Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  As I was prone to at the time, and my mother—bless her heart—can testify to this, I became quite impatient and then outright upset, perhaps even a little livid. How dare Mrs. Robinson make me stand in front of everyone and speak on a Frenchman in the middle of Black History Month? My six year-old self would have none of it. This situation was all the more bewildering because I secretly had a schoolboy’s crush on Mrs. Robinson, who had the biggest and baddest Afro hairdo I had ever seen other than my mother’s ultra-hip and always happening Afro. I was really upset, and I needed to let Mrs. Robinson know. So, I raised my little trembling hand. She winked at me, as she customarily did, and then came right over to my desk. I let her know that there had been a mistake, that it was Black History Month, and that we were supposed to be learning about black folk not French folk. Gosh! She graciously allowed me to verbally punch myself out, and then she said: “Reiland, if you would spend as much time following directions as you do creating your own little lesson plans there is no telling what you might amount to someday.” She went on to say, as only a real soul sister could at the end of the 1970s, “Ba-a-aby, please read the back of the card and then let me know if you still have a problem with Dr. Du Bois.” She smiled smartly, and then sashayed away.

  I don’t know. Maybe it was the way she said “Dr. Du Bois” with such reverence, or the tender tone she took with me even as she scolded me—which, of course, made my little heart skip a beat and tears well up in my eyes. Whichever it was, needless to say, eventually I read the paragraph or two on Du Bois on the back of the card. I was astonished. It shook my ship. It really rattled my cage. It opened up something deep inside of me. I got up in front of everyone that day and proudly presented on “Dr. Du Bois,” of course, butchering his name every other time I attempted to say it. But, Mrs. Robinson was right there with me. I felt like Muhammad Ali, and she was my Angelo Dundee. After class I apologized for putting up such resistance to learning about “Dr. Du Bois” (once again unintentionally slaughtering his name), and then I sincerely asked her if she thought if I got really good grades I could go and study with him when I grew up. Immediately I sensed something was wrong, and this wasn’t just a situation of “kids say the darndest things.” Then I saw tears well up in Mrs. Robinson’s eyes, and the more she held back her tears the more I was unable to hold back mine. She hugged me and then sat me down and told me that “Dr. Du Bois” died in 1963. I stood there, stock-still for a moment. I was devastated. Completely destroyed. In one afternoon it seemed as though my whole world had been turned right-side up, and then upside down again.

  After our tough talk about Du Bois’s death and why he is buried in Africa, perhaps sensing my profound sadness, Mrs. Robinson walked me over to the school library, showed me the black history and culture section, and then and there I checked out grade school level books on Du Bois and the organization he helped to establish, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was heady stuff. It was like coming home for a kid who never had a real home to speak of. I couldn’t wait to learn more about Du Bois. I started reading immediately. That afternoon there was no time for cartoons or toys or playing with my friends. It was Du Bois and I for hours and hours. We quickly became buddies. I practically immediately asked him if he would be my best friend. I thought he was something akin to a superhero, and over time he sort of became a superhero to my younger self, to that fatherless little boy suffering in the public housing projects. In a sense, Du Bois became my dad.

  I will never forget the day that Mrs. Robinson shared Du Bois with me, that evening at the dinner table I told my mother everything I learned about Du Bois. She could tell I was obviously excited. She noted my reading material and was determined to outdo Mrs. Robinson by taking me to the public library and exposing me to Du Bois, the NAACP, and eventually the Civil Rights Movement. Over the next couple of years, each Saturday morning I was more excited about going to the library than I was about watching cartoons or playing basketball. It is in this sense that I often say that it was Du Bois who initially led me to the library, to the world of literature, and to the life of the mind. It was like some sort of divine intervention. Divine, indeed, and Du Bois eventually became the equivalent of my intellectual guardian angel and philosophical father figure. Thanks, of course, to Mrs. Robinson and my mama.

  By the time I reached junior high school I had become aware of the fact that Du Bois’s most famous book was The Souls of Black Folk. It was there in junior high school that I first attempted to read the weighted words of W. E. B. Du Bois. I had been diligently building my vocabulary and reading skills, just as my mother told me I should, in order to be able to actually read Du Bois, and not merely read about Du Bois. It was like I was on a mission from first grade through to junior high school to be able to read Du Bois and discover what all the fuss was about. Perhaps my twelve or thirteen year-old soul sensed that it was a magical, life-changing moment. I believed that I was ready to read The Souls of Black Folk. It was a big deal. Family, friends, church folk, and school teachers all enthusiastically chimed in about how the book had impacted them, and each seemed to emphasize that it was a very adult book, about very adult issues. I was counseled to take it slowly and to feel free to come to them with questions. It was as if my village elders were handing me over to some great godfather, some supreme high priest who had been tasked with guiding me through my rites of passage from childhood to adulthood, from boyhood to manhood.

