In 1981, Bernice Johnson Reagon gave a talk at the West Coast Women's Music Festival that was later published under the title “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century.”Footnote 1 In the talk and subsequent article, Reagon argues that the way of the future for activists is not the constructive and nurturing atmosphere of work with only like-identifying people, but the uncomfortable and stretching atmosphere of coalition work that requires cooperation while emphasizing difference. It was an idea far ahead of its time—a time in which the popular white, majority American imagination forwarded a colorblind ethic that erased difference instead of pressing into it.Footnote 2
Reagon's talk was a critique of white feminists who hoped women's festivals and feminist gatherings would be a safe place full of people who were like them. Reagon believed that this was an illusion; “woman” and “feminist” always had been categories full of differing identities that were often sublimated to fulfill the dream of homelike comfort for those who enforced normativity in spaces like the West Coast Women's Music Festival. Reagon's words on the topic are frank:
We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there. Even when we have our “women-only” festivals, there is no such thing. The fault is not necessarily with the organizers of the gathering. To a large extent it's because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It's over. Give it up.Footnote 3
She goes on to offer a critique of nationalism as well:
Of course the problem is that there ain't nobody in there but folk like you, which by implication means you wouldn't know what to do if you were running it with all of the other people who are out there in the world. Now that's nationalism. I mean it's nurturing, but it is also nationalism. At a certain stage nationalism is crucial to a people if you are going to ever impact as a group in your own interest. Nationalism at another point becomes reactionary because it is totally inadequate for surviving in the world with many peoples.Footnote 4
Her view of this changing landscape was not negative or apocalyptic, however. Reagon understood how deeply the Black Freedom and Feminist Movements had formed her identity, but she also understood that the only way to organize effectively in the present crisis was to put the idiosyncratic concerns of each group into conversation with one another, as messy and challenging (and even dangerous) as the work would be.
This insistence on the crucial role of coalition work puts Reagon in continuity with prominent Black male thinkers. In “From Protest to Politics,” Bayard Rustin argued, “We need allies. The future of the Negro struggle depends on whether the contradictions of this society can be resolved by a coalition of progressive forces which become the effective political majority in the United States…The task of molding a political movement out of the March on Washington coalition is not simple, but no alternatives have been advanced. We need to choose our allies on the basis of common political objectives.”Footnote 5 King articulated a similar sentiment in Where Do We Go From Here?, saying:
What is most needed is a coalition of Negroes and liberal whites that will work to make both major parties truly responsive to the needs of the poor…The ability of Negroes to enter alliances is a mark of our growing strength, not of our weakness. In entering alliances, the Negro is not relying on white leadership or ideology; he is taking his place as an equal partner in a common endeavor. His organized strength and his new independence pave the way for alliances. Far from losing independence in an alliance, he is using it for constructive and multiplied gains.Footnote 6
Although Reagon's coalition politics embrace identity expression more forcefully than this, Rustin and King did argue for the political necessity and moral importance of building allies between groups of differing racial, ethnic, class, and gender backgrounds. Because of their respectability politics, however, Rustin's and King's insistence on cooperation with white allies was meeting resistance among younger activists by the mid-1960s. In this sense, Reagon's coalition politics were more in line with a figure such as Fred Hampton, whose “Rainbow Coalition” brought together white, brown, and Black people to fight police brutality without requiring members to defer to the cultural expectations of a dominant group.Footnote 7
In addition to contributing to the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement's male intellectual leaders, Reagon's encouragement of coalition politics puts her squarely within Black feminism's contributions to larger social movements. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins connected the strategy of coalition building with transversal politics, which emphasizes seeking solidarity across difference while maintaining individual positionality.Footnote 8 Transversal politics was developed by Italian feminists and elaborated by Nira Yuval-Davis in the 1990s in reaction to the isolating effect that second-wave identity politics had on broader movements for justice.Footnote 9 bell hooks also argued for a reassessment of the importance of solidarity among women after the whitewashed version of the concept had been deconstructed by women of color, saying, “Women are divided by sexist attitudes, racism, class privilege, and a host of other prejudices. Sustained woman bonding can occur only when these divisions are confronted and the necessary steps taken to eliminate them. Divisions will not be eliminated by wishful thinking or romantic reverie about common oppression.”Footnote 10
Decades before feminists theorized transversal politics and before Reagon gave her talk about coalition politics, however, Reagon prefigured this political work in her musical praxis. This article will explore Reagon's music making in depth during the period after she left the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the mid-1960s. I will argue that Reagon's musical activity during this understudied period in her career offers us a paradigm of the political strategy she would later articulate—a musical coalition politics—with which she facilitated her movement from spaces that nurtured her identity across uncomfortable boundaries in order to build coalitions. Reagon's musical coalition politics add to broader discussions about music and the Civil Rights/Black Freedom Movement.Footnote 11 Most discussions of Reagon's participation in Movement music end with her participation in the SNCC Freedom Singers; however, if one considers Reagon's performances and musical activities in this period as freedom singing, her career explodes previously constructed boundaries around freedom song and about the Movement itself.Footnote 12 Reagon's musical coalition politics were an embodied response to the changing front of the Black Freedom Movement, and shed light on continuities that the dominant narrative of the Movement often downplays.
