The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most moving and transformational chapters of Black history so it’s appropriate to highlight it during Black History Month. And it is hard to imagine the Civil Rights Movement without the songs people sang during the good and the bad, during the rallies, sit ins, marches, arrests and beatings. In the face of violence, the songs were not just tools of inspiration but tools of non-violent resistance. While there were too many songs too count, these stand out as among the best.
1. We Shall Overcome was a gospel song, which became a civil rights anthem during a strike in Charleston in 1946. One of the women walking the picket line outside of the American Tobacco Company, started singing the spiritual. Zilphia Horton, the co-founder of the Highlander Research and Education Center, learned the song and taught it to Pete Seeger, who taught it to other folk singers, including Guy Carawan who performed it and taught it at the founding meeting of the Civil Rights Organization SNCC ( Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.) The song then became an anthem not only for the Civil Rights movement in the United States, but for South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement, North Ireland’s independence movement, and many other independence movements in countries including India, Bengal, Czechoslovakia. Listen to Mahalia Jackson sing We Shall Overcome:
2. Oh Freedom is an anti-slavery spiritual that was sung by slaves. It is fitting that in 1963, this freedom song inaugurated the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where 250,000 would rally for civil rights and labor rights, and where Martin Luther King would deliver his legendary I have a Dream speech. On the morning of August 28th, the protesters gathered at the Washington Monument, where Joan Baez sang Oh Freedom, immortalizing the song for generations to come.
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