is also the author of the book “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City” (Duke University Press, 2012). 

She is the founding chief curator at the Go-Go Museum & Café, and co-founder of the Don’t Mute DC petition with the cafe’s CEO and co-founder, activist Ronald “Moe” Moten, and alum Julien Broomfield (B.A. ’26), creator of the hashtag.  

“The ties are very close. There are a lot of connections,” says Hopkinson. “And there are tons of go-go musicians that have come out of Howard.” 

A Howard-born Hashtag is Famous Forever 

“Don’t Mute DC.” Those three words came to Broomfield easily and quickly, beginning a journey for the hashtag that would include social change and recognition at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. 

During her senior year at Howard in 2019 while wrapping up her English degree, Broomfield noticed something was off as she walked past the old MetroPCS store near campus at 7th Street and Florida Avenue in the Shaw neighborhood. The go-go music she had always heard coming from the store, a comforting sound that reminded her she was back at Howard, was quiet, which was literally unheard of. She didn’t think much of it, reasoning the store’s speakers weren’t working until she learned more on social media. 

“I went on Twitter (now X) and saw someone talking about the issues of gentrification in the Shaw area,” Broomfield explained. “In the five years I had been at Howard, the shift was crazy. I was seeing way less Black people in that area and a lot more white people, a lot more construction on the homes, and a lot of people walking their dogs on Howard’s campus as if it’s a park. I did my research and found out that the residents of the building across the street from MetroPCS were complaining about the music. They were just complaining because they didn’t want to hear it.”  

She learned the store was receiving threats of getting shut down and headed back to Twitter to speak against what was happening. When she woke up the next morning, she saw she went viral. She and other Howard students decided there should be a hashtag to pull together what was happening. 

“We started thinking and I started to think about my own experiences as a Black woman, tall and thick, and all the times I allowed myself to be silenced,” said Broomfield. “They Can’t Mute Us” was suggested initially before she landed on the “Don’t Mute DC” hashtag. “I thought of the word ‘mute’ because when I think of the word mute, I think of a TV. You can mute it, but you can still see what’s going on. ‘Oh, you all think you’re just going to shut that up? No, you need to hear it.’ We need to hear what’s going on around us. I said ‘what about Don’t Mute DC’ and it took off.” 

Broomfield never imagined the hashtag would explode like it did. “I was just in a space where I wanted to speak my mind and let people know what was going on. It was never with the purpose of ‘Oh, I want to start a thing.’ At the time, I was dealing with some real social anxiety, so that genuinely was not my goal. I wanted people to know about it so we could help turn the music back on.” 

Her smartphone was activated non-stop with calls and texts for interview requests all while she was busy preparing for finals. It was all overwhelming, so Broomfield partnered with Moten and Hopkinson to help her navigate what was happening. The pairing worked since they were more deeply steeped in the city and its gentrification issues than Newark, New Jersey native Broomfield.  

“‘[Hopkinson] said ‘Let’s work together, let’s get you to do these interviews with people we trust and we know will get the word out there in an honest way,” said Broomfield. “I felt how honest they were, and I decided to work with them. I’m not from D.C. and the last thing I wanted to do was do D.C. a disservice.” 

Keeping her service to spirit strong, Broomfield is currently a program director for Girl Scouts Heart of New Jersey. 

Immortalizing Go-Go 

When Moten first told Hopkinson back in 2009 about the need for a go-go museum in D.C., she dismissed the thought. “He was just running his mouth, saying people don’t respect go-go and that’s why we need a museum. I thought it was an outlandish idea,” Hopkinson said. 

Fast forward a decade later, and the idea started taking on its earliest shape with key activations. One of them was a 2020 telethon with WPGC and Don’t Mute DC to benefit the Go-Go Museum & Café, which took place at the former MetroPCS store where the Don’t Mute DC movement was born. “I walked down there (from Howard) with my colleague Carolyn Malachi. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. They raised over $17,000 dollars. But to just see people come with crumbled $5 bills in their hands, and people pulling over to the side of the road saying ‘Yeah, we want a museum.’ Then the pandemic happened.” 