The Harambee Singers: Shaking Loose from Respectability Politics, Shaping a New Identity
Bernice Johnson Reagon was born in Dougherty County (outside of Albany), Georgia in October of 1942. She was the daughter of a minister and grew up singing in her rural, Black church. Reagon was an undergraduate at Albany State College when Albany organized a local movement for civil rights in tandem with communities around the South. During that movement in 1961, Reagon made a name for herself as a powerful song leader, and was expelled from Albany State after being jailed as a result of her movement participation. After her expulsion, she entered Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship, but soon discovered that she needed to be more directly involved in the Movement. She returned to full-time organizing in late 1962, joining the SNCC Freedom Singers. The Freedom Singers traveled the country, bringing the Movement into concert halls, and raising money and consciousness for the cause. Their most well-known appearance was at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, which concluded with the iconic singing of “We Shall Overcome” to close the festival alongside luminaries of the folk revival Peter, Paul, and Mary, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger.
In 1964, Reagon was back in Atlanta negotiating the raising of a small child, a career as a performer, and the completion of her undergraduate work at Spelman. She says of this period in her life:
I began to look for ways to continue to be who I was. My life over the next seven years was full of a personal inner searching for balance with all my loves and wants, with a real practical experimentation to see if I could be a wife, mother, singer, and worker sharing the cultural history of my people.
This period was turbulent because it marked a major transition for Black people. From the period of nonviolent demonstrations and “We shall overcome someday,” to rebellions in the major cities of this nation, the transition was immersed in demands for acknowledgment of African Americans as a people with a culture and history worthy of being taught to all Americans. It was a time when I and many of our people went inside ourselves and our communities and reconsidered our sense of what was good and what was beautiful about us. The cry of “Black Power” which was first heard on the Meredith March in Mississippi in 1966, became a new breath of life as we struggled to become the people so many of us almost never got a chance to know.Footnote 13
Already, Reagon was carefully considering the intersection of her personal, political, and musical identities, and how those identities interacted with the transitions happening in Movement activities around the country. She directly related her experimentation and her struggle to “continue to be who she was” with the changing front of the Freedom Movement. Throughout her career as a musician, activist, and public intellectual, Reagon constantly curated her musical and political identity and negotiated her relation to the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of her participation in it. She also addressed the tendency to go inside oneself and one's community, a tendency that manifests itself in the nationalism she would later critique as helpful but insufficient.
During this period of experimentation, Reagon was deeply embedded in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement in Atlanta as a logical extension of her Movement organizing work and her musical prowess. During Reagon's time at Spelman, the University hired Vincent Harding, the civil rights activist and historian, to chair the History and Sociology Department. In 1967, eastern North Carolina native and poet A. B. Spellman—who had been a music critic in New York and a vital part of the Black Arts Movement there alongside Amiri Baraka—came to Atlanta.Footnote 14 Spellman, along with other artists in the Atlanta community including Reagon, started the journal Rhythm, which was “committed to Revolutionary Pan-African Nationalism” and sought to provide a Black Arts vehicle for local artists and activists.Footnote 15 In the wake of the King assassination in 1968, Harding, Spellman, and critic Stephen Henderson collaborated to form the Institute for the Black World (IBW), a think tank that hosted seminars and provided a forum for the discussion of a wide variety of subjects relevant to the Black diaspora. IBW was especially interested in promoting African American art and culture, and included in its statement of purpose that it would exist for the “encouragement of those creative artists who are searching for the meaning of the black aesthetic.”Footnote 16
During this same period, Reagon was producing the Penny Festival, a benefit concert and educational program that served as an investment in the local Black community and as a benefit for the Atlanta Cooperative Preschool Center.Footnote 17 The Penny Festival, which only charged a penny for admission but encouraged donors to give more if they could, grew out of Reagon's “awareness of the need for an Afro-American cultural history program in the Atlanta community.”Footnote 18 The Penny Festival drew from the resources of the Black Arts Movement community in Atlanta beyond Reagon as well; the 1968 festival featured a production about W. E. B. Dubois titled “The Black Flame” written by A. B. Spellman (Figure 1).Footnote 19
Figure 1. Flyer for the 1968 Penny Festival, in the SFCRP Collection (20004), Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The productions also featured a vast array of Black music, from African American spirituals to African freedom songs, curated by Reagon and performed by artists in the Atlanta community.Footnote 20 It was after the first Penny Festival that Reagon formed the Harambee Singers from some of the women who performed with her.Footnote 21 The Harambee Singers were something of a riff on the SNCC Freedom Singers for a new time and place and a testing ground for many of the ideas that Reagon would later perfect.
