Essay on the Role of Music in the Civil Rights Movement

It is difficult to imagine something like music being of extreme importance in difficult humanitarian situations. As one would imagine, all of the crucial events would come out of revolts, strikes or political actions. However, sometimes, culture can be a very powerful tool in these kind of crises to help organise or even trigger these kind of events. In this essay, I will argue how music became an important tool for African-Americans and their civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties and how it contributed to its (partial) success.

The healing and yet striking voice of the ’’Negro’’ and its function

The sixties was a time of revolts in the United States. The appearance of the generation X, a young cohort of people descendants of the baby boomers, who disliked the way in which society functioned, started to take unprecedented habits (forming grunge bands, experimenting with drugs, etc.).They triggered revolts and many political movements. However, the most important of these moments is, perhaps, the civil rights movement.

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PLACE AN ORDER

Even though slavery was abolished in 1863, the struggles of the African-American communities with racism and discrimination have always been present, and continue to be present today. Music has always been a stereotypical characteristic of black communities in the States, and there is a good reason why.

Ever since the appearance of the slavery trade, African-Americans would continuously work at the cotton fields in the states of the south, in the Delta Area, with little rest. In order to make this harsh task slightly more bearable, they came up with a particular singing style. They would sing songs about their lives, how everything changed since they were taken away from their land, their living conditions in America, etc., and they would sing them while doing their work. They were usually deep, sad songs, reason why this style was eventually called the blues.

The blues had a very important psycho-sociological function in this setting. Through song, African-Americans developed, perhaps in a subconscious way, this tool that would help them create a sense of community, a sense of unity, a means of mentally evading themselves from the harsh lives they were forcedly assigned to have by white people, owners of the lands. It was this singing voice used as a tool that would help them alleviate their inner wounds, sooth them, keep them going. This singing voice has been present ever since in African-American communities (not without musically evolving with the pass of the years) and its sociological function has remained pretty much intact.

Because of its origins (and the fact that racial problems are still present in the current society), this singing voice has shaped the stereotype of the African-Americans as natural born singers, it has developed the image of the African-American mummy, who is here to calm us down with her voice in times of crisis, but can also incite revelry if needed.

These various images demonstrate the way the black woman’s voice can be called upon to heal a crisis in national unity as well as provoke one. […] A figure that serves the unit, who heals and nurtures it but has no rights or privileges within it – more mammy than mother. Here I am not suggesting that the individual women themselves chose to serve as mammies but instead that this figure of the singing black woman is often similar to the uses of black women’s bodies as nurturing, healing, life and love giving for the majority culture.[1]

As Farah Jasmine Griffin explains in the citation above, the voice has acquired a dual quality- That of nurturing and healing, and that of being provocative.
The quality of healing is a feature that was embedded in the black singing voices of the past, coming from the early nineteenth century, and straight from the cotton plantations. However, the quality of provocation comes from later times, those of the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century – and it comes straight from the will of African-American communities to improve their quality of life, from claiming their rights as citizens and human beings. This is where the next part of the essay begins.