Civil Rights Music
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As a whole, new social movements scholarship emerged as a response to and interpretation of contemporary European social movements, such as the Greens, that were focused on cultural, moral, and identity issues, rather than on economic distribution. Much post-war European sociology was more influenced by Marxist theory than was its American counterpart; as such, it had often assumed that collective action came out of material interests and that collective actors were economic classes. “The social movement,” for many European scholars, was the labor-socialist movement. By contrast, NSMs [i.e., new social movements] were often thought to be more like “moral crusades,” and as such appeared as a new phenomenon that needed to be theorized distinctly for the historical moment in which they occurred. Thus the cultural component of new social movement theory had to do with the content of movement ideology, the concerns motivating activists, and the arena in which collective action was focused—that is, cultural understandings, norms, and identities rather than material interests and economic distribution. New social movement theory was generally macro in orientation, and retained the traditional Marxian concern with articulating the ways in which societal infrastructures produced and are reflected by culture and action. New social movement theory garnered attention, support, and critique from scholars. Many North American critics, not surprisingly, questioned whether the social movements themselves, or the social conditions that helped to produce them, were in fact “new.” (92, all emphasis in original)
It is important to emphasize that new social movements usually focus on “cultural understandings, norms, and identities” rather than solely on class struggles or material interests à la “old” social movements. Additionally, Williams’s emphasis on the cultural aspects of new social movement theory, which revolve around the “content of movement ideology, the concerns motivating activists, and the arena in which collective action [is] focused,” seems to directly speak to the Civil Rights Movement’s qualifications as a new social movement. The Civil Rights Movement distinguished itself from previous African American (if not other American) popular movements in light of its unique utilization of radio, television, print media, grassroots political organizing, and more traditional forms of social activism in its efforts to establish and express its “movement ideology,” encapsulate the “concerns” of its organic intellectual-activists, and engage the new social, political, and cultural “arena” in the immediate post-war period, especially between 1954–1965.[7]
Drawing from a wide range of new social movement scholarship, the defining characteristics of new social movements can be essentially summarized as: (1) identity, autonomy, and self-realization; (2) defense rather than offense; (3) politicization of everyday life; (4) working-class and underclass (as opposed to merely middle-class) mobilization; (5) self-exemplification (organizational forms and styles that reproduce and circulate the ideology of the movement); (6) unconventional means (as opposed to conventional means such as voting); and (7) partial and overlapping commitments (a web of intermeshing memberships rather than traditional party loyalty).[8] In many ways the Civil Rights Movement resembles a “new” social movement much more than it does an “old” social movement, and this, almost in and of itself, may go far to explain why so many “old school” historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and cultural critics have failed to acknowledge the ways movement leaders and rank and file movement members politicized and utilized music to capture and convey the politics, culture, and social justice agenda of the movement.
Here it is important to observe that both the new social movement scholars and Civil Rights Movement scholars emphasize collective identity and agency as being central to their respective fields of critical inquiry. In fact, it could be said that like social movements in general, the Civil Rights Movement enabled its participants to not only imagine themselves as part of a larger community, but to actually create art, culture, and communities of struggle. As a result, the movement produced a sense of collective identity, as well as collective agency. Obviously the Civil Rights Movement’s “politicization of everyday life,” its “unconventional means” of utilizing radio, television, and print media to educate, decolonize and politicize, its “partial and overlapping commitments” to the strategies, tactics, and goals of both “old” and “new” popular movements, its “working-class and underclass (as opposed to merely middle-class) mobilization,” and, perhaps most importantly, its “self-exemplification” and emphasis on “self-realization” all speak volumes about its clear qualifications as a “new” social, political, and cultural movement and also the ways in which it brazenly promoted a new post-war African American collective identity and form of agency.
Collective identity, as Francesca Polletta and James Jasper asserted in “Collective Identity and Social Movements” (2001), is “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity” (285). Collective identities, they importantly continued, “are expressed in cultural materials—names, narratives, symbols, verbal styles, rituals, clothing, and so on—but not all cultural materials express collective identities. Collective identity does not imply the rational calculus for evaluating choices that ‘interest’ does. And unlike ideology, collective identity carries with it positive feelings for other members of the group” (285).