The Harambee Singers was a “choral Black women collective” that intentionally nurtured Black history and culture and spoke directly to important Black activist and intellectual networks.Footnote 22 In the visual aesthetic, political surroundings, musical repertoire, and promotional framing of the Harambee Singers, one can see Bernice Johnson Reagon beginning to differentiate herself politically and musically from the dominant Civil Rights narrative. I recognize the Harambee Singers as Reagon's move to explore “inside herself and her community” as she puts it above; their music and overall style was a deep affirmation of Black womanhood and a step away from the respectability politics that so frustrated younger people in the latter years of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. In the Harambee Singers, Reagon embraced Black Power and the other more revolutionary forms of political engagement she was seeing around the world, without necessarily advocating for Black nationalism or separatism.
The Harambee Singers sang primarily for Black Consciousness, Black Arts, Black Studies, and Black Power gatherings. For example, the Harambee Singers were one of several music groups that performed at the opening of the IBW and other gatherings of the burgeoning Black Studies programs around the country.Footnote 23 These performing contexts place them squarely within the core of a new radical Black politics that was forming under the leadership of young leaders such as Stokely Carmichael in the 1960s and continued in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. The Harambee Singers also accented blackness with more ferocity than did earlier movement singing groups by participating in the reclamation of African traditional clothing and culture and emphasizing the connection with global post-colonial struggle that attracted the younger generation of Black activists at the time. Gone was the Sunday-best suits, ties, and dresses of the Southern, church-led Civil Rights Movement—in their place were traditional African clothing and hairstyles, a clear identification with younger, more radical politics (see Figure 3 for an example of Harambee's typical performance attire). The name itself—Harambee—participates in the reclamation of African language and tradition that was active at the time as well. “Harambee” is a Swahili word and references a Kenyan tradition of community uplift activities.
The opening ceremony of Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham, North Carolina is another example of the types of gatherings at which the Harambee Singers were performing and illustrates the evolution of Reagon's political identity during this period.Footnote 24 Malcolm X Liberation University formed as a result of the Black Student Movement at Duke University in 1969. Rather than push for a Black Studies program that would be controlled by a predominantly white institution, many activists in Durham felt that an independent, Black-run, revolutionary institution of higher learning would better serve the Black community. Malcolm X Liberation University designed its curriculum around the pursuit of Black freedom and the dissemination of Black history and Black pride away from the insidious impact of institutionalized white supremacy.
On opening ceremony day, the people of Durham and gathered guests marched from Hayti—an historically Black neighborhood in Durham—to the new University's campus in downtown Durham singing “power to the people” accompanied by African drumming. In front of the university—which was painted black, red, green, and yellow and featured a prominent mural of Malcolm X with a raised fist—speakers, including activist, scholar, and founder of the school Howard Fuller and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's widow, laid out the purpose and program of the school. The Harambee Singers, led by Reagon, performed in celebration of the school's opening and the ideals it represented. Their performance of the song “The Black Magician” is very much in keeping with Reagon's evolving singing and performing style. The women stand in a tight semicircle around Reagon wearing colorful, traditional African garb. The singing is accompanied only by handheld percussion instruments. There is a rhythmic drive and vocal tenacity to the performance that buoys the politics of the event and goes beyond the singing Reagon did with the Freedom Singers, prefiguring the style she would later master with Sweet Honey in the Rock. The lyrics eschew the Christian-centric themes of traditional freedom-singing for an emphasis on African spirituality (Figures 2 and 3).
Figure 2. Durhamites marching to the Malcolm X Liberation University (Black Journal 18; Malcolm X Liberation University, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.79.1.68.1abc).
Figure 3. Reagon and the Harambee Singers performing “The Black Magician” at the Malcolm X Liberation University opening ceremony (Black Journal 18; Malcolm X Liberation University, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2012.79.1.68.1abc).
