JOURNAL EXCERPT: ‘The Air As Your Territory’: Tracing the Legacy of Civil Rights Music

EDITOR’S NOTE: Below is an excerpt of a story from our Summer 2021 journal issue, exploring the theme of “Voices.” We share it today in honor of Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who passed away this week at the age of 81. Reagon is featured in this piece written by Kim Ruehl, former editor in chief of No Depression and author of  A Singing Army: Zilphia Horton and the Highlander Folk School.

The images are so pervasive, even those who weren’t born yet then can picture them now — the crowded streets, integrated crowds, and signs with slogans like “I Am a Man.” Implicated in every mental image of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s is the soundtrack of the time, artists like Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, The Staple Singers, and Odetta. Songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and more.

But relying on these musicians and recordings alone to tell the story of civil rights music is to erase the way music was — and often still is — used strategically to change hearts and minds and ultimately shift cultures and policies.

Indeed, music was so vibrant in the middle of the 20th century, when large swaths of young people became involved in one of the most successful social movements in modern history, because of the way cultural organizers and other activists used it at marches, rallies, and mass meetings. Most of it was never recorded. It existed outside of the music industry, and that fact is perhaps what makes it one of the most vivid examples of the way a generation found its voice.

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, music scholar, song leader, and founding member of both The Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock, summed up music’s role in the movement to journalist Bill Moyers in 1991: “The communal singing that people do together is a way of announcing that we’re here, that this is real, and so anybody who comes into that space, as long as you’re singing, they cannot change the air in that space. The song will maintain the air as your territory.”

Charging the Air

The story of music in the civil rights era has many beginnings, but this chapter started in 1962, when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and thrown in jail in Albany, Georgia.

By then, King had been a leader in the movement for a little more than six years; his star rose when he took to the pulpit in a Montgomery, Alabama, church and called for a boycott of the city buses at the end of 1955. And though Black folks and white allies had been organizing for changes in the nation’s civil rights laws for generations at that point, then-26-year-old King’s oratory power and insistence on nonviolent action caught the attention of the evening news.

Within a few years, King and others had built an organizing mechanism through their Southern Christian Leadership Conference that used Black churches for mass meetings about civil rights struggles. This choice to put the church at the center of King’s efforts was, among other things, both convenient — he was a minister, after all — and strategic. The Black church had always provided a safe place for resistance. It had connective tissue built into it, and connection was vital to a movement asking people to come together who had been strategically kept separate by those in power. Besides, people were used to discussing hard truths at church, were used to being led and ruminating on remote things like freedom.

They were also used to singing in church. People were familiar with hymns that song leaders would turn into freedom songs, like “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind on Jesus,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table.” Characteristic of the form, the latter had a melody and lyrical arc that populated numerous songs, like “I’m-a Gonna Climb Up Jacob’s Ladder” and “God’s Gonna Set This World on Fire.” That common structure allowed song leaders like Reagon to alter something slightly and everyone present would know just how to join in.

Within a few years of King’s appearance in that Montgomery church, students across the South, inspired by him and other leaders, had taken to resisting Jim Crow laws by sitting down at Woolworth’s lunch counters across the South to buy themselves a meal. They refused to respond to violent threats, to people pouring hot coffee on them, to people spitting in their faces. Centuries of persistent oppression aside, suddenly there were news cameras to catch their resistance, daring the nation to not look away.

Lunch counter at the old Woolworth’s “five and dime” store in Greensboro, North Carolina, a site marking the sit-ins of the American civil rights movement that is now part of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum. (Photo by Carol Highsmith / Library of Congress)

By 1960, they had formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They held training sessions for nonviolent resistance and practiced through role-playing in churches, homes, and at places like the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. And they sang.

Black folks had always sung their resistance, using song to get through the day during the slave centuries. They used song as code for the Underground Railroad — lyric and melody mapping their way to literal freedom as they sang songs like “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”

So, it was not unusual when, at the SNCC organizing convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1960, they asked Guy Carawan, Highlander’s music director, to play that old labor hymn “We Shall Overcome.” At least some of those present were aware that young Black women such as Lucille Simmons had adapted the song from a hymn by another young Black woman named Louise Shropshire 15 years earlier in South Carolina. Those women had taught it to Carawan’s predecessor, Zilphia Horton, who taught it to Carawan.

