Musicians at the Heart of the Movement
From Jim Crow highways to bombed churches, musicians endured America’s cruelty. Nina Simone turned that rage into a battle cry in an hour of writing. It took a lifetime of injustice to fuel it.
As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, violence against the Black community grew ever more frequent. As historian Thomas Holt emphasized, “the message was clear: every step forward in the quest for the human dignity of Black Americans would be met with a murderous response.” Because they challenged the racial barrier and because their successes nurtured hope, Black artists, whether officially involved in the struggle or not, were among the preferred targets of white supremacists. Touring in the South was therefore particularly dreaded. “Lord, it was hard: we were often scared to death,” confessed Fred Cash of the Impressions. Mahalia Jackson left us a testimony of the difficulties endured by African American musicians when they traveled the roads of the Deep South:
“From Virginia to Florida, it was a nightmare. We could neither get a meal nor find a room along the highways. They refused to serve us in restaurants. At the roadside diners, the young waitresses would rush toward the car and stop dead when they saw Black people; they would turn around and walk away without a word. At some gas stations, they refused to fill the tank or give us oil. Others told us there were no restrooms. It was frightening to see the anger on their faces when they spotted us, Black people in such a nice car.”
Intimidations, verbal and physical violence, death threats: such was the lot of tours in the South, and few musicians, like Duke Ellington, had the means to protect themselves even slightly from the humiliating effects of segregation. “To avoid any trouble, we chartered two Pullman sleeping cars and a twenty-one-meter-long baggage car. Wherever we went in the South, we slept in our Pullmans.”
Touring the Southern states was all the more grueling because many musicians of the new generation had grown up in the North and were therefore unfamiliar with the complexity of the Jim Crow laws in effect on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. “While traveling through the South in 1951, I suddenly saw the divisions: there were White restrooms and Black latrines, White restaurants and Black dives, White hotels and Black flophouses,” observed Ray Charles in this regard. In the lands of Dixie, Black musicians were constantly subjected to the hostility of the white population. Emma Patron, one of the singers of the group The Bobettes, known for the hit “Mr Lee,” recounts that during a tour with Elvis Presley and Paul Anka, she went into a Woolworth’s in Georgia to buy toiletries. “Everyone in our group had a fifty-dollar bill, and the saleswoman said to us: ‘You all must have picked a whole lot of cotton, huh!’ We didn’t know what she was talking about, because we grew up in New York.”
The reception at theaters and concert halls was much the same. Solomon Burke had to go on stage with a blindfold over his face because the promoters did not know he was Black, and during the 1963 tour organized by the Motown label to promote its artists, young Stevie Wonder tells us that “once in Macon, Georgia, there was a Confederate flag hanging from the front of the stage. One of our guys, Gene Shelby, told the promoter: ‘Our star Marvin Gaye is not going to appreciate that flag.’ The guy answered: ‘Boy, you see how that flag is swinging in the wind? You better take your tail and get out of here, or it’s going to end up at the top of a tree swinging just like that flag.’” The humiliations did not end there, since the simple act of needing to use the restroom became an ordeal. “You could drive for hours without ever finding a gas station that would let us use the restroom,” testifies Ray Charles. “If you stopped by the side of the road, you ran the risk of being arrested.”
One of the greatest fears of Black musicians traveling the roads of the South was being stopped by the police. “Back then, they didn’t need charges. They’d rough you up if they felt like it. They’d call you nigger, bastard, or whatever else struck their fancy. Trying to explain yourself, to defend yourself, trying to reason with them: that was all the excuse the cops needed to beat you down. If you didn’t want to get beaten, you just had to keep quiet and bite your tongue.” Since musicians were most often paid in cash, they were easy prey for officers looking to supplement their income. On the roads of the South, shakedowns were in fact commonplace, as this testimony from Tina Turner attests: “I don’t know how many times I witnessed the following exchange. We’d be crossing, say, Mississippi, when a white cop would signal us to pull over. ‘Well, boy,’ he’d say, provocatively, to Jimmy Thomas, one of the backup singers who also served as our driver, ‘you were going a little fast, weren’t you?’ Jimmy would reply in his most polite tone: ‘No, sir, I was obeying the speed limit.’ And the cat-and-mouse game would begin. [...] Of course the officer would drive off a little richer, and we’d continue down the road... until another officer ordered us to stop.”
