SNCC Music Special Part 1, Track 2

Today on Sojourner Truth, we hear Part 1 of music from the The Freedom Singers performed live during the 50th anniversary conference of SNCC in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2010. Join us as we travel back in time and listen to the songs that mobilized millions of people across the country and around the world for peace and equality.

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, music played an integral role in the inspiration and mobilization of Black and white people across the United States against racism and poverty. Groups like The Freedom Singers, which began as a student quartet in 1962 at Albany State College in Georgia, provided the soundtrack to the mass movement that was taking place in that era. Organizations like the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, began using this music as a tool for progress.

The Freedom Singers were organized by Cordell Reagon in 1962. After witnessing the power of the singing in the Albany mass meetings, Pete Seeger suggested to James Forman that a singing group would be very supportive of the organization in building support, sharing information and raising funds. Cordell, one of the SNCC field secretaries who came to Albany, Georgia in 1961, was a tenor singer out of the Nashville sit-in movement. The youngest member of SNCCs staff, by 1961 he had been on the Freedom Rides, working in voter registration and participated in sit-in demonstrations. He formed the first group of Freedom Singers from the movements he had been active in across the country.

Overall, the power of congregational-style singing, fused with Black Baptist acappella church singing and protest songs and chants, became instrumental in empowering and educating listeners about civil rights issues. It was also a powerful social weapon of influence in the fight against Jim Crow segregation.