Songs of the Civil Rights Movement

"This is the BBC." "You ordered this guy to stand by you out." "This march will not continue." "The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color." "Their cause must be our cause to them." "Music played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. Without music, the Civil Rights Movement would have been like a bird without wings." "Because music created a sense of solidarity, a unified people. It inspired us to go out, to sit in." "So someone will come up to you while you were sitting in at the segregated lunch counter in Nashville, in Atlanta, in Birmingham, in Montgomery." "In poor hot water on your hot coffee or put a light cigarette down your back, you would just sit down and maybe home a song. You'd get arrested and a mass arrest and you'd start singing." "At night, the sheriff huddle would come and say, "Stop singing. And if we didn't stop, which we didn't," "If it was hot, he would turn the heat up. If it was cool, he would turn the air conditioning on. He was very mean. To keep our morale up, we sang. We could hear the men singing in their part of the jail. "And when they would sing to us and we would sing back to them, over my head I hear music in the air. That was one of my favorites." Music has been a source of healing, spiritual sustenance, joy for release and a political protest for many enslaved Africans on the American continent for centuries. On the plantations of the antebellum American South, spirituals laden with hidden messages were often the only form of communion and hope for salvation for those enslaved. Songs of reaching a promised land along the River Jordan, songs of souls being freed, songs that relieved the suffering of daily life, songs that directed the enslaved to the roots, to freedom. Some of these spirituals were to become the songs of the civil rights movement. As we remembered the death of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, we're celebrating the role of music in the struggle for equal rights for all people of color in America. We're monitoring the schools in this state, in this country, that the government has pushed black apes in our high schools and elementary schools with our precious superior white children and forced them to mix. One of the early spirituals, the enslaved sang, was swing low sweet chariot. Here are singer Oral Moses and music historian Steve Ross. It is typical of spirituals, those songs that Africans sang to relieve the stress and the pressure of the horrific kind of life that they led as enslaved people. And in many instances they could not talk back to people, they were brutally treated. And so as a way of giving an answer to their frustrations, their feelings, they sang songs. Swing low sweet chariot is among more than 6000 spirituals that has no one composer. They're probably are a number of different sources. Sometimes up and sometimes down, coming for a carry me home, but still my soul is heaven bound, coming for a carry me home. There's a lot of information and myths information floating around about the origin of swing low. One thing that we do know is that sometime around the mid 1800s the tune and the words were connected probably around in the 1840s. I suppose no one really knows what came first. My guess is that the tunes and the lyrics came first and an overlay of meaning was introduced by the slaves. Swing low, the literal words of swing low, were overlaid with a meaning that allowed them to derive great inspiration and hope for the future and hope for freedom in a way that was not detectable by the white slaveholders. For example, swing low sweet chariot coming for a carry me home. I suppose the literal meaning would be the sort of the biblical meaning, swing low meaning come down from heaven, some sort of heavenly vehicle, and then coming for a carry me home would be to take me to heaven. And the coded message or the secret meaning would refer to the underground railroad, which is not a railroad, of course, and it's not underground in a literal sense, but it's a loose connection of depots and individuals in places that helped shepherd and safeguard the slaves as they were making their way to freedom. For example, swing low, come down to the slave holding states, sweet chariot meaning the underground railroad, coming for a carry me home would be to come to take me to freedom in the North or in the Canada. First verses, I looked over Jordan and what did I see, obviously there's a biblical reference there, but it also refers to the Mississippi River or the Ohio River, and what did I see, a band of angels, obviously that's literally a group of angels, it could also mean in the coded messages the workers of the underground railroad. Here at Tubman Woods, considered the Moses of the Freedom Movement, she was born in 1820 and lived until 1913, she escaped from slavery in the late 1840s, and then spent the rest of her life making trips back and forth from the North to the South and back again, helping others escape slavery. So I think the coded messages really helped to inspire and give a sense of hope in the face of not much hope. In 1900, a young African American wrote a poem which his brother later set to music. James Weldon Johnson