This same sense of impunity existed in the North, where the police were just as violent. In August 1959, Miles Davis was attacked and arbitrarily arrested by an officer in front of the Birdland, where he was playing that evening. “I hadn’t done anything except help a friend hail a cab. She happened to be white, and the white cop didn’t appreciate a Negro doing that. In East St. Louis, I would have expected that kind of garbage about ‘resisting arrest,’ but not in New York, which was supposed to be the most liberated, most hip city in the world. But once again, I was surrounded by white people, and I learned that when that happens and you’re Black, there is no justice. None. [...] That incident changed me forever, made me far more bitter and cynical than I should have been.”
These lawful aggressions were not isolated cases but rather reflected a deliberate effort to force African American musicians to abide by the rules of the racist system in place.
This campaign of terror orchestrated across the country nevertheless failed to discourage Black artists from joining the ranks of the Civil Rights Movement. At the dawn of the 1960s, more and more of them demanded contractual clauses prohibiting segregation at the concerts they gave in the South, which allowed them to cancel the engagement if there was any racial discrimination, whether in the audience or on stage. At the same time, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Nina Simone, and Thelonious Monk sponsored the SNCC, while Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Mahalia Jackson supported Kennedy’s electoral campaign, hoping that once elected, he would confront the racial question. For her part, Odetta Holmes reinterpreted the repertoire of Leadbelly, convinced that singing the message of social justice emanating from the bluesman’s compositions had meaning at a time when the Black community was preparing to deliver the final blow to Jim Crow. Charles Mingus composed the piece “Fables of Faubus” following the events at Little Rock in 1957. The piece was a frontal attack against the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, who had tried by every means to prevent the end of school segregation.
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie. Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous? He won’t permit integrated schools.
Then he’s a fool!
A first instrumental version of the piece was released in 1959 on the album Ah Um, Columbia having refused to endorse the lyrics. A year later, Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus” again, this time in a vocal version. The track appears on the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, released on the Candid Records label.
However, nothing illustrated the radicalization of Black musicians better than the trajectory of crooner Nat King Cole. Cole was born in 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1923, he followed his parents to Chicago, like many African American families fleeing the harshness of the Deep South. With his velvet voice and his perfect son-in-law demeanor, he managed very early on to win the hearts of white America, all the more easily as he then turned a blind eye to the injustices that the Black community endured daily. Closer to the thinking of Booker T. Washington than to that of Du Bois, Cole was the embodiment of that Black bourgeoisie that favored gradualism. Two events that occurred in 1956 would make him change course. On April 10, as already mentioned, he was savagely attacked on stage in Birmingham. A few months later, NBC entrusted him with his own talk show.
Launched in October on NBC, the Cole’s Show was the first televised program hosted by a Black man. The production’s choice was far from incidental for anyone aware of how little political involvement Cole had shown until then. Although it attracted many viewers early on, the show did not last a year. The blame lay with sponsors who refused to invest in a show hosted by a “Negro.” It was these two traumatic experiences that drove Nat King Cole to invest himself in the struggle. Harry Belafonte recounted that after that, he “truly understood the harshness of the United States. And then he realized he could no longer remain silent.”
Breaking free from the norms imposed by the record industry and producing direct social commentary in one’s music was not without risk. As Charles Mingus’s experience at Columbia had demonstrated, there was no question of Black artists using their position to criticize the United States in general and racism in particular. Things were even worse when an artist managed to break free from the major labels. Thus, Ray Charles’s arrest for heroin possession and use was perceived by many African Americans as a replay of Sam Cooke’s assassination, a means of silencing a Black man displaying triumphant success. As Peter Guralnick notes in his essay on soul, “Ray Charles had ended up winning what Sam Cooke fought for at RCA (and what James Brown would later define as Black Capitalism): a measure of independence, not only artistic but also financial, sufficient economic power to become a buyer on the record market.” The media coverage of Ray Charles’s arrest was unprecedented for such a minor offense, attesting to a desire to destroy him publicly. “Many white musicians were also shooting up (Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, Chet Baker), but the press acted as if only Black musicians did,” Miles Davis remarked ironically.