Indeed, that song and others like it — from the Black Baptist hymn tradition as well as from the labor movement — became so pervasive in organizing efforts that SNCC leaders Cordell Reagon and Charles Neblett started talking about creating a singing group. Folksinger and ardent ally Pete Seeger encouraged them. As Carawan’s wife, Candie, recalls, Seeger’s wife, Toshi, felt that a singing group, which could tour around, might open people up to the ideas of the movement while also raising funds.

With that advice ringing in their heads, Reagon and Neblett went to Albany in 1962. There they found a community of Black folks who were accustomed to singing out and through their struggle.

“Albany has a really deep, deep tradition of singing — old style, line-out hymns,” Candie recalls. “In Guy’s mind, it was one of the places, as he traveled throughout the South, where this really rich, deep tradition of singing already was there. There was already a movement in Albany before there was SNCC, … [so] SNCC was going to wind up being in a vanguard position, with a lot of young people willing to take such tremendous risk and all.

“But there was plenty going on before that. There was already really important singing. … Bernice [Johnson] and Rutha [Mae Harris] would have already been part of singing in the movement even before the SNCC organizers came over and tried to crystalize things.”

Indeed, Johnson had a voice that packed such remarkable strength that it instantly filled any room with power and energy. And she was not the only one. There were numerous singers in Albany who could have led the music of the movement, and out of that group emerged the undeniable combination of Johnson, Harris, Reagon, and Neblett. They named themselves the SNCC Freedom Singers, and Toshi Seeger got to work booking their engagements.

Johnson eventually married Cordell Reagon and earned her doctorate from Howard University, becoming a scholar in the fields of music and cultural history. In 1988, she explained to NPR: “When the news reporters began to come down [to Albany, Georgia] … well, what they began to write about was the singing. No matter what the articles said, they talked about singing.

“Press was very difficult to get,” she added. “So the Freedom Singers came out of a need to have another kind of structure to generate support. … By the time we formed the Freedom Singers, we were transporting a microcosm experience. So we would be these four people standing in this hall, singing and talking about the movement.”

They attracted both dollars and reporters to a cause whose time had long since come, but none of them were in it for the money or fame. That they were able to garner both was something they just saw as useful to the success of the movement. Underneath it all was the music and the truth about these freedom songs: They worked.

And they continue to work. Wendi Moore-O’Neal, a co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) who has dedicated her career to this kind of music-fueled cultural organizing, who has studied Dr. Reagon’s work and carries it forward, explains: “When I sing with people, I’m not trying to actually get us to sound good because that’s not my bag. I’m actually trying to get us to charge the air with our power, with our life force, to feel our power and to collectivize it. I’m trying to reinforce our beliefs that hold us together. I’m trying to give us experiences that help us to be a group and experience solidarity — exhibit, practice solidarity. I’m trying to reinforce our demands, you know. … I’m wanting people to understand what’s being said.

“Part of why the Freedom Singers worked so well is because they were [using] popular hymns,” she adds. “You’re really taking songs people already know and changing the words. And the word changes for those songs don’t really shift the meaning of the songs. They kind of reinforce the meaning of the songs. They take it beyond a religious context and apply it to the contemporary challenge.”

Mind Stayed on Freedom

Before the Freedom Singers materialized, the Montgomery Trio was one of the most notable singing groups in the movement, Candie Carawan says. It was their 13-year-old member, Mary Ethel Dozier, who added the “We are not afraid” verse to “We Shall Overcome” during a middle-of-the-night police raid.

That song’s effectiveness has been celebrated time and again, but it is by far not the only one that was updated and adapted to the civil rights struggle. There were plenty of others one could pull from Baptist hymnals, changing a few small words — changing “Jesus” to “freedom” was a favorite shortcut, as in “Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.”

Song leaders also waffled back and forth between whether it made better sense to sing from the “I” or the “we.” Regardless, employing any of these songs during a tense moment of a march, or to open a rally, was an opportunity to galvanize support around the shared interests of those participating in the movement. It was also a way to call the roll, to welcome all those present into the cause.

