Songs of the Civil Rights Movement
Welcome to a website dedicated to music inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement has a time period associated with it, from approximately 1954-1971. The historical events leading up to the Movement however, began hundreds of years before, when slaves were taken from Africa. This timeline shows the progression of events and legal proceedings from when slaves first arrived in Virginia up until the time period known as the Civil Rights Movement.
- Late 1600s- America brings African slaves to Virginia and other colonies
- 1660-1865: Slavery normal and legal
- 1861- Start of Civil War
- 1863- President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally frees all slaves in the Confederacy
- 1865- the Civil War ended
- 1865- Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery
- 1896- U.S. Supreme Court rules in Plessy vs. Ferguson that segregated public facilities for whites and blacks are legal
- 1954- Courts outlaw segregation: Brown vs. Board of Education overturns Plessy vs. Ferguson
- 1955- Rosa Parks sits in the front of the bus, not the back "where blacks are supposed to sit," leading to Montgomery Bus Boycotts
- 1961- Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins Freedom Rides throughout the South to try to de-segregate interstate public bus travel
- 1962- Violent riots occur over possibility of first black college student in Oxford, location of University of Mississippi
- 1963- More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., in the largest civil rights demonstration ever; Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
- _1963- Assassination of Kennedy, a major player in the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
- 1964- President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1964
Since 1964, great strides have been made to ensure the equal treatment, access to privileges and resources for all people. We have a hard time imagining what it would have been like to scoff at someone drinking from the same water fountain, just because of their skin color. Though it's true that we've evolved culturally, 1964 was only 51 years ago! Racial discrimination is passed on in families and through cultural institutions, often unintentionally. As more and more black people were allowed to develop the faculties of intelligence and creativity that were once limited to white people, attitudes changed. The participation of blacks in the workforce during WW1 and WW2 also had a great impact on the acceptance of "black presence."
Because of all that blacks have experienced in America, there are plenty of documented "first African-American..." moments. The feeling that blacks were really lesser-than was so strong that those moments in time were truly momentous. These types of success have not been documented for Asians or Latin-Americans, even with their very real experiences of discrimination, because slavery was not involved to the same extent.
It is now the year 2015, and there are still news reports of racially-motivated violence and discrimination. A major difference between now and then is that it's no longer socially acceptable to openly express discrimination of others based on their ethnicity, but it still happens. A current focus of news corporations are the slew of police-shootings of black men, often for a lack of good cause. So, the movement for equality continues in different ways.
Anytime there is a need to unite people for the sake of cultural change, art and music are often used.
We'd like to share a few songs that convey the urgent messages and stories that came out of
the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960's. Enjoy!