wrote, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Perhaps the first real song about civil rights, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" became the black national anthem. When it was adopted by the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Color People, which Johnson became a leader of in 1917. The Constitution says that no person should be kept from voting because of his race or his color. Their cause must be our cause to sing a song. During Reconstruction, whites in the South who felt disenfranchised by the Civil War, vented their frustration on the now freed people of color, men, women, and children. Acts of violence meted out on innocent and uppity, black people, for the most spurious reasons were commonplace below the Mason-Dixon line. The Northeast and West were not exempt from these atrocities. In the 1930s, a song was written unlike any song that had gone before, a chilling lament, a damning indictment of lynching. And now I like to sing a tune. It was written especially for me. It's titled "Strange Fruit." My name is David Marklick. I'm the author of "Strange Fruit," the biography of a song, "Billy Holidays," famous anti-lynching song from 1939. It was in fact written several years before "Billy Holidays" recorded it. It was written in the mid-1930s by a man named Abel Mirapoul, a schoolteacher in the Bronx, a radical Jewish schoolteacher in the Bronx, who was very much involved in the politics of his day and was particularly interested in civil rights, and had seen a photograph of a lynching. He was a poet by Avocation, and he wrote an anti-lynching poem, a poem about the photograph that he saw, and later said it to music, and it was performed extensively around New York, largely in left-wing circles, but didn't get to "Billy Holidays" right away. My name is Robert Mirapoul. I was adopted by Abel and Ann Mirapoul, and took the name Mirapoul. People were so stunned by this. The stark images that it evoked, the very fact that this was an attack, that this he scorned, and shame upon the people who were engaged in this horrific act of violence. They didn't want to have anything to do with that, and so there were literally riots in some of the southern venues where "Billy Holidays" was going to sing, that in some cases prevented her from singing. People who were sort of in the establishment were scared of causing controversy. Radio stations didn't want to be boycotted by white racists, and people didn't want to be attacked. So there was a reluctance to perform this song. Oh, no! In 1955, the brutal murder took place of a young black Chicago boy named Emmett Till. His death shocked America. It was down in Mississippi. Not so long ago, when the young boy from Chicago town stepped through a southern door. His boys fit for tragedy. I can still remember well the color of his skin was black, and his name was Emmett Till. My name is Simmel, right? I'm also the cousin of Emmett Till. Emmett Till and I were your second cousin, and I lived in Mississippi in 1955, and Emmett came down there to visit us for a little vacation. So he arrived in Mississippi on a Saturday, beginning of the cotton harvest, late August. So he would be at home all day with nothing to do, board and waiting for us to get off, and back in those days we worked from sun to none. It was from sun up to sundown, and when we get off, we will have supper, and we wanted to go somewhere. Well, on a Wednesday night, we wanted to go to this little town. It was called money, money Mississippi, and it was about three miles west of where we live. So we went to this little store. My nephew, Wheeler, went into the store first to buy something, and Emmett went in behind him. So Wheeler came out of this store, leaving Emmett in there alone with Mrs. Bryant, that she was the wife of this store owner. So my brother Mara Reese immediately sent me in to be with Emmett. So inside of the store, when I was there, Emmett said nothing out of line. He said nothing. He paid for his stuff, we both left the store together, and when we got outside of the store, Mrs. Bryant came out, and she was headed towards her car. And for some unknown reason, Emmett whistle at Calum Bryant, and it scared us so bad. We just couldn't get in our car fast enough to get out of town, because in Mississippi, you didn't whistle at a white woman. That was suicide, instant death, but Emmett didn't know that. Backed us, she said, "Please don't tell Uncle Moe's what I've done. I don't want to go home." Because he was afraid that if we had told Daddy, Daddy was going to send him back to Chicago. So we not, you know, figuring that we was going to get just a weapon for what he had done, we didn't tell our dad what happened. Thursday came nothing happened, Friday came nothing happened, Saturday, we forgot all about it. We got ready to go to Greenwood. This was a little town about 13 miles to the south of where we lived, and we were stayed up to 12 midnight. At 12 midnight, we headed home. We arrived home about one, went to bed, and Emmett and I, in my bedroom, there was two beds. My brother Robert was sleeping on the West Wall, Emmett and I was on the East Wall. About 2/3 I heard loud talking in the house, and when I opened my eyes, there were two white