Richie Havens - Handsome Johnny (Live At The Bitter End) (1967)

The Tallest Tree Paul Robeson Part 1

The Freedom Singers perform "We Shall Not Be Moved" at the March on Wash...

Peter, Paul & Mary - If I Had A Hammer

Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick's Black History Protest Folk Song Video Revisited

The late 20th-century U.S. Civil Rights Movement activist-organizer and protest folk songwriter-singer, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, produced this educational folk song video, in the years prior to his death in the 1980's, which reveals some historical facts that many U.S. history textbooks have often failed to include.

`We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement' 1963 Introduction: An Excerpt

In 1963, the introduction to the We Shall Overcome! Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement songbook (that was compiled by Guy and Candie Carawan for SNCC and published by Moe Asch's Oak Publications) indicated how non-commercially-motivated Freedom Movement protest folk songs, that working-class people of various racial backgrounds and Movement activist/organizers collectively created in 20th century, differ from most of the commercially-motivated pop songs that get played on corporate media conglomerate radio and television station programs in 21st-century, in the following way:

"Freedom songs today are sung in many kinds of situations: at mass meetings, prayer vigils, demonstrations, before Freedom Rides and Sit-Ins, in paddy wagons and jails, at conferences, work-shops and informal gatherings. They are sung to bolster spirits, to gain new courage and to increase the sense of unity...

"The freedom songs are of many kinds and range through many moods. The important ones are the old, slow-paced spirituals and hymns (some in the minor mode) that sing of hope and determination, and, the rhythmic jubilee spirituals and bright gospel songs that protest boldly and celebrate eventual victory. These are in the majority and usually have new or revised words to old tunes...Finally, there is a small miscellany of songs imported from the north, including a couple of revised union songs and a handful of newly adapted folk songs. These have come from exchange students, freedom riders, folk singers and hit records...The students have been responsible for making up most of the new lyrics and singing new life into the old songs...

"...No other songs have been able to express so closely the feelings of the participants or have been so easily adapted to fit current situations as some of the old spirituals. When sung with anything approximating the old time style and spirit, they are unbeatable..."

SNCC Freedom Singer Matt Jones: A 1994 Interview--Part 1

The Summer of 1994 marked the 30th Anniversary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, in which over 1,000 student volunteers from around the U.S. participated, after attending training sessions in Oxford, Ohio. But in 2017 a former chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown (n/k/a Jamil al-Amin), is still imprisoned for life in a Georgia prison.

In 1994, Downtown spoke with former SNCC organizer and Freedom Singers Director, Matt Jones (1936-2011) about the Freedom Summer, the Freedom Singers, SNCC and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Jones lived in Manhattan and for many years  generously donated his time to sing at many human rights and peace benefits. At The People’s Voice Café in Manhattan, a celebration of his 70th birthday took place in 2006. Following is part 1 of an interview with Jones, which first appeared in the September 21, 1994 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown.

Now it’s 30 years [in 1994] after the Mississippi Summer Project. What activities were you involved in that led to the Freedom Summer? What are your most enduring and vivid memories of that Summer?
Matt Jones: In January 1964, I went on tour with the SNCC Freedom Singers. Our job was to organize Friends of SNCC chapters in the northern part of the United States and to talk about the Movement to interested students, who would in turn give their bodies, their minds and their finances to the struggle. They knew, by the accounts of life and death that we would give them in our concerts, that to work for SNCC was as dangerous as any war.

In early 1964, we did a concert at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The KKK burned a cross on the lawn. Dick Gregory, who was touring with us, made fun of the incident. We wrote a song called “The Klansman:” (recites)

“Out of the night
When the full moon is bright
Rides a devil known as a Klansman.
Devil, who makes the sign of a K.
Devil, you’re bound to see your day.”

From the incident many students from Oxford got involved in SNCC. Their networking with the SNCC office in Atlanta set the stage for using Oxford as the meeting place for the Summer Orientation. Similar networking was done in other states, but none was as complex as The Mississippi Summer Project.