While many artists participated in the struggle, the commitment shown by Harry Belafonte deserves a moment’s attention, so deeply did this actor and singer become one with the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1927 in Harlem to a Jamaican mother and a Martinican father, Belafonte began his singing career in the aftermath of the Second World War, supported in his endeavors by Max Roach and Charlie Parker. In 1954, he recorded his first album, a collection of folk songs that included a tribute to one of the legendary figures of blues culture, the miner John Henry, already encountered in our narrative. “When I sing ‘John Henry,’ I project myself to the very roots of the song,” Belafonte confided. “I overflow with pride at the thought of what John Henry represents for all Black people.” Two years later, in 1956, he achieved worldwide success with his rendition of “Banana Boat (Day-O),” a work song about the grueling working conditions in the banana plantations of Jamaica.
At the risk of losing his white audience, which represented at least half of his following, Belafonte decided that same year to put his fame and his money at the service of the Civil Rights Movement. Politically, he was influenced by the activism of Paul Robeson and by the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. His militancy drew the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan, triggered a smear campaign from the reactionary media that dominated in the United States, and he was blacklisted by Hollywood throughout the 1960s.
Belafonte chose to put his voice and his money at the service of the SCLC. It was during a meeting for the Montgomery bus boycott campaign that he struck up a friendship with Martin Luther King, whose principal adviser he became. This closeness did not prevent him from supporting, discussing with, and working with the other Civil Rights organizations such as the SNCC and CORE. He was thus one of the few within King’s organization to support Stokely Carmichael, the rising new figure of the SNCC, an eloquent man who frightened white America and the Black bourgeoisie with his radical speeches.
Belafonte was also among those who scolded the government for its lack of courage when it came to investing in the fight against racial inequality. In 1960, when Kennedy approached him hoping for his support in the electoral campaign, Belafonte retorted that rather than meeting African American stars, Kennedy would do better to talk with the political leaders of the Black community. Three years later, he was at the forefront of the struggle in Birmingham, where he was one of the key players in the campaign to desegregate public places and promote the hiring of Black personnel in downtown businesses. Martin Luther King recounts that, from the beginning of the crisis in the spring of 1963, Harry Belafonte immediately organized a committee: “That very evening money was raised. During the three weeks that followed that meeting, Belafonte, who always throws himself wholeheartedly into whatever he does, spent his time unstintingly to mobilize people and raise funds. [...] One can never overstate the role that this great artist played in the Birmingham crusade.”
Harry Belafonte was also one of the initiators of the famous March on Washington of August 28, 1963. The idea had taken shape a few months earlier, in December 1962, under the impetus of the trade unionist and pioneer of direct action A. Philip Randolph and his comrade in struggle, the tireless activist Bayard Rustin, King’s mentor. As with the aborted yet victorious march of 1941, the goal was to pressure the American government into ending once and for all the economic and political segregation that still afflicted the Black community. As the event took shape and support grew ever more numerous, Kennedy was forced to grant official endorsement to the march. As Malcolm X remarked ironically, “when the white man realized he couldn’t stop it, he joined it.” From that point on, the marchers had to accept all of the authorities’ conditions or risk seeing the event canceled. Radical slogans and speeches were banned, and Black leaders abandoned many of their demands for fear of offending white churches and liberals. Regarding the co-opting of the march by the latter, Malcolm X observed that “they went there too. They infiltrated it. They became part of the march and then ran off with the whole thing. And since they were running it, the whole thing lost all its militant energy. No more anger, no more pressure, no more radicalism.”
Many musicians lent their artistic and financial support to the March on Washington. Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr. actively promoted the event, and Nat King Cole spared no effort to ensure that all African American political organizations, from the NAACP to CORE, were represented on this historic day. Concerts were organized to fund the march, including one on August 5 in Birmingham, where three months earlier the police had committed the barbaric crimes that had moved the international community.
On the day of the concert, however, the city’s mayor refused to deploy that same police force to protect the audience and artists from an attack that the Ku Klux Klan was plotting. This threat did not prevent the public from turning out en masse. The organizers expected around 5,000 people; more than 20,000 came. That day, they had the pleasure of seeing Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Clyde McPhatter, and the Shirelles, among others, take the stage one after another, interspersed with speeches by Martin Luther King and appearances by the author James Baldwin and boxing champion Joe Louis. For his part, Harry Belafonte convinced his friend Marlon Brando and the actors Burt Lancaster and Charlton Heston to participate in the march, and Martin Luther King entrusted him with organizing the musicians’ appearances upon arrival in Washington. “The struggle for civil rights was instilled in me from the cradle,” he declared that day. “I got it from my parents, who got it from their parents. If we are in Washington today, it is thanks to several generations of Black Americans who tried to appeal to the conscience of white supremacy.”
