Sounding Freedom: The Black Revolutionary Tradition in Song

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ashley Hunter. I work in the Unified Procurement Services team. We appreciate you for joining The Sounding Freedom: The Black Revolutionary Tradition in Song event today. Before we get started, I would like to cover a few event logistics. First, this event will be recorded and posted to our public-facing site for future reference. In addition, captions and a transcript are being provided by a certified real-time captioner. If you have any technical issues during the event, please direct message John Dawson through Zoom.

As with all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility events, this is a time to learn and share. You may have a lot of questions based on today's content, and there may be topics that are completely new to you. We encourage you to ask any and all questions so we can grow together.

Questions can be provided in one of three ways during the conversation portions of this event. You can post a question via chat for everyone to see, you can use the Raise Hand feature in Zoom to ask a live question, or you can direct message me with any anonymous questions.

I would now like to welcome Dr. Yolanda Covington-Ward, who will be introducing our speaker today, Maya Cunningham. Dr. Covington-Ward is the department chair and Professor of the WEB Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. She served as the department chair in Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh with a secondary appointment in anthropology. She is currently on the advisory council of the Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora.

Professor Covington-Ward received her MA and PhD degrees in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan and a BA in Afro-American studies from Brown University. Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Covington-Ward.

Thank you so much, Ashley, for such a gracious introduction. And I now have the honor of introducing our speaker for today, Maya Cunningham. Maya is an amazing PhD student in the WEB Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. And I wanted to say just a few quick words about the Department. The Department was founded in 1970 and has served as a center of Black life and culture on campus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for over 50 years.

And I'd also like to point out that the Department founded the second PhD program in Afro-American studies in the nation. So Maya Cunningham is a part of this legacy of excellence that our department fosters on campus. So now I'd like to turn to her biography so you can learn exactly how amazing she is.

Maya Cunningham is an ethnomusicologist, a jazz vocalist, and a cultural activist. Her research focuses on African American cultural identity and traditional African and African American music. She is an expert in African American expressive culture, African American history, and jazz history. She is a jazz vocalist in the tradition of Abbey Lincoln, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, and Lorez Alexandria.

She is also a composer and conceptual artist who fuses her music with visual art, works in textile, glass, paint, and mixed media. She sings in several African languages, including Ewe, Bamana, and Setswana. Maya Cunningham is a lecturer in the Department of Music and Theater Arts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she's also completing a PhD in the WEB Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies with a concentration in ethnomusicology.

She has earned three Masters of Arts, one of which is in Afro-American Studies from UMass, another in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a third in jazz performance from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. So very distinguished already. She received a Bachelor of Music in jazz studies from Howard University.

Cunningham recently received the 2022 Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship. We were very, very proud of that achievement. Cunningham is also a 2017 Fulbright fellow and has presented her research and writing at conferences nationally and internationally. In 2022, Maya Cunningham published "The Hush Harbor as Sanctuary-- African American Survival Silence During British American Slavery" in Sonic Histories of Occupation-- Sounds and Imperialism in Global Contexts, which came out with Bloomsbury.

Another book chapter, "Singing Power, Sounding Identity, the Black Woman's Voice from Hush Harbors and Beyond," is included in the Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories, which was edited by Janell Hobson and came out in 2021. Maya Cunningham has also published public-facing work, like a curated playlist and accompanying essay entitled "A People in Flight-- African Americans in Movement for the Smithsonian Folkways Records" and "The Sound World of Harriet Tubman," which was published in Ms. Magazine.

In 2017, Maya Cunningham launched Ethnomusicology in Action, a project of Denver Arts and Culture, Incorporated, to empower Afro-descendant children through research-based Black music curricula that offers them robust learning opportunities about their history, culture, and traditional music. Ethnomusicology in action also aims to contribute to the public narrative on Black music traditions through recordings and broadcast media. And you can learn more about this work that Maya Cunningham is doing at www.ethnomusicologyinaction.org. So without further ado, please welcome Maya Cunningham.

Thank you, Dr. Covington-Ward, for that wonderful introduction. And thank you very much to the UMass President Systems Office for hosting and having me to be able to share this talk, "The Black Revolutionary Tradition in Song." I'm so excited. I absolutely love talking about the way in which African Americans have linked with other Afro descendants and within the group to push forward freedom strategies through music, so much so that it's a part of the tradition.

So I just want to share my screen, introduce the talk a little bit, and then we'll get right into it. If those who are here-- thank you very much for attending-- if you have questions, please do-- there'll be time for questions periodically throughout the talk. But if you do have any questions, please feel free to share in the chat as well. And I will be made aware of those questions so I can address them.

So just in case, I just want to introduce the talk. This talk explores the Black musical forms and songs of artists that have expressed African American freedom-seeking strategies and related political ideologies. Music has always been a major mode of expression for African Americans, connecting the group to their African homeland and deeply rooting them to American soil. These roots birthed foundational African American traditions like blues, jazz, gospel, and soul that are intertwined with the African American activist tradition.

And so there is an accompanying playlist which is a soundscape of the Black revolutionary tradition in song-- not in total, because that's a tremendous work. I mean, we would need a museum to really explain all of the different aspects of that. But what I'm hoping to focus on in terms of the revolutionary tradition is some salient streamlines throughout African American history.

So Dr. Covington-Ward so graciously mentioned that I am an ethnomusicologist, and I always feel the need to share what that is. Ethnomusicology is a study of music as culture. It's a small branch of cultural anthropology that involves the same kinds of research methods that cultural anthropologists use-- field studies, engaging with these communities as researchers. It can be considered to be the anthropology of music. And it evolved both from cultural anthropology and musicology.

So I want to start with Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a part of the general description of the talk, because Miss Hamer embodies the Black revolutionary tradition in song. So she is a cultural insider, a cultural bearer, who grew up in the traditions of the Black American church-- probably blues, if she was living in-- I believe she lived, at some point, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and rural Mississippi in that area.

And so these songs, the spirituals-- just want to share this-- the spirituals the congregational music of the Black church were part of her life and a major mode of expression for her personal spirituality and faith. But then she became politically active with a group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights movement in the early '60s.

And that's when she began to translate and use her musical heritage as a singer-- she's one of my favorite singers, actually-- as a singer and as an activist to engage in a political ideology that's long-standing in African America called Black liberalism, which essentially is pushing for the belief that full citizenship rights can be achieved for African Americans through changes in law and that kind of thing.

And so the liberation strategy that she engaged in with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was so pervasive in what we think of as the Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century was agitation, agitation towards achieving full citizenship. In her case, they were pushing for the right to vote for African Americans in Mississippi to be able to utilize their right to vote that had been long denied to them under Jim Crow racial laws.

