A digital archive
We've Been Protesting
A digital museum of Black and African-American protest history — documented through events, songs, art, literature, poetry, and quotes, with sources for every record.
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- Song · UpdatedRespectRespect — Aretha Franklin
- Song · UpdatedAlabamaJohn Coltrane recorded "Alabama" on November 18, 1963, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Two months earlier, a bomb had gone off beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on a Sunday morning, as parishioners gathered for services. It killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair, who was 11. The piece has no lyriics. Coltrane said very little about it. Impulse! producer Bob Thiele asked him whether the title had "any significance to today's problems." Coltrane answered: "It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me." LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, wrote that exchange down in his liner notes for Coltrane Live at Birdland, the album that carried the track when Impulse! released it on January 9, 1964. Baraka got nothing further out of him. In the notes he hedged about whether the real Alabama was the catalyst at all. Coltrane never publicly said he wrote the piece in response to the bombing. The scholar Lewis Porter, who has spent decades on this recording, knows of no instance where he did. Listeners have long heard Dr. King's eulogy for the four girls in the shape of the melody, and Porter argues the connection is there in the notes themselves. That reading belongs to the people who made it. What Coltrane left is the title, the date and the record.
- Song · UpdatedStrange FruitAbel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, wrote "Strange Fruit" as a poem in 1937 and published it under the name Lewis Allan. He said a photograph of a lynching had haunted him for days. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Encyclopaedia Britannica identify it as Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930. Billie Holiday first sang it in 1939 at Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub. She closed her set with it, in a darkened room, with a single spotlight on her face. Columbia would not record it. The label released her from her contract for one session, and she took the song to Milt Gabler at Commodore, who cut it on April 20, 1939. Gabler thought it ran short, so pianist Sonny White improvised an opening. It sold a million copies and became the biggest seller of her career. Holiday wrote later that the song reminded her of her father. Clarence Holiday, a guitarist, died in Dallas in 1937, and she understood that hospitals there had turned him away while he was dying of pneumonia. "I have to keep singing it," she wrote, "not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died the things that killed him are still happening in the South." Documentary research by Lewis Porter has since found that Clarence was taken directly to a Dallas hospital and treated, as Black patients there were, in a segregated basement ward. She sang it for the rest of her life. She died on July 17, 1959, at 44, in a hospital bed where federal narcotics agents had placed her under arrest weeks earlier.
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