The March on Washington was an immense success and constituted the apex of the nonviolent movement initiated by Martin Luther King. By attracting international attention, it managed to place civil rights at the center of the American political agenda. Around 250,000 demonstrators participated in the event, predominantly Black, though white supporters came in significant numbers as well. People flocked from across the country to the Lincoln Memorial, in front of which a podium had been erected for the occasion. “Washington is a city of spectacles,” King enthused. “Every four years, the festivities of the presidential inauguration bring together the great and the powerful of this world. For a hundred and fifty years, all manner of kings, prime ministers, heroes, and celebrities have received the ovation of an administrative crowd.
But never, in the course of its splendid history, had Washington witnessed a spectacle as grandiose as the one that took place within its walls on August 28, 1963. Among the approximately 250,000 people who came to the capital that day, there were many dignitaries and a host of celebrities, but those who stirred the deepest emotion were the ordinary, anonymous people who, clothed in majestic dignity, had come to bear witness to their intense determination to achieve, here and now, true democracy.” Throughout the day, trade unionists, artists, and Black activists took turns at the microphone, supported by numerous rabbis, deeply invested in the Black struggle, and white clergymen. More than 500 cameras filmed the event, relaying the distorted image of an America that had finally exorcised its demons.
That day, as during the Emancipation a century earlier, music was everywhere and freedom songs were on everyone’s lips, with demonstrators improvising topical verses. On stage, Odetta performed alone on guitar the gospel “I’m On My Way and I Won’t Turn Back,” the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Joan Baez, delivered a stirring rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song dedicated to the activist Medgar Evers, who had been assassinated in June, while the actor Ossie Davis followed them at the microphone to pay tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois, who had died the day before in Accra, Ghana. For her part, the opera singer Marian Anderson had the privilege of opening the festivities with the national anthem, a song deemed inappropriate by many CORE and SNCC activists.
Another source of unease, and by no means a minor one: only two women spoke during the demonstration, even though women had been at the forefront of the struggle from the very beginning. They were Josephine Baker and the head of the Arkansas NAACP, Daisy Bates, whose speeches were dismayingly brief. Nothing better illustrates the erasure that women suffered than the story of the activist Prathia Hall, a pastor by calling. Raphael G. Warnock, senator from Georgia since 2021, recounts: “One day, King attended a large rally, and that is when Prathia began to pray aloud to God, confiding her desires for the world, repeating several times ‘I have a dream!’ [...] People need to know that before it was Martin’s dream, it was Prathia’s prayer.”
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered one of the most momentous speeches in the history of the United States. Before taking the floor, he invited Mahalia Jackson to join him on stage to perform a stirring rendition of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” by Thomas A. Dorsey. When the song ended, the Queen of Gospel remained at his side, encouraging him by shouting: “Tell them about your dream, Martin!” King’s speech was far more than a mere rhetorical feat. By choosing to speak in the American capital, steps away from the White House, he issued a genuine challenge to white America to break with its racist past and choose a multiracial future.
Far from tempering the revolutionary unrest rumbling within the Black community, he demanded that the civil rights law promised by Kennedy be passed, that the federal government fight endemic unemployment, that it raise the federal minimum wage by two dollars, and that it end segregation in schools, which was still the norm despite the law passed in 1954. “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice appears.” The very next day after this prophetic speech, Hoover, the head of the FBI, called King “the most dangerous Negro to the future of this nation from the standpoint of communism.”
While the government sought to buy time and the prisons of the South filled with peaceful demonstrators, more than 20,000 of whom were incarcerated over the course of the year, eighteen days after the March on Washington, a bomb exploded in a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four young African American girls. “I was in my den on September 15,” Nina Simone recounts, “when the radio announced that dynamite had been thrown inside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where Black children were attending Sunday school. Four of the girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) had been killed. Later in the day, during the riots that followed, the Birmingham police had shot another Black child, and a gang of white men had knocked a young Black boy off his bicycle and beaten him to death in the middle of the street. [...] I suddenly understood what it meant to be Black in the America of 1963.”
This new act of barbarism perpetrated in the name of white supremacy did not seem to move the government. As Martin Luther King lamented the day after the funeral, “no official white person attended. There were no white faces to be seen, apart from a few courageous clergymen, pitifully few in number. That day, the city was not only in mourning for the loss of those children; it had also lost its honor and dignity.” In the wake of the tragedy, John Coltrane composed “Alabama” in memory of the four victims, basing it on the rhythm and melody of the eulogy that King delivered at their burial.
