Singing With The Freedom Riders: The Music Of The Movement

BIRMINGHAM -- In a church where four little girls lost their lives, angels still seem to be singing. Their songs are not of the pain left behind, but of freedom.

The choir rose to its feet and sang:

Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
I'll go home to my Lord
And I'll be free.

As if a wave swept through the pews nearly everyone in the audience rose, swayed and clapped. The energy was palpable, the way Sunday at a Southern Baptist church can be. But this wasn't Sunday service, it was a special performance at the 16th Street Baptist Church (pictured below) by the Carlton Reese Memorial Choir for an audience of very special guests - the Freedom Riders.

In a city synonymous with the strife of segregation and the forces that fought so fiercely to end it, this church is a sacred place in the Civil Rights Movement legacy. Birmingham is also a place where the Freedom Riders suffered a particularly brutal beating by the Ku Klux Klan as they challenged the segregation of interstate buses there.

The violence in Birmingham became so bloody then, that the city became known as "Bombingham."

It was the latest stop along the 2011 Freedom Ride, which brought together a handful of original Freedom Riders and 40 college students from across the country and from different backgrounds to retrace the original journey through the Deep South. Each stop up until then had been wrought with emotions: guilt, sorrow, anger and hope.

I sat about a dozen rows back from where those little girls lost their lives in 1963 when a klansmen's bomb was detonated outside the church, and couldn't help but glance over at the stained glass window that once rained down in shards on the congregation.

To be in that room, in that city, was breathtaking.

And then the choir sang -- so sweet a sound.

Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around
I'm gonna keep on walking, keep on walking.

Again a wave of energy swept through the church. The Freedom Riders in attendance, now in their late 60s or 70s, swayed and a surge of difficult joy coursed through the students.

Even I was starting to feel possessed by whatever it was the choir or that place was doing to us.

I felt, for lack of a better word, empowered, and it became immediately clear how much this music meant to the movement.

LISTEN:

There were influential ministers who preached power from the pulpits, but it was the church choirs of the Civil Rights era that gave the people a soundtrack that stirred them into the streets to stand up for their rights. The movement was filled with music, freedom songs and old gospel standbys born from the souls and spirits of black folks and our struggles.

So many of these songs also became the life-blood of the Freedom Riders, who braved heaps of brutality along interstate highways throughout the Deep South during the Freedom Rides of 1961.

"Music was just as important as learning about nonviolence," said Ernest "Rip" Patton, one of the original Freedom Riders. "Music brought us together -- we can't all talk at the same time, but we can all sing at the same time. It gives you that spiritual feeling. It was like our glue."

A couple days earlier, about five of the original Freedom Riders and the 40 students accompanying them were in Atlanta, sitting in the pews of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Sr. and his son, Martin Luther King Jr., once preached.

We sat and listened to a sermon by the younger King that played over the speakers. And then a woman's voice, a beautiful voice, rose and unfurled from the speakers and filled every recess in the place. It was a haunting song called "How Great Thou Art" -- powerful and subdued.

It was a change of pace for the students, who had by then passed the long bus rides by singing "We Shall Overcome," "This Little Light of Mine" and "The Buses Are A-Coming" over and over, even remixing some of the songs or making up raps with names of the Freedom Riders on the bus worked into their lyrics. But this was different. It had a bit more weight.

"We sang that in church every Sunday," said Samantha Williams, 23, a student at the University of Arkansas, of the song that played inside the church. "To hear it sung in that context, you almost feel guilty for singing it."

In Birmingham the choir sang, "I Don't Feel No Way Tired" -- the kind of song that could keep you keeping on no matter what.

"The music was the inspiration. It gave the people a lot of courage that they didn't think they had," said Eloise Gaffney, the choir director who joined the choir in 1962 and quickly "found a place in the movement."

"When we were talking about we ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, it kind of just fired them up. And it was Martin King that was the one that said this choir can sing them out of their seats and into the streets."

Annie B. Levison, another longtime choir member, said that people came to the church to hear the preaching and the teaching, but also the singing.

"You know how when you start singing in your church, and you know how it just catch on fire, well everybody would catch on fire, and when they get on fire and the Lord is just dwelling inside of them -- they're ready," she said. "That's what you had to do. Get them on fire. And when the fire starts burning all over, they're going to run. So, where' you going to run to? You're going to run out to the people and say lets get free. Lets get free!"

