AFROPUNK, the revolutionary black counterculture music festival, will celebrate its 10th year in New York City this weekend with -- if last year's numbers are any indication -- a crowd of more than 60,000 at Brooklyn's Commodore Barry Park. It's come a long way from its start in 2005 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, thanks to its co-founder, Matthew Morgan.

Morgan, who considers himself to be the most radical of his four siblings, is the biracial son of a Guyanese father and a Russian-Polish mother. He grew up in England during the 1970s where he witnessed the rise of the rebellious punk rock genre .

From a young age Morgan was aware of difference and the intertwined relationship of race, music and discrimination. "I saw young people of color come up at time in the UK where they were pushing back against the government," Morgan told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. "They were pushing back against society in general, and punk rock -- from a white Western sense -- came from that angst and that rebellious nature that was from young black people."

Morgan began working with musicians, such as Cree Summer and Santigold. He came to America in 2000 to continue his work with these kinds of musicians: black artists whose style tended to lie outside mainstream ideas of how black music was supposed to sound or look. When he arrived, he expected to find a more accepting atmosphere in New York City. Instead, he says he was greeted with the same attitudes that had made him feel like an outcast in London.

So Morgan, along with fellow industry colleague James Spooner, began a movement that would revolutionize the way black people understood music and cultural identity.