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         AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS

                   SNCC Freedom Singers

                                                                SNCC Freedom Singers (1964)

The struggle of people of African descent for justice in an American context started in 1619 on the ships bringing slaves to this continent, and very much continues today as new waves of racism make clear that the struggle is far from over. The phase of this long struggle that emerged in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement, is undoubtedly the best-known non-violent social movement in American history. This is appropriate given that it was in many respects the model for the numerous progressive movements that followed. It set the framework in terms of non-violent tactics, collective leadership, and radically democratic ideology. Unfortunately, much popular knowledge about the movement consists of half-truths and myths. Perhaps the most common and most misleading myth is the notion that the movement was started by and led by Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights movement is often portrayed as virtually King’s singlehanded effort. But as a far less well-known but equally important figure in the movement, Ella Baker, put it, King did not make the movement, the movement made King. Reverend King was an important figure but he was only one among thousands of activists and hundreds of leaders. While he was a great orator and a great translator of the movement’s ideas to mainstream America, he was more often a follower of the movement’s actions than a leader of them. His high public visibility often obscured the extent to which the movement was driven by thousands of ordinary citizens struggling amidst great danger without media coverage or public recognition.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference became the most visible civil rights organization under Dr. King’s leadership, but the national office often found itself trying to catch up with what bolder local activists were doing. Women were often the most important leaders of the CRM and the single most important figure of the movement may not have been King but rather Ella Baker, who shaped virtually all the organizations of the movement and played a key role in fostering the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that sent the movement into its most important phase.

SNCC became the most important civil rights organization of the 1960s due to its philosophy of cultivating local, group-centered leadership rather than building a central, hierarchical national organization. In a sense, there were dozens of civil rights movements in communities throughout the South and the North where racism was just as pervasive though different in that it did not include legal segregation (the US version of apartheid). many of which were quite independent of national leaders. The backbone of the struggle consisted of hundreds of grassroots organizers, local people still mostly unsung, who sought not notoriety but justice, and who toiled, usually amid life-threatening danger, for many years before and after the most dramatic demonstrations, protests, marches, and speeches that are the best-known manifestations of the movement. It was this mass of ordinary folks who brought down the system of legal segregation of the races, brought voting rights and host of other civil rights to people who had long been denied them, brought new-found pride and power to African Americans and inspired millions of marginalized people around the globe to fight for their rights.

Many kinds of art and artists have played roles in the movement, but as the first chapter of The Art of Protest shows in detail, it was music, especially in the form of "freedom songs" drawn from a deep tradition of African American spirituals, that gave the Civil Rights movement its signature style and provided the movement with a powerful, soul-deep voice.

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  • SNCC Freedom Singers The Freedom Singers of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) embodied the central power of song in the mid-20th century phase of the ongoing African American struggle for justice.

Civil Rights Movement Culture: History and Legacy

Further Research

Books and Articles

  • Burns, Stewart, ed. Daybreak of Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1997. Excellent book that tells the story of the pivotal Montgomery bus boycott through firsthand accounts and documents from many perspectives.
  • Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan, eds. Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through Its Songs. New York: Sing Out, 1990. Fine compilation of lyrics and songs with commentaries on each by the editors and other movement activists.
  • Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. 1981; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Best overview of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.
  • Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. P. Franklin, eds. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women of the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Extends, updates, and deepens the work begun in Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Crawford, Rouse, and Woods.
  • Crawford, Vicki, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds. Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pathbreaking volume in the ongoing task of correcting the distorted gender picture in histories of the civil rights movement. Includes women foremothers preceding the 1950–60s movement.
  • Denisoff, R. Serge. Sing a Song of Social Significance. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Includes much analysis of freedom songs, as well as other related protest songs, before and after the civil rights movement.
  • Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Important study focuses on ordinary folks struggling in one of the most dangerous areas the movement entered.
  • Hogan, Wesley C. Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America. University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Excellent study of SNCC and its wide influence on other movement groups.
  • Johnson, Gaye Theresa, and Alex Lubin, eds. The Future of Black Radicalism. NY: Verso, 2017. Superb collection of essays on the past and future of African American movements.
  • Kelley, Robin. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Brilliantly places the CRM in the context of the longer struggle for racial equality on this continent.
  • McDonnell, John. Songs of Struggle and Protest. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1979. Places freedom songs in the wide tradition of folk rebellions going back centuries.
  • McQuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. NY. Knopf, 2010. Analyzes racial sexual violence and exploitation in the context of racial injustice and the movement.
  • Morris, Aldon. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Free Press, 1984. Excellent treatment of church culture and politics of the early civil rights movement.
  • Payne, Charles. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. The best book on the movement culture of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Deep South, and the richest treatment of the radically democratic culture growing out of the “organizing tradition” nourished by folks like Ella Baker.
  • Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Excellent biography of the great antileader of the civil rights movement.
  • Reagon, Bernice Johnson. “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955–1965: A Study in Culture History.” PhD diss., Howard University, 1975. Ann Arbor, MI: Xerox University Microfilms, 1975. The major study of music in the civil rights movement by the great participant-observer member of the SNCC Freedom Singers.
  • --. The Power of Communal Song.” In Cultures in Contention, ed. Douglas Kahn and Diane Neumaier. Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1985. Condensed statement of Reagon’s wisdom on music in movement struggles.
  • Sanger, Kerran L. 'When the Spirit Says Sing!' The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Garland, 1995. Solid, detailed study.
  • Seeger, Pete, and Bob Reiser. Everyone Says Freedom. New York: Norton, 1989. Collection of freedom song lyrics and music with commentary.
  • Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Brilliantly retraces the long history of racial justice struggles in the US as a key to defining and creating a true democracy.
  • Walker, Alice. Meridian. New York: Pocket Books, 1976. Powerful novel about the civil rights movement and its transition into the black power phase.

Music and Film/Video

  • Eyes on the Prize (first series). Directed by Henry Hampton. Blackside, 1987. Six great one-hour documentaries tracing the whole history of the civil rights movement. Bernice Johnson Reagon did the music for the series, and it is therefore rich in freedom songs. See also the excellent companion PBS website,
  • A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. Directed by Steve York and Peter Ackerman. York Zimmerman/WETA Production, 2000. PBS documentary that places the civil rights movement in relation to the long tradition of nonviolent struggle. Includes some freedom song audio clips.
  • Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Various Artists. Folk Era Records, 1994.
  • Freedom on My Mind. Directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mumford. California Newsreel, 1994. Excellent documentary film using organizing in the crucial state of Mississippi as the lens through which to tell the movement story.
  • Fundi. Directed by Joanne Grant. Icarus Films, 1986. Documentary film on the life of the great organizer Ella Baker.
  • The Story of Greenwood Mississippi. Smithsonian Folkways Records. Traces the impact of freedom songs on one particular community in struggle.
  • Strange Fruit. Directed by Joel Katz. PBS Independent Lens, 2003. Places Billie Holiday's antilynching song "Strange Fruit" in the context of the wider history of freedom songs.
  • Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960–1966. Smithsonian Folkways Records. Excellent, extensive set of recordings.
  • We Shall Overcome. Directed by Jim Brown. California Newsreel, 1989. Documentary using the story of the most famous freedom song to trace the role of music in the labor and civil rights movements.