by Imani Perry
When the young people who integrated Central High in Little Rock in 1957 traveled to lecture about their experiences, they were supported by a tradition and a set of community practices they’d learned from birth. They were reminded, even after having left segregated schools rich with black formalism, that that community remained and that they could be nurtured by it when they returned from the viciousness of the segregationist white masses. For example, when Melba Patillo and her mother, Lois Patillo, spoke at First Baptist in Little Rock, it was at the behest of the Youth Fellowship, which organized and nurtured the identity and the mission of black young people in that city. Together they sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”11 The spirit of unisonance that day, we can imagine, was one of hope that Melba would understand that when she ventured out of black institutions to integrate a white school, she carried an entire community’s support and dreams with her.
This was how it was. Black associations, with black formalist expressions, led by black adults, pursued the goal of racial justice in organized and strategic fashion. But in 1960 things changed. In Greensboro, four North Carolina A&T students acted spontaneously. They’d been cut and sewn in the black associational life of schools and churches and civic organizations, Negro History Week, and the “stand up straight” grace of black formalism. But they did something unprecedented and beyond the standard ways and means.
On February 1 these four students sat down at a lunch counter. On February 2 they were thirty. On February 3 they were fifty. Sit-ins, as a form of protest, were not new. But the time, place, and number in Greensboro were. And their spontaneous energy signaled that the student movement to come would have a different, more insurgent and more improvisational, structure. The youth would lead, and they would foster new songs and new tactics and develop new styles of leadership. By the end of February—that month during which these young people had been raised to honor their ancestors and freedom fighters, their culture and traditions, the month that included Negro History Week and Douglass’s and Lincoln’s birthdays—50,000 students had conducted sit-ins and protests all over the South.
After the spontaneity, it was time for them to organize themselves. On April 15, 1960, 200 students gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh.12 They were the youth wing of King’s SCLC, but they had decided to create their own independent organization in the tradition of the SNYC. It was to be called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”). The conference had been called by Ella Baker, then the secretary of the SCLC. Baker, who was politically committed to the nonhierarchical and democratic participation of everyone in the movement, from the youth to the elders, taught, challenged, and encouraged the young activists as they met. During the conference, Guy Carawan, a white leftist who had been invited, began teaching the students songs. Carawan, who had been trained at the Highlander Folk School, was a member of the People’s Songs collective and an active participant in the folk revival movement.13 Two weeks earlier, at the Highlander Folk School’s Annual College Workshop, he had taught the eighty-three students present his reinterpretation of some traditional spirituals and hymns, and he was invited to do the same in Raleigh. These songs were in some sense a return gift. In them, Carawan reworked traditional black music to speak to the movement and the moment. The most significant of these, which he ended the first night of the conference with, was “We Shall Overcome.” Years later he described the roots of his reworked composition in this fashion: “The old words were . . . ‘I’ll Overcome someday, I’ll be all right / I’ll wear the cross, I’ll Wear the Crown / I’ll be like him, I’ll Sing My Song Someday.’”14
“I’ll Overcome Someday” was a song written by the Reverend Charles Albert Tindley, a popular black Methodist minister who led a multiracial congregation in Philadelphia. “I’ll Overcome Someday” appeared with seven other songs in a hymnal published in 1901. The hymn took its content from Galatians 6:9, “Ye shall overcome if ye faint not. . . . And let us not be weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” These words resonated with the arduous struggle black Americans saw before them, and had confronted in the past when Tindley first penned them.
And although “We Shall Overcome” textually came from the Tindley hymn, it was sung to the melody of a different song: black gospel composer Louise Shropshire’s hymn “If My Jesus Wills.” Shropshire was a close associate of both King and of Birmingham’s leading activist, Fred Shuttlesworth. She was also part of the Highlander Folk School community, as well as the nationally networked Baptist and Church of God in Christ black religious communities.
Carawan’s remix of Tindley’s words and Shropshire’s melody caught on quickly. It was easy to learn and its structure accommodated improvisation. Its slow pace left room for call and response, as well as individual variation in collective song. It was not formalist, but it was spiritual and could be rendered beautifully in black vernacular styles. It was also easily accessed by any and all voices.
Back in New York, however, the not-yet-famous black writer and performer from Stamps, Arkansas, Maya Angelou, was still singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In 1960 she and Godfrey Cambridge hosted the “Cabaret for Freedom” at the Village Gate to raise funds for Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC. Angelou and Cambridge were inspired to do so by a speech delivered by King in New York. Angelou described the power of that encounter:
He began to speak in a rich sonorous voice. He brought greetings from our brothers and sisters in Atlanta and in Montgomery, in Charlotte and Raleigh, Jackson and Jacksonville. A lot of you, he reminded us, are from the South and still have ties to the land. Somewhere there was an old grandmother holding on, a few uncles, some cousins and friends. He said the South we might remember is gone. There was a new South. A more violent and ugly South, a country where our white brothers and sisters were terrified of change, inevitable change. They would rather scratch up the land with bloody fingers and take their most precious document, the Declaration of Independence, and throw it in the deepest ocean, bury it under the highest mountain, or burn it in the most flagrant blaze, than admit justice into a seat at the welcome table, and fair-play room in a vacant inn.
