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Let Freedom Sing!: Get Your Rights, Jack

Deborah Jeter

The Power of Music!

The final article in celebrating Black History Month is on the powerful way that music influenced history in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's.

"In February, 1964, freedom workers were picketing Leb's restaurant in Atlanta. Thousands of passers-by, diners-out, and spectators crowded the four corners of the intersection. Demonstrators lined the two sides of the street. Suddenly an old man dressed in the red-piped, white satin robes of a Klan Cyclops limped through the narrow aisle of the sidewalk between restaurant and curb, leading a line of white-sheeted followers and a half dozen shirt-sleeved boys and men.

"Reporters, police, and spectators watched pop-eyed with apprehension as the white line moved valiant and stony-faced through the two dense, predominantly black walls of demonstrators. The Negro youngsters, after a loaded pause, sang 'We Shall Overcome.'

"The second or third time through, several Klansmen called out their slogans against the rising assault of music:

'I'm a white man and proud of it!'

'Niggers, go home!'

'Kill the niggers!'

"'Black and White together, Black and White together....' sang the laughing Negroes, most of them now dancing as they clapped. The music swelled and pounded louder, faster, and more aggressive, and the twisting girls and laughing boys danced and clapped closer and closer to the Klan.

"The young voices sang at the angry white faces, 'We shall brothers be...We shall brothers be.. We shall brothers be someday...' Another line of Klansmen crossing the street was infiltrated. Several Negro boys had borrowed white table cloths from Leb's, draped them over their dark heads, and slipped into the white line to march grinning with the Klansmen.

"The singing went on for hours, until many of us thought the poor Klansmen would, indeed, be overcome by the volume of the music, the power of the beat, and the hilarity of the ridicule."

"On other days, when the Klan wasn't 'integrating' the line in front of Leb's they would picket down the street at Herron's, a restaurant which served black and white. On one of those days the photographer was running back and forth and spotted a little girl walking along with her message written on a paper napkin.'"

"Love one another"

The above comments are excerpts from an exceptional book that I use with my class during January and February of each year.

The book, "Sing for Freedom", a Sing Out Publication, has many songs that were sung throughout the Civil Rights Movement and offers an event how the song was used to literally change the course of history.