In their musical repertoire, the Harambee Singers frequently took on a more revolutionary edge than the Freedom Singers. According to Jamila Jones, one of Reagon's partners in the Harambee Singers, they never sang the types of songs that were typical of the Montgomery Trio and other groups spawned by the Civil Rights Movement.Footnote 25 Instead they took on a more pan-Africanist, Black Power leaning in their repertoire and performance style choices. The repertoire they sang at Black Consciousness gatherings included songs such as “Move on Over or We'll Move on Over You,” “Hands Off Nkrumah,” “I've Known Rivers,” “Joe Willie,” and “I Am Black and I Have Beauty.” “Move on Over or We'll Move on Over You” was written by Len Chandler, Jr. in 1965 and performed at protests in the Civil Rights Movement, but it takes a much more aggressive stance than most freedom songs. It is sung to the tune “John Brown's Body.” As is suggested by its evocative title, the tune was originally associated with the armed resistance to slavery and has a colorful history of text pairings including “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe and “Solidarity Forever” by Ralph Chaplin. Chandler's lyrics hark back to the original context of the tune and hold up John Brown as the freedom fighter exemplar. Sing Out! magazine printed the lyrics above an illustration of the January 1966 occupation of Greenville (Mississippi) Air Force Base by around seventy tenant farmers demanding land, food, jobs, and shelter.Footnote 26 The protest was organized by SNCC and led by members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party such as Unita Blackwell.Footnote 27 The illustration in Sing Out! features the looming figure of John Brown above the Greenville Air Force Base occupiers. This visual signifier connects the tone of Chandler's lyrics and the Greenville occupiers to John Brown's fiery and violent freedom fighting.
The lyrics critique the de facto anthem of the nonviolent movement, “We Shall Overcome,” explicitly, saying “You conspire to keep us silent in the field and in the slum, You promise us the vote then sing us We Shall Overcome.” There is a meaningful elision happening over the course of the song with regard to who the lyrics are addressing. Are these freedom singers singing to the white power structure? Are they singing to the U.S. government as verse three implies with its reference to a “dove of peace with bloody beak?” Are they singing to moderate elements within the Movement itself as the reference to “We Shall Overcome” in verse two might imply? The lack of clarity is instructive for it reveals the frustration and the building militancy among some within the Movement, including perhaps the women of the Harambee Singers.
“Hands Off Nkruma,” another of the Harambee Singers’ frequently performed songs, was written by Jimmy Collier—a Black folksinger who worked with Martin Luther King Jr.—and Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick—an associate of King's in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and cofounder of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed, Black self-defense group. “Hands Off Nkruma” addresses the overthrowing of Kwame Nkruma, who became the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana after leading it to independence from Britain in 1957. It was widely suspected (and later confirmed) that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in the coup at the time the Harambee Singers would have been performing the song. The prevalence of “Hands Off Nkruma” in U.S. Black Consciousness circles demonstrates the degree to which young activists in the United States were in tune with events in Africa's freedom movements and beginning to view their struggle through the lens of post-colonialism. Post-colonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon greatly impacted Black Consciousness in the United States, bringing to bear an entirely different philosophical grounding than the nonviolence of Rustin, King, Parks, and so on. The lyrics to “Hands Off Nkruma,” as one might expect, take quite a different tack than many traditional freedom songs, overtly critiquing global capitalism and national law enforcement agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA, and connecting the coup with the U.S. government's opposition to socialism and communism around the world including the war in Vietnam. “I've Known Rivers,” “Joe Willie,” and “I Am Black and I Have Beauty” were all songs of deep affirmation for Black culture and Black people. “I've Known Rivers” was a setting of the Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which muses on the depth of the soul of Black people, on the connection of all Black people to Africa, on the greatness of the accomplishments of African civilizations, and on the deep connection to the land that people of African descent often feel. “Joe Willie” is a love song to African American men, a powerful reversal of the demonization they experience in U.S. culture writ large. “I Am Black and I Have Beauty” is a reference to a passage in the Biblical book, Song of Solomon. It affirms the unique beauty of Black features in a world that had attached (and continues to attach) negative connotations to Black physicality.
In keeping with their more revolutionary tone, the Harambee Singers worked to establish personae that eschewed associations with commercial enterprise. There are no commercial recordings of the group, despite the fact that they continued to perform long after Reagon left. Their performances were solely for the empowerment and encouragement of the small groups of Black activists and politically engaged young people with whom they associated. A review of a performance of the group that kicked off University of Michigan's Black Liberation Week in March of 1971 makes their antagonism to having their music consumed as entertainment clear:
Stemming from African origins of voice inflection and the gospel tradition of employing the feet and hands as the base of the rhythm, their music is far from the Motown realm of music as a commercial venture. Instead it is music of the black revolution, a giving of the total soul in expressing black goals and values, without regard to white concepts of what music should be. “We talk to our people through music. We can't say its entertainment because it's gotta be more than that. You can go to the movies for entertainment.” Explained Mattie Casey, one of the five Harambee Singers.Footnote 28
In this excerpt, reviewer Juanita Anderson and Harambee Singers member Mattie Casey connect the commercial sensibilities of Motown with white expectation, and the historically and culturally minded rhythm and singing style of the Harambee Singers with a deep expression of blackness that goes beyond entertainment. Anderson and Casey are tapping into a long-established dichotomy between Berry Gordy's Motown as the personification of Black, patriarchal middle-class bourgeois mobility and other, less overtly commercialized forms of Black popular expression such as the early soul music of Stax records as “authentic” and inherently more in tune with resistant and revolutionary elements. Although this perception is subjective and oversimplified, the meanings invested in certain types of cultural production are significant for evaluations of freedom singing, as evidenced by the reference to Motown as a way to enhance the revolutionary credibility of the Harambee Singers in the review above. Freedom song is typically given pride of place as an authenticity-bearing and authenticity-granting Black music given its roots in the Black Freedom movement extending back to the resistance to slavery.