Indeed, it is possible to have an individual identity that is not directly tied to that of the broader collective and, as a result, one may argue that simply defining oneself does not in and of itself constitute a politically significant act or serve as adequate evidence of a social movement. As a matter of fact, it should be emphasized that any attempt to discuss the politics of the popular music and popular culture of the Civil Rights Movement demands careful delineation because, truth be told, it was variously preoccupied with style, performance, opposition, leisure, consumption, representation, and, increasingly, liberation. However, as Scott Hunt and Robert Benford in “Collective Identity, Solidarity, and Commitment” (1994) asserted, “[b]y virtue of constructing and elaborating a sense of who they are, movement participants and adherents also construct a sense of who they are not” (443). Needless to say, this process of differentiation is an extremely important one, and obviously registers as a politically significant act when we recall the unconventional politics, counterculture, and defensive posture of, as well as the emphasis on both self-realization and self-exemplification in, new social movements discourse discussed above.
In Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (1991), Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison famously conceived of social movements as “forms of cognitive praxis which are shaped by both external and internal political processes” (4; see also 45–65). They went on to elaborate:
Social movements express shifts in the consciousness of actors as they are articulated in the interactions between activists and their opposition(s) in historically situated political and cultural contexts. The content of this consciousness, what we call the cognitive praxis of a movement, is thus socially conditioned: it depends upon the conceptualization of a problem which is bound by the concerns of historically situated actors and on the reactions of their opponents. In other words, social movements are the result of an interactional process which centers around the articulation of a collective identity and which occurs within the boundaries of a particular society. Our approach thus focuses upon the process of articulating a movement identity (cognitive praxis), on the actors taking part in this process (movement intellectuals), and on the contexts of articulation (political cultures and institutions). (4)
Throughout this study my focus will be on three key themes. First, there will be an intense focus on the emergence of a new, post-war black identity and on the process (or, at times, processes) through which movement intellectual-artist-activists
articulated a Civil Rights Movement identity. Second, the next three chapters will center on the principle actors or, rather, the Civil Rights Movement organic intellectual-artist-activists—mostly musicians, but also other unsung movement members—who significantly, although often subtly, contributed to the origins and evolution of the Civil Rights Movement. Lastly, the chapters to follow will focus on the social, political, and cultural contexts that historically influenced the Civil Rights Movement and one of its central, even if often unacknowledged, mediums of spiritual reinvigoration, cultural expression, political articulation, and social transformation: civil rights music. No matter what one may think of my conception of “civil rights music” at this point, if indeed the subsequent chapters are objectively engaged it will be difficult to deny the manner in which music helped the Civil Rights Movement “express shifts in the consciousness of [movement] actors,” leaders and rank and filers, and in myriad ways symbolized a key kind of “cognitive praxis” of the Civil Rights Movement. As a matter of fact, as Eyerman and Jamison continued their groundbreaking research on social movements they made a remarkable discovery concerning the relationship between music and social movements, especially those of the 1960s.
Eyerman and Jamison linked collective identity and agency to the interconnections between popular music and popular movements in their sequel to Social Movements, the acclaimed Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (1998). In Music and Social Movements, Eyerman and Jamison argued that music is essentially a cognitive phenomenon with enormous potential to influence the politics and culture of social movements in light of its “knowledge-bearing” and “identity-giving qualities” (23, see also 48–73). This means that Civil Rights Movement intellectual-artist-activists’ emphasis on the ways in which music and other aspects of post-war black popular culture actually enlightened them, politicized them, socialized them, mobilized them, and provided them with a deeper understanding of themselves and their respective communities, as well as the wider world, is not out of the ordinary or merely reflections of “old” black folk’s foolishness.
In this book the Civil Rights Movement is reinterpreted as a central moment in, and the culmination of, the reconstitution of African American culture between 1945 and 1965. Beginning with the end of World War II in 1945 and extending through to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an unprecedented creative turmoil led not only to the genesis of what quickly became the Civil Rights Movement, but also inspired new modes of cultural expression, which in turn gave way to new kinds of African American collective identity and socio-political agency. However seemingly haphazardly initially, the new cultural consciousness, energy, and almost palpable optimism of the first decade immediately following the war (circa 1945 to 1955) enabled African Americans to critically call into question longstanding “American” views, underlying values, and habitual behavior, causing a great deal of debate and reflection. Even as the optimism eventually turned to social and political pessimism in many quarters of black America, some of the initial sentiment seeped into, and was synthesized with the social and political lifeblood of the inchoate Civil Rights Movement in often unintended and circuitous ways.
One of the core contentions of this book is that both the culture of everyday life—the views, values, mores, and habits that form the very basis of social behavior—and the “art worlds” or aesthetics of cultural expression were deeply affected by the groundbreaking activities and exemplary cultural actions that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. In this sense, the Civil Rights Movement was as significant for artists as it was for social and political activists. It was, perhaps, the great cultural generator, the gargantuan cultural game-changer of the middle years and later half of the twentieth century. Its impact was simultaneously social and cultural. It impacted black politics and black aesthetics, as well as American politics and American aesthetics more generally.
