Civil Rights Music

by Reiland Rabaka

  A number of cultural historians, as well as historians of art, music, and literature have begun to look more closely at the social and political contexts within which culture is created and disseminated. As a result, we now have a body of literature on specific cultural and artistic “movements” and “worlds,” ranging from the “slave narratives” of the Abolitionist Movement to the radical writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and extending through to the evolution of classic jazz into “bebop” during the Bebop Movement. In the bulk of this work there is a concerted effort to socialize the subject, to contextualize the individual artist as not simply expressing their personal views and values, but instead to comprehend, for instance, Mahalia Jackson, Smokey Robinson, Nina Simone, Little Richard, and Ruth Brown, to name some of the musicians who will appear later in this book, as representative figures who captured and communicated the ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement.[13]

  As much as I intellectually admire and greatly appreciate this work, I must admit that it has had virtually little or no influence on the sociology of social movements—one of my chief areas of concern here. This is primarily due to a discursive difference in focus: for most social movement theorists and other sociologists, culture is something that forms or “frames” social movements and other distinctly “social” activities as a set of (external) conditioning factors, while for cultural theorists it is social movements and social ecology that provide the external contexts or conditions that shape the primary objects of analysis, art, literature, music and their creators. Where the social theorists highlight the social background that the artist and their artistry is embedded in, or has shaped and shaded the artist and their artistry, the cultural theorists emphasize “movement culture” or a cultural frame for movement campaigns and activities. One might surmise that the real difference has to do with what is influencing what and the discursive direction of the context and conditioning. Even more important, however, seems to be a fundamental difference in discursive devices, language, methods, and epistemological orientation. Indeed, sociologists and humanists are subjected to different processes of academic acculturation, and are very rarely given an opportunity to learn about, let alone really critically engage, each other’s work.

  My approach here seeks to synthesize history, sociology, politics, economics, and African American studies in an effort to develop an alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement by exploring the texts and contexts of black popular music as a form of, and force for cultural transformation between 1945 and 1965. As Houston Baker observed in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987), African American life, culture, and struggle has distinct, signature “soundings” and “resoundings,” and it is an “‘alien’ sound” that “gives birth to notions of the indigenous—say, Africans, or Afro-Americans—as deformed” (51, all emphasis in original). But, Baker boldly asserted, African Americans’ “indigenous sound appears monstrous and deformed only to the intruder” and, I would add, to the enslaver, to the colonizer, and to the oppressor (52, all emphasis in original). African Americans’ unique “soundings” and “resoundings,” therefore, have been a core component of black popular movements going all the way back to the spirituals and the Abolitionist Movement. And, according to Baker, African American musical traditions are recreated and given new life as they either arise out of, or intensely interact with black popular movements. However, the inverse is also true, black popular movements often express their meaning and frequently gain coherence and sustenance through the medium of black popular music.

  Arguably, nowhere has the role of black popular music in a black popular movement been more pronounced than in the Civil Rights Movement. From the Abolitionist Movement through to the Civil Rights Movement, black popular music helped to shape the mission, message, and cultural memory of African American social and political movements. As a matter of fact, a case could be made concerning the ways in which it has been chiefly through black popular music that most black popular movements, especially the Civil Rights Movement, have exerted their enormous influence and long-lasting legacy on American culture, as well as on the wider world.

  By focusing on black popular music as a form of, and force for cultural transformation during the Civil Rights Movement I hope to reveal a significant but neglected element of the movement that was central to its success and certainly deserves just as much scholarly attention as the more renowned social and political strategies and tactics of the movement. Even though the Civil Rights Movement will serve as our primary point of departure throughout this book, it is hoped that its politicization and mobilization of various African American traditions—spiritual, intellectual, cultural, social, political, and musical—will inspire a new politicization and mobilization of various African American traditions in the present, where many of the issues the Civil Rights Movement sought to eradicate have sadly returned with a vengeance.

  By selectively and very critically recreating civil rights cultural traditions and cultural expressions, we can reinvent a new Civil Rights Movement (or something of the sort) aimed at the most pressing problems of the twenty-first century. Moreover, as was the case during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, black popular music will more than likely provide us with one of the key mediums through which to capture and convey the emancipatory ideals and ethos of the much-needed new movement. As a result, the analysis in the chapters to follow should be interpreted as part alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century, and part intense invocation and sacred summoning of a new Civil Rights Movement in the twenty-first century. The struggle, as they say, continues. A luta continua, vitória é certa.

