The Fourth of July holiday has never symbolized freedom for me, since my ancestors remained enslaved on July 4, 1776. Every year I revisit the story of Frederick Douglass’ speech in 1853, in which he castigates a nation that celebrates independence while holding over 3 million Black people in bondage. And we still ain’t free, 246 years later, if freedom is supposed to also encompass equality.
The irony of celebrating “Independence Day” is sinking in for many not-Black folks who are reeling from the latest in a series of political setbacks handed down by the Supreme Court and Republican controlled state legislatures. Across the country there are protests planned. There is a lot of anger, and I am also hearing cries of despair. I hear folk talking about leaving the country, others pronouncing that they won’t bother to vote, cause voting gets them nowhere. I’m hearing a lot of blaming and seeing too much finger-pointing. Some people are just scared, having never had to face the open levels of hate in this nation which led to a coup attempt that almost succeeded—with so many of those who plotted it free to try again.
I know what I have learned to do when shit hits the fan and gloom is in the forecast for the days ahead. I draw upon the wisdom of musical organizers who always put a little “stiffnin” in my spine, and give me the courage and strength to get up and face yet another day.
With that in mind, join me this Black Music Sunday in meeting, honoring and listening to the SNCC Freedom Singers.
The Freedom Singers’ story begins with the formation of the Albany Movement. As told on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) website:
In October 1961, SNCC field secretaries Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon, later joined by Charles Jones, traveled to Albany, Georgia where local citizens, especially students at Albany State College (today Albany State University), an HBCU, were heating up the civil rights struggle. They had come to conduct workshops on nonviolence and to initiate voter registration efforts. At the time, although Albany’s population was 40 percent Black, few were registered to vote. The city itself was completely segregated. Recalled Sherrod, “When we first came to Albany, the people were afraid, really afraid…” Locals were scared of white retaliation due to the culture of fear created by Police Chief Laurie Pritchett.
Out of the Albany Movement, a powerful tool for change was birthed: the Freedom Singers.
Freedom songs and freedom singing reached new heights during the Albany Movement. At mass meetings, the singing was done in a congregational style. “There weren’t soloists; there were song leaders,” explained Bernice Johnson. Song leaders began a song, but “the minute you started… the song was expanded by the voices of everyone present.” The effect was powerful and empowering.
Cordell Reagon was struck by the depth of the congregational style of singing in Albany. After talking with SNCC executive secretary James Forman, he formed the original SNCC Freedom Singers to sing movement songs to audiences across the nation. Reagon, a tenor, recruited Bernice Johnson to sing alto, Rutha Mae Harris to sing soprano, and Chuck Neblett to sing bass. They were occasionally joined by Albany activist Bertha Gober. The group hit the road in December 1962 on its first tour organized by Toshi Seeger, Pete Seeger’s wife. “We traveled all over the country in a compact Buick,” Rutha Mae Harris recalled. “On one tour, we managed to go fifty thousand miles in nine months without any flights.”The Freedom Singers originated as a student quartet formed in 1962 at Albany State College in Albany, Georgia. After folk singer Pete Seeger witnessed the power of their congregational-style of singing, which fused black Baptist acapella church singing with protest songs and chants, their performances drew aid and support to SNCC during the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Seeger suggested The Freedom Singers as a touring group to the SNCC executive secretary James Forman as a way to fuel future campaigns. As a result, communal song became essential to empowering and educating audiences about civil rights issues and a powerful social weapon of influence in the fight against Jim Crow segregation. Without the music force of broad communal singing, the Civil Rights Movement may not have resonated beyond of the struggles of the Jim Crow South.
Take a listen to this interview with one of those freedom singers, Charles Neblett. When Emmett Till was killed at the age of 14. Neblett was the same age, and he identified with young Till—saying, “that was me.” Hearing about the acquittal of Till’s murderers, who then went on to sell the story of exactly how they killed him, changed his life. He joined the movement only a few years later.