  Then the moment arrived. It was time to read and loose myself in The Souls of Black Folk, literally and figuratively speaking. I will never, ever, forget it. It was the cover of the book that drew me to it, that soulfully summoned me in a special, almost alchemic way. I feel sort of embarrassed saying it, but The Souls of Black Folk is the first book with a black person on the cover that my twelve year-old eyes had ever seen. Sure, my mother read me fiction and poetry by black writers growing up, and she certainly encouraged me to read books by black authors, but their pictures weren’t on the covers of their books. Something happened to me when I saw Du Bois and, as I felt back then and still feel now, he saw me. I stared at him and studied that determined look on his face and the fire in his eyes, and he stared back at me, I imagined, with wild wonder. We went on like this for what seemed a lifetime, and then at last I opened the book. Along with James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Angela Davis: An Autobiography, all of which I read the summer before I began high school, The Souls of Black Folk is a touchstone in my life and has traveled with me from adolescence to adulthood.

  Growing up in a poor and extremely poverty-stricken family scattered throughout the South (but mostly based in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia), and being the son of a Southern Baptist minister (i.e., a “country preacher”), I was immediately taken by the candid discussion of racism and black spirituality in The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois, it seemed to me, was writing about my life as much as he was writing about his, and he did so in such an extremely eloquent and lyrical manner that I found myself in his words. I too lived behind “the Veil,” and pondered the world beyond it. I was all too familiar with that omnipresent question, which liberal and well-meaning white folk always seem to ask more with their actions than their words: “How does it feel to be a problem?”

  Certainly my life stands as a testament to the fact that African Americans at the dawn of the twenty-first century are still approached more as problems than as persons—that is to say, as human beings with rights to be respected and protected. When and where I read Du Bois’s blistering criticisms of racial domination and discrimination in The Souls of Black Folk, I found myself thinking, even in junior high school, that finally I had found someone who not only lived through the horror and harrowing experience of what it means to be black in an utterly anti-black and white supremacist world, but who unequivocally advocated anti-racist resistance in thought and action. He articulated, what appeared to me at twelve or thirteen years of age, some spe
cial secret truth that only he and I were privy. I did not know it then, but what Du Bois shared with me in that initial encounter, in those tattered and repeatedly read pages of The Souls of Black Folk, would alter my intellectual and political life forever.

  Coming of age in the Deep South in the 1980s and early 1990s I was baffled by the constant displays of racism, and particularly “white supremacy,” as Du Bois dubbed it in classic essays, such as “The Souls of White Folk” (1910) and “Of the Culture of White Folk” (1917). Throughout high school and undergraduate the more I read Du Bois, the more special secret truths he shared with me, and only adolescent me, or so I possessively thought. Our special secret truths transcended and, I am tempted to say, transgressed the rubric(s) of race and the harsh realities of racism to quickly include Pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, black Marxism, democratic socialism, male-feminism, and pacifism, among others. Increasingly I began to interpret him as more than merely a “race man” or “race leader.” In the fertile ground of my young mind he blossomed into a revolutionary humanist intellectual and political activist who spoke in novel and much-needed ways to my burgeoning and deep-seated desire to simultaneously become a radical political activist, insurgent intellectual, and avant-garde artist.

  However, it was not simply Du Bois the insurgent intellectual, political radical, and littérateur that intrigued me. There were also the intense, often-painfully autobiographical moments strewn throughout his corpus that endeared him to me and fostered a special, extra-intellectual kinship. For instance, the fact that he grew up poor, without a father, had a close and loving relationship with his mother, was fascinated with Africa and its diaspora from an early age, read voraciously, told vivid stories, and respected but was extremely critical of the black church and other forms of organized religion, endeared him to me and aided me in my quest to make sense of the world and the “problems,” not only that he identified and to which he sought solutions, but also the new “problems” of contemporary culture and society. As an undergrad student, I was particularly moved when I read the often-overlooked passage from his “Last Message,” which the then ailing octogenarian, nearly nonagenarian Du Bois composed sensing his imminent death:

  I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done. (Du Bois 1971, 736)

  After reading this, I simply couldn’t keep the secret truths Du Bois shared with me to myself; I had to tell someone else. I wondered if there were others who had found themselves in his words, who were mesmerized by his magic message, who possessed the intellectual audacity to attempt to finish in the twenty-first century what he initiated at the end of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, I also wondered whether anyone had noticed how much of his work, especially The Souls of Black Folk, was grounded in and placed a special emphasis on the power of black popular music and its connections with black politics and black social movements. Like Martin Luther King, Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, Du Bois seemed to be as enamored with African American sacred songs-cum-African American protest songs as much as I was. He seemed to be able to hear the secrets in the subtexts of black songs.