For their “Cabaret for Freedom” Angelou and Cambridge gathered an impressive roster of performers, but the audience was perhaps even more impressive, including the writer John Killens and his wife, Grace; Lorraine Hansberry’s widower, Bob Nemiroff; Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; and Sidney and Juanita Poitier. Every seat at the Village Gate was taken. Angelou described the evening in her second memoir, The Heart of a Woman: “The show began and the performers, illuminated with the spirit, hit the stage and blazed. Comfortable with the material of their own routines, comedians made the audience howl with pleasure and singers delighted the listeners with familiar romantic songs. The revue, which is what the show had become, moved quickly until a scene from Langston Hughes’s ‘The Emperor of Haiti’ brought the first note of seriousness. Hugh Hurd, playing the title role, reminded us all that although as black people we had a dignity and a love of life, those qualities had to be defended constantly.” It wasn’t simply happenstance to end with Hughes and Haiti. The insurgency of the Haitian revolution still influenced the black American political imagination, as did Hughes’s figure as a leading artist of the New Negro era. History was ever-present in black protest. At the conclusion of the show the cast stood in a straight line and sang the song that would resonate most deeply with them all, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Angelou wrote, “The audience stood in support and respect. Those who knew the lyrics joined in, building and filling the air with the song often called ‘The Negro National Anthem.’ After the third bow, Godfrey hugged me and whispered, ‘We’ve got a hit. A hit, damn, a hit.’”
Weeks later, Maya Angelou signed on to be a local coordinator for the growing civil rights organization. But months later, at the 1961 SCLC convention, although the participants closed the proceedings by singing the first and the third verses to “Lift Every Voice and
Sing” as usual, they also listened to Guy Carawan and Harry Belafonte sing folk songs of the sort that would soon become known as “freedom songs” for their association with the civil rights movement. Like the SNCC youth, the convention participants were gifted with a remixed version of past sounds for their future protests. This meeting of old and new ways of performing political protest foreshadowed that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” would be slowly but surely bypassed.
That fall, three young SNCC activists arrived in Albany, Georgia, to conduct a voter registration drive. But it grew to be much more. Albany activists dedicated themselves to an effort to desegregate the entire city. Bernice Johnson Reagon, an Albany native serving as the NAACP youth secretary when SNCC came to town, had come of age singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” In an interview decades later, she said, “I learned that in elementary school. So one of the aspects of growing up in the South in these schools is we got a repertoire that really had something for us in terms of sustaining us in what was a segregated society. So that song has been a part of my repertoire since I was about seven years old.”15 Reagon soon would join SNCC. So did a white woman named Faith Holsaert, who came from New York to join the movement. Holsaert described her coming of age and how it also led her to SNCC:
My sister and I grew up on James Street in a Greenwich Village household headed by two women, our Jewish birth mother, Eunice Spelman Holsaert, and Charity Abigail Bailey, our African-American mother by affection. When I was seven, we spent a year in Haiti where my sister and I were in the racial minority, and our female household was noteworthy. Scene of a historic slave uprising, Haiti, the first Black-run republic in the Americas, prompted a pride in Charity that I took on, because I loved her so much. In my child’s heart, Haiti and Blackness and rebellion were one. . . . My 10-year-old classmates and I studied Negro history, so-called Negro history. We learned “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, in which the stormy past gives rise to hope.16
Just as Holsaert had grown up an organizer, so had Reagon. They began to work together. At the first rally, Reagon began by singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” but didn’t get the reaction she expected:
I remember being surprised that everybody in Albany State College gym at that time didn’t know the Negro National Anthem, which in Albany you learned from the time you were born. That was one of my first awarenesses that all black people didn’t grow up like we did in Albany. After this first march, we’re at Union Baptist Church, Charlie Jones looks at me and said—Bernice, sing a song. And I started, Steal Away. By the time I got to, troubled—where “trouble” was supposed to bell I didn’t see any trouble, so I put “freedom” in there. And I guess that was the first time I really understood sort of using what I’d been given in terms of songs.17
Cordell Reagon, a SNCC worker who married Bernice Johnson in 1963, worked with her as one of the Freedom Singers during the movement. He describes the transition in this way: “Charles [Sherrod] and I brought with us the music we had been doing on the freedom rides, and when it mixed with that rich Baptist and African tradition in Albany, something happened. Before we came, the kids might have been singing the Negro National Anthem—we brought something to them and they gave something to us, a spirit, a power that made us less afraid. Together we all made something unbelievable, a total spiritual experience.”18 The transition to freedom songs was major. And, as Reagon remembers, their sound, which traveled from churches to bus stations, lunch counters, and southern streets, became an essential element in the movement:
Most of the mass meeting was singing, in Albany—there was more singing than there was talking. And uh, so most of the work that was done in terms of taking care of movement business, had to do with nurturing the people who had come, and there would be two or three people who would talk but basically songs were the bed of everything . . . and I’d never seen or felt songs do that. . . . I’d had songs in college and high school and church, but in the movement—all the words sounded differently. Steal Away, which I’d sung all my life, said something very different—“all in the street, I’m going to let it shine.”19
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” had once been the primary freedom song, but the SNCC Freedom Singers, along with the other student activists and members of SCLC and CORE and the multitudes who joined marches, sang new freedom songs. The Freedom Singers, in addition to singing at mass meetings, demonstrations, and rallies, also toured and recorded songs as fundraising endeavors. And so the songs circulated beyond the sites of protest. Moreover, freedom songs invited people in who didn’t sing well, those who were on their first trip down south, and those who had no familiarity with black institutions or culture but were joining the movement in droves.