And so I wanted to start with her theme song. I had the opportunity, in 2015, to interview Congressman John Lewis in his beautiful office in Washington, DC. He was very gracious to give me time with him to talk about the protest music of the Civil Rights Movement that he remembered that he participated in. And he said that "This Little Light of Mine" was one of Ms. Hamer's theme songs. So I'd like us to start here.

[FANNIE LOU HAMER, "LET IT SHINE"] This little light of mine

I'm going to let it shine

This little light of mine

I'm going to let it shine

Let it shine!

This little light of mine

I'm going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

Let it shine, oh everywhere I go, Lord

I'm going to let it shine everywhere I go, Lord

I'm going to let it, let it shine everywhere I go, Lord

I'm going to let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

I would fade out because I think kind of cutting off is a little disrespectful to the artist, but for the sake of not being able to manipulate that, I'll have to cut off. What I would interpret Ms. Hamer as saying is, there's a dual message here. "This Little Light of Mine" is a song that she would have sung in church, "This Little Light of Mine," being the committed Christian she was, she would have thought about that in terms of sharing the love of God with people as the light that she's talking about.

But this light, there's a dual meaning in that she's asserting that the light, in this case, is the group's pushing forward for right, for citizenship, for the right to vote, pushing against racist terror. I recently spoke with Dr. Michael Thelwell, who's the founding chair of our department, and I asked him if he knew Ms. Hamer. And he did because he was active with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

And he said that often, when people like-- when he and the other SNCC workers would go into rural communities in Mississippi, they would be asked by the people that they were working with, is this the work of the Lord? So we're talking about epistemologies of African Americans-- sacred epistemologies of African Americans. Or he would say that they would receive a validation for what they were doing by saying-- by being told, you're doing the work of the Lord.

And so I think that this is how Ms. Hamer saw her activism, as a work that was an extension of her religious identity, her religious faith, which is why "This Little Light of Mine" was her theme song. So I just wanted to provide that kind of introduction into the talk.

I'll be talking about these a little more, but common or well-known, well-received, widely engaged with African American political ideologies documented by Michael Dawson in his 2001 work Black Visions-- The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies are Black liberalism, the push for full citizenship rights of African Americans living in the United States, Black nationalism, the idea or the view of African Americans as a nation within a nation.

And then that ideology extends out in different ways, particularly seeing African Americans as a connection or being connected with the African homeland. Others, Black Marxism, Black feminism, and Black conservativism. For this talk, I'm going to focus more on Black liberalism and Black nationalism as it's expressed through music forms, music traditions, and songs.

Now, I want to explain these two photos here. This is a photo of WEB Du Bois, who, of course, our department is named for, who was a father, in a sense, of Black liberalism, and advocated for African Americans to receive-- or to be able to enjoy and engage with full citizenship rights as African Americans in the United States, as American citizens.

And then another major figure in Black nationalism is Marcus Garvey, who was busy engaging and organizing not only African Americans, but Afro descendants all over the Black world as nations within nations that are joined and connected by a common ancestry on the continent of Africa. So I'll talk about them a little later.

I never like to assume knowledge, so I just wanted to get into this, explain these freedom-seeking strategies, then we'll do an overview of African America. So freedom-seeking strategies that are often associated with these ideologies. Booker T. Washington, who's pictured here, is associated with this strategy of accommodation. And I'll talk about him a little more.

But accommodation, in survival, and maybe even in the internal thriving in of African America, but without-- these are simple definitions, which, of course, this is not an academic lecture. This is a talk. So I don't want to get too far into the weeds with this.

And in terms of accommodation, African Americans finding ways to thrive, but within the United States racial hierarchy that was so firmly codified with the advent of the Jim Crow period.

That was certainly not the philosophy of someone like the WEB Du Bois, who was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP. And so he advocated for a freedom seeking strategy that involved agitation, pushing in different ways for African American civil liberties.

And then the strategy of migration or separation that was so deeply advocated by Marcus Garvey, who saw African Americans achieving freedom by eventually migrating to a homeland, and certainly, within that context of a nation within a nation, and not believing, as many Black nationalists, sometimes-- often-- they often believed-- that full citizenship cannot be achieved in the United States without a migration or without some sort of engagement with the homeland. So we'll nuance all of these out.

Now, this is not going to take long, but I never like to assume knowledge. We often receive misunderstandings because African Americans are often a maligned and stereotyped group. There's all kinds of information in popular media and popular culture floating around about African America that may or may not be true. So I just want to overview African Americans for the sake of a foundational understanding of getting into the revolutionary tradition and understanding the context of it.

So African Americans are an intraethnic group of Afro descendants whose ancestors were forcibly brought into the United States and enslaved in the United States starting in 1619-- slavery started much earlier in other places in the Americas-- and ending in the mid-1800s.

Anthropologists might argue, and do argue, as I do, that that definition will expand to incorporate Afro descendants who come into the United States, new immigrant groups of Africans or Afro descendants who come into the United States, often in different ways, become culturally enmeshed or culturally connected to African America or to a Black American identity, sometimes with a dual kind of identity with African Americans and then that's rooted in a home country. So that definition is a working definition of African America.

African America is networked through Black churches, Black denominations, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black sororities and fraternities, civic and activist organizations, like the NAACP or the Congressional Black Caucus, certain kinds of cultural arts institutions, neighborhoods or historically Black communities, and then in cities, metropolitan areas with high populations of African Americans, like Washington, DC, where I grew up, and the Atlanta metro area, Chicago, et cetera. And if there are questions, please do feel free to drop them in the chat.

What I would think of or what we would think of is the African American culture-- certainly, African American expressive culture, but long-standing ways of being, formed primarily in the Southern United States, and does have regional distinctions. African American high population centers are still-- it's still the Southern United States, major northern urban cities, East Coast urban centers, major Midwestern cities and West Coast cities.

These are some realms of the centers of African American cultural influence, where you have large numbers of African Americans and the group identity being expressed in various ways centered in these areas that have high populations of African Americans.

The Black liberatory practice in music developed through the historical timeline of African America, so starting from the African antecedent throughout slavery, what is called the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the nadir, the instituting of stringent racial hierarchy laws, segregation, racial apartheid, the great migrations the Civil Rights era, the Black Power movement, some would argue a post-Civil rights era. I don't know if that is necessarily true. But certainly, an era where legal integration has been instituted. And then the Black Lives Matter movement in the present day.

So the African American antecedent, African Americans' ancestors, were citizens of African empires and kingdoms. And these are just some of them. I've only had the ones where African Americans come from most prevalently, so West Africa, West Central Africa. And many African Americans, as we'll see later, carry the identity or carry the identity of citizens of these kingdoms or empires with them into the new world.