Even the visual markers of early soul, the natural hair and traditional African clothing with which the Harambee Singers signaled their affiliation with a more radical politics, eventually succumbed in part to the commercializing impulse they were initially resisting. This passage from Mark Anthony Neal is revealing in this regard:
Generally associated with the genre of music that bore its name, throughout the 1960s soul became primarily linked to evocations of black communal pride. In this regard soul came to represent an authentic, though obviously essentialized blackness that undergirded the Black Power and Civil Rights movements that soul has come to be associated with…With the subsequent annexation of black popular music, in which the soul genre was then the dominant popular form, the larger meanings of soul were also deconstructed for use within mass culture. Divorced from its politicized and organic connotations, “soul” became a malleable market resource merchandised to black and white consumers alike.Footnote 29
It is this very process that the Harambee Singers were positioning themselves against in their insistence on not becoming “entertainment” in a capitalist society. They saw their music and their mission as far too important to be deconstructed for use within mass culture. Not only were the Harambee Singers taking up the visual icons of early soul before they had been commercialized, they were also insistent on the specificity of their audience and their message. They were speaking affirmation of blackness to Black people as Black women and drawing from the deep well of the African American experience. This experience included the music of the struggle they had just come out of, but also had its eye on a new day of struggle where new identities and new resources would be necessary.
In their single-minded purpose, the Harambee Singers did not shy away from setting up boundaries and defining the scope of their project. In the same review of the Black Liberation Week performance quoted above, Harambee Singers member Jackie Howard explained that “Black people cannot be concerned with women's liberation because they are trying to be liberated as a whole.”Footnote 30 This statement contains the complexity of the idiosyncratic issues facing the Black community, as well as the racism that Black women had already faced from white women in the Feminist Movement. It reflects the need for a safe space to have experiences of affirmation and nurturing before being asked to contribute to a movement that does not necessarily have the same goals and may not necessarily lead to liberation for Black people. It is also in keeping with one of the requirements of coalition politics. Patricia Hill Collins argues that private conversations and internal processes of affirming self-definition must happen before building coalition.Footnote 31
The Harambee Singers provided the space and the soundtrack for these conversations of self-definition in the Black Consciousness circles in which they moved. Hill Collins, however, says “these internal processes of self-definition cannot continue indefinitely without engaging in relationships with other groups.”Footnote 32 White feminists were a coalition partner Bernice Johnson Reagon would later figure out how to collaborate with, even if the relationship was at times challenging and contentious as the excerpts from Reagon's talk from the West Coast Women's Music Festival above indicate. However at this moment, Reagon was content to be “nurtured and reborn through the rich sands of Black Nationalism.”Footnote 33
In the progression from the Freedom Singers to the Harambee Singers to what came after, one can see Reagon working through a strategy for nurturing blackness while also encouraging cooperation and participation across boundaries. The Harambee Singers offered the same critique that Black Power offered to old-guard Civil Rights Movement leadership—rejection of respectability politics; concern about the pace of change; and a lack of concern about the anger the younger generation of activists felt. At the same time, they saw themselves as offering a “voice calling for unity.”Footnote 34 This unifying voice was first and foremost a call to unify Black people. It seems that at this moment, Reagon knew that Black people must be unified around positive affirmations and articulations of blackness rather than placate the expectations of whiteness or champion a talented tenth-style refutation of the negative stereotypes white people had constructed.Footnote 35
Reagon demonstrated in her musical commitments that freedom singing was an ideal venue for this unifying work. Her freedom singing with the Harambee Singers shows us the beginning of Reagon's articulation of a developing political identity that embraced some aspects of Black Power radicalism and Black nationalism, but which went on to critique the alienation of potential coalition partners. With the Harambee Singers, Reagon took the first step in the process toward coalition politics. The Harambee Singers allowed Reagon to explore musically not only the roots of her Black identity, but also the nurturing womb of Black nationalism as she described it. In this process, she began to refine her own identity as a political actor through musical performance of freedom singing in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Reagon's exploration of this new identity through her freedom singing was a “reconsidering” of blackness as inherently good and beautiful that would animate her next steps as a performer. The Harambee Singers were the narrowing and deepening that must occur before one can enter into coalition properly grounded. Reagon's next musical projects restarted the musical dialogue with other groups with a new understanding of what it would take to build meaningful partnerships without compromising one's cultural and political self.
The Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project: A Musical Coalition
During the same year Harambee Singers was formed, Reagon was busy—in addition to that work, she also released her first solo album, coordinated workshops on her work in the Civil Rights Movement with Guy Carawan, continued her academic training, and began a collaboration with white activist and folk singer Anne Romaine. Reagon's collaboration with Romaine, eventually named the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project (SFCRP), shows Reagon experimenting with the next step toward embodying a musical coalition politics, where through musical performance Black and white identities are deeply explored, differences are acknowledged, and areas of solidarity are discovered and emphasized. Reagon was still forging a relatively unique stance in the post-Civil Rights era, one that did not compromise on its embrace of the new Black aesthetic, but also one that intentionally remained open to allies and places of potential coalition. This stance made her a challenging presence for people such as Anne Romaine. Romaine was left transformed as a result of the encounters generated by musical and political partnership with Reagon, revealing the potential of such musical coalition work and paving the way for Reagon's later musical endeavors.
Anne Romaine grew up in the segregated cotton mill towns of North Carolina. Her grandfather was a weaver at the Cannon Mill and her grandmother owned a beauty shop in downtown Kannapolis. Her father earned a law degree and opened a practice in Gastonia, where Romaine made music in her small, Presbyterian church and developed a love for country and bluegrass. Romaine went to college at Queen's College in Charlotte, and took a job at an all-white prison for girls called the Arkansas Girl's Reform School. In the fall of 1964, she began graduate school at the University of Virginia and met Howard Romaine, who had just returned from participating as an SNCC volunteer during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.Footnote 36 It was through Howard that Anne was introduced to Civil Rights work, and eventually to Bernice Johnson Reagon.
Romaine reached out to Reagon in early 1966 about organizing a concert tour to fundraise for the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), the largely white counterpart to SNCC. SSOC leaders had met with SNCC leaders and others at Highlander Center to discuss future individual and joint endeavors. Bob Moses proposed that the SSOC consider something similar to what the Freedom Singers had provided SNCC: publicity, recruiting, and fundraising through a touring musical group committed to disseminating the message of the movement. At the time, the suggestion was to employ the group most representative of white musical engagement with the movement—Northern, white folk musicians. Anne Romaine was chosen to spearhead the tour.
Romaine spoke first with Guy Carawan and Gil Turner, who encouraged her to consult with Reagon because of Reagon's experience organizing similar musical events with the Freedom Singers. The two women discovered that they shared a passion for history, Southern folk traditions, and using musical performance to further the cause of justice in the South. They quickly revised the original plan for the concert tour to include Black and white folk music performers, and decided that they should all be from the South. They named it the Southern Folk Festival, and it was the first venture of the larger umbrella organization called the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project (SFCRP).
In a pamphlet produced about the history and performers of the tour, Reagon explains their intentions:
We were high on idealism, thinking that by using songs that had jumped cultural, racial, social, and economic boundaries, we could entice audiences to see where the songs and cultures had gone, maybe even to follow. The concerts we developed had as their strong center the integrity and independence of the cultures, rooted in the life experiences of people singing of the world from their personal point of view.Footnote 37
One can see the foundations of coalition politics informing the project. Reagon and Romaine developed the concerts with the “integrity and independence of the cultures” at the center, “rooted” in the experiences and identities of the individual performers. Nira Yuval-Davis explains that dialogue according to transversal/coalition politics “should be based on the principles of rooting and shifting—that is, being centered in one's own experience while being empathetic to the differential positioning of the partners in the dialogue [emphasis mine].”Footnote 38 Both of these quotes use the same metaphor of rootedness to describe the importance of exploring and articulating one's own identity within the process of building coalition. What is often left underexplored in the feminist literature about transversal/coalition politics is how this rootedness can and should be demonstrated, or through what media the process of cultural and political exchange can flow. Reagon and Romaine show us one such real-world example in the concerts they organized for the SFCRP.
