Beyoncé sings Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” and draws attention to civil rights history
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
It’s been crazy enough in this country with certain white folks going into major freakout mode over Beyoncé Knowles Carter, known to the world as simply Beyoncé, for daring to release a country music album. This outrage happened, completely ignoring the fact that Beyoncé is from Houston, Texas and grew up with the genre, which I addressed here in a recent story about zydeco. Now there is now yet another offense being laid on her Black feet and vocal chords. She’s singing “Blackbird” written by former Beatle Paul McCartney, and taking the song back to its inspirational roots in the civil rights movement — specifically the history of “The Little Rock Nine.”
CBS News reported:
Beatles legend Paul McCartney's praised Beyoncé's cover of the band's song "Blackbird," saying that it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired him in the first place.
Last week, Beyoncé released "Cowboy Carter," a 27-track country album that bends the genre. In it she included "Blackbird," which was originally written by McCartney in 1969 and included in the band's double album "The Beatles."
"I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place," McCartney said in an Instagram post, on Thursday. "I think Beyoncé has done a fab version and would urge anyone who has not heard it yet to check it out. You are going to love it!"
The 81-year-old rocker went on to say that he spoke with Beyoncé, who thanked him for writing the song and letting her do it.
"I told her the pleasure was all mine and I thought she had done a killer version of the song," he added.
Some folks on social media can’t leave well enough alone, and out themselves with max caucacity. Rather than being annoyed, there are times I love seeing trollish comments, simply because I get to be there there for the ratio. In this case, a person decided to “explain” Blackbird to Paul McCartney
I had to laugh at some of the responses:
The same dude also white-splained on an Instagram post (which is now locked down) that he “doesn’t see color.” Sigh. However, the stupid shown here reminded me of the history that is familiar to me, since I lived through it — which should also be a reminder that the openly racist MAGA crap we have to put up with these days ain’t new.
Since I’m not sure how many people actually remember The Little Rock Nine, I thought it might be important to do a little refresher history post today.
From the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture:
The Little Rock Nine
In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. The case, Brown v. The Board of Education, has become iconic for Americans because it marked the formal beginning of the end of segregation. But the gears of change grind slowly. It wasn't until September 1957 when nine teens would become symbols, much like the landmark decision we know as Brown v. The Board of Education, of all that was in store for our nation in the years to come.
The "Little Rock Nine," as the nine teens came to be known, were to be the first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School.
Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls
Three years earlier, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Little Rock school board pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools. This idea was explosive for the community and, like much of the South, it was fraught with anger and bitterness.
On September 2, 1957 the night prior to what was to be the teens' first day in Central High classrooms, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to block their entrance. Faubus said it was for the safety of the nine students. On September 4, just 24 hours after a federal judge ordered the Little Rock Nine to begin attending Central High immediately, a belligerent mob, along with the National Guard, again prevented the teens from entering the school.
Here’s a short 20 minute documentary covering that history.
In this video, we explore the sites where the students attempted to dismantle the racist policies, with the help of the 101st Airborne division of the US Army. We also interview Dr. Terrence Roberts, one of the Little Rock Nine, about his experience. And we cover the aftermath of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in the Little Rock School District, as well as the impact the integration process had on the civil rights movement.
While looking for a documentary to post — a program I remember seeing on TV years ago popped up. This episode of Oprah aired on 11/16/1996. (watch the faces of the members of the Nine)
In the late 50's, the nine black teenagers who were sent to integrate the Little Rock Central High School endured relentless bullying, threats and violence from many of their white classmates. Nearly 40 years later, in a groundbreaking episode of "The Oprah Show," some of the white students who admitted they harassed the Little Rock Nine Came forward
So back to Paul McCartney and his denier. Back in 2016, McCartney performed in Little Rock, Arkansas, and took this photo with two members of the Little Rock Nine:
Here’s a clip of that performance.
Melissa Noel wrote for Essence:
Beyoncé’s Rendition Of 'Blackbird' Is An Ode To The Civil Rights Movement
Beyoncé’s latest album, “Cowboy Carter,” released as the second act of her three-part project, has garnered significant attention since its release last Friday. On the album, country music legends Linda Martell and Willie Nelson appear, as well as duets with Miley Cyrus and Post Malone and a cover of Dolly Parton’s famed song “Jolene.”
In addition, Beyonce’s eighth studio album includes a soulful cover of the Beatles’ classic “Blackbird.” This rendition, titled “Blackbiird” on the album to align with its act ii theme, features a quartet of Black women country singers: Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts
[...]
