Teaching Freedom Song as Antiracist Praxis

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-465
Author(s):  
Stephen Stacks
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Music Curriculum ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Freedom Movement

In the teaching of history, oversimplification is, perhaps, unavoidable. In certain cases, however, that oversimplification can be deadly. There are some lessons that are too complex, some stories that are too nuanced, to be reduced in such a way. By their contours and particularities, they resist easy digestion. In the spirit of this particularity, my contribution to the colloquy is specific, but hopefully applicable to contexts beyond its specificity: I argue that the US Black Freedom Movement (or civil rights movement) and its music is a story that must be taught in all its complexity, for oversimplifying it does concrete harm to the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the present. Teaching the US Black Freedom Movement and its music is also vital if we hope to enable our students to be forces of understanding, healing, and justice in the world, and should be an integral component of any undergraduate music curriculum that hopes to be antiracist.

“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAMMY L. KERNODLE
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
New Type ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Nina Simone ◽  
Important Shift

AbstractThis article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type of freedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical content and structure of Simone's music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of the transition from King's nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield's Chicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, which had largely avoided overt political statements.

Poll Power

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement

The civil rights movement required money. In the early 1960s, after years of grassroots organizing, civil rights activists convinced non-profit foundations to donate in support of voter education and registration efforts. One result was the Voter Education Project (VEP), which, starting in 1962, showed far-reaching results almost immediately and organized the groundwork that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In African American communities across the South, the VEP catalyzed existing campaigns; it paid for fuel, booked rallies, bought food for volunteers, and paid people to canvass neighborhoods. Despite this progress, powerful conservatives in Congress weaponized the federal tax code to undercut the important work of the VEP. Though local power had long existed in the hundreds of southern towns and cities that saw organized civil rights action, the VEP was vital to converting that power into political motion. Evan Faulkenbury offers a much-needed explanation of how philanthropic foundations, outside funding, and tax policy shaped the southern black freedom movement.

Introduction

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Freedom Movement

This introduction discusses the beginnings of the “jail, no bail” strategy in the southern civil rights movement, introduces the Black Power vernacular as a critical optic of the book, and charts the ways in which jailing and imprisonment were central features of the black freedom movement from Greensboro to Black Power. This chapter also introduces the writings of Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur as the central texts for this rhetorical analysis. Finally, the chapter suggests that these extremely popular, though understudied, writings are useful spaces to understand how imprisonment occupied a contested terrain, used simultaneously for black liberation and for state repression.

We Can Add to the World Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Azaransky
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Congress Of Racial Equality ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Freedom Movement

Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray developed a black Christian pacifism inspired by Gandhian nonviolence. Their activist projects in the 1940s, including sit-ins, freedom rides, and multicity marches, became mainstays of the later civil rights movement. While working with majority-white organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, Murray, Rustin, and Farmer nevertheless developed what Farmer called “the race logic of pacifism,” the idea that black Americans had a particular aptitude for nonviolent direct action because of their experiences of white racism. In the midst of a majority-white Christian peace movement, these three black activists devised a religious pacifism that was also distinctly black. Their early activism illuminates, furthermore, questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the black freedom movement.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Freedom Movement

The five-decade department store movement was contemporaneous with both the black labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, it provides a privileged perspective on these two movements and their interrelationships. The department store movement helped dismantle racialized patterns of labor and consumption and, in the process, facilitated the emergence of a modern black middle class. This new black middle class and those aspiring to ideal middle-class status would profoundly shape the course of the civil rights movement. The department store movement reveals aspects of the black middle class that might enhance our understanding of the politics of the black freedom movement in the twentieth century, not least of which is why its targets were so often sites of consumption.

National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory 1968–2016

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-189
Author(s):  
Robert Greene
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
National Review ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives and historical memories of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the US civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Department Store ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Black Colleges ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Freedom Movement

The introduction familiarizes the reader with the concept of the second curriculum – a pedagogy of idealism, race consciousness, and cultural nationalism that flowed through all black colleges and made them formidable epicenters of black militancy and activism. The case for constructing a longitudinal history of seven different institutions is made. The author repurposes the theory of communitas, first introduced by anthropologist Victor Turner, and uses this concept to define black colleges as dedicated, racialized spaces that countered the ideology of white supremacy that permeated American society and sought to crush the social, political, and economic advancement of African Americans. In doing so, HBCUs served as a vital cornerstone of the black freedom movement in America.

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