For Global Peace with Social Justice in a Sustainable Environment

Freedom Songs The Music of the Civil Rights Movement - MLK Assassination

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Comment by Laura Dussault on April 6, 2010 at 6:16am: Greetings.
I would love to hear more. I am studying nonviolence to become a trainer of nonviolence. I am also hoping to present to my local Coalition Against Domestic Violence as well as SOAR(Sisters Overcoming Abusive Relationships) and interested in practicing nonviolence with conflicts. I actually started studying after volunteering to take pictures and video at a nonviolence training and nonviolence has become a focus. I met Bernard LaFayette Jr. and have heard many of his stories and would like to hear more.
-Laura

Comment by David Hadley Finke on April 5, 2010 at 7:58am: Music was absolutely vital and central to The Movement.

A high point in my own experience was during the Chicago Freedom Movement for which Dr. King was the titular head: "The Movement to End Slums." (Work for several years preceding had been done by the organization for which I later worked [1967-73], the Chicago office of American Friends Service Committee.)

We had a rally at Rev. Stroy Freeman's church on the South Side., (I think it was called "Friendship Baptist Church," but I'm not sure. It was just off Ashland Avenue around 71st Street. Ashland for years had been the racial dividing line, but had then moved west to Western Avenue.)

Dr. King was to be the featured speaker. He brought his insight and energy to similar meetings in churches all over Chicago -- often opposed by agents and thugs of the Daley machine,about which I could tell more stories.

Mahalia Jackson introduced him in a most invigorating and inspiring way: She glowed as she welcomed him to the lectern, singing, "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, and the Walls came Tumbling Down." And that was exactly what happened over the course of the next several months.

How happy I was to be one fo the many thousands of "foot soldiers" in that successful campaign of Nonviolent Resistance.

And how glad I am that this music still keeps singing in my soul!

Thank you, Mehalia! Thank you, Doc!

-DHF