Seeing many students that we had organized with speeches and songs was an affirmation that we had done a good job. But that reality scared me. I suddenly felt an enormous responsibility. The people we had sung to and who we had organized were the students who were going South.

We heard that three students were missing in Meridian [Mississippi]. I became very nervous. I sat under the tree where we had taught many students nonviolent techniques, and hoped that they would decide to go home, because I did not want the responsibility of their deaths. I knew [SNCC Field Secretary] Bob Moses was talking to the students in the hall, and felt confident of Bob’s ability to explain things. Bob was a genius at making points with a few words. He had an eloquent silence. Bob was the leader of the Council of Federated Organizations [COFO] in Mississippi during Freedom Summer.

I knew I had a lot of responsibility for the students being there. I’m one of the cheerleaders, one of the people who talked them into coming down. Or talked them into thinking that was the place to be. But I had no way of knowing, when I was talking to them, that they would come down and somebody would actually get killed. A student would actually get killed. And we would have to deal with that.

So when we heard that three [civil rights] workers were missing, I looked at these students wishing they would go home.

Why was a decision made to utilize the student volunteers?
Jones: I had been arrested 29 times in the Movement.

Twenty-nine?
Jones: Across the South.

What kinds of arrests?
Jones: Well, you would go to register people to vote and they would throw you in jail. You would go to integrate a lunch counter and they would throw you in jail. You would go to integrate a movie theater and get thrown in jail. And it just wound up, in the final analysis, being 29 times.

We had found out, as early as the March on Washington [in 1963], that with white student involvement the country would pay more attention to the struggle. We knew from past experience that this country would not react to Black people being killed. So in bringing the student volunteers to the South, their parents, their home towns, their colleges and their congressmen would be interested in their welfare.

We were right. However, we were as shocked as the rest of the nation when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were killed. In 1963, we had previously used white students in other places throughout the South. However, the majority of these students were from the South.

So we took a calculated risk. We thought that something would happen. That people would get involved. And they did get involved. We didn’t want it to happen the way it happened…

Now when I was sitting under that tree, I knew that they were going. But I also knew I was going with them. So right after some of them left, I wound up going to Meridian. And being there with [Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC)] leader] Jim Bevel and a CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] worker named “Flukie” Suarez.

But I knew that some of the veteran workers had to go into Meridian at that time. And I was one of them that went into Meridian. I was frightened, but I also knew a little bit more about how to survive in that area than Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman had known. (end of part 1)

Paul Robeson Predicted 1960s U.S. Student Protest Movement In 1955

Five years before African-American students and Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] student activists began their mass-based non-violent sit-in protests in opposition to Jim Crow and segregation in the southern region of United States in 1960, U.S. protest folk singer and civil rights movement activist Paul Robeson predicted that a student protest movement in the USA would develop. In the May 1955 issue of his Freedom journal, for example, Robeson wrote:

"It is good, these days, to get out to the college campuses and see the stirring of new life among the students. The Ivy Curtain of conformity, which for a decade has shut them off from the sunlight of independent thinking, is beginning to wilt. The fresh breeze of free expression is beginning to filter into the stale atmosphere of the cold-war classrooms...

"Yes, a ferment is growing among America's students, both Negro and white. Many are beginning to see that if a concern for future jobs has dictated conformity, a concern for their very lives requires that they think for themselves..."

Paul Robeson's July 1952 `Freedom' Journal Article Revisited

In the July 1952 issue of his Freedom journal publication, U.S. protest folk singer and civil rights/anti-war movement activist Paul Robeson wrote the following:

"The Council on African Affairs called a press conference the other day. It has to do with the present disobedience campaign in South Africa in particular...

"Now, whatever our difficulties and disabilities, the South Africans are even more fiercely oppressed. Pass laws, curfew laws, unbelievable conditions in housing, jobs, all the stigmas of segregation in stations, public places, stores, and so forth.

"So what do they do?...