Beyoncé’s cover of “Blackbird” with an all-Black female ensemble pays homage to McCartney’s original intent while also highlighting the ongoing fight for representation in the music industry, particularly within the country genre. By featuring Black women artists in this rendition, Beyoncé underscores their resilience and significance in the racial justice movement.
I’ll leave you with this, written by Juliana Kim, for NPR:
What The Beatles and Beyoncé's 'Blackbird' means to this Little Rock Nine member
When McCartney sings "Blackbird fly," Beals interprets it as meaning "I see you." But when the words come from Beyoncé, Beals said she understands it as "I've done it, you can do it too."
"It gives it a new meaning," Beals said. "She's saying whatever is your thing, get up, pack your wings and fly."
She hopes Beyoncé's cover will prompt people to remember and reflect on the civil rights movement, as well as remind them that there is more work to do in the fight for equality.
"As long as there is a single individual on the planet who is not free, then none of us are free," she said.
Beals added that the song and its reference to the Little Rock Nine are especially poignant today, given that several states — including Arkansas — have fought to limit the teaching of Black history in recent years.
Beals said her books about her experience at Central High School, including Warriors Don't Cry and March Forward, Girl, have also been challenged in schools over the years.
"Blackbird is about the past, today and the future," she said.
Here’s Beyoncé’s cover.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Davante Jennings cast his first ballot for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Republican Donald Trump’s election that year, he says, turned him from an idealistic college student to a jaded cynic overnight.
Jennings walked away from a system he thought ignored people like himself, a young Black man who grew up politically conscious in Alabama but wielded no obvious power. It took nearly six years for him to see that view as self-defeating.
Now, at 27, Jennings is not only eager to cast his second presidential vote for Democratic President Joe Biden, but he also is fully invested as an activist, top aide to a Georgia state lawmaker and regular volunteer recruiting would-be voters off the sideline as part of the not-for-profit New Georgia Project.
“I was like, I’m not voting for this if it’s all rigged and doesn’t even matter,” he said in an interview. “Now, I can talk to people that have been beaten down by the system and say, ‘I get it. Let’s talk about why this is important.’”
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When Walder St. Louis entered the Miami pawnshop in October 2021, his shopping list contained just a few items: Two AK-47s and an AR-15.
Germine Joly, then head of the Haitian gang 400 Mawozo, had placed the order from a Port-au-Prince prison. St. Louis would soon send two barrels of firearms back to the Haitian capital.
Heavily armed gangs control 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, the United Nations has estimated, where they rape, kidnap and kill with impunity. Haiti doesn’t manufacture firearms, and the U.N. prohibits importing them, but that’s no problem for the criminals. When they go shopping, the United States is their gun store. The semiautomatic rifles that have wrought human carnage from an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., to a Walmart in El Paso are also being used to menace the Haitian government and terrorize the population.
U.S. authorities seized some of the guns in the 400 Mawozo plot before they could be smuggled, and Joly, St. Louis and two others pleaded guilty to federal gunrunning conspiracy charges. The gang would soon gain notoriety for kidnapping 17 American and Canadian missionaries.
Other firearms, purchased in part with ransom money, slipped into Haiti undetected. That’s the most common outcome, analysts say, owing to access in the United States, corruption in Haiti and insufficient screening in both countries.
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Amid frictions with some in the West, Lula has chosen to focus his foreign-policy muscle on rallying the global south. “The global south is becoming an essential part of the solution for the main crises afflicting the planet,” such as inequality, climate change, and war, Lula said in his address to the AU.
The solutions to those crises must be both political and economic, in Lula’s telling. His address mentioned establishing an independent Palestinian state as well as working to ensure that developing countries are not restricted to neoliberal economic models by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. “There will be no stability or democracy with hunger and unemployment,” he added.
Brazil has said its priorities for its G-20 presidency include combatting world hunger, reforming multilateral organizations including the IMF and World Bank, and giving fairer sovereign debt treatment to struggling borrowers. Accomplishing those goals depends on building strong coalitions. And “African countries are often getting behind the agendas Brazil is putting forth globally,” said Brazilian political scientist Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro.
Brazil is studying plans to restructure and partially forgive some of its $280 million in loans to African governments, including those of Ghana, Mozambique, and Senegal. Lula aims to pressure wealthier creditors to do the same. The countries that Lula visited—Egypt and Ethiopia—are also new members of the BRICS grouping. The BRICS’ development bank is taking small steps to build alternatives to dollar hegemony.
