From Dr. Kevin Bird’s lecture Freedom Songs: The Songs and Singing that Inspired the Civil Rights Movement:
African Americans had this bold notion that the leprous body politic of the United States might even be washed and cleansed.
And that’s a bold notion after you’ve lived through the worst episode of political violence in the Western world as ever seen in 1875, from Virginia to Texas, untold numbers of political assassinations. When you’ve lived through other eras, eras like the last eight decades of the 1800s, the establishment of the Jim Crow regime, which the Nazis looked to and said, hey, that works pretty good. Maybe we should try something like that.
You know, they’ve got some pretty good laws over there in America. Let’s copy them. Hitler himself will tell you that.
And so to have the faith that you could baptize the body politic of the United States and cleanse it in some way, that’s big faith. That’s big faith indeed.
Bird had just played a clip of Fanny Lou Hamer singing “Going Down to the River Jordan.”
There’s a line from Mark Noll that I have mentioned before, one that regularly rings in my head and that I couldn’t help thinking of listening to that lecture: “reform was born aloft on the wings of song.” It comes from his book God and Race in American Politics:
As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.
What I had forgotten is that immediately preceding this is a quote from and brief description of the life of… Fannie Lou Hamer. (“She had Mississippi in her bones.”)
I woke up this morning and had Hamer singing “Woke Up This Morning” stuck in my head. I’m driving an hour to Portland today and I’m going to do myself a favor and listen to Hamer talk and sing the whole way.
Also from the lecture, Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons briefly introduces herself and her story:
And I thought, Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into here? Because I was at the end of my sophomore year at Spelman College. So what did they give us? They gave us a list of members of the NAACP who lived in Laurel. And we were to go and knock on their door to see if they wanted to be a part of Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Well, that was scary. The idea of going up to somebody’s door and asking them, Are you interested in having a Freedom Summer project? Yes, you could get killed. Yes, your house could be burned down. You [could] lose your job. But are you interested? That’s what we were told to say.
And of course, I went to the first couch and the woman’s name was Eberta Spinks. And I knock on the door, she opens the door and I’m standing there trying to say… How do you ask somebody if they want to possibly be killed or have their house burned to the ground?
And I’m not getting much out and she looks me up and down and she says, Are you one of those Freedom Riders? Well, I hadn’t been one, but I thought maybe I should say yes. And I said, Yes, ma’am.
And she said, Come in, I’ve been waiting on you all my life. And she was in her 50s. So that was the beginning of the Laurel movement.