Neblett talks about movement efforts to encourage Black residents to vote, encouraging them to go register at the courthouse, and Black residents looking at them like they were out of their minds. When people in the community watched them get arrested and go to jail, they began to get over their fear, singing songs with lyrics like “ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around … ain’t gonna let fear turn me around.”
Meet two other Freedom Singers, Rutha Mae Harris and Charles Sherrod, in this Georgia Stories profile.
As the YouTube caption notes:
Albany native Rutha Mae Harris recalls life in the segregated town of Albany. In 1961 […] African-American activists like Harris and Charles Sherrod organized marches in the streets and were arrested for it. They protested those arrests and when they were not protesting, they were in churches organizing and planning. Harris explains how Albany churches were filled with people singing about freedom and how singing empowered her.
Harris was also featured in a 2020 story from Aamna Mohdin, community affairs correspondent for The Guardian.
Harris’ story is one that started out shaped by her father, and continues to be shaped today—by her over 60-year fight for freedom.
Born on 27 November 1940, in Albany, Harris spent much of her early childhood sheltered from the brutal reality of segregation. To protect his children, her father, a minister, had not allowed them to go to restaurants, hotels or the cinema – anywhere where they might have found their entry barred because of the colour of their skin. Instead, he told his children he had built their beloved family home for them so that they did not need to go out for entertainment. Harris remembers a time when he stopped at a petrol station and asked if the children could use the toilet. When the owner refused, her father left without buying any fuel.
In 1960, Harris enrolled at Florida A&M University, majoring in music. When she came home at the end of the school year, in the summer of 1961, the Albany civil rights movement had begun. She put her education on hold and became involved. While she was aware that racism existed, she did not realise the extent of the apartheid-like system in operation. “It was when I started working in a movement that I realised that I was not free,” she says. When she finally understood the scale of the oppression that black Americans faced at the time, she was devastated, but determined to fight. “I was involved in the civil rights movement to get my freedom for myself,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone else getting it for me.”
[...]
She adds: “I’ll be 80 years old in November and I’m still singing the songs of freedom and still travelling.” She organises two groups of singers in Albany; a continuation of what she was doing in the 60s. “Telling the story of the civil rights movement through song. I do not want this song to die out so I keep them afloat.”
For me, there are no more powerful words than “I Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” The Freedom Singers tailored traditional gospel lyrics to the situation in Albany, calling out Chief Pritchett by name.
Ain't gonna let segregation (Lordy), turn me around
Turn me around, turn me around
Ain't gonna let segregation (Lordy), turn me around
Keep on a walking, keep on a talking
Marching up to freedom land
Ain't gonna let no jailhouse (Lordy), turn me around
Turn me around, turn me around
Ain't gonna let no jailhouse, turn me around
Keep on a walking, keep on a talking
Marching up to freedom land
Ain't gonna let no Nervous Nellie (Lordy), turn me around
Turn me around, turn me around
Ain't gonna let no Nervous Nellie (Lordy), turn me around
Keep on a walking, keep on a talking
Marching up to freedom land
Ain't gonna let Chief Pritchett (Lordy), turn me around
Turn me around, turn me around
Ain't gonna let Chief Pritchett (Lordy), turn me around
Keep on a walking, keep on a talking
Marching up to freedom land
Have a listen.
In 1963, the Freedom Singers were introduced to a wider audience when they performed at the Newport Folk Festival, alongside artists like Bob Dylan, Odetta, and Joan Baez.
This clip offers three songs—“Fighting For My Rights,” “I Love Your Dog, I Love My Dog,” and “Get On Board, Little Children.”
The Freedom Singers also performed “Woke Up This Morning.”
The YouTube caption concisely notes the impact of the Singers’ music for anyone who stumbles upon the video.
Recorded live at the Newport Folk Festival, on July 26, 1963; The Freedom Singers: Bernice Johnson, Rutha Harris, Cordell Hull Reagon and Charles Neblitt No folk-song trend of the last few years aroused so much attention as the use of "freedom songs" in the Negro civil rights movement. This is probably the greatest peacetime functional use of folk music since the labor movement organizing drive in the 1930's. There "freedom songs" are old spirituals with renewed meaning for today, either in their original form or with new words. They are heard in jails, and at sit-ins, demonstrations, rallies and all tension points where morale needs a boost.