LISTEN:

"Singing With The Freedom Riders" is one part of a series of pieces by Trymaine Lee that first ran on Black Voices:

• "Ku Klux Klan Violence: Town Near Appalachian Mountains Tries To Shake Memories"
• "Selma 46 Years After Bloody Sunday"
• "Take it to Church: The Music of the Movement"
• "Going Back to Rock Hill"
• "Freedom Ride 2011: Day 3"
• "Getting on the Bus, 50 Years Later"
• "In the Valley of the Shadow of Freedom Riders"
• "Let Freedom Ring: 2011 Freedom Riders Reach New Orleans"

Comments

[Cindbird]

01:32 AM on 06/01/2011

I live near Birmingham. I have two sons. One of my best friends is African-American. She has two daughters. The day the Civil Rights Institute opened, we took the kids to go see it. We had to park a few blocks away. When we crossed the street, the kids held hands as they had been taught. It was pure accident that they stacked up one white child, one black child. As we walked down the sidewalk, we were stopped and asked if we would allow a photo of the kids. The woman said that Dr. King had said that one day, little Black boys and little Black girls would walk hand in hand down the streets of Birmingham with little White boys and little White girls, and here was that dream realized. It was only then that we realized how the kids had stacked up. It was not something that had crossed our minds. The courage of the Freedom Riders and many others made that day possible.

[TommyMcCarthy]

03:07 PM on 06/01/2011

What a delightful story "Cindbird"....thanks for sharing it.

For those interested here's a link to "American Experience"s treatment of the Freedom Rides of 1961.

http://video.pbs.org/video/1925571160


Your comment is also a reminder to me personally... regarding my own prejudices.

I have always considered myself to be an advocate and an activist for human rights of all kinds...but it has been many years since I have traveled in the deep south.........

I'm often (too often).. caught off guard by the ease with which I too slip into "stereotyping"......
When some opportunistic politician seeks to:
re-write our history to "airbrush" slavery out of the the Civil War.....
or minimize the injustice of the "Jim Crow" era....or the struggles of the movement in our own lifetimes...
or to use the old "dog whistle" language of the segregationists against NEW targets
(the gays, immigrants, Muslims..etc.)

It's so easy to think...."Well there THEY go again....ya' know....down THERE"

Your comment reminds me that there have always been people of good will...even in Birmingham....which we considered the very epicenter of injustice in the US.

The very BEST news about all of that is also contained in your comment.....

That as long as we continue to tell them the truth....the generation embodied by your children (and theirs)....will find it hard to imagine why anyone harbored the old hatreds in the first place.

Regards
TM

[Cindbird]

05:27 PM on 06/02/2011

You're right. I believe that we have to teach our children what happened during the Civil Rights Movement. They must understand what people fought for. Because that's how we make sure it never happens again. I started First Grade with the KKK burning a cross across the street from the school. They had integrated the schools over the summer. I never want another child to be that frightened again. I want my sons to understand what it felt like to have words I won't repeat, screamed at me because I was holding hands with a new friend who was black. For me, the test of how well I taught that lesson, is the fact that my oldest son, who is 21, has a Goddaughter. His best friend's child. She is African-American. And he saw it as a great honor that his friend trusted him enough that if something were to happen, David would step in as a father figure for the child. That is the real results of the Movement, that there be no division between black and white. That we don't see the different skin color, we see only the heart which beats beneath. We're not totally there yet, but we're surely not where we were.

[blognostic]

02:30 PM on 05/31/2011

Music liberates our emotional tensions. :)

[Cornelia36]

01:52 PM on 05/31/2011

There is nothing, NOTHING like the older gospel songs, IMO. My mother calls them "the old one hundreds". Contemporary is good, and I like that too...but something about being in church on a Sunday morning, and someone sings "Precious Lord", or "Peace Be Still". (getting emotional now). My Grandmother had dementia before she passed...but the one thing she never forgot was the words to "This Little Light of Mine"... :)

[springsm]

12:52 PM on 05/31/2011

Oops, I meant to say "and the credibility of the people singing these gospels." Sorry...these pieces actually effect me way down deep.

[springsm]

12:50 PM on 05/31/2011

I really love this music because of the message and the feelings and the credibility of this music,

[Gregor53]

12:10 PM on 05/31/2011

The Freedom Riders should be an inspiration for those today that feel they can not impact local or state politics. They are heros of the 1960's and risked everything, some including their lives, for what the believed. Let us hope we never need another group of brave individuals to risk their lives in a fight for their Civil Rights.

[RockyMissouri]

12:15 AM on 05/31/2011

Whenever I feel that something is overwhelming, I try to think of the Freedom Riders and all the travails they had to endure...suddenly, my problems seem insignificant compared to their burdens...