  Black Popular Music as Cultural Expression and Cultural Action

  My interest in the relationship between black popular movements and black popular music here can be comprehended as an elaboration of the work I began in Hip Hop’s Inheritance, Hip Hop’s Amnesia, and The Hip Hop Movement. The emphasis on black popular music as a form of, and force for cultural transformation during the Civil Rights Movement is ultimately about exploring the production of ideas and culture that arise out of the social justice agendas and political praxes of black popular movements, and on the role of “movement intellectual-artist-activists,” specifically “movement musicians,” in articulating the ideals, culture, and collective identity of black popular movements. A cognitive approach to black popular movements understands them, and the distinct black popular culture that seems to always accompany them, to be primarily knowledge producers, and social forces that open up novel arenas for the production and practice of new forms of knowledge, culture, and politics. By focusing on the cognitive dimensions of the black popular culture and black popular music of black popular movements, my more general aim here is to make the content and substance—literally, the distinct movement culture—of black popular movements’ politics and praxis, rather than their form or organization, the central focus of analysis.

  The cognitive approach to black popular movements and their distinct black popular culture, which obviously includes black popular music, has three core concepts: context, process, and knowledge production. Black popular movements emerge in particular times and particular places. Indeed, they are the products of specific social and political conditions, as well as deeper and more longstanding historical and cultural traditions. However, even though they are shaped by these broader contextual conditions, black popular movements typically temporarily transcend the specific situations from which they arise. In fact, they create new contexts, new public spaces for identifying and addressing the most pressing problems of their respective epochs. From my point of view, there quite simply is no need to incessantly reduce them to the organizations or institutions that they eventually evolved into. I honestly believe that what is truly significant is their jazz-like transience, their momentariness, their fluidity. Black popular movements are processes in formation and works-in-progress. They do not
miraculously spring to socio-political life fully-formed, which is one of the reasons I critically explore the origins and early evolution of the Civil Rights Movement as far back as World War II and its immediate aftermath (circa 1939 to 1954). On the contrary, black popular movements can be conceived of as contingent and emergent arenas that evoke and evolve previous and present African American life-worlds and life-struggles. They are, therefore, creative and incredibly experimental, and provide arenas for the production and practice of new forms of social, political, cultural, and cognitive expression and action.[14]

  In the new spaces that black popular movements open up, the enunciation of a new collective and cognitive identity is, for me, a core process. Black popular movements are typically the conveyors of some sort of historical project and political praxis. These movements offer a new epistemology by producing praxis-promoting knowledge and culture or, rather, new knowledge and culture with practical intent, often integrating a new cosmology or worldview, as well as organizational innovations and new approaches to everything from science to religion. Once separate areas of knowledge production, whether cosmological, technical, political or organizational, are most often combined into an integrated praxis in the space formed and informed by the emergence of black popular movements. However, we need to be clear here, when the utopian vision of the aforementioned integrated praxis is coupled with specific practical activities and organizational forms, it provides a cognitive core to movement activity as the movement members form both their historical project and political praxis, as well as their collective identity. In black popular movements, the process of collective identity formation coincides with what Eyerman and Jamison termed “cognitive praxis” above. Beyond the leaders and other famous figures of black popular movements who embody the “cognitive praxis” of the movement, rank and filers, artists, and most especially musicians, are directly involved in the evolution and articulation of the “cognitive praxis” of the movement. Consequently, here I am drawing on Eyerman and Jamison’s concept of “cognitive praxis” to call attention to the creative role of consciousness and cognition in the thought and practices of all black popular movement members, not merely the more noted folk, and especially movement artists and movement musicians.

  By elucidating the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and black popular music, I would like to extend the range and reach of Eyerman and Jamison’s concept of “cognitive praxis” and apply it in much greater discursive detail than they did in Music and Social Movements to the Civil Rights Movement and its major soundtracks. The “cognitive praxis” approach to the Civil Rights Movement and its major soundtracks will also enable me to analyze frequently forgotten forms of movement habituation—the habits, customs, mores, and movement rituals—as well as the symbolic representations that the movement produced—in particular, the sounds and songs of the Civil Rights Movement. It was not merely American politics and society that were profoundly affected by the Civil Rights Movement. With this work, I would like to illustrate some of the myriad ways that the aspirations and frustrations of the Civil Rights Movement were not only given coherence through the medium of black popular music, but also that black popular music was impacted by, and often took on new meanings and messages as a consequence of the movement. Additionally, I would like to focus on, not only movement leaders and other famous figures, but also on movement intellectual-artist-activists, especially musicians, and those other forgotten figures who created, organized, and articulated the cultural expressions and cultural actions of the movement.

