Category: Civil Rights

  • Some Motor City History

    Blind Blake (1896-1938) recorded “Detroit Bound Blues” for Paramount in 1928. It’s a kind of miniature record of at least some of the impetus behind the Great Migration. I’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good jobI’m goin’ to Detroit, get myself a good jobTried to stay around here with the starvation mob I’m goin’…

  • Pastoral Scene of the Gallant South

    Content warning: graphic images of racial violence. “Strange Fruit” was written by a longtime English teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Abel Meeropol in 1937 (shown above with his sons Robert and Michael, the biological children of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, whom Abel and his wife adopted after the Rosenbergs’ execution). The…

  • So Black and Blue

    Ralph Ellison, above, writes in Invisible Man, his 1952 novel about race in America: Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my [apartment], and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like…

  • “Doing 55” Playlist

    Hoodie (David Hammons, 1993). Trigger/Content Warning: Disturbing subject matter, police brutality, racism, profanity, racist language including the n-word. Read Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s article “‘Doing Fifty-Five in a Fifty-Four’: Hip Hop, Cop Voice and the Cadence of White Supremacy in the United States”: Stoever notes: As African American theorists, writers, artists and musicians – from Frederick Douglass in…

  • Soul as Protest

    Content/Trigger Warning: Racist language in original sources. Soul was a stream of rhythm and blues that engaged overtly with social issues. Where 1950s and early 1960s R&B was primarily dance music, in the mid-60s, certain artists began marrying the R&B musical sensibility to lyrics that dealt with pressing political topics. In the Civil Rights Movement,…

  • Freedom Now?

    The “Greensboro Four” sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, 1960. Read about the protests here. The cover of drummer Max Roach’s 1961 album We Insist! was an explicit reference to the Greensboro protests. We Insist! drew analogies between social and political freedom, and the aesthetic freedom of Roach’s music. The Max Roach Quintet performing “Driva…

  • We Shall Overcome

    The Library of Congress describes the famous Civil Rights Movement song, “We Shall Overcome”: It was the most powerful song of the 20th century. It started out in church pews and picket lines, inspired one of the greatest freedom movements in U.S. history, and went on to topple governments and bring about reform all over…

  • Jazz 59

    In 1959, African-American composer Ed Bland made the influential short semi-documentary film The Cry of Jazz, which explains jazz for the newbie, and situates the music in the history of black life in America. Bland used the music of avant-garde Afrofuturist composer and pianist Sun Ra as the soundtrack. 1959 was also the year that…

  • Beneath the Underdog

    Trigger/content warning: disturbing video imagery, offensive language. When I was working on my doctorate and teaching a writing class for music majors, I wanted to assign my students a passage from the great jazz bass player, composer, and bandleader Charles Mingus’s 1971 memoir, Beneath the Underdog. The fiftieth anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central…

  • Booker T. vs. W.E.B.

    (W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington) I subscribe to the Poem-A-Day email offered for free by the Academy of American Poets. It’s nice to wake up to a poem before you start dealing with your to-do lists and putting out the various fires of everyday life. During the week, the Academy sends out a…

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