  As will be discussed in the next chapter, Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk identifies African American music as one of the major contributions that African Americans have made to American history, culture, and society. Consequently, there is a sense in which Civil Rights Music can also be read as an effort to bring both Du Bois’s sociology and musicology to bear on the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement by simultaneously exploring the musical and “extra-musical” elements of gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll during the civil rights era. There will be more detailed discussion of Du Bois’s sociology and musicology in the subsequent chapter, but here it is important to emphasize that almost every word in this book is underwritten or, rather, written in the aftermath of the enormous influence of W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably the first great African American musicologist.[4]

  Building on Du Bois’s assertion that African American music is one of the key elements of African American culture, over the last couple of years I have thought long and hard about what a simultaneous sociology and musicology of the Civil Rights Movement might reveal to us in the twenty-first century. By moving away from the famous figures of the Civil Rights Movement approach to the movement and instead turning our attention to the rank and filers and “movement artist-activists,” specifically “movement musicians,” Civil Rights Music explores the mobilization of the black popular music of the Civil Rights Movement. It investigates both sacred and secular, highbrow and lowbrow, as well as commercial, and non-commercial forms of “civil rights music” with an eye on the ways in which the music reveals important elements or events of the Civil Rights Movement that are otherwise virtually inaccessible more than fifty years after the end of the movement.

  The “Subjugated Knowledges” of the Soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement

  The chapters to follow offer a simultaneous history, sociology, and musicology of the Civil Rights Movement with a focus on “movement music” or, rather, “civil rights music.” Moreover, the subsequent chapters reveal that black popular music and black popular culture have always been more than merely “popular music” and “popular culture” in the conventional sense and most often reflect a broader social, political, and cultural movement. For example, the spirituals registered African American protest against enslavement and was the central soundtrack of the Abolitionist Movement. The blues revealed African American desperation and resistance during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years and was in many ways a mouthpiece for working-class and underclass African Americans during the Black Women’s Club Movement and the early years of the New Negro Movement. Further, ragtime and jazz expressed the incredibly evolving “New Negro” ethos during the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance era.

  As the ensuing chapters will reveal, the soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement often tell us as much about the movement as its most eloquent leaders and participants. And, for those who might balk at the assertion that music can illustrate as much about a movement as its leaders, participants, and other more conventional political and cultural artifacts should bear in mind Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison’s contentions in “Social Movements and Cultural Transformation: Popular Music in the 1960s” (1995), where they stated, “In the 1960s songs contributed to a political movement, and were often performed at political demonstrations and collective festivals. Singers and songs were central to the cognitive praxis of these social movements, indeed, they may be central to all social movements in their formative stages” (451). Eyerman and Jamison continued, “During the early to mid-1960s the collective identity of what was then called The Movement was articulated not merely through organizations or even mass demonstrations, although there were plenty of both, but perhaps even more significantly through popular music. Movement ideas, images and feelings were disseminated in and through popular music and, at the same time, the movements of the times influenced developments, both in form and content, in popular music” (452). Beginning with the sacred soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, gospel and freedom songs, and then turning to the secular soundtracks of the Civil Rights Movement, rhythm & blues and rock & roll, Civil Rights Music essentially historicizes and critically analyzes how “[m]ovement ideas, images and feelings were disseminated in and through popular music.” However, it also explores how the movement “influenced developments, both in form and content, in [black] popular music” between 1954 and 1965.

  Civil Rights Music remixes the history of the Civil Rights Movement, in part, by utilizing aspects of Eyerman and Jamison’s socio-musicology methodology and examining the ways in which “movement music” contributed to the “cognitive praxis” or, rath
er, the ideas and actions of the Civil Rights Movement, which were expressed through music as much as through conventional politics and social organization efforts. A qualitatively different interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement emerges when the movement is critically engaged from the point of view of both its national and local, commercial and non-commercial artist-activists, especially the musicians of the movement (including the musicians secretly associated with the movement as a consequence of violent anti-black racist and economic reprisal). From my point of view, civil rights studies is a wide-ranging and wide-reaching field of critical inquiry where an iconic black popular movement and the black popular culture (including the black popular music) that emerged out of it are conceived of as “text” and (re)situated and (re)interpreted within the wider “context” of, first and foremost, African American history, culture, aesthetics, politics, and economics, and then ultimately broader national and international history, culture, aesthetics, politics, and economics.[5]