4.8 - The Arts, Music, and Politics of Freedom
Art as a Tool for Global Advocacy
During the twentieth-century Black Freedom movement, Black artists contributed to the struggle for racial equality through a wide range of creative expression, poetry, music, and performance among them. This work didn't just document the movement, it actively carried African Americans' resistance to inequality onto the global stage, strengthening similar liberation efforts among Afro-descendants living outside the United States as well.
Poets played a distinct role in this effort. Nicolás Guillén, a prominent Cuban poet of African descent and a key figure of the Negrismo movement, used his writing to examine the connections between anti-Black racism in the United States and in Latin America. His poetry denounced segregation and racial violence directly, drawing international audiences' attention to Black freedom struggles that extended well beyond U.S. borders.
Musicians brought their own distinct form of protest to this global stage. Jazz bassist Charles Mingus composed protest music grounded in African American musical traditions like call and response, and his work helped draw worldwide attention to white supremacist resistance against racial integration in the United States, including events like the 1957 Little Rock Crisis. It's worth knowing the specific story behind one of his most famous protest pieces: Mingus originally composed "Fables of Faubus" as a direct response to the Little Rock Crisis, but in 1959, Columbia Records refused to let him include the song's lyrics, forcing it to be released as an instrumental. The following year, in 1960, Mingus rereleased the piece with its full lyrics as "Original Faubus Fables," using call and response to mock the absurdity of racial segregation through pointed references to Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus, the very official who had ordered troops to block Black students from integrating Little Rock's schools.
Performance itself could also serve as protest. Black performers who expatriated abroad, like Josephine Baker, used their platforms to critique the glaring double standard of an American democracy that championed equality abroad while actively maintaining segregation at home, a hypocrisy made all the more visible by their success and visibility overseas.
Faith, Music, and Mobilization
Faith and music were deeply intertwined sources of inspiration and community mobilization throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the movement's freedom songs grew directly out of adaptations of hymns, spirituals, gospel songs, and labor union songs, all nurtured within Black churches, which had long served as spaces for organizing and reshaping this broad range of musical traditions to fit new political purposes.
These freedom songs did real, tangible work for the people singing them. Many activists risked their lives in the pursuit of equality and freedom, and these songs helped unify communities, renew activists' spirits in moments of exhaustion or fear, provide direction through their lyrics, and communicate a shared hope for a more just and inclusive future. While well-known singers like Mahalia Jackson and Harry Belafonte performed iconic renditions of these songs, freedom songs were most often sung collectively, as a group, reflecting the same community stewardship that Black church leaders had long fostered through shared hymns and spirituals.
Martin Luther King Jr. described "We Shall Overcome" as the defining anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. Activists sang it constantly, while marching, while protesting, when they were arrested, and even while sitting in jail cells. The song's power as a source of political inspiration ran so deep that it directly served as the muse for King's own 1966 speech, which he titled after the song itself.
"We Shall Overcome" is itself a good example of how freedom songs were adapted. It grew out of "I'll Overcome Someday," a gospel hymn by Black Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley published around 1900, and striking Black tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, sang a version of it in the 1940s. It spread through the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training center for labor and civil rights organizers, and folk singer Guy Carawan taught it to the student activists who founded SNCC in 1960.
Required Sources
"Little Rock" by Nicolás Guillén, 1958
Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén wrote "Little Rock" after the 1957 crisis, and it appeared in his 1958 collection La paloma de vuelo popular (The Dove of Popular Flight). The poem opens with a blues weeping on a fine morning, then pictures Black children walking to school in fear between rifles while the white South swings its whip, with Jim Crow as their teacher and the "sons of Lynch" as their classmates. It mocks U.S. leaders who talk about the "free world" (and play golf) while Black children are told to bow their heads, and it ends by asking readers to imagine the whole world turned into Little Rock. Writing in Spanish from Cuba, Guillén used a U.S. event to denounce segregation and racial violence for readers across Latin America, an example of how Black artists carried the Black Freedom movement to global audiences.
Nicolás Guillén, "Little Rock," in La paloma de vuelo popular: Elegías (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1958)
Guillén, the Afro-Cuban poet, wrote this poem in Spanish after the 1957 crisis at Little Rock Central High School. It pictures Black children walking to school between rifles in a segregated South, mocks American leaders who talk about freedom while this happens, and ends by asking readers to imagine the whole world turned into Little Rock. The CED includes it to show how Black writers outside the United States used the civil rights struggle to denounce racism for readers across Latin America.
"Original Faubus Fables" by Charles Mingus, 1960 (video, 9:13)
This is the 1960 recording from the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus on Candid Records, the label that let Mingus record the lyrics Columbia had cut. Over the music, Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond trade lines in call and response: Mingus asks Richmond to name someone "ridiculous," Richmond answers with Governor Faubus's name, and the two keep mocking him and other politicians. Listening to it shows how Mingus used an African American musical tradition to ridicule white resistance to integration, in a record that reached jazz fans in the United States and abroad.
Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr., 1964 (Excerpt from Chapter 4, "A New Day in Birmingham," p. 48)
Why We Can't Wait (1964) is King's book about the 1963 Birmingham campaign. In the chapter "A New Day in Birmingham," he describes the nightly mass meetings in Black churches and the freedom songs sung there. He calls the songs "the soul of the movement" and explains that they are adaptations of the songs enslaved people sang, sung for the same reason: Black Americans were still not free, and the songs gave them hope and courage. The chapter is direct evidence for this topic's point that faith and music, nurtured in Black churches, inspired activists and held them together.
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), chapter 4, "A New Day in Birmingham"
In a sense the freedom songs are the soul of the movement.
In this chapter King describes the 1963 Birmingham campaign from the inside, including the nightly mass meetings in Black churches. He explains that the freedom songs sung there grew out of the songs enslaved people sang, and that people still sang them for the same reason: they were not yet free, and the songs gave them courage and hope. The CED includes this passage as direct evidence that faith and music held the movement together.
Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait (1964), ch. 4, "A New Day in Birmingham," p. 48 in the edition the CED uses. Source: Beacon Press, King Legacy edition
"Can't Turn Me Around" (video, 3:18)
"Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" (often shortened to "Can't Turn Me Around") is a freedom song adapted from an older spiritual. Activists in the Albany Movement in Georgia (1961 to 1962) made it famous, and marchers changed the words to name whoever stood in their way, such as a local police chief. This recording is a modern performance by the hip-hop band The Roots for the 2009 documentary Soundtrack for a Revolution, which retells the movement through its music. The song's simple, repeatable lines about walking, talking, and marching on to freedom show how freedom songs gave activists direction and courage, and the new version shows the tradition still speaking to later generations.