Nothing but Love in God's Water by Robert Darden

Author:Robert Darden [Darden, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Music, Genres & Styles, Classical, Reference
ISBN: 9780271080147
Google: yRl3AQAACAAJ
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Published: 2014-01-15T00:23:27+00:00

5

MONTGOMERY

Black Sacred Song in the Modern Civil Rights Movement

Yet, even here amid dangers, and here amid temptations, let the “Alleluia” be sung by others and by us, too.... Therefore, my brethren, let us sing now, not for the delights of peace, but for the solace of our labor. Just as travelers are accustomed to sing, sing but advance; solace your labor by singing; do not love inactivity; keep singing and keep progressing.... If you are progressing, you are advancing; but progress in well-doing, progress in good faith, progress in good deeds. Keep singing and keep advancing.

—SAINT AUGUSTINE

It was all part and parcel of the big left turn middle class college students were making.... So we owe it all to Rosa Parks.

—DAVE VAN RONK

Black sacred music is the primary reservoir of the Black people’s historical context and an important factor in the process of social change.

—WYATT TEE WALKER

Even as Brown v. Board of Education was met with often violent opposition in the South, Representative Adam Clayton Powell had been working with State Department officials to arrange a series of international tours and “cultural” programs abroad featuring African-American artists. On November 18, 1955, he announced tours featuring Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Count Basie to Communist-controlled Eastern Europe, as well as Asia and Africa. A week later, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rulings that banned racial segregation in passenger bus and train waiting rooms. Several southern states immediately announced that they would resist the measures.1 In Chicago, Mahalia Jackson continued her political activities as well. In the summer and fall of 1954, she joined Representative Dawson in supporting young Cook County clerk Richard Daley’s candidacy for mayor, singing at rallies and precinct meetings, sometimes accompanied by Thomas Dorsey: “But Mahalia’s hidden strength lay in her living room. There was no day when preachers were not visiting Mahalia Jackson. And in Chicago, the reverends controlled a lot of votes.”2 Later, after Daley’s new “machine” had swept the polls, she joined the newly elected Mayor Daley, Joe Louis, Senator Everett Dirksen, Walter Reuther, Jesse Owens, and others at Chicago’s huge Bud Billiken Parade. At one point, Daley pulled her over and said, according to Goreau, “Anything I can do for you, Mahalia, you just let me know.”3

But most blacks knew that white politicians would do very little for them, particularly in the South. As mentioned earlier, the August 1955 murder of fourteen-year-old Chicago native Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, just months after the Brown v. Board of Education announcement, was, in the eyes of many scholars, another milestone in the civil rights movement. The intense national media coverage of Till’s brutal slaying and the subsequent release of his killers created both an outcry and a national debate on Jim Crow. And the next generation of young African-American leaders soon to be coming of age in Nashville, Montgomery, Albany, and elsewhere were horrified at the lynching and its all-too-predictable outcome. Consequently, the murder had the effect of “radicalizing” these new student leaders, a number of whom began “embracing ideas of activism.

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