For Reagon and Romaine, the selection of performers for the concert tour became a political statement in and of itself, regardless of the lyrical and musical content of the songs they would perform. They would stage and embody what they hoped the audience would take away: That the vernacular music of the South could lead to the realization that different races have always been deeply interconnected and reliant on each other. They began recruiting performers willing to travel through the South in an integrated group, performing concerts to integrated audiences designed to celebrate the differences, but also to proclaim the fundamental interdependence, of white and Black Southern folk culture. Their promotional material made this clear as well as emphasizing the educational or historical aspect of the project.Footnote 39
A grant proposal written by Romaine and Reagon for the SFCRP states: “The theory behind the encouragement of the two cultures separately and then combined is that only an individual with pride and respect for himself and his traditional heritage can then become a part of the larger functioning society, pulling his own weight.”Footnote 40 This quote directly parallels the cultural work being done in the Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the Black Power and “Black is beautiful” emphases of the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, Romaine and Reagon saw their work in direct continuity with the Civil Rights Movement. Many of the experiences they had across the South as they performed mirror the experiences of organizers in the Movement. In the first couple of years of the tour, they were refused service, they were picketed by hate groups, and they were pulled over and harassed by police. At one point, they were nearly driven off the road by white people who ran into their bumper and pushed their car up to an unsafe speed while a second car pulled alongside them with a pistol drawn.Footnote 41
One such experience made a particular impact on Romaine. After a show in Arkansas, the group was preparing to drive overnight to East Tennessee for a concert the following day. They decided that Rev. Pearly Brown, a Black bluesman who was traveling with the tour, would ride with Anne Romaine and another white woman. Romaine protested, fearing for everyone's safety if two white women were seen riding in a car with a Black man at night. Reagon yelled back at Romaine, “You better decide what's more important: your life or doing what's right!”Footnote 42 Romaine reports that she was angry for a while after she got into the car, but later realized that the confrontation with Reagon was a turning point for her. The truth that Reagon had the courage to speak to her in that moment caused her to recommit to accepting the consequences of what they were trying to accomplish.
Over the years of their collaboration, Reagon and Romaine had several run-ins like this one that illustrate the challenge of this type of musical coalition politics. In a letter from September of 1974, Reagon complains that her name appears on a poster without her having given consent. She says:
I have gone over our various conversations re: the meeting this coming weekend. At no point was I definite about the concert, only “might be interested” or “maybe,” certainly nothing that would warrant my name appearing on a poster. By the way, it's the second time it's happened this summer. Either I own myself or I don't…Somehow after the conversation, everything I said “maybe” about you turned into a definite and acted on it. I will not be present this weekend—definitely. See this as a protest against the way I was handled in this matter.Footnote 43
In October of 1974, Reagon wrote another letter to Romaine about being put on a committee when she was absent from a board meeting. It reads,
I cannot imagine being put on that committee when I was not present. Was there really no one else who would agree to it? I reluctantly accept. I am not sure what's going on, but it does not seem healthy to me to put someone on a committee of this type when that person has not been able to, for ideological reasons, participate in the program.Footnote 44
Although Reagon's ideological reservations about this specific program are uncertain, in a 2004 interview she explained that by 1969 she had become frustrated with the Southern Folk Festival because the burden of singing about racism fell entirely on the Black performers, whereas the white performers continued to sing about working hard and labor organizing. In the interview, she said:
We performed all over the South wherever courageous people would dare to, and sometimes this was like church groups or this was labor groups, more often than not it was small programs on college campuses. By ‘69 I had stopped that work. I had become uncomfortable with the fact that in the festival, in the concert we were doing racism was represented only in the Black material. So the white singers got to sing about working hard, labor organizing, but they really didn't have any songs about racism. And I started to ask Anne, I said, “when you all gonna start,” I said, “we didn't create racism” [laughs]. Why is the only representation of racism coming from the Black side of southern culture? And I said, “some of you need to start to write songs as southern white progressive people about racism. And so I stepped out of it.”Footnote 45
Reagon is not reacting to the discomfort of difference here. According to Reagon, Romaine and the other white performers were not pulling their weight in the coalition, which led to a breakdown. Despite the clear tension evidenced here, communication between the two women returned to normal until May of 1981, when Reagon wrote the following letter to Romaine on the letterhead of the Smithsonian Institution:
Dear Anne:
I have received the brochure on the Southern Grassroots Artists and Tours. You had called me after the fact, informing me that Sweet Honey's picture would be included. Please consider this letter a statement of policy regarding the use of my name or any organization I am associated with. You are hereby requested to refrain from using my name, photograph without my written consent.
I am sorry to be pushed to this point, but I have lived through more than ten years of you taking liberties with my commitment and belief in your work. And it does not extend to the extent you have taken it.
Sincerely,
Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon
Director
Program in Black American CultureFootnote 46
Reagon's honesty reveals the seriousness with which she approached her musical and political identity and the importance she placed on her collaboration with Romaine. She remained in coalition with Romaine but did not hesitate to draw the line when her priorities were violated. It is precisely these types of uncomfortable confrontations that Reagon argues give coalition politics its power to transform. One must know who one is, have it embedded in one's bones and seeping from one's pores, and then one must figure out how to share that with other people without losing it or allowing someone else to compromise it. Then one must work in the spaces where your vision of justice overlaps, all the while remaining open to being changed by your encounters with others. The coalition of Reagon and Romaine demonstrates that music can be an effective forum for such encounter, even when lines are crossed and correction must be made to continue the collaboration in a healthy manner.