men standing at the foot of my bed. One had a 45 and a flashlight in his hand. He ordered me to lay back down and go back to sleep, and he asked Emmett a couple of questions. Was he the boy that had done that talking and money? Emmett said, "Yeah." Back in those days, you didn't say "Yeah" to white men. You had to be "Yes, sir," or "No, sir," "Yes, ma'am," or "No, ma'am." They threatened to whip Emmett inside of the house. I still don't know what's going on. About that time, my mother came in the room and she began to beg and to plead and to offer their money to leave Emmett alone. This is when I really realized that Emmett was in grave danger. And who I brought kind of hesitating when money was mentioned, but JW Myers said, "No." So they made Emmett dress. They marched him out of the room. Now, Emmett left my bedroom. He didn't say one word. And they marched him out to a waiting truck and asked the person in the truck. "Is this the right boy?" And our latest force responded. It is. And they put him in the car and drove away. We never saw him alive again. It was three days before we found out anything. We found Emmett's body on a Wednesday. Three days after they had taken him out of my home. He had been beaten. He had been tortured. Then they shot him in the head. Then they threw him in the towel and had to rub him. What is amazing about Strange Fruit is that it is an attack. It is a rather nasty attack. An able miracle when asked about why he wrote Strange Fruit said, "Because I hate lynching and I hate the people who perpetrate lynching." "He is strange." "I hate the people who perpetrate lynching and I hate the people who perpetrate lynching." Later that year, a woman named Rosa Parks said she was thinking about Emmett Till when she refused to give a proceed at the front of an Alabama bus reserved to White's only. The bus was organized with racial segregation, the white passengers to the front and the color to the rear. And the bus driver, who would order some persons to give up their seats for white passengers who had to stand. When I refused to move, he had me arrested, put in jail. The arrest of Rosa Parks led to the boycott of the bus company that lasted for over a year until the company capitulated and scrapped segregation. One of the leaders of that boycott was a 26-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King. In one of his books, Dr. Martin Luther King, got off of miraculous few sentences. As I remember it, he said, "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it brackets more violence. With violence, you can murder the hater, but you just increase hate. Hate cannot drive out hate. Darkness can out drive out darkness only light can do that. Only love can drive out hate." "We shall overcome." The folk singer and activist Pete Seager responded to Martin Luther King's philosophy of peaceful protest. Seager adopted the song that was to become the leading anthem for the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, the nonviolent approach was tested multiple times and was often met with brutal force from both law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan. "If you ordered this guy, then pay you off. This march will not continue." "And we shall overcome." In 1957, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was set up, initiating the Civil Rights Act which did not come into law until 1964. Hence, the times they are changing. "You have to keep up bloody in order that they will not have the privilege to vote." One of its first tasks was to look into the denial of voting rights for Africans and Native Americans in the South and across the states. In 1963, 250,000 people marched to Washington, D.C. to campaign for jobs and freedom. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Music was an important part of this event too. "This will be our final selection from the folk singing group, and we ask that all of you within the sound of their voices join in and express your feelings." Mary E. King, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, and author of Freedom Song, was an activist in 1964, campaigning for voter registration in Mississippi. "We had something called "Freedom Singers." In the student-on-violent coordinating committee, we had a group of four individuals who were, shall we say, "lay musicologists," and they were brought together and called "Freedom Singers," and we would send them to events organized by the friends in different cities, and they would sing the "Freedom Songs." "Tell me about your light." You need to remember that there were mass meetings going on. Almost any night in local communities and churches, there were mass meetings that were taking place. There might be an hour of singing of Freedom Songs as warm-up before the actual program began. This would not be for worship. These were often training or strategy sessions. The mass meetings were where the decision would be made, that yes, we're going to march on Thursday, or no, we will not do that action. It's too dangerous. Instead, let us use another technique. These mass meetings were themselves relying on music for a part of the process of decision-making, because there were certain freedom songs that were reserved to be used only at certain