However, the trauma that Nina Simone felt following the murder of the four little girls of Birmingham would shape her career for the seven years that followed. Born in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, to a mother who was a Methodist pastor, she became the official pianist of her church at the age of six. Because of her talent, she was also confronted with Jim Crow laws from an early age. “At eleven, I was asked to give a recital at the town hall. I was seated at the piano, with the appropriate bearing, while a white man introduced me to the audience. When I looked up, I saw my parents, dressed in their finest, being expelled from their front-row seats in favor of a white family I did not know. [...] The day after that recital, I felt as if I had been flayed alive [...] but the skin grew back, a little tougher, a little less innocent, a little more Black.”
Thanks to the help of Muriel Massinovitch, a wealthy white woman she affectionately nicknamed Miss Mazzy, Nina Simone had the opportunity to pursue the classical piano training she dreamed of, but her undeniable talent could not open the doors of the exclusive circle of concert pianists. “You’re Black. No matter how talented you are, you’ll never make it in classical music,” Charles Mingus remarked sardonically, having lived through much the same experience when he tried to learn the cello. “If you want to play, play a Black instrument.” In 1950, at seventeen, Nina Simone tried in vain to gain admission to the highly esteemed Curtis Institute:
“The wonderful thing about a case of discrimination is that you can never be certain of its authenticity, because nobody is going to openly proclaim themselves a racist. They tell you that you were rejected because you weren’t good enough, and you’ll never know if it’s true or not. So you feel ashamed, humiliated, furious at being the victim of prejudice, but with this constant anxiety of wondering whether it really is that, or whether after all you just aren’t good enough. [...] Nobody had told me that the color of my skin would always make a difference, no matter what I did in life. I received a bitter lesson from the Curtis Institute.”
The injustice experienced by Nina Simone was the norm in the world of American classical music. “I had a good friend from St. Louis, Eugene Hays, who was studying classical piano at Juilliard with me,” Miles Davis recounts. “He was a genius. If he had been white, he would be one of the greatest classical pianists in the world today. But he was Black and ahead of his time. They gave him nothing.”
The obstacles that Jim Crow placed in her path are at the root of Nina Simone’s political engagement. She was notably very close to the SNCC, whose radical actions she supported, believing them more likely to make the government yield than King’s nonviolent philosophy. But it was only after the murder of the four little girls of Birmingham that this young, talented, and Black woman made the decision to denounce systemic American racism through her art. “My only weapon was music. So I sat down at the piano, and an hour later I came out of my studio with the fresh score of ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ It was my first civil rights song, and it burst out of me faster than I could write it down. I knew from that moment that I would devote myself for as long as necessary to the fight for Black people to obtain justice, freedom, and equality before the law, until the final victory.” “Mississippi Goddamn” paid tribute to the courage of African American activists who were fighting in the racist states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, while denouncing the indifference of the authorities.
Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sittin’ in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last.
“They made it into a 45 that sold well, except in the South, where we encountered distribution problems. The pretext was the sacrilegious title, but the real reason was plain to see. A retailer in South Carolina sent back to our office a full crate of unsold copies, all snapped in half. I laughed about it, because it meant the message was getting through. [...] My music now had a purpose greater than the pursuit of classical perfection; it was dedicated to the fight for the freedom of my people and their historic destiny. [...] Even if it brought me nothing else, it brought me self-respect.”
References
● Holt, Thomas C. The Movement. 2021.
● As early as 1934, Langston Hughes, in Return, a short story from his book A History of Whites (2023), highlighted this hatred, compounded by the fear Southern whites felt toward Black musicians who displayed their success.
● Mayfield, Todd, and Travis Atria. Traveling Soul. 2016.
● Lerner, Gerda. From Slavery to Segregation: Black Women in White America. 1975.
● Ellington, Duke. Music Is My Mistress. 2016.
● Charles, Ray, and David Ritz. Ray Charles: The Blues in the Skin. 2005.
● Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. 1998.
● Wonder, Stevie. Confessions of a Child of Soul. 2011.
● Charles, Ray, and David Ritz. Ray Charles: The Blues in the Skin. 2005.
● Turner, Tina. Autobiography. 2018.
● Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. 2017.
● Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music. 2016.
● Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinventions (1925–1965). 2014.