Finally, the Freedom Singers closed the Newport Folk Festival as part of a powerful ensemble, singing “We Shall Overcome.”
One of the Freedom Singers who you may be more familiar with (especially if you’re a frequent Black Music Sunday reader) is Bernice Johnson Reagon.
Johnson was suspended from Albany State for her activism. She spent a semester at Spelman College in Atlanta before joining SNCC’s newly-formed Freedom Singers in 1962. She married the group’s co-founder Cordell Reagon. The Freedom Singers toured the country to raise money for SNCC projects in the Deep South. The group also moved in and out of movement hotspots, using their music to provide a spark for local activism. “Basically the singing was the ‘bed’ and the ‘air’ of everything,” remembered Johnson. “I had never heard or felt singing do that on that level of power.”
In 1966, Johnson Reagon founded the Harambee Singers and in 1973, she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an all-women, African American a cappella group that sought to effect change and portray the Black experience through their voices. Johnson Reagon continued to use her powerful singing to allow others to study the African American oral tradition in radio, film, and concerts across the country.
In 1969, folk singer and activist Barbara Dane and her partner Irwin Silber founded Paredon Records, whose 50 recordings would later be donated to Smithsonian Folkways. One album they produced in 1975 was Reagon’s Give Your Hands to Struggle. I bought that album more than once, wearing it out by playing it over and over again. An added bonus was the extensive liner notes, now available in PDF format, which I suggest you read.
Reagon spoke with Bill Moyers in 1991 about “This Little Light of Mine” and the power of “I” versus “We” in Black music.
Transcript:
BILL MOYERS: You talk about, you know, “This Little Light of Mine” was what people could do, could sing when they were scared, when they were in trouble.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON: A lot of these black, old songs are “I” songs-“This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine.” So when you get a group-now, changing songs to “we,” like “We shall not be moved” and “We shall overcome,” that’s the presence of white people in collaboration with black people because in order to express community, you have to go to the first person plural. And in the black community, when you want the communal expression, everybody says “I.” So if there are five of us here and all of us say “I,” then you know that there’s a group. And a lot of times I’ve found when people say “we” they’re giving you a cover to not say whether they’re going to be there or not. So the “I” songs are very important. So “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” means that when the march goes, I am going to be there. So it really is a way of saying “The life that I have, I will offer to this thing.”
And we grow up in a culture, as black people, where we were really-we really got strong messages about being visible and that the best way to be was to have this sheen and move almost as if nobody could tell you were there. You know, whatever job you had, if you could just get it done and just-and the cooler you were about it, the more you were applauded, to the extent that people really had to go through a barrier to stick out. Now, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” is just crashing through all of it. It is a very arrogant stance. “Everywhere I go, I’m going to let it shine.” And sometimes I used to say, “Well, you know, I’m going to shine so bright, you’re going to have to have shades on to see me!” And that’s something-many times, that was the way we felt. If you get a bunch of black people together walking down some of these Southern streets, you had never seen that yourself, in the march, so you really are very clear that you are sticking out. And so that’s that “This little light of mine” song.
The Freedom Singers still with us continue to carry the message. Rutha Mae Harris, Charles Neblett, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and her daughter Toshi Reagon all performed at the White House for President Barack Obama in 2010, as part of the "Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement."
They also led a workshop for students at the White House.
Toshi Reagon, daughter of Cordell and Bernice, sings to a new generation, carrying the commitment in the music forward. (I’ve written about her a couple times, too.)
If you are scared, worried, discouraged, disheartened, or just plain angry about events unfolding around us, and our uncertain future, please let this and other powerful music wash over you, lift you up, and focus you on what must be done—for ourselves, our communities, our country and the world.
Join me in the comments for even more uplifting and mobilizing music, and remember to keep your eyes on the prize. Vote, and take someone with you.