moments. For example, if the community was afraid that someone was going to be killed or that there would be some attack, there was a Freedom Song called, "This may be the last time we see each other." Another was weighed in the water, which talked about how God is going to trouble the waters, and we must pass through the troubled waters before we can come to the other side. The music, the choice of Freedom Songs, was actually pinpointed to the predicaments, the dilemmas, the strategies that were being used. It was a phenomenally important tool. It's almost hard to convey it to somebody who was not there. The mass meetings, people were sitting on aisles, people were sitting on stairs, hanging off boughs, listening outside windows, spilling into the streets, and this was a tremendous part of the mobilization of the civil rights movement. Music, music, music, music was powerfully instrumental in the civil rights movement. Oh, me, I pray, I pray, I pray, I pray. Amazing grace, spoke of forgiveness and redemption. Bob Zellner, a descendant of Klux Klanzman, and the first white southerner to join the civil rights movement, recalls singing it, to de-escalate the violence of police against him and other protesters. I remember one time in the summer of '63 in Danville, Virginia, a night march. Do you think you can control the situation if there are further demonstrations today? We will control it. Will you need the support? Do you think of the National Guard of Alabama, the State National Guard? If we do, we can get it. Do you personally, Mr. Connor, consider the demands of the Negro leaders unreasonable? I do. Do you think you can keep bombing in the present situation of segregation? I may not be able to do it, but I'll die trying. 123 people were hospitalized that night. One of the things that we would do when they would use violence, we would say violence will not stop us. So the next night, there were even more people on the steps of the town hall, and we were surrounded by fire trucks and by garbage people who had been deputized and had table legs that they were going to beat the demonstrators with. And I remember being absolutely terrified because I knew they were about to start the fire hoses again the night before my wife had been washed under a car. And when she tried to climb out, a deputy policeman hit her in the head with a table leg. So I knew it was about to start. There's an old saying in the Civil Rights Movement here in the United States that, when in doubt, pray and sing. And that night, for some reason, we sang amazing grace. And we stepped up from the steps and began to slowly walk toward the police, and they parted. Amen. Because it made the white police uncomfortable, because these were songs that they sang in their church. And we walked back to the church safely that night. The hymn's theme was reflected in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Our refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. Our refuse to accept the idea that man is mere floatsome and jetsome in the rivet of light, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. Freedom! The name of this tune is Mississippi God's damn. While the freedom singers raised their voices and protests, many established artists began to use theirs to join the struggle. For Nina Simone, the deaths of four young black girls in the bombing of a church in Alabama. And the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi turned her to protest and inspired her to write a song. Mississippi God damn. Soul singer Sam Cook wrote a song that was to become another anthem for the struggle. There has to be the soundtrack of your life in a sense too. And a change is going to come is definitely a major part of the soundtrack of that period of my life. I was born by the river in a little sense. Oh and just like the river I've been running every sense. Today Jennifer Lawson is a powerful media executive. In 1964 she was a young graduate from Alabama and headed to Mississippi during Freedom Summer. The civil rights movement was a very pivotal time in my life to be 16, 17, 18 years old and to suddenly see that your actions could really make a difference in the world. Is heavy stuff. Popular music was very important to us. Even in the darkest times I think in the most difficult times it inspired me and energized me to try to make a difference. My name is Elsie Cook. I'm the brother of the late great Sam Cook. Well I know you remember blowing in the wind by Bob Duh. Sam always said a black man should have been blowing in the wind. And he said down in the road I was born by the river in a little tent. But just like the river I've been running every sense. It's been a long time coming but I know a change is going to come. And he said a change is going to come. It was the hardest song he ever wrote in his life. Sam Cook quietly gave the proceeds of the song to Martin Luther King. Yeah he gave it to the civil rights Martin Luther King. Sam didn't want all this out. So I didn't. Sam didn't want a public. Sam did some. He didn't want to brag about it. And so I really really did not talk about that. The other part of the song that I really relate to is so strongly not afraid to die. Tired of living but not afraid to