So for instance, there are places all over the United States where African Americans settled towns that named them Timbuktu after a major cultural center that was a part of the empire of Mali. Dr. Michael Gomez documents in his work Exchanging our Country Marks that African Americans were brought into the new world-- 24% of the Africans that came into the United States came from the Senegambia region, 26% from the Bight of Biafra, so southeastern Nigeria or the areas around southeastern Nigeria, 15% from the Sierra Leone, 15% from the Gold Coast, Ghana, and 24% in West Central Africa.

If the percentages are above 100, it's-- I talked with Dr. Gomez a few years ago. And there's new research coming out all the time. And so the Senegambia estimate originally, in his book, was 15%, but he said it's actually 24% and the United States received the largest number of people from that region of Africa.

The Ethnomusicology in Action project is a project of a not-for-profit that I work with called Themba Arts and Culture. And we had this poster commissioned to try to very quickly and easily communicate, particularly with young people, the origins of African Americans or the roots of African Americans. So I just wanted to show that to make it a little easier to digest.

And of course, we know that African Americans came into the United States via the transatlantic slave trade. These are-- I'd like to focus on-- we talk about the African antecedent and those who descended from African empires. I'd like to focus on the quintessential story of Alex Haley. Alex Haley, seventh great grandfather, Kunta Kinte. He documented through the archival record here in the US and through a Manding Jali or Griot in the Kente village in Juffure, which is in the Gambia, how his ancestor came into the United States.

And of course, we know these two very classic movies, Roots 1977 and Roots 2016. And so Alex Haley is just one of the descendants of people from the Manding area, or the area of the Mali Empire of Africa. These are two others, Abdul Ibrahima Sori, who was a prince in the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea, and then Omar Ibn Said, who was a Fula Muslim scholar also from present-day Senegal.

So the Manding diaspora, these men, Haley, as the seventh great grandson of Kunta Kinte and and these men, represent this Manding diaspora, people coming who were citizens of kingdoms that were associated with or derived from the Mali Empire which rose in the 1200s.

This is the actual port in Annapolis where Kunta Kinte came in. And there's a beautiful Alex Haley Memorial there. So this is in Annapolis. This is exactly the ship-- the ship was called the Lord Ligonier. This is exactly where the Lord Ligonier came to where Kunta Kinte disembarked for the first time in the United States and set forth his lineage here, which we know through Alex Haley.

Gomez also documents where Africans came in to-- where exactly-- the Africans that came from these specific areas, where they came into the United States. I always argue that influences the music traditions that developed in those areas. But so that's just another piece of the information. Of course, we know the 1619 story of the first Africans who came from the West Central Africa into Virginia.

And then this is a story of Richard Oswald and Henry Laurens, who was one of the-- he was the first president of the Continental Congress in the United States and a notorious slave trader. And they owned an island off of the Coast of Sierra Leone called Bunce Island, where many, many Africans from the Sierra Leone region were trafficked into the low country of North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina.

And this highlighted area is called the Gullah Geechee Corridor that has specific culture that derives from other areas on the continent, but largely from the Sierra Leone region, as is embodied in this basket-- in Gullah basketry, which is almost identical to the basketry in Sierra Leone, and then other musical carryovers as well. Any questions? OK.

Hi, Maya. I'm not seeing any questions right now.

OK, thank you. So now, this is the context of the Black revolutionary tradition. Why did Black people have to engage in the Revolutionary tradition or a liberatory tradition? It is because when Africans arrived, they were considered to be-- I would say more so not only colonial subjects, but certainly colonial property. They were non-citizens, and according to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, had no rights-- quote, "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

And so no group can live in that condition, and must engage in freedom-seeking strategies to have a better life for themselves and a better life for their children. And so that's the context of the Black revolutionary tradition. I just want to underscore that with this graph that just shows the hierarchy of power in the US during slavery and after. So there were colonial rulers, like Henry Laurens, like George Washington, like Thomas Jefferson and those, colonial citizens who had a social contract with these rulers, with British North America, and then later, the United States, to be governed, and then colonial subjects, and then colonial property.

And that's where African Americans fell, into this idea of colonial property or chattel, and it just could not stand. After the Civil War and after emancipation, there was a Reconstruction period in which many Historically Black Colleges and Universities were founded and other citizenship rights were negotiated, pushed for, and gained such as land and the right to vote.

But then they were quickly taken away in what we call the Nadir, or the institution of Jim Crow segregation, where this racial hierarchy continued through apartheid, separation, and really, subjugation. And so through this historical context, we have a Black revolutionary tradition that, really, some of it was only possible through what's called the Great Migration, where African Americans had to flee the South, either in search, certainly, of better opportunities and job opportunities to escape the plantation economy that was so prevalent there, but also to free racial terror, to flee the lynching that was going on at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and any white citizen who was deputized to police Black people and Black bodies.

They had to escape from that area. And so they did so by going to Northern cities in the East Coast, the Midwest, and then on the West Coast. And there are these migration patterns that this map documents.

I have here a picture of Zora Neale Hurston because she represents-- actually, her family left-- I believe it was Alabama-- and moved to Florida. So that's another part of the migration. My own family did that as well, moved from Georgia into these all-Black towns in Florida.

And then from Florida, she made her way to Washington, DC, and Baltimore and eventually became a major contributor in cultural anthropology in Harlem, which was only possible through the migration of African Americans to the North in places like Harlem. My computer says that connection is unstable. So if there's some adjustment that needs to be made, please let me know.

So as a result of the Great Migration, we have these major cosmopolitan centers of African America, certainly, Harlem, areas like Washington, DC, where you have instant Black institutions that are built by African Americans, and they have major influence in terms of projecting the narrative of African America, even leading the group and producing leaders for the group.

And then the Civil Rights era, which we'll get into much more. Of course, I have a photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King. Of course, this was all the Civil Rights movement. And we'll push into some other battles. But anyway, this is representative of the Civil Rights era that was precipitated by the Great Migration, by the Harlem or the New Negro Renaissance, and then the Black Power movement and Black Arts Movement that flowed out of the Civil Rights movement, and then what we would think of as the time of the Black Lives Matter movement or the anti-racist movement.

We have major Black leaders rising as the result of the work of the Civil Rights movement, but us all needing to engage in much more work to be done, again, to push for full citizenship. In terms of African American culture, we can define, certainly, expressive culture with African American language, foodways, folktales, Black religion, strong music traditions, double consciousness and two-ness, and then these music traditions being connected to a freedom ethos.

So these are all some things-- components of African American culture, ways that we can understand the African American way of being. I want to push into this idea of two-ness that WEB Du Bois published and wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk. So I'll quote. He says African Americans have, quote, "two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts."