Improved ties between Brazil and Africa, as well as increased trade, could boost Brazil’s economy. During Lula’s first two presidential administrations from 2003 to 2010, Brazil opened or reactivated more than 15 embassies in African countries and launched multiple bilateral cooperation programs. By 2009, Brazilian exports to Africa reached a record high of 5.7 percent of its global exports. That number fell to 3.9 percent by 2023, when Lula took office again.
Now, in an effort to reboot commercial ties on the continent, the Lula administration is rolling out new credit lines for exports to African countries and planning bilateral cooperation programs with Brazilian state research agencies in the health care and agriculture sectors. “We don’t need to leave Africa in the sole hands of the IMF and the World Bank,” said Claudia de Borba Maciel, the Brazilian ambassador to Guinea-Bissau, in an interview last week. “Brazil and the BRICS bank can have an important role.”
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An overhaul of Somalia’s constitution, scrapping its power-sharing system and handing the president increased control, is threatening to destabilise the fragile country, as its wealthiest and most stable state refuses to recognise the changes.
The amendments risk worsening violence, the information minister from the semi-autonomous state of Puntland has warned. Mohamud Aidid Dirir told the Guardian that “almost a totally new constitution” had been introduced without input from the state’s leaders. He accused the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, of using parliament to “gather authority into his hands”.
Somali lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last weekend to adopt a slew of amendments to the constitution, which will reshape the political and electoral system and hand more power to the president. The parliamentary speaker, Adan Mohamed Nuur Madobe, called the move “historic”.
The amendments give the president the authority to appoint and dismiss prime ministers, transferring that power from lawmakers, and grant him increased control over appointments to the electoral commission, taking away input from federal states. The current power-sharing model of government, a system that ensures the country’s four main clans get equal representation in parliament, will be also scrapped in place of universal suffrage.
“We are a fragile country still recovering from a civil war, which doesn’t have stable politics. If power is concentrated in one person’s hands, there is a risk we could go back to civil war. We have always warned that this could happen,” said Dirir.
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Hundreds of newcomers from Africa have filled a shortage of workers in RouynNoranda, creating a new community in a remote mining town. How African Immigrants Have Revived a Remote Corner of Quebec
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Not long ago, the handful of African immigrants in Rouyn-Noranda, a remote city in northern Quebec, all knew one another.
There was the Nigerian woman long married to a Québécois man. The odd researchers from Cameroon or the Ivory Coast. And, of course, the doyen, a Congolese chemist who first made a name for himself driving a Zamboni at hockey games. Today, newcomers from Africa are everywhere — in the streets, supermarkets, factories, hotels, even at the church-basement boxing club.
A couple from Benin has taken over Chez Morasse, a city institution that introduced a greasy spoon favorite, poutine, to this region. And women from several corners of West and Central Africa were chatting at the city’s new African grocery store, Épicerie Interculturelle. “Since last year, it’s like the gate of hell or the gate of heaven, something opened, and everybody just kept trooping in — I’ve never seen so many Africans in my life,” Folake Lawanson Savard, 51, the Nigerian whose husband is Québécois, said to loud laughter in the store.
The influx of immigrants has also raised concerns, contributing to the nation’s housing crisis and straining public services in some areas, leading the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to announce plans to rein in their numbers.
The increase has created African communities in the unlikeliest places in the Frenchspeaking province of Quebec. Some are working in logging in boreal forests. Others, after becoming permanent residents or citizens, are government workers in Indigenous towns accessible only by boat or small propeller planes.
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The collective plan is designed to provide meaningful relief to Black borrowers who rely more heavily on student debt than white families and who take longer to pay them off, the Biden-Harris administration says. The Grio: What Black student loan borrowers should know about Biden’s new ‘Plan B’ for debt relief
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President Joe Biden announced Monday his highly anticipated Plan B for student loan debt cancellation nearly a year after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down his original program. The White House’s announcement asserts that the new plan will provide “significant relief” for Black and Latino borrowers.
“We know there are big racial disparities in the student loan program, and students of color are more likely to borrow larger amounts and are more likely to struggle to repay [their loans],” U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal told theGrio. Additionally, he said, the program would have a “positive impact on the racial wealth gap.
“Most Black borrowers owe more 10 years out of school than they originally borrowed because of interest outstripping payments,” Kvaal explained. “We need to bring relief to everyone who’s struggling with their student loans.”
The announcement includes five methods to “fix” the federal student loan program, including providing debt cancellation for borrowers who owe more today than they did when they entered repayment, who have owed for 20 years or more and who are experiencing financial hardship.
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