die. Sadly I've lost a lot of friends along the way. And the classmate of mine Samuel Young Jr. was killed 50 years ago in January 1966 in Tuskegee. And he was a college student and we had had a meeting and in just a few hours later he was killed by a gas station, white gas station attendant in Tuskegee. And there were so many other civil rights workers that we lost. And so when I think about the lyrics that of being unafraid to die, that's how I think of so many of these people. We knew that we were living and we were working in a volatile situation, you know, somewhat like a war zone in some ways where your life was sometimes in real danger. So the song then conveys that for me. What's also interesting to me is that he then goes to his brother and there I think he's speaking metaphorically, brother would have been the term that Sam Cook would have used for another black male. I go to my brother another black male and I say brother help me please. And he winds up knocking me back down on my knees. This to me is about his uncertainty of who to trust. It would later come out that there were informants to something called the state sovereignty commission, which was set up specifically to uphold the laws of racial segregation. And there was a massive program of surveillance on all the civil rights workers and volunteers that would not emerge until later. But to me he is speaking about the fact that there was an awareness that mysteriously police would turn up knowing that something was going to happen. And there were people who were collaborators, black people who were collaborators with the sheriff or with the local police or with the local vigilante groups, the local terror groups, the local cook gux clan. To me this is a very explicit reference. But now I think I'm able to. By then of course the conditions in Mississippi were on the national agenda. And so to a degree we had succeeded in our purpose and it would not be long until the Civil Rights Act was effectuated. The Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 also is what built the political pressure and force for the passage of the Voting Rights Act the following year in 1965. Everyone associates the Voting Rights Act with Selma, the march from Selma to Montgomery. But in fact it was the summer of 1964 that began to build that national pressure for the Voting Rights Act. It's been a long, a long time coming but I know the change will come. Oh yes it will. Sam Cook was shot dead in December 1964. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 after the marches from Selma to Montgomery. The following years were turbulent in the United States. There was a growing anger that despite so many victories for equality, things were not getting any better. Do you hate white people? Do I hate them? Yeah, I hate them. I ain't too far on novel. Would you hate them enough to fight them? For 310 years of free slavery what I'm going to do man? Would you fight white people? Show love all day long. The black power movement led to a split among civil rights activists. There was distrust between young and old, black and white and there was a war in Vietnam. Race rides broke out in several northern cities. The shots are coming fast and heavy now. We're in Detroit. As the night is again broken by gunfire. Marmen are coming to the scene. Squad cries are being used as shields. This is a third such incident. Law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan. Palage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. I see trees of green. In 1967, Louis Armstrong released this song, intended as an antidote to the more strident music of recent years. But given the events of the time, it quickly took on an ironic meaning. After delivering what was to be his final speech, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated as he stepped out onto the balcony of his motel room in Memphis. Dr. King just as he screamed not. Dr. King and the bill had exploded in his face and evidently it came from this direction. And we turned around immediately because we didn't know how many bullets were coming. But we turned around looking and we were looking to see where it come from because you couldn't tell. You couldn't tell it was a shot. You didn't get a shot. No, until it hit his face. It sounded like a stick of dynamite on large firecracker. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed on the balcony of his motel in Memphis, apparently by a white man with a rifle. Dr. King was rushed to hospital critically wounded and pronounced dead within the arm. A week later, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. The struggle did not end with King's death. It was overshadowed by the Vietnam War. The '70s saw a changing of political focus. New artists using their voices came to the fore, Richie Havens. Cosby Stills and Nash, Marvin Gaye. The songs of the Civil Rights movement were truly a unique force for change at a pivotal time in America's history. We have to do what every group in this country did. We got to take over the communities where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs. So we can have decent schools, so we can have decent justice. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the jerk and hit.