Songs of the Civil Rights Movement
Soul Music
BBC
4.7 • 831 Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2018
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actor Clarke Peters narrates this special edition to mark 50 years since the assassination of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King on April 4th 1968.
"If in doubt, pray and sing" an activist recalls how music was used as part of Dr King's non-violent resistance movement.
The stories of the songs behind the Civil Rights Movement include the spirituals and freedom songs that were integral to the struggle. In the 19th century, music became a tool for protest and resistance among the enslaved peoples of the American South.
Hear the stories behind some of the most popular anthems and Freedom Songs that were later used as part of the civil resistance movement that eventually led to voting rights and desegregation.
From Swing Low Sweet Chariot and We Shall Overcome to Amazing Grace, Strange Fruit and A Change Is Gonna Come, witnesses to and participants in the Civil Rights Movement recall how songs were such a vital part of the story.
Producer: Maggie Ayre
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in April 2018.
Transcript
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| 0:39.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:44.5 | You are ordered to stop, stand where you are. |
| 0:52.6 | This march will not continue. |
| 0:54.5 | The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. |
| 0:59.9 | Their cause must be our cause too. |
| 1:05.4 | Music played a major role in the Civil Rights Movement. |
| 1:09.0 | Without music, the Civil Rights Movement would have been like a |
| 1:12.2 | bird without wings. |
| 1:17.1 | Because music created a sense of solidarity. It unified people. It inspired us to go out, to sit in. |
| 1:29.7 | So someone would come up to you while you were sitting in at the segregated lunch counter in Nashville, in Atlanta, in Birmingham, in Montgomery, and pour hot water on you, a hot coffee, or put a lighted cigarette down your bag. |
| 1:43.3 | You would just sit there and |
| 1:45.2 | maybe a home a song. You get arrested and a mass arrest and you start singing. |
| 1:51.1 | At night the sheriff Huddo would come and say, stop singing. And if we didn't stop, which we |
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