"They declared on April 6th [1952] their determination to oppose the new oppressive laws--and it started on June 26th [1952]. They refuse to obey Jim Crow and submit to arrest at this stage. Just imagine if we started something like that in the South--or even in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville and Los Angeles...

"These South Africans aren't afraid of baiting. They march in thousands with raised clenched fists. They sing their songs of protest...

"And finally, these Africans realize that the old political parties (the so-called Liberals and Conservatives, equivalents of our Democratic and Republican Parties) serve the interests of those who rule, who own. They do not and cannot serve the masses of the people, Black or white. So they have had to form their own Congress and look forward to their own party, springing from themselves and serving the people..."

Did Paul Robeson Protest Against Korean War More Than The Weavers Did?

On June 27, 1950 Democratic U.S. President Harry S. Truman ordered the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy to intervene militarily in the civil war in Korea; and on June 30, 1950 Democratic U.S. President Truman authorized the beginning of U.S. military air strikes and the use of U.S. military ground forces against targets in North Korea and against North Korean troops in both southern and northern Korea.

But in a speech at a Civil Rights Congress [CRC] anti-war rally of 18,000 people in New York City's Madison Square Garden on June 28, 1950, U.S. anti-war movement and civil rights movement activist and folk song singer Paul Robeson said the following:

"...The people's will for freedom is stronger than atom bombs and we may be sure the people of Korea, Indo-China, the Philippines and Formosa will not treat their invaders lightly any more. We have supported, not only the bankrupt Chiang in China, but all the little Chiangs--equally corrupt and lacking in favor among their people--all over the Far East.

"And the American people must resent this forced alliance of our proud nation with the dishonorable quislings who stand, momentarily, in the way of their peoples' strivings for freedom and independence.

"Our place has always been on the side of the Lafayettes, the heroes of the French Revolution, Touissaints, the Kosciuskos, the Bolivars--not the Quislings of Europe and the Chiangs, the Bao Dai's and the Syngman Rhee's of Asia.

"The meaning of the President's order that the lives of our airmen and sailors must be sacrificed for the government's despicable puppet in Korea, shall not be lost to the millions in the East whose day of freedom is not far off...

"Least of all will the meaning of the President's order be lost to the Negro people. They will know that if we don't stop our armed adventure in Korea today--tomorrow it will be Africa. For the maw of the warmakers is insatiable. They aim to rule the world or ruin it. Their slogan is all or none.

"It has already meant our intervention not only in Korea, but in Formosa, the Philippines and Indo-china with arms, ships, aircraft, and men.

"I have said before, and say it again, that the place for the Negro people to fight for their freedom is here at home--in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas--in the Chicago ghetto, and right here in New York's Stuyvesant Town!...

"...It falls upon our shoulders here in the United States to halt our government's intervention on behalf of the corrupt Rhee regime..."

And in a November 24, 1950 speech before 5,000 people in New York City's St. Nicholas Arena at the First National Convention of the Labor Youth League, Robeson also said the following:

"I am happy and proud to take part in this first National Convention of the Labor Youth League...You know, and I know, that there are people in our country who are NOT happy about your meeting. They want you to be quiet while they herd you off to fight the youth of Korea...

"They want you to sit still while the...Eisenhowers turn the universities into barracks and bludgeon your young, inquiring minds into a meek conformity with the policies of the war-minded, the racists, and the rich...

"But YOU say, No!

"You say, No more war! Books not bullets! Bread, not cannon! Life, not death!

"You say, Peace!..."

In the January 1952 issue of his Freedom newspaper, Robeson also wrote:

"Six months ago the truce negotiations began in Korea. But today the bloodshed continues, and American diplomats and top brass persist in carrying on the most shameful war in which our country has ever been engaged...

