The Freedom Singers
Intrinsically connected, their performances drew aid and support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the emerging civil rights movement.
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.
Rutha Mae Harris, a former freedom singer, speculated that without the music force of broad communal singing, the civil rights movement may not have resonated beyond the struggles of the Jim Crow South.
He recruited Albany natives and local singers in the black church Rutha Mae Harris and Bernice Johnson, whom he later married.
[8] Churches played a crucial role in the Civil Rights movement, often times hosting gatherings to mobilize people and offering a safe space from racist intimidation.
As author, Richard King, notes, "freedom songs were particularly striking ways of making a presence known to the hostile whites and to the nation- and to the participants themselves.
[10] After the first initial meeting, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leaders realized very quickly the power that Freedom Songs had on the movement.
On February 1, 1960, in the Greensboro sit-ins, four African-American college students protested segregation and Jim Crow laws by sitting at a "whites-only" lunch counter.
Using sit-ins as a means of protest became increasingly popular throughout the South, and the anti-segregationist organizers began to see college students as a potential resource.
This form of nonviolent protest brought SNCC to national attention, throwing a harsh public light on white racism in the South.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) called a conference later that year to found a new organization, and from this grew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, usually pronounced "snick").
Joining forces with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), white and black activists rode buses together into Southern towns to protest segregated bus terminals.
[11][12][13] The Freedom Singers were intrinsically connected to SNCC, which was formed on April 16, 1960, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to organize against growing injustice and violence against black people.
The group's main focus was to educate the black community about their basic freedoms, including the right to vote, and encourage the integration of "whites-only" territory.
SNCC planned and funded the Freedom Singers' tours and paid the members ten to twenty dollars a week to work as field secretaries for the movement.
[10] The highpoint of the Freedom Singers' career occurred in the spring and summer of 1963 when they appeared at the March on Washington, an event that drew 350,000 people.
The Freedom Singers contributed to a live album for the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, where the group sang "We Shall Overcome" linking arms with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul and Mary.
[15] The New York Times identified the Freedom Singers as "the ablest performing group" to emerge from a broad field of folk musicians.
The songs, influenced by gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, and which have a hymn-like quality, show a relationship between "secular and spiritual elements" with ornamented, richly harmonized and syncopated part singing.
[17] "Singing was integral" to the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, helping to bring young black Americans together to work for racial equality.
"[8] Singing together gave protesters strength to participate in demonstrations and freedom rides—and to endure jail time, verbal and physical assaults, police dog attacks, and high-pressure fire hoses aimed at them.
[19] Because the melodies and lyrics were so familiar to their black American listeners, the Freedom Singers were able to build on already-established contexts to create metaphors that related to their cause.
Charles Albert Tindley and "If My Jesus Wills" composed by Louise Shropshire between 1932 and 1942—provided the basis for "We Shall Overcome", which has been called the movement's anthem.
Other white folksingers, such as Guy Carawan, Joan Baez, Barbara Dane, took it up by way of showing solidarity with the growing movement and helping their audiences to identify with the struggles of the students in the south.
[1] Guy and Candie Carawan, two Freedom Movement activists who were also singing musicians, were responsible for popularizing "We Shall Overcome" by making sure that students at the Highlander Folk School left with powerful memories of the effect it had on any group.
[15] The youngest member of SNCC's staff, by 1961 he had been on Freedom Rides, worked in voter registration in Mississippi and sit-in demonstrations in Illinois and Alabama.