And that comes out in the music, in an engagement with pushing for full citizenship rights through Black liberalism, but also engaging in pan-Africanism or looking or embracing an African identity or an identity as Africans in America that's so prevalent in the Black nationalist ideology.

So all of these, these political ideologies and freedom-seeking strategies, are expressed in the African American music timeline. This is a wonderful graphic that was pulled together by Dr. Portia Maultsby, a very well-known African Americanist, ethnomusicologist. And we're going to tease out some of these. But later in the talk, I'll focus more on jazz in connection to Black liberalism and Black nationalism.

Martin Delaney is considered to be a father of Black nationalism, who advocated during slavery. He was a compatriot with Frederick Douglass. And his Black nationalism, I would argue, is rooted in his ancestry. So Malveaux says, "Delaney held a fierce Black pride and loyalty to Africa as the African American homeland. These values were inspired by his Mandinka grandmother."

So here we have Delaney with a Mandinka grandmother, who is-- what is she? A citizen of the Mali Empire or of empires that derived from the Mali Empire. This Mali Empire waned in the 1400s, 1500s, and 1600s. But there were successive empires out of the Mali Empire. The Mali Empire was a Mandinka empire, but there were other successive empires.

And this idea of empire, she would have heard the story from the Manding jalis of her Mandinka community. She would have heard the story of the founding of the empire by a man, a warrior, named Sundiata. She would have heard these instruments that come from the area of the empire.

So I want us to hear the sound world of Delaney's grandmother and why he was so deeply committed to Black nationalism and advocated for migration. He advocated for African Americans to eventually migrate to Africa to escape slavery, and even went to Nigeria to stake out potential land, but was not able to receive that land because it competed with British colonial interests.

This is also a photograph of Delaney when he eventually fought and served in the Civil War. And he published a wonderful book that expresses his Black nationalist ideologies. It's a fiction called Blake. But so let's just hear a little about-- this is the story of Sundiata. The Sundiata epic can be told-- the whole epic takes about three or four days to tell, or it can be condensed into 20 or 30 minutes. So this is the condensed version. We won't listen to it all, but I do want you to hear a little bit of it. I'm just going to move this forward. OK, here we go. And take note.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

[PLAYING MUSIC]

This instrument being played is a balafon.

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

- He took his bow and arrow, the brave son of Sogolon, and conquered the Savannah. He took his bow and arrow, the master hunter, son of Sogolon, the buffalo woman who gave birth to the lion king of Manday. [INAUDIBLE]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

So this is just a guess of mine. Delaney's Mandinka grandmother very well could have told him of the founding of the Mali Empire and instilled in him a Black nationalism that is rooted in citizenship, ancestral citizenship, on the continent of Africa, particularly in the area of Mali and Mandinka.

This is another beautiful instrument called the akonting, which is essentially the same instrument as the banjo that was so prevalent in African America because of that Senegambian-- the number of Africans who were captured and brought into the US from the Senegambia region.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

I don't know if I mentioned it, but I will mention it now. There's a full playlist available with these examples that is available through the registration link, and then it could be that we could possibly put the playlist link in the chat a little later. But there's a full playlist to give you more time with these examples. And then my goal is to contextualize the soundscape of the Black revolutionary tradition by discussing figures like Delaney.

The last example-- and I'll just play a teeny bit of this. There's a little technical issue with-- well, I guess it's not going to affect them that much. This is Sierra Leone. The mende are also a Manding language-- part of the Manding cultural group. And so this is an example of women of a beautiful women's song.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

[NON-ENGLISH SINGING]

[END PLAYBACK]

I'm going to try to quote Frederick Douglass, who is Martin Delaney's friend. He said that every day he wakes up with pride that he's a man, but Martin Delaney woke up every day with pride that he was a Black man. And his pride as a Black man was rooted in his ancestry, his lineage, and the histories of African people, and certainly, maybe even the sound world of the continent that managed to come over and be translated on US soil.

Martin Delaney, the [AUDIO OUT] father of Black nationalism. And I want to move on to who some argue might be the father of Black liberalism. And he believed-- Frederick Douglass-- that Africans could achieve abolition here, and engaged in abolition after his escape from slavery, and was considered to be a major leader, if not "the" leader, of African America.

And so he talks about music in his time on a plantation in Maryland, which is not too far, actually, from where Harriet Tubman was living. And he said here-- this is from his narrative-- "The slaves selected to go to the great farmhouse for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves were particularly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods for miles around reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.

They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time or tune. The thought that came up came out, if not in word, in sound, and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone."

When I think about this, I think about the kind of cultural way of being that would birth a form like the blues, which is a major mode of expression that developed after slavery in the 1880s. I pulled an example of Frederick Douglass discussing his method of agitation towards Black freedom from-- the Smithsonian Folkways has a wonderful catalog of these kinds of recordings. So I'll play a little bit here.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- One important branch of my anti-slavery work in Rochester, in addition to speaking and writing against slavery, must not be omitted. My position gave me the chance of hitting the old enemy some telling blows in another direction than these. In Rochester, I was on the southern border of Lake Ontario, and Canada was right over the way. And my prominence as an abolitionist and as the editor of an anti-slavery paper naturally made me the station master and conductor of the Underground Railroad passing through the city.

Secrecy and concealment were necessary conditions to the successful operation of this railroad, and hence its prefix, "Underground." My agents, it was all the more exciting and interesting because not altogether free from danger. I could take no step in it without exposing myself to fine and imprisonment, for these were the penalties imposed by the Fugitive Slave Law for feeding, harboring, or otherwise assisting a slave to escape from his master.

But in the face of this fact, I can say I never did more congenial, attractive, fascinating, and satisfactory work-- true, as a means of destroying slavery. It was like an attempt to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon. But the thought that there was one less slave-- and a fugitive slave-- brought to my heart unspeakable joy.

[END PLAYBACK]

Yes. So still engaging in agitation and freedom-seeking, but in an encoded way, as he described in the Underground Railroad. There's another foundational leader who was the master of that, engaging in agitation, actually liberating African Americans from slavery to be citizens in the northern United States and after the Fugitive Slave Law, when that was no longer safe and they could be recaptured in Canada. And that is Harriet Tubman.

This is a-- I just want to use a musical example. I put here the strategy of migration because, at this time, these early epistemologies of nation that were African Americans were forming, the strategy of migration would have been escapes to the North. But oftentimes, the relief from slavery was seen as going to heaven. So the River Jordan meant crossing over to the North, but it also meant crossing into heaven. I'm talking about a theme from the African American spirituals.

I'm coming back to Fannie Lou Hamer from this compilation "Songs My Mother Taught Me" because these are the songs that were formed in something pictured here called hush arbors, these secret meetings that African Americans would hold at night in woods away from the eyes of white slave masters that gave them the freedom to preach, pray, praise, plan escapes.