  Epistemologically, the reconstituted conception of “cognitive praxis” that I will utilize throughout this book is also discursively derived from the Africana tradition of critical theory (or, rather, Africana critical theory) and is meant as an alternative to conventional interpretations of the Civil Rights Movement, where civil rights leaders and other famous figures seemingly ingeniously impose order on a chaotic world with little or no reference to the centuries of African American social, political, cultural, and intellectual traditions that these leaders and other famous figures, in point of fact, actually emerged out of. In essence, Africana critical theory is theory critical of domination and discrimination in classical and contemporary, continental and diasporan African life-worlds and life-struggles. It is a style of critical theorizing, inextricably linked to progressive political practice(s), that highlights and accents black radicals’ answers to the key questions posed by the major forms and forces of domination and discrimination that have historically, and continue currently, to shape and mold our modern/postmodern and neocolonial/postcolonial world.[15]

  Africana critical theory involves not only the critique of domination and discrimination, but also—à la the Civil Rights Movement—a deep commitment to human liberation and radical democratic social transformation. Similar to other traditions of critical social theory, Africana critical theory is concerned with thoroughly analyzing contemporary society “in light of its used and unused or abused capabilities for improving the human [and deteriorating environmental] condition” (Marcuse 1964, xlii; see also Wilkerson and Paris 2001). What distinguishes and helps to define Africana critical theory is its emphasis on the often-overlooked continental and diasporan African contributions to critical theory. It draws from critical thought and philosophical traditions rooted in the realities of continental and diasporan African history, culture, and struggle. Which is to say, Africana critical theory inherently employs a methodological orientation and modes of interpretation that highlight and accent black militantism and black radicalism.[16] Moreover, if it need be said at this point, the black liberation struggle is simultaneously national and international and, therefore, requires multidimensional and multiperspectival theory in which to interpret and explain the various diverse phenomena, philosophical motifs, and socio-political movements characteristic of—to use Frantz Fanon’s famous phrase—l’expérience vécue du noir (“the lived-experience of the black”)—that is to say, the reality of constantly and simultaneously wrestling and wrangling with racism, sexism, capitalism and colonialism, among other forms of domination, oppression and exploitation.[17]

  Conceptually complementing cognitive praxis and Africana critical theory, another key notion that I will be borrowing from Eyerman and Jamison is their incisive emphasis on “exemplary action.” In discursively developing their conception of “exemplary action,” Eyerman and Jamison (1998) contended that it can be conceived of as a “specification of the symbolic action” and the “cognitive praxis of social movements” (23). Moreover, the “exemplary action of cognitive praxis is symbolic in several senses,” but it is also, they strongly stressed, “‘more’ than merely symbolic. As real cultural representations—art, literature, songs—it is artifactual and material, as well.” Which is to say, the music and other artistic expressions of popular socio-political movements are more than merely ideational and traditional art. Indeed, they are art in every sense of the word “art,” but they are also “knowledge-bearing” and “identity-giving” social, political, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual expressions that are simultaneously symbolic and factual, if not often literal representations and articulations of the life-worlds and life-struggles of popular movement participants and adherents. Eyerman and Jamison went further to explain:

  What we are attempting to capture with the term [i.e., exemplary action] is the exemplary use of music and art in social movements, the various ways in which songs and singers can serve a function akin to the exemplary works that Thomas Kuhn [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970)] characterized as being central to scientific revolutions: the paradigm-constituting entities that serve to realign scientific thinking and that represent ideal examples of fundamentally innovative scientific work. The difference between culture and science, however, is that the exemplary action of music and art is lived as well as thought: it is cognitive, but it also draws on more emotive aspects of human consciousness. As cultural expression, exempla
ry action is self-revealing and thus a symbolic representation of the individual and the collective which are the movement. It is symbolic in that it symbolizes all the movement stands for, what is seen as virtuous and what is seen as evil. In the age of symbols, an age of electronic media and the transmission of virtual images, the exemplary action of a movement can serve an educative function for many more than the participants and their immediate public. This exemplary action can also be recorded, in film, word, and music. . . . (23)

  Again, Eyerman and Jamison help to highlight that Civil Rights Movement members are not alone in viewing their beloved music and art—which is to say, gospel, freedom songs, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, and other cultural expressions—as having more than merely aesthetic implications. As we will witness in each of the subsequent chapters, music and other art created in the context of, or inspired by social movements, political struggles, and cultural crises most often takes on multiple meanings—some aesthetic and cultural meanings, and other more social and political meanings. Civil rights music and other Civil Rights Movement-inspired art forms are not exceptions to these rules. Moreover, when Eyerman and Jamison contended above that “songs and singers can serve a function akin to the exemplary works that Thomas Kuhn characterized as being central to scientific revolutions: the paradigm-constituting entities that serve to realign scientific thinking and that represent ideal examples of fundamentally innovative scientific work,” it is possible for us to transpose Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions and apply it to the popular music and popular culture of the Civil Rights Movement.