"A 100,000 Americans dead, wounded and missing have been listed in this war which nobody--not even the most cynical politician--bothers to call a `police action' any more. And more than that, we have killed, maimed and rendered homeless a million Koreans, all in the name of preserving western civilization. U.S. troops have acted like beasts, as do all aggressive, invading, imperialist armies. North and South of the 38th parallel, they have looked upon the Korean people with contempt, called them filthy names, raped their women, lorded it over old women and children, and shot prisoners in the back...

"In Indo-China, Indonesia, Malaya--which side are we on?...In each case we have been on the side of the Dutch, the French and the British colonial powers who stand arrogantly,arms akimbo, feet spread wide, blocking the road to national liberation and independence...

"...We must demand: End War--Make Peace Now! An immediate truce in Korea! A meeting and peace agreement among the 5 major powers!..."

Coincidentally, according to a footnote in the 1978 Paul Robeson Speaks book that Philip Foner edited, "with recording companies refusing to issue his records or record new ones and all concert halls, theaters, etc. closed to him, Robeson, who had been listed among top ten highest paid concert artists of 1941, sees his income dwindle from a high of over $100,000 (equal to around $1.1 million in 2016 U.S. dollars) to about $6,000 (equal to around $54,000 in 2016 U.S. dollars) in 1952..."

Members of the commercially-oriented folk song group, the Weavers, however, apparently did not publicly express opposition to U.S. military intervention in the Korean Civil War between 1950 and 1952 as much as did Robeson; and, coincidentally, the commercially-oriented Weavers folk song group earned a lot more money between 1950 and 1952 than did Robeson (before members of the Weavers were also eventually blacklisted in 1952, because of their 1940's association with left or left-liberal popular front groups, Decca Records Corporation apparently stopped distributing their records or recording new Weavers single records or vinyl albums and most U.S. concert halls and theaters were closed to the Weavers until they were allowed to publicly perform again in a 1955 Carnegie Hall concert in Manhattan).  As Ronald Lankford, Jr. recalled in his book Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest:

"...The Weavers...signed with Decca...Old friends from People's Songs, a radical booking agency, and Sing Out!, the folksong magazine, seemed...distrustful of the Weavers' newfound success...They believed that [they]...had sold out their principles for popular success...The Weavers...stopped attending trade union potlucks...When Mother Bloor...keeled over in August 1951, the Weavers didn't even bother to send flowers...It was pretty clear that the Weavers were avoiding their former haunts..."

And as Dick Weissman recalled in his 2010 book Talkin' `Bout A Revolution: Music and Social Change in America: 

"...Gordon Jenkins, an arranger-producer at Decca Records, loved the group and signed them to the label. Between 1950 and 1952 they sold over 4 million records. One of their major hits was Lead Belly's song `Goodnight Irene.' The group shared composer credits with Huddie Ledbetter on `Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,' reworking his adaptation of an Irish melody into the song...

"...The Weavers' managers tried to keep them from performing at radical rallies, or having any direct associations with radical movements...It would have been difficult for conservatives to object to the content of the Weavers' Decca recordings. `On Top of Old Smokey" was a traditional English-American love ballad, `Goodnight Irene' was a sad song about an unfortunate love affair...The Weavers were scolded by the left; Irwin Silber, who was now running People;s Artists, criticized the group in the magazine Sing Out! for not having any black members when they performed so much African American music...The Weavers were listed as communists in Counterattack and Red Channels, two publications run by three ex-FBI agents...As a result of these listings, the Weavers began to lose bookings, a prospective television show disappeared, and Decca Records cancelled their record deal..."

A month after the U.S. military intervention in Korea's civil war began in late June 1950, the Weavers found that their Decca record version of a pro-Zionist movement folk song, "Tzena, Tzena", and their version of Lead Belly's "Goodnight Irene" folk song were among the ten hit records that were being played by U.S. commercial radio station DJs and on U.S. commercial jukeboxes; and by August 5, 1950, while U.S. military intervention in Korea escalated, the Weavers' "Goodnight Irene" record was number 2 on Billboard magazine's hit record chart at the same time the Weavers' "Tzena, Tzena" record was still number 4 on Billboard magazine's hit record chart.