And so the spirituals were formed within the context of these hush arbor meetings-- or developed, I should say, within the context of these hush arbor meetings. And so Fannie Lou Hamer learned these from her mother. And so I thought I would use her voice as a voice for Harriet Tubman, since we don't have a recording of Harriet Tubman, who was known to be a lively and a wonderful singer. She was known to be a wonderful singer, Harriet Tubman. So here's Fannie Lou Hamer in her place. Just a little bit of this.

[FANNIE LOU HAMER, "PILGRIM OF SORROW"]

I am an old Pilgrim of sorrow

Tossed in this wide world alone

I have no hope for tomorrow

I'm trying to make heaven my home

So this song which is called "Pilgrim of Sorrow, Citizen of Heaven, Heaven My Home," I've heard Fannie Lou Hamer sing it. I've heard Maya Angelou sing it. She said that her grandmother, Annie Henderson, sang it every Sunday in church. And so this idea of migration, escaping, often meant the hope of heaven for early African Americans.

Now, in hush arbors, you have this kind of way of-- something called lining hymns or prayer with moans. So there's a kind of internal turning inward or inward flight that's happening to escape the reality of slavery, which is a liberation tactic. Again, nation within a nation, secret encoded, what James C. Scott, an anthropologist, calls the hidden transcript.

And so I want to play this traditional prayer with Moses. It might have sounded during these hush arbors. This was collected by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon for Smithsonian Folkways in 1989 as a part of her groundbreaking series called "Wade in the Water." And this is from the African American congregational singing component of that recording.

["TRADITIONAL PRAYER WITH MOANS"]

Heavenly father

Which are in heaven

Hallowed be thy name

Let thy kingdom come

Let your glorious will be done all night

Even as [INAUDIBLE] done in heaven

Forgive us

So moving forward, this is another-- this is, again, a larger painting of what a hush arbor may have looked like. And you see the preacher is here at the center. And so I wanted-- I created this series of soundscapes for the "Sound World of Harriet Tubman" article for Ms. Magazine.

I had the opportunity to visit her birthplace in 2019. This is the oldest plantation in Maryland, where Harriet Tubman was born. This was the spring, so it's very beautiful. But she said, quote, "Slavery is hell," unquote. And so in this beautiful setting, this amazing, terrible brutality is happening. And so African Americans were using these secret meetings as a way of escape.

And so I want to-- this is available on the playlist, as is the Shirley Caesar "Praying Slave Lady," where she enacts a woman going into in her own hush arbor space. I won't play that now just for the sake of time. It's on the playlist. But I wanted to play a little bit of "The Sound World of Harriet Tubman" and help us immerse in the cultural context of where the spirituals formed, and which are a huge basis of the Black revolutionary tradition in song.

["PRAYING SLAVE LADY"]

[CRICKETS]

[INAUDIBLE]

Oh peace, oh me

We all, we meld

Oh where the night falls

[INAUDIBLE]

This is a longer example, but I want to get to the footsteps-- you'll hear footsteps. And the night sound.

[FOOTSTEPS]

This one. So I'll leave you to hopefully experience more of it in the playlist. But that would be kind of the soundscape. Those singers are the women of Gee's Bend, the quilt makers of Gee's Bend from Gee's Bend, Alabama. So I thought, again, women who inherited these song tradition, the congregational songs of the Black church, which formed in these hush arbor meetings.

This is another one where, as a producer, I tried to dramatize an escape that Harriet Tubman would have facilitated. So again, yes, agitating, pushing against, gaining citizenship, literally, for the African Americans she was leading into freedom, but softly, quietly, and in secret, so totally within the hidden transcript of African America. I'll just play a little bit of that.

[MAYA CUNNINGHAM, "ESCAPE--GO DOWN MOSES"]

[FOOTSTEPS]

I'm sorry. So sorry.

[FROGS CROAKING]

[DOGS BARKING]

(SINGING) Go down, Moses

Way down in Egypt land

Tell old Pharaoh

Let my people go.

The inclusion of that song is important because Harriet Tubman said that she would give signals to the group. She couldn't just say, OK, guys, it's time to move forward to safety. She would say, OK, when I sing this song, this is what you do. When I sing this song, it's safe to move forward. And so she used these songs to communicate messages to the freedom travelers that she was leading.

Now, I talked about masking and the kind of hidden transcript that Harriet Tubman engaged in, and others like her, with songs. She actually sang a song when she was escaping called "Bound for the Promised Land" so that her family would know she was escaping but the slave master, who was standing right there while she was singing, would not know because it was a secret and encoded. And I have here the words like hidden transcript, double entendre.

And so in this piece, the Buzzard Lope, it is a song called "Throw Me Anywhere, Lord." And African Americans were using these song dances to enact and express and even protest the conditions that they were subject to. And so the Buzzard Lope-- and this is very common in many African-- West African cultures-- I don't like to generalize-- but it's common to perform history or to perform messages or to perform in this way, where you're enacting something to create a document, a historical document, of an event.

And so here, the gentleman who's leading the dance, the buzzard is in the middle, and it represents the African Americans as the prey. And the buzzard is the hunter. So I think you can know who that is in this story. And so funerary rites were very important to Africans and African Americans who came, or the Africans who came in. And while they were working sometimes to death in fields, they were not allowed to observe burial customs.

And so oftentimes, their comrades and family, if they just dropped dead in the middle of working in intense heat or whatever was going on, they were thrown aside. Thrown me anywhere, Lord. And so to see that happening-- and you know what happens with a dead body and buzzards. This is the kind of thing that they were performing. It was literally performing and protesting and exposing their oppressor. So let's just look at a little bit of this.

[GEORGIA SEA ISLAND SINGERS, "BUZZARD LOPE"]

Throw me anywhere, Lord

In that old field

This is Bessie Jones, blues singer.

(SINGING) Throw me anywhere, Lord,

In that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

In that old field

Don't care where you throw me

In that old field

Since King Jesus owns me

Lord, in that old field

Don't care how you do me

In that old field

Since King Jesus choose me

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

You may be and bang me

Lord, in that old field

Since King Jesus saved me

Lord, in that old field

[INAUDIBLE] me

Lord, in that old field

Just can't despair me

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Don't care how you treat me

Lord, in that old field

Just can't dismiss me

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Don't care how you treat me

Lord, in that old field

Just can't dismiss me

[INAUDIBLE] me

Lord, in that old field

Just can't dismiss me

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field

Throw me anywhere, Lord

Lord, in that old field.

A culture-bearer who is from Sapelo Island, Cornelia Bailey, writes about seeing her father and his friends perform this in their house on Friday nights. And it's called "God, Buzzard, and the Bolito Man." That's the name of her autobiography where she writes about the original context of this dance and how they were performing, as I said, the oppression they were experiencing.