Simultaneously a political and cultural quest, the Civil Rights Movement combined culture and politics, which ultimately reconstituted both, and provided a broader historical, cultural, and political context for African American cultural expression between 1945 and 1965. The fusion of politics and culture during the Civil Rights Movement meant that artists were incessantly inspired by the movement and that these same artists, in turn, offered the enormous resources and repertoire of African American artistic culture—various aesthetic traditions and cultural expressions, including musical genres—to Civil Rights Movement thought and practices. Moreover, in the Civil Rights Movement African American cultural traditions were mobilized and, in the process, transformed in the interest of the particular political project at hand: achieving civil rights and social justice, as well as making American citizenship and democracy a reality for all U.S. citizens, not merely wealthy and middle-class white Americans. I contend that this deconstruction and reconstruction of black expressive culture through mobilization is central to any serious understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, and its influential legacy in the twenty-first century.
Truth be told, the transformation of black expressive culture via mobilization has been generally neglected in historical, sociological and political studies of the Civil Rights Movement, where responsibility for “real” change is typically attributed either to anonymous, universal forces, such as war, racism, capitalism or modernization, or to charismatic movement leaders and other politically powerful individuals. Flying in the face of the conventional interpretations that privilege politics over aesthetics, Civil Rights Music argues that the cultural expression—especially the musical expression—that took place during the Civil Rights Movement was a central catalyst and symbolic of more pervasive changes in African American views, values, ideas, and ways of life. Here, I intend to place “civil rights music” right alongside of “civil rights politics” and give artistic expression the recognition it deserves as a key component of, and contributor to, both cultural and social transformation between 1945 and 1965.
In the following chapters we will critically consider the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement impacted black popular music and, vice versa, the ways in which black popular music impacted the Civil Rights Movement between 1945 and 1965, although especially between 1954 through 1965. Black popular music was important in the formation of, and remains key to the remembrance of the ideals and ethos of the Civil Rights Movement, but sadly the musical components of the new post-war collective black identity and agency have seldom been seriously examined in civil rights studies, or broader studies of black popular movements. By training my attention on, and critically treating the interaction of classic black popular music and the Civil Rights Movement, here I would like to accent a central and, perhaps even more, a seminal element of the movement’s dual emphasis on both social and cultural transformation. Additionally, I would like to offer an alternative history and critical theory of the Civil Rights Movement that places its politics and social justice agenda in deep dialogue with its popular music and popular culture.
I conceive of these relations between black popular culture and black politics, between black popular music and black popular movements, as a kind of collective learning process, a form of communal political education, in continuation of my previous emphasis on both the sociology and musicology of black popular movements. In my previous work I sought to identify the epistemologies, methodologies, and praxeologies of African American social, political, and cultural movements by focusing on the ways in which musical and other aesthetic traditions typically reflect the ethos of the major movement of their era of inception. My previous musicology also attempted to explore how the extra-musical aspects of black popular music historically affected and continue to factor into African Americans’ intellectual, cultural, social, and political identities and agency. In Civil Rights Music my primary preoccupation is with the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement provided a context for both the politicization of knowledge and the mobilization of black popular music. Moreover, the main
aim of this book is to challenge the conventional conception of black popular music that disassociates it from black popular movements by critically exploring how arguably the most renowned movement in African American history produced or, at the least, significantly influenced black popular music soundtracks that captured and conveyed both individual and collective aspirations and frustrations, as well as both individual and collective triumphs and tragedies.
Sadly, although I will say it anyway, the Civil Rights Movement has undeniably faded as a living political force in U.S. society. However, I argue throughout this book, its ideals and ethos remain alive in our collective memory and social imagination. The movement was more than merely a social and political movement. It was also a transformative cultural movement that inspired myriad innovative artistic traditions. Reducing the Civil Rights Movement purely to politics, as most scholars and students of social movements tend to do, ignores and often erases a large part of the distinctiveness of black popular movements and what they really represent, especially to erstwhile active movement members. In essence, it is to dilute and dismiss these movements and relegate them to the dustbin of history, to a nostalgic, erstwhile activism that at its best can actually serve to inspire new politics and social movements, but all too often evokes little or no serious academic or political interest. Allow me, if you will, to briefly explain.
On the one hand, scholarly efforts to revisit and revise the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement through empirical analysis of the history and biography of movement activists seems to have unfortunately fallen victim to academic faddism and the intellectual fatigue surrounding the movement by the turn of the twenty-first century. The truth is most U.S. citizens, including academics and even many independent scholars, believe that they know all that is worthwhile knowing about the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, a discursively dismissive attitude taints the reception and interpretation of civil rights studies in the twenty-first century.