The aesthetics of the student movement shifted away not just from “Lift Every Voice” but also from black formalism. SNCC workers, the vanguard and the pulsing heart of the freedom movement, wore overalls day in and day out, like the fieldworkers in the Mississippi Delta that they joined. They became part of local communities. Their work was not primarily in churches or marches, where the features of black formalism were often most pronounced. More important, however, the times called most insistently for strategizing and fighting, not self-defining and narrating. Though the movement relied upon black formalism, and with it the anthem, the move away from them both in the midst of the period’s most pressing demands made a great deal of sense.
But through the détentes, crises, and standoffs of the movement, freedom songs were there. The songs emboldened organizers and protesters as they faced down deadly racism. But they also kept spirit intact, not unlike the spirituals and work songs of the past. Organizers sang them in Albany, Birmingham, the Mississippi Delta, Atlanta, and many other sites of movement. And the youth who revived and reinterpreted the traditional purposes of song remained at the forefront. Even its most prominent “elder,” Martin Luther King Jr., was only in his twenties and thirties during his leadership days. Still, SCLC and SNCC members butted heads over SNCC’s resistance to traditional hierarchical organizing models, and these felt like generational conflicts. Young activists, and their allies, stepped out in courage and with a more diffuse and democratic leadership philosophy that was echoed in how they sang for freedom.
Although Albany’s activists weren’t successful in achieving the goal of desegregation, Birmingham’s benefited from the knowledge garnered from both successes and failures, and they succeeded in desegregating their city. Moreover, the Birmingham’s Children’s Crusade of 1963 awakened the nation to the brutality of the Deep South. Birmingham’s segregationist political leaders were shaken by the black youth of their city, who displayed all the self-regard, interdependence, and courage that had been socialized in black children by teachers, community activists, and families for generations. Organizers in Birmingham were both local, such as Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Civil Rights, and regional, like the SCLC. The youth there, however, as in Greensboro, acted on their own behalf, at times betraying their elders’ wishes in order to join and shape the movement.
During the civil rights movement, southern black radio stations often used their transmissions to share information and provide forums for discussion among diffuse black communities that were cut off from each other by the boundaries of segregation and geography. They served as an extension of the historic role of the black press. In Birmingham, Tall Paul White of WEDR drew praise from Martin Luther King Jr. and other prominent African American leaders for supporting student protesters. His coded language told students when to walk out and which streets to take. Their demonstrations, arrests, and confrontations with dogs and fire hoses, televised on national TV news, led to an agreement in May between the city’s African American leaders, the SCLC, and the mayor to integrate public facilities.
The balance between understanding that the young activists benefited from the transmission of tradition, on the one hand, and that youth were breaking into a new phase of the freedom movement,
on the other, must be treated with care. Deborah E. McDowell describes an intergenerational community event that took place earlier in 1963 in her memoir Leaving Pipeshop: Memories of Kin. That February’s Lincoln Douglass Birthday Banquet, hosted by the Bessemer Voters League, was an impassioned occasion, McDowell writes: “For months schools and churches throughout the Birmingham area had been preparing for the ceremony. . . . The Birmingham World headlined speakers and black radio stations broadcast a veritable Who’s Who of civil rights personalities, who flowed in and out of Birmingham throughout 1963.”20 This was the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the formalism of the occasion was befitting such an important event. Rev. Manfred McKinley, a preacher and a leading voting rights organizer, delivered the keynote address. “A royal blue banner billowed on the church’s front façade and you could see the gold lettering emancipation—100 years, all the way from the Bessemer Super Highway. The women of the Deaconess society cooked all day for the event, and the girls of the junior choir helped to serve the collard greens, mustard yellow scoops of potato salad, fried chicken, corn bread and sweet potato pie.”21 Consistent with the tradition, McDowell, then eleven years old, was also a participant in the program. She delivered a portion of the Gettysburg Address, a “speech that I can still recite almost verbatim now, thirty plus years hence. I had practiced it over and over again . . . but none of the rehearsals had prepared me for the overwhelming emotion I felt that evening in the basement as the candles flickered on the paper covered tables and the room grew very still.”22