Two musical examples demonstrate the type of musical coalition politics that was at the heart of the SFCRP's efforts: “On the Line” performed by Anne Romaine and “Joan Little” by Bernice Johnson Reagon. Although I have been unable to locate set lists for the early Southern Folk Festival tour concerts, one can imagine these two songs being sung in tandem as a powerful illustration of the ideals behind Reagon's and Romaine's project. Reagon's “Joan Little” is a cappella, save for a shaker and some audible body percussion in the back of the mix. It is squarely in the idiom of the African American spiritual or gospel song, featuring vocal techniques such as slides, runs, and heterophonic improvisation. Frequently, in recorded live performances, Reagon told the story of Joan Little and explained the solidarity she felt with her and expressed in the lyrics before singing the song. Romaine's “On the Line” is in the classic honky-tonk style, with a heavy backbeat, acoustic guitar, and a very prominent steel guitar performing winding improvisations throughout.
Both of these songs maintain distinct musical styles rooted in white and Black Southern folk forms but address a common political concern: Justice for Joan Little, a North Carolina woman who was charged with murder after killing in self-defense a prison guard who raped her. This is musical coalition politics embodied. From the depths of their own cultural experience, these two women who do not come from the same place or always agree on the way forward, unite their distinct voices for a cause on which their commitments overlap. Both songs call their listeners to empathy and solidarity with the women whose stories they are telling. “Joan Little” identifies with Joan by equating her with the listener (“Joan is you”), the singer (“Joan is me), and those with whom the singer is in intimate relationship (Joan Little, she's my sister” etc.). “On the Line” universalizes the experience of Joan Little and Inez Garcia by suggesting that human rights in general are on the line. Both songs also suggest that if our society allows this type of injustice to go unaddressed, we are all, whether we are physically in a prison or not, living in an incarcerated life. They could both be called narrative freedom songs, the effect of which Reagon has described as a “newspaper in song.”Footnote 47 Reagon's “Joan Little” gets more personal, however, and narrates Reagon's own experience growing up and her inner feelings as she heard the story of Joan Little. It expresses her outrage despite the ambiguity her raising may have imbued in her. It articulates a clear cultural identity and responds to an injustice in the present (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Brochure/order form for Reagon and Romaine's Joan Little record, in the SFCRP Collection (20004), Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The case of Joan Little would have offended the sensibilities of the old guard Civil Rights leadership. Little would not have been selected by the SCLC as a suitable “civil rights subject” in the way Rosa Parks was—her story was too complex, her status too ambivalent for the types of media narratives the traditional civil rights organizations tended to craft, which dramatized the victimization of “worthy beneficiaries” of the Movement's goals.Footnote 48 Little's mother asked the state to declare her a truant and commit her to a training school, from which she fled. Later in her life, Little was arrested several times for theft and eventually convicted of felony larceny and breaking and entering.Footnote 49 It was while serving her time for this crime that Little killed the guard who attempted to rape her and fled the prison. Reagon, however, does not shy away from standing with Joan Little. Instead she identifies with her and clarifies her position forcefully, but in a way that invited Romaine to respond in kind. It is this clarity of expression and purpose, and the ability to elicit a response from a diversity of actors that typifies Reagon's musical coalition politics, which would continue to serve her for the remainder of her career with the Smithsonian and Sweet Honey in the Rock.
The musical coalition politics that Reagon pioneered between 1966 and 1981 is significant for several reasons. First, her music making and activism with the Harambee Singers and with Anne Romaine models a viable and flexible approach to collaboration without compromising identity in the process, a model worthy of the attention of contemporary social movements and their attendant musicians and activists. Second, the strategies Reagon developed in her musical and political collaborations during this period have the potential to give additional contours to the Black feminist theorization of coalition/transversal politics, supporting theory with praxis. Lastly, Reagon's musical activity in this period shows the evolution of one of the most important activist-scholar-musicians of the twentieth century as she negotiated and articulated a political positionality in order to address the challenges of the years following the end of the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement. Reagon's solution gets beyond the misleading binary thinking behind “nonviolent civil disobedience vs. Black Nationalism” or “the Civil Rights Movement vs. Black Power,” and sheds light on the multifarious continuities between the pre- and post-1968 Black Freedom Movement.Footnote 50
Competing Interest
None.
Stephen Stacks earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and has a forthcoming book on freedom song in post-1968 U.S. culture with the University of Illinois Press. Stephen is an adjunct professor at North Carolina Central University and an associate pastor at Greenwood Forest Baptist Church in Cary, NC, where he directs the congregation's musical life.