If there are questions, please feel free to let me know. Let's move into, after slavery, we have these different political, as I said, liberation strategies that were enacted that are symbolized by different leaders. And I want to talk about, first, Booker T. Washington, who was often associated with this accommodation strategy.

And the reason is because in 1895, he gave what is called the Atlanta Compromise Speech, where he essentially conceded to the apartheid system of the South. But that's not what he was all-- that's not everything that he was about. This is the Tuskegee Institute, the university-- the school that he built after graduating from Hampton for African Americans to be educated. And there's just much more to the story. But he could be safely described as an accommodationist.

I do have this finger image. I don't mean to be gruesome, but at the time of his giving this speech and telling the white listeners, "In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as fingers," so conceding and giving away, I guess he was speaking for African Americans, African American citizenship, African Americans' right to vote. None of that. He wasn't advocating for that.

There were actually-- I just did some research. Because of the lynching that was happening at the time, there was actually-- a lynching, of course, is a gruesome practice where African American men and women would be killed for trespassing the racial hierarchy or the racial apartheid order, and literally, not too far away, while he was talking about being as separate as two fingers, these people that would do this lynching would keep African Americans' body parts as souvenirs.

And so literally, in a storefront, a man's knuckles who was lynched were being displayed in the storefront as he was talking about being as separate as two fingers. And I do have a little bit of the speech that we can hear.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, [INAUDIBLE] wonder that estimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say cast down your bucket where you are. Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom you are surrounded.

Those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth, strange tongue and habits, for the prosperity of the town, would I permit it, I would receive for I said to my own breath. Cast down your bucket where you are.

[END PLAYBACK]

OK, so I thought that a fitting musical example to accompany this, embody or illustrate the consequence of this strategy, is a prison song, because at the same time where Booker T. Washington was advocating this accommodationist strategy, African Americans were being-- particularly men-- were being held captive in prisons to exploit their labor. They were being convicted for crimes that didn't even exist.

And so this is the consequence of not pushing for civil rights and civil liberties as American citizens-- the prison labor industry grew. Lynchings grew to be at an all-time high. So just wanted to hear the voice of the suffering from-- that they sing-- this is a song called "Go Down, Old Hannah," which is a work song-- a prison labor work song.

["GO DOWN, OLD HANNAH"]

Why don't you go down, old Hannah

Don't you rise no more

Why, go down, old Hannah

Well, well, well

Don't you rise no more

Don't you rise no more

Why don't you go down, old Hannah

Don't you rise no more

This song, old Hannah is the sun. They're beckoning the sun, please go down so that this exploitative labor can stop. I want to talk about Dr. WEB Du Bois and his advocating the Black Liberation, Black liberalism strategy or ideology through agitation, pushing for full citizenship.

And I don't want us to run out of time, because I do have some other things to cover. But essentially, he was the founder of-- one of the founders of the NAACP and then became editor of The Crisis, which was the organ-- that's a fancy word for the newspaper-- of the NAACP that widely engaged African Americans in this strategy.

So I think we'll have time to just listen-- this is also in the playlist-- listen to his discussion of the NAACP and how he ended up becoming involved with the organization in connection with Booker T. Washington.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- And so I changed from studying the Negro problem to propaganda, to letting people know just what the Negro problem meant in what the colored people were suffering and what they were kept from doing. I was practically compelled to make this change because the people who were supporting Atlanta University were a little uneasy about the way in which I talked about the Negro problem.

And pressure began to be put upon the University to do without my services. I had begun to criticize Booker Washington, saying it wasn't enough to teach Negroes trades. The Negroes had to have some voice in their government. They had to have protection in the courts. And they had to have trained men to lead them.

Well, all this together put such pressure upon Atlanta University that at last, I resigned. I mean, they would have they would have had to drop me if they wanted to keep the philanthropic gifts that were coming from the rich people of the North. So I accepted an invitation to come to New York in 1910 and helped the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

I had attended their conference in 1909. I became one of the incorporators and founders of the association. I came up in 1910 and was slated to be the secretary of the organization. But I didn't want to be secretary, because secretary raises money and I couldn't raise money. What I wanted to do was to write and to talk.

[END PLAYBACK]

OK, and he founded The Crisis magazine, which was widely circulated for years. James Weldon Johnson was also a founding member and leader of the NAACP, and wrote what is the African American national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." So we'll listen to a little bit of this to-- that heralds this development, institutional development, institutionalization, of Black liberalism in the form of the NAACP through leaders like James Weldon Johnson and Du Bois.

[THE WARDLAW BROTHERS, "LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING"]

This is a group called the Wardlaw Brothers.

Lift every voice and sing

Until Earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmony of liberty

Let our rejoicings rise

High as the listening skies

Let it resound

Loud as the rolling sea

In this song, it ends with "Sing a song full of the faith like the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Let a--" child. Of course I know the lyrics, but I can't think of them right now. "To this due day begun, let us march on until victory is won." And then the second verse-- or the third verse-- is "True to our God, true to our native land."

And so in the lyrics of this anthem, you have not only the idea of Black liberalism being the two-ness that Du Bois talks about, the African and the American. You have Black liberalism being communicated. "Sing a song full of the hope that the dark past has taught us. Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us," particularly because the migration has started to happen.

But at the end, "Let us march on to the-- true to our God, true to our native land, meaning true to Africa." So we have this idea of Black nationalism enfolded into the lyrics. And that intermixing is very common with the ideologies and those who engage and enact them.

I don't want-- I don't want to-- I think I'm going to have to just edit just a little bit. I'll talk about-- I think that it's important to stay with this, and then I might have to edit at the end just for the sake of time. But again, you have the founding of the NAACP. Their headquarters were in New York. They were free from the tyranny of the South and the kind of direct attacks that could happen by members of the Klan, and so forth, if they agitated against racial apartheid or Jim Crow.

And so outside of their office-- at this point, it was on Fifth Avenue, New York-- every time they learned of a man who was lynched, they would fly this flag to agitate-- to push against-- at least to push the legislative branch to enact a lynching law. And that didn't happen until just a few years ago.

Billie Holiday, in jazz, which had started to develop-- this is later, after the 1910s. So she came up-- actually, she was born in the 1910s but came into influence in the 1930s. And she decided to start performing a protest song called "Strange Fruit" to call attention to and to protest and expose this lynching practice that was the result of the apartheid system.

So we'll listen to a little bit of this. This is from the end of her life-- towards the end of her life, in 1959. Holiday, there's new research that's come out that she was deeply persecuted by the FBI, hounded by the FBI, who were pressuring her to stop singing this song. But she refused, and that was her activism. And she began to call attention-- call great attention, international attention, to the struggle of African America. OK, I don't know why I'm having a--

[BILLIE HOLIDAY, "STRANGE FRUIT"]

Now a little tune written especially for me, "Strange Fruit."