In 1991, Bernice Johnson Reagon explained to Bill Moyers: “In the Black community, when you want the communal expression, everybody says I. So if there are five of us here, and all of us say I, then you know that there’s a group. … ‘This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.’ Me. When the march goes, I am going to be there. It really is a way of saying, ‘The life that I have, I will offer to this thing.’”

Reagon went on to talk about the extent to which Black people had been denied personhood, had been expected to fade into the background. To do their job and know their place. This happened, she said, “to the extent that people really had to go through a barrier to stick out. … [So,] It’s a very arrogant stance, saying, ‘Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine.’”

One thing that is often lost when reporting about that era of civil rights organizing, when looking at images of crowds singing, is just how many I’s were present and joining in, asserting that “arrogance,” when they sang with Reagon and her peers. And this is one reason why the Freedom Singers remain the primary singing group to whom historians refer when discussing singing during the civil rights movement.

SONG’s O’Neal believes that however music is made and used, it is vital to the mission of shifting culture toward a world where all are welcome and treated with equal dignity, or King’s vision of Beloved Community. Her focus remains how best to use music in song circles — she calls it “congregational singing,” galvanizing groups around a cause — as well as on the street or at gatherings. There, songs take on a life of their own, as people who are demanding change develop their own relationships with the songs.

“There was a time there,” she says, “when you didn’t see people using freedom singing. Now I show up places and I don’t know anybody [there], but I hear songs I’ve taught. It’s an amazing experience.”

‘South Gotta Change’

It is perhaps a testament to the effectiveness of organizers who are committed to carrying forward the legacy of the singing movement that it has become acceptable — encouraged, even — for recording artists in Nashville, New York, and elsewhere to include social justice-themed music on their albums. Artists like Tré Burt, Sunny War, Allison Russell, and Rhiannon Giddens have made a point of remaining allegiant to their roots while making music the mainstream (read: predominantly white) music media is no longer willing to ignore.

Alongside them is Amythyst Kiah, who began her career singing old-time music from her hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee, but has risen to greater prominence as one-fourth of the supergroup Our Native Daughters with Giddens, Russell, and Leyla McCalla.

Amythyst Kiah performs at Mountain Stage in 2021. (Photo by Amos Perrine)

“I certainly wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to be an activist, I’m going to be part of the movement,’” she says on forging the group. “I was never really openly vocal about my politics because I was gigging in the Bible Belt, in a place where there’s a lot of neo-conservative white folks. I was usually the only Black person at a show, especially when I was playing old-time festivals. In my mind, I had to keep my guard up because I want to play this gig, have an opportunity to come back. I figured it would be safe for me to just play music. I guess I was just shutting up and singing for a while.”

Still, she adds, “I wanted to be able to live authentically and speak my truth. I was still finding a way to do that and so … it was like, ‘Okay here’s my chance, I don’t have to do this alone.’”

The potential music carries to inspire even its makers to realize they aren’t alone when they struggle for justice is something performers and organizers have in common.

Especially when people have been separated by the pandemic, the ability to find great recorded music that speaks to the moment fulfills a certain need. As cultural organizers have known for decades, people need to hear their own thoughts and feelings reflected back at them before they find the confidence to make any change, whether those thoughts and feelings are about love and loneliness or whether they’re about a restless yearning for widespread cultural awakening. It is the latter, in response to the visible organizing, that has given rise to some of the most exciting artists of this generation.

Adia Victoria, whose mother is a community organizer, has talked about how she used her year in quarantine studying up on the history of Black music in her native South Carolina. On the heels of her remarkable, stirring 2019 album, Silences, Victoria dropped the surprise single “South Gotta Change” in 2020. In it, she sings:

I stood up to the mountain
Told the mountain, “Say my name.”
And if you’re tired of walking
Let the children lead the way …
We’re gonna find a way
The South gotta change.

Many Southerners agree with the determination that the South needs to change. Indeed, the powerful voices of Southern Black women and men have been demanding it — singing it — for generations.