Hopkinson added that the museum shifted to different digital activations, often revolving around public policy issues, to bring awareness and fundraising to the movement. Her Ph.D. students at Howard were extremely crucial in getting those activations moving forward. “That museum wouldn’t be there without them. We did get some resources, but it’s never enough. Being able to hire the grad students using grant money was just invaluable and really good training. People like to work with people at Howard. It was a really powerful thing.” 

Those activations “kept the pressure on the city for the city to do what we needed the city to do. We needed money, investment, people, archives, and infrastructure. Everything I said we needed, they’ve done.” 

The museum opened Feb. 19, 2025, exactly five years after go-go was named the official music of Washington, D.C. 

As founding chief curator at the museum, Hopkinson said her heaviest lifting came during the pre-opening period when she oversaw everything from the design team to the tech team to managing major partnerships. She also created global opportunities to connect with go-go.  

Hopkinson, who currently is an associate professor at American University, is able to step back a bit from the museum and come on as needed. Right now, she’s currently curating an exchange with artists from Asheville, North Carolina on public policy and advice on how to get a city to invest in Black businesses the way Washington, D.C. invested in the museum.  

“It was a miracle. They said it would take $8 million,” she said of initial projections to open the museum. “We only got $3 million, and we still did it. I have to credit my position at Howard and the association I had with my students there and being able to do a lot more with less.” 

Go-go Goes to School 

Watching her students grappling with virtual learning early during the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard assistant professor Carolyn Malachi came up with a solution – introducing go-go into the curriculum, but in a non-traditional way. Malachi teaches audio production and engineers courses with a focus on immersive media in the Cathy Hughes School of Communications. She’s also assistant chair of the Department of Music, Journalism & Film in the school. 

“We were all alone and studying in these virtual environments,” said Malachi. “I wanted to bring them something that was interactive to help them feel they could escape their homes and be a part of community during those times.” Malachi devised two new courses, Multimedia Audio Production and Music in Media, that incorporated go-go from unexpected angles. She was inspired by the research of Allie Martin, an ethnomusicologist and Dartmouth College professor, who studied the sound of gentrification in several areas including Georgia and Florida Avenues, the corner from which go-go music had famously emanated.  

“I’ve had my students listen to the sound of gentrification as the result of her research, understanding that go-go music is part of the native soundscape of Washington, D.C.,” Malachi explained. “There were critical listening exercises that involved not just listening to the music itself, but how the sound of the drums, the sound of the percussion, and the sound of the lead talker interacts with the physical properties, with the space that we are all occupying together.” 

She added that the lessons also bring forth an understanding of the critical elements of go-go, not necessarily from a production standpoint but from a technical, critical listening standpoint. The lessons are “helping students analyze genre and understand composition, and put them in the place of an engineer … We’re using go-go as a means for students to understand the unique characteristics of the genre, and why we look at that through the audio program is because eventually after a piece of music is composed and arranged and produced, the engineer has to refine the creative to ensure it communicates well with the listener, understand what has to take priority and when.” 

Malachi will incorporate more go-go into the curriculum in her own special ways. She’s looking forward to an Advanced Audio Production Capstone that will create a Dolby Atmos (immersive spacial audio technology) mix of a go-go record. “We are privileged in the Cathy Hughes School of Communications audio sequence to have the very first Dolby Atmos studio at an HBCU. It’s very exciting. Being in D.C., it’s especially a privilege to potentially work with a go-go record and put the listener inside of a real go-go. Imagine listening from the perspective of the crowd, but at home,” she said. “Students coming in this year as first-year audio students will be doing this work by the time they get to their Advance Audio production class in their senior year.” 

The Grammy-nominated Malachi has worked in go-go off campus with her 2016 song “We Like Money” featuring Michelle Blackwell, inspired in part by Brown’s “We Need Some Money.” She also co-wrote Brown’s “Best in Me” and sang background vocals on his “Beautiful Life.”