Going to start and stop [INAUDIBLE]. Here we go. This is the first verse.

(SINGING) Southern trees bear strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

How they had freedom to be able to sing this song and perform this song-- she was from Baltimore, based in Harlem, and was using the jazz vocal aesthetic as a mode of personal expression, which is rooted in the blues. She said she wanted the sound and the feeling of Bessie Smith and the harmonic, melodic language and the approach of Louis Armstrong.

And she was one of the first jazz vocalists, and innovated the art form of jazz vocals, and used the freedom of being able to express and perform all kinds of messages through song using this intensely emotionally communicative aesthetic to call attention to the plight of African Americans and the lynching that they were often subjected to, particularly in the Southern and Midwestern United States.

In response to the racial terror of African Americans and Afro descendants in the new world, Marcus Garvey rose as a leader of Black nationalism. During the Harlem Renaissance, he founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1940 and advocated this idea of a nation within a nation.

I want to read Michael Dawson's-- his definition of Black nationalism. "Black nationalist political ideology views African Americans as a nation within a nation that should command self-determination, self-reliance, and an independent Black economic base."

And so there's also heavy emphasis on Africa as an African American homeland. And in some variations, there is a focus on reclaiming Africa as a homeland physically, culturally, and spiritually. And we're going to see this theme, that part of Black nationalism constantly being expressed in the music. And so Garvey's idea, he did advocate for Afro descendant-- I keep saying that because there were chapters all over North America and Cuba, in all other areas of the Black world, certainly, in the Caribbean and Jamaica, Cuba, as I said, in other places.

So anyway, he advocated for migration, eventually. But he used these different kinds of tools to galvanize the identity of African Americans as a nation within a nation. So here are Garveyites in front of the UNIA printing and publishing house on Seventh Avenue in Harlem in 1922 dressed in military regalia, as he was when he would have these grand parades through Harlem.

And so he would do these kinds of things to emphasize African Americans as a nation within a nation. And it's interesting. He chose to have an anthem that was associated with-- the anthem of the UNIA, called the Ethiopian Anthem, that was performed at the first International Convention of Negro Peoples of the World chaired by Garvey.

So here, we have this pan-Africanist sentiment or pan-Africanist perspective given to Black nationalism liberation strategies, where all Afro descendants, no matter where they're coming from, even externalized from the African homeland, are connected. And that's something that Marcus Garvey advocated.

The anthem is not at all written using the aesthetics we would think as of an African American Heritage language. It sounds very much like other anthems do in the more Euro-American aesthetic. [BARKING] Excuse me for my puppy. I was hoping that we would get away with-- I was hoping that we would get away with quiet. But forgive me for that. Anyway, let's play Marcus Garvey, the UNIA and Ethiopian Anthem.

[BENJAMIN EBENEZER BURELL AND ARNOLD JOSIAH FORD, "THE UNIA ETHIOPIAN ANTHEM"]

In this historic building tonight, for the purpose of enlightening the world, respecting the attitude--

These are Garvey's words--

--of the new Negro. If you believe that the Negro should have a place in the sun, if you believe that Africa should be one vast empire controlled by the Negro, then arise and sing the National Anthem of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Ethiopia, thou, land of our fathers

Thou land where the gods loved to be

A storm cloud at night suddenly gathers

Our armies come rushing to thee.

We must in the fight be victorious

Maya, I think you're on mute.

Sorry, sorry. You get the idea. It's kind of a military call to action. I wanted to play that, but I wanted to also use another example of this kind of the New Negro Renaissance, which is also known as the Harlem Renaissance, this cultural blossoming, really kind of the making of much of African American expressive culture as it's presented on the public stage or in the public arena.

And so you have writers like Langston Hughes forging the African American poetry aesthetic using blues to create verse and Sterling Brown, and a lot of times, in the Harlem Renaissance, with the Harlem Renaissance writers and with the painters, they would look to in their work in African homeland connection. And that's something that I think connects with Garvey's brand of Black nationalism. And so Langston Hughes did a piece called "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" that gestures towards an African American homeland.

And then Duke Ellington wrote a piece called "African Flower." And this is just a few of-- just some examples of this embracing Africa or heralding Africa in the work of the Renaissance art figures. We'll just hear a teeny bit of this. I want to skip to him-- he talks a little bit about this, but I'm going to skip to him doing the poem.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- I looked out the window and I saw this great muddy history was linked to this man-- never forgot it--

Sorry.

- Because-- it had been about sunset-- "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."

I've known rivers

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins

My soul has grown deep like the rivers

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young

I built my hut near the Congo and it allowed me to sleep

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans

And I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers, ancient dusky rivers

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

[END PLAYBACK]

[DUKE ELLINGTON, "AFRICAN FLOWER"]

That's the first verse. OK. And then moving forward, these are Harlem Renaissance or Renaissance-associated visual artists who were embracing the idea of Africa in their work. Now, is it culturally accurate Africa? Maybe, maybe not. But since gesturing, I think there was-- not Claude McKay, but another Renaissance poet whose name I can't remember-- who wrote "What is Africa to Me?"

So again, just embracing Africa, kind of enacting or expressing the concomitant ethos that Marcus Garvey was expressing in terms of looking to Africa as a homeland in his brand of Black nationalism.

Now, I know that-- I think we do have probably a hard stop at 1:30. Is that correct? Ashley, is that correct?

Yes, that's correct. And we do have some questions.

OK, are there any questions so far? I do have questions?

Yes.

OK. I'll take time to answer them, I'll stop sharing, and then I'll do one or two other examples, and then we'll end.

All right. Sorry, my camera disappeared. So first, Shah says "Thank you so much for being here and your moving and informative talk. The recordings are such a nice touch. I can't wait to go to the playlist and listen for more. What's the best way to access and listen to your own music?"

My music?

Yes.

Maya Cunningham?

I do have a release out on Spotify. So Spotify.

OK, and just type in Maya Cunningham?

Maya Cunningham. And then I took my website down to be revamped. But it was mayacunninghammusic. So look for mayacunninghammusic.com as well.

OK, and another question. "How do you see Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' fit in. Is it a natural progression on the line of music that came before or something else?"

OK, I'm going to answer that with this last example. So we have-- I'm glad-- let me just skip to that. So we have the advent of the Civil Rights movement and John Coltrane coming into prominence during the 1950s and the 1960s. And of course, he and other jazz musicians were deeply engaged in the battles of the Civil Rights movement.

