Freedom Facts and Firsts. Jessie Carney Smith
to know a community or a people without understanding its songs because music represents a people’s way of thinking and their collective recorded history.
Helen R. Houston
Reagon, Cordell (1943–1996)
Cordell Hull Reagon was a founding member of the Freedom Singers. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1943 and died of a gunshot wound in his Berkeley, California, apartment in November 1996. Reagon became a civil rights leader at the age of 16. By the time he was 18 years of age, he was an experienced activist, having participated in sit-ins, freedom rides, voter demonstrations and workshops. He and Charles Sherrod were sent in 1961 to Albany, Georgia, to assist in the work of confronting and dismantling the thriving segregated system. Using non-violent tactics, they became involved in the Albany community and its fight in the face of threats and violence. In 1962, as a means of raising money to support the work and goals of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and to tell the stories of the movement, the Freedom Singers group was founded by Reagon. Reagon, who had a strong tenor voice and experience with music as a force in Nashville, joined forces with Rutha Mae Harris and Bernice Johnson (who was to marry Reagon and later formed Sweet Honey in the Rock) of Albany, Georgia, as well as Charles Neblett, a civil rights demonstrator from Cairo, Illinois. They used the rich tradition of African American music to convey their message. They toured—not without threats and violence—the country, performing at colleges, universities, homes, jails, political rallies, and in the August 1963 March on Washington. The original Freedom Singers recorded an album and disbanded in 1963.
Helen R. Houston
Robeson, Paul(1898–1976)
Paul Leroy Bustill Robeson was born April 9, 1898, in Princeton, New Jersey, and died December 23, 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was equipped with the principles, pride, and courage he needed to confront and surmount the racial barriers and racist treatment he received as a black renaissance man. In spite of the racism at Rutgers University at the time he attended, he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, varsity letters in four sports, became first All-American in football, and graduated valedictorian. At Columbia University, he earned a degree in law; however, racism in the profession caused him to switch to the stage. His career flourished even though there were limited roles for black actors. He began to sing spirituals and work songs that reflected both the common man and the universal brotherhood of man. His travels led him to associate with a variety of organizations and ideologies. The 1930s saw him visiting the Soviet Union, an experience that marked a turning point in his life. He began to support communism and speak out against racism. However, Robeson’s desire was to change America, not leave it. Thus, he led a delegation to Washington, D.C., as a part of the Anti-Lynching Crusade, urged Congress to lift the racial barriers in baseball, and was a founding member of the Progressive Party because he wanted to challenge the existing parties in the presidential election. Robeson’s stances and rhetoric in the face of racism caused his concerts to be cancelled and his passport to be revoked.
Paul Robeson (Fisk University).
Helen R. Houston
Literature
Literature of the Civil Rights Movement
African American literature is traditionally polemical and thus indicative of the political and social concerns of black people. This is evident in African American literature at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, a time characterized by a rising consciousness of identity and self-affirmation. Beginning in the 1950s, writings by African Americans increasingly shifted from integrationist literature directed toward a primarily white audience to a literature that was reflective of intra-communal issues and the validation of black experiences. Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen (1949), James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Lorraine Hans-berry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) are among the most prominent works of the decade. These works are reflective of the concerns of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike the naturalistic and social realist writings of the 1940s, this literature celebrated life in the black community, sometimes in relation to the white community, but more often not. These works revealed the humanity of black people, thus suggesting that the political and social rights of African Americans are an obvious extension of that humanity.
The 1960s marked a decidedly more pronounced shift in the literature. Like literature of the 1950s that focused on interpersonal and intra-communal issues of black people, the 1960s literature emphasized political and social awareness and black pride. The New York City literary organization called the Umbra Society held meetings in 1962 and 1963 that served as precursor to the Black Art Movement. Black writers Tom Dent, Askia Toure, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton were among the writers who developed and attended Umbra meetings. At these meetings writers discussed their work, as well as social and political issues. Despite the efforts of the Umbra writers, the assassination of Malcolm X, and Amiri Baraka’s establishment of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School (BARTS) in 1965 are generally considered the beginning of the Blacks Arts Movement. Under the leadership of Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, black writers sought to promote an aesthetic that was truly reflective of African artistic values and that celebrated the lives of black people. Amiri Baraka’s essay “Black Art” and his poem “Black Art,” and Larry Neal’s essay “The Black Arts Movement,” all provide insights into the radical black aesthetic espoused by the most prominent writers of this period.
The movement largely produced poetry and drama. Some of the other dominant writers of the period included Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, Haki Mutabuti (Don Lee), Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Alice Childress, Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins, and Douglas Turner Ward. Larry Neal considered the literary movement the sister to the Black Power Movement because of its radical nature. Despite the empowering nature of the black aesthetic promoted by the writers of the Black Arts Movement, the efforts of the writers were marred by concerns of artistry being overshadowed by the didactic nature of the writing and problems of misogyny, vulgarity, violence, and a glamorization of an impoverished mindset and lifestyle. With the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement ended in the early 1970s.
Rebecca S. Dixon
Writers
Angelou, Maya (1928–)
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, spent her early years in Stamps, Arkansas. It was here that she learned the glaring need for change in the South. As the movement for civil rights began to build in the 1950s, Angelou became an active participant for change. Upon moving to New York in the 1950s to pursue a professional dancing career, Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild and became one of many artists who participated in the movement. Along with Godfrey Cambridge, she wrote a revue called Cabaret for Freedom, which was to be performed as a fundraiser for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1960 and 1961, Angelou served as the northern coordinator for the SCLC. Just as her reputation began to grow as a writer and poet, she decided to move with her son to Africa with African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make. They lived for a while in Cairo, Egypt, then Angelou and her son moved to Ghana. In Ghana, Angelou met Malcolm X and they later corresponded. When she returned to the United States in 1964, her goal was to assist him in building a new organization. Malcolm X was assassinated shortly after Angelou’s return, however, and this put an end to their plans. Angelou immersed herself in the Civil Rights Movement and again became a part of the SCLC. With the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Angelou became more serious about her writing and wrote her first book, the award-winning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.