Just as we can never know all of the movement’s nameless rank-and-file participants, it is hard to identify more than a small handful of gospel singers who notably contributed to the civil rights struggle. Considering the grassroots, non-commercial obscurity of most performers, this should not be surprising. But if almost all black churches featured gospel music, and activist churches were the major centers of movement activity, it is not difficult to imagine the proliferation of activist singers, groups, or choruses. Whether raising funds at gospel music programs, performing at rallies and mass meetings, marching in the streets, or just stuffing envelopes, gospel artists were undoubtedly active throughout local movements. Indeed, Carlton Reese, Cleo Kennedy, and the Birmingham Movement Choir amply proved this under the aegis of Reverend Shuttlesworth.
The inherent power of African American church culture gave civil rights leaders and grassroots movement folk potent means to overcome adversity. “Successful social movements usually comprise people who are willing to make great sacrifices in a single-minded pursuit of their goals,” notes Aldon D. Morris. “The black church supplied the civil rights movement with a collective enthusiasm generated through a rich culture consisting of songs, testimonies, oratory, and prayers that spoke directly to the needs of an oppressed group.” Morris shows how the black church “supplied the civil rights movement with a collective enthusiasm generated through a rich culture consisting of songs, testimonies, oratory, and prayers that spoke directly to the needs of an oppressed group.”239
Black church culture was an important part of the civil rights movement, and gospel music had a significant presence throughout the period. However, the fact that gospel was a crucial element of movement history is not a widely broached concept in either popular or scholarly literature. Much of the explanation for this lies in the music’s very ubiquity: gospel had revolutionized black church services by the postwar era, and it was a powerful cultural force within black popular consciousness through radio, recordings, and live performances. The tremendous legacy of gospel music, including its pivotal role in all movement phases, has simply been taken for granted without serious thought or argument.
Significantly, the pervasiveness of gospel culture is consonant with the “local people” themes of revisionist civil rights historiography: that is, the search for movement consciousness in black gospel music must move beyond the big names and major labels and look into the disseminated population of grassroots gospel communities. Dr. King could swoop in and out of local movements to reap most of the glory or blame, and outside activists could always leave the violent scenes of grassroots struggle, but local folks were rooted to their homes and ultimately responsible for their own successes and failures. Whereas distant label bosses and marketing strategists had limited familiarity with local conditions, and even less exposure to the personal physical dangers experienced daily by the African American masses, most gospel performers were far removed from the lucrative limelight and acutely vulnerable to the immediate social environment.
Songs reflect the personalities of their composers, and especially the performers who bring them to life. Because of gospel’s strong entrenchment in the black church, the same dialectical tensions at work in the Afro-Christian community were present among the gospel community. Thus the innumerable gospel artists from across the country, at every level of notoriety and professional status, possessed the same wide range of political commitment as the rest of the black community.
Black gospel’s impressive variety was consequently mirrored in the church-based music of the civil rights movement, as professional interpreters, local songleaders, and movement congregations performed the freedom song repertoire in the myriad stylistic variations of the popular gospel idiom. Even in rural churches where spirituals were preserved in more archaic form—and where much of the most crucial grassroots activism took place—essentially all church music was an expression of the local gospel community.
Not only was gospel valuable for organizational purposes, it was invaluable for psychological purposes. At the concrete level, gospel music has proven to be a reliable cultural tool for engendering community social action. At the abstract level, the major lyrical themes of gospel songs emphasize faith and perseverance through life’s struggles, and these messages resonated deeply with the church-steeped masses during that remarkable struggle for freedom.
But the rarity of overt political themes or explicit protest language in gospel lyrics has led many to the mistaken assumption that the music is wholly “otherworldly” in focus, and therefore some of these critics have minimized its influence on the civil rights movement. Yet far from a troubling conundrum, the paradox of an ostensibly apolitical music being a critical factor in the politicization and mobilization of an oppressed people actually holds the key to understanding the gospel/movement connection at the heart of this thesis.
As inheritor of the black sacred song tradition, gospel music has always operated primarily in the realm of infrapolitics—by strategically masking its oppositional expressions in biblical allegory and religious symbolism to deflect the repressive reaction of hostile whites. In other words, to base an analysis of this relationship solely upon open and obvious protest rhetoric is really to miss the entire point. By definition, the hidden transcript just does not work that way. What might appear to be clear evidence of an escapist mentality to outsiders may in fact resonate as a deeply meaningful message of coded resistance within the black gospel community itself.
But according to infrapolitical theory, “unsettled times” of heightened unrest typically create opportunities for the hidden transcript to open up, allowing subaltern groups to produce more overt forms of cultural protest. In conformity with the model, black gospel music did indeed manifest an increased amount of material that more directly addressed the dramatically changing times. That only a miniscule fraction of gospel recordings made during the postwar golden age did so is hardly a sign of the music’s otherworldly rejection of secular struggles. Especially at the height of the civil rights movement, such a striking absence of overt protest in black gospel discourse merely underscores the infrapolitical essence of the form.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND DISCOGRAPHY