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The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement

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The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement Making Movement Sounds: The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:39987965 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Making Movement Sounds: The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement A dissertation presented by Elizabeth Cooper Davis To The Department of African and African American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August, 2017 © 2017 Elizabeth Cooper Davis All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Ingrid Monson Elizabeth Cooper Davis Making Movement Sounds: The Cultural Organizing Behind the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement Abstract Making Movement Sounds recovers the people, places, and ideas that shaped the freedom songs of the civil rights movement and the strategies for their frontlines use. Rather than locate the movement’s song repertoire within long histories of black cultural resistance, I uncover the cross-racial collaborations, influential strategizing centers, and core cultural concepts most responsible for its emergence and deployment as a political tool. I give particular attention to the workings of power and privilege by examining the oft-ignored prominence of the mid-century folk revival, the fields of folklore and folksong scholarship, and the disproportionate influence afforded the movement’s white folk collaborators. Drawing on interviews with and reports and personal correspondence from leading cultural organizers as well as folksingers’ commercially-produced frontlines field recordings and accompanying liner notes, I highlight the black and white collaborators, cultural concepts, and community debates that led to an array of musical strategies from the foregrounding of traditional black hymns to the surprising leveraging of the unlikely weapon of copyright law. I argue that the songs are best understood, not by tracing their “continuities and ruptures”1 with black cultural tradition, but by tracing the collaborations and disputes of their key cultural actors and the socio-cultural context !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 30. ! iii animating their encounters. Ultimately, Making Movement Sounds puts music history in conversation with anthropology, performance studies, and cultural studies to revise understandings of the people, politics, and practices shaping the mid-century sound of black resistance. ! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter One 32 Guy Carawan and the Discovery of America’s Folk Chapter Two 62 Making Movement Sounds: The Encounters That Shaped the Repertoire Chapter Three 98 “All Rights Reserved:” Copyrighting a Freedom Song Chapter Four 126 Forging a Legacy: The Creation of the “We Shall Overcome” Fund Epilogue 160 Bibliography 168 ! v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This nine-year journey has taught me that intellectual work is and must be community work. Throughout every stage of this project I have been surrounded and supported by a host teachers, mentors, guides, friends, and family. Each of them is in these pages and for that I am grateful. My committee—Ingrid Monson, Robin Bernstein, and Vincent Brown—has indelibly shaped my work in the archives, on the page, and in the classroom. Vince Brown’s insistence on tending to the artful—whether in his writing and teaching or by including Bad Brains and Fela in discussions of black Atlantic history—has been a constant source of inspiration. As I have sought to merge my artistic, political, and academic selves, he has been a reassuring tombolo between worlds. Robin Bernstein’s remarkable work has indelibly shaped my own but her committed teaching and mentorship have gotten me to where I am. More times than I can count, she has steered me straight when I wavered and convinced me I was capable when I doubted. And Ingrid Monson has been an extraordinarily gracious, generous, and attentive advisor. I have been guided by her commitment to freedom sounds and it is thanks to her keen insights and unwavering support that I was able to see and write my way through. Three other teachers have profoundly impacted my work. J. Lorand Matory’s graduate seminar in cultural anthropology was my introduction to graduate school and it was his insistence on centering W. E. B. Du Bois and Lee Baker and interrogating the discipline’s relationship to race and racism that convinced me to stay. Steve Seidel’s leadership in the field of arts in education has changed my perception of what is possible and I am honored to call him both mentor and friend. His is a radical pedagogy of kindness and whenever I teach, he is with me. I am also forever thankful for having known Juan Flores. His ferocious commitment to taking culture seriously—in his scholarship and on the dance floor—convinced me there might be a place for me in the academy. His support of me and so many students of color, infectious delight in the play of ideas, and radical hospitality led me to walk down this path. For the resources needed to conduct my research and write these pages, I am indebted to a number of people and institutions. The Hutchins Center, The Center for American Political Studies (CAPS), and The Graduate Society at Harvard University all enabled early research for this project. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at Hutchins and Lilia Halpern-Smith at CAPS were particularly supportive. It is no exaggeration to say that this dissertation would not have been completed without the supports offered by The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during my year as a Graduate Fellow. I owe tremendous thanks to Lizbeth Cohen and Judith Vichniac for their leadership, Sharon Bromberg-Lin and Rebecca Haley for their support, and the 2016-2017 cohort of fellows for a truly transformative year. I am particularly thankful to fellow fellows Alex Gourevitch, Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Aisha Khan, Kenneth Mack, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Tulasi Srinivas. This work would not exist without the generosity of those whose knowledge of Highlander and movement music long predates and far outstretches my own. Lee Grady at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Susan Williams at Highlander, and Kristin Turner at North Carolina State University were all particularly helpful in navigating the archives. ! vi Kim Ruehl repeatedly offered her wisdom about Zilphia Horton and invaluably supported my work by inviting me to write about “We Shall Overcome” in her roots music journal, No Depression. Comments offered on that article by Candie Carawan, Charlayne Hunter- Gault, Margo Jefferson, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Susan Williams helped me get from those pages to these. The stories shared in conversations with Candie Carawan, Julius Lester, Pam McMichael, Wendi O’Neal, and Carlton Turner shaped those told in these pages and I am particularly grateful for the supports offered by Tufara Waller Muhammad, who held my feet to the fire, and Wendi O’Neal, who told me mine was “north star work.” This project was inspired by my colleagues and friends at The Urban Bush Women (UBW), Junebug Productions, and The Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) and written with them in mind. In the 11 years I have known and worked with them, they have taught me what it means to honor integrity over fear and to move with more curiosity than critique. Dr. Kimberly Richards, Ron Chisolm, and the host of trainers at PISAB gave me an actionable understanding of race and racism and a framework with joy at its core; and UBW and Junebug—especially Maria Bauman, Paloma McGregor, Stephanie McKee, Takema Robinson, and, of course, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar—have forever changed my understanding of what it means to artfully engage politics, scholarship, community, friendship, and family. If I have avoided becoming “an educated fool,” it is, undoubtedly, thanks to them. This project would not exist without the friends who have consistently supported both my thinking and my sanity. Namita Dharia and Nancy Khalil have been my doctoral sisters from the beginning. Emily Owens is a beacon of radical self-care and scholarship that heals both the past and the present. Dana Edell has been of a source of joy and a co- conspirator all the way from SPACE to the Flying Saucer. Juniper Lesnik Downs has been inspiring and holding me down for more than two decades. And I quite literally would not have had the mental, emotional, or physical space to complete this project were it not for the kindness and care of Luba Falk Feigenberg and the warmth and joy of Fairmont Street. Most of all, these pages endeavor to honor my family’s generations-long commitment to history, culture, and justice. I am lifted and inspired by Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, W. Allison Davis, Margarett Gillespie Cooper, George C. Cooper, Peggy Cooper Davis, and Gordon J. Davis, and I dedicate every word to Susannah Speed, for her fight, and to Johari, my jewel, and Kamara, my moon, for their everything. ! vii INTRODUCTION In July 1959 armed officials raided the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee during the final night of a leadership workshop for black and white participants of the burgeoning civil rights movement. They cut off the lights for nearly two hours, searched the building, assaulted some of those present, and carted others off to jail. Neither the workshop nor the raid was unusual.
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