And I'm just going-- because of this idea of linked fate, which Michael Dawson talks about, the idea of one-- and I do have to say, thank you very much, Dr. Lucie, because I took his course and it really has informed my-- he's a prolific professor in our department. And he formed my ideas around this by his readings and his instruction.

So this idea of linked fate, what happens to one happens to all. And so when jazz musicians would see things like the Emmett Till lynching, or others saw the Emmett Till lynching, what happens to one happens to all. And it was happening. Then you have these strategies of dismantling desegregation through agitation.

And so I'm just going to just move through here. These are some figures of the Civil Rights movement. But they would think of-- we could think of their work like Ella Baker's work, Bayard Rustin's work, Dr. King's work as a call, the work of these SNCC activists, like Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and our CHAR Department founder, who was a SNCC activist, Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, as a response and a call to musicians the work of the Freedom Riders like James Farmer.

And so these are major battles of the Civil Rights movement. And then, of course, we talked about Fannie Lou Hamer. I don't want to spend too much time. But these are the responses that were coming from the jazz music culture, the jazz cohort, of which John Coltrane rose to be a major member of that. And so we don't have time to cover all of this, but my last example, then, will be to respond to that question about John Coltrane, these are some responses-- these are all available on the playlist-- responses by musicians like Maxwell, who was one of our faculty members and taught Black music in the Department of Music and was a major figure in jazz.

So these are-- he saw the sit-in movements happening, ketchup being poured on the protesters' heads, all of that, people being arrested, and wrote songs for them to homage them like "Tender Warriors, or Praise for a Martyr." And then the 1963-- I'm moving forward here-- the 1963--

Maya, also, you're not sharing your screen. I just want to let you know.

Oh, no, that's no good. Thank you. I thought I was sharing my screen. I'm so sorry. Let me just move into this slide, then. So let's see. I thought I was. Let me just close out here. Go. From current slide.

OK, so in 1963, national attention was focused on the Birmingham Children's Campaign that was facilitated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the brainchild of leaders like Diane Nash. And a gentleman named Bethel Pastor who was working with them-- forgive me for not remembering his full name.

But in response, you have the bombing of the four little girls at the very church-- the 16th Street Baptist Church-- that was the center for the Birmingham Children's Campaign. And this rocked the nation, particularly African America, to see children that, of course, are the treasure of individual parents, but are the treasure of the community, being so brutally killed.

And in response, John Coltrane wrote an elegy to them-- or a eulogy-- called-- a commemoration of their death-- called "Alabama." And so out of this kind of freedom time, where there was a freedom ethos that was permeating throughout African America that was being freely expressed in the South now, where there were confrontations to the racial hierarchy, but also freely expressed in the North, in places like New York, where there was the center of the Jazz culture, you have people like John Coltrane writing "A Love Supreme" who were responding to that time.

People like Romare Bearden were founding and innovating collage techniques in response to the freedom struggle. So I'll just, since you mentioned, the person-- thank you for asking that question. I'll play this piece that John Coltrane wrote in '64. I believe "Love Supreme" was 1963. But it may have been a little after this. He began to experiment with the style that would lead to "A Love Supreme." he wrote this piece Alabama that was based on the rhythmic inflections of the speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King at their funeral. We'll just listen to a little bit of this to close out.

[JOHN COLTRANE, "ALABAMA"]

So as the music began to grow in the jazz realm, the call-out to the Civil Rights movement, the response to the Civil Rights movement, and then the call-out to Africa as the African homeland began to develop in the music as well. And there are some scholars who argue that people like Max Roach, Abby Lincoln, Maya Angelou were precipitant Black nationalists that helped to give birth to the later rise of Black nationalism in the Black Power movement that really led, in a certain cohort, African Americans to-- to the popular embracing of Black nationalism, particularly cultural Black nationalism, which championed a return to and embracing of Africa as a homeland through African American expressive culture.

And so that was just a little bit of the Black revolutionary tradition in song. And thank you very much for having me. And if there are other questions, I certainly can answer them. But thank you very much for having me.

Yeah. Thank you, Maya. We have a few questions if that's OK.

Oh, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

OK. So Deborah says, "Thank you so much for your powerful music and critical information that you shared. With lots of viewpoints being expressed and laws being enacted, especially in the South, that rolled back a lot of gains for African Americans, do you think African Americans and African populations in the US can rely on revolutionary music once again to find strength to preserve through this era of the Black Lives Matter movement?"

It's still there, because-- I'm going to say this, and if it steps on toes, OK. It's still there, because when it comes down to the recent protests on college campuses, you still have that freedom ethos and the music of the Black church that rises to the fore. And that really is the foundation, in terms of the modern civil rights movement, of the freedom songs and musicians coming out of the Black church, using that as a mode of expressing and developing music, but also using and re-utilizing songs that are coming out of the church.

So it's still there to a certain extent. I think that, in my frank opinion, I think that some of the ideological warfare that has been enacted upon African America has begun to erode the foundation that allowed us to even have a liberation movement. And I think that's something to attend to in terms of seeking freedom in the contemporary, is that we have to understand the ideologies that are imposed upon us that we may import unknowingly that are a part of the colonial agenda that will dismantle the power that we have in terms of the revolutionary song tradition. So that's something to be-- that's the way I would answer that question. Yes, and we have to attend to things to be able to allow that to come forth even more.

Thank you, Maya. Outside of your playlist, are there any resources you recommend to continue to learn about how music plays a part in the Black revolution?

There's a book by Dr. Ingrid Monson called Jazz, the Civil Rights-- Freedom Sounds, Jazz and the Civil Rights, Call-Out to Jazz in Africa. There's huge, wonderful publications by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who talks about the freedom song tradition that she was a part of during the Civil Rights movement. There's a wonderful book by Shana Redmond called-- it's about Black American anthems, and she goes deeply into that. So those are some resources.

Right. Thank you. Any additional questions? And a few people had to hop off, but that's OK. So as we round out our event today, I'd like to give a few thank yous. First thank you and round of applause to Maya, wonderful discussion. And I love learning and hearing connecting some of those things that we're taught through our history, and as an African American myself, learning even more about our history.

I'd also like to give a thank you to Dr. Covington-Ward-- I think she had to hop off-- for introducing you at the beginning of the event. And lastly, thank you to our event committee, Anita Gill, Mike Grier, and Christina England for helping to bring this together. An event survey is going to be sent out this afternoon. We'd love to get your feedback. Love to hear about additional DEIA events that we can hold to just bring us together and learn a little bit more about other cultures and other experiences.

Again, Maya, thank you very much. I'm looking forward to listening to that playlist over the long weekend and learning more based on some of the resources that you shared. And thank you, and I hope everyone has [INAUDIBLE].

Thank you for having me. Happy Black History Month, everyone.

Thank you.