This double compact disc project documents a central aspect of the cultural environment of the Civil Rights Movement, acknowledging songs as the language that focused people’s energy. The featured tracks are a series of musical images of a people in conversation about their determination to be free. Many of the songs were recorded live in mass meetings held in churches, where people from different life experiences, predominantly Black, with a few White supporters, came together in a common struggle. These freedom songs draw from spirituals, gospel, rhythm and blues, football chants, blues and calypso forms. The enclosed booklet written by Bernice Johnson Reagon provides rare historic photographs along with the powerful story of African American musical culture and its role in the Civil Rights Movement.

Born in slavery and nurtured in the Black church, African American sacred music records a people’s struggle to survive and the longing to be free. African American sacred music merged a variety of musical forms and performance traditions, including spirituals, ring-dancing, hymns, pentecostal shouts, quartet singing, and gospel. In giving voice to the continued struggle for freedom, sacred music profoundly influenced the development not only of African American communities but also of mainstream popular culture. Currently Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Reagon served as principal scholar, conceptual producer, and host of the path-breaking and Peabody Award-winning Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio series Wade In The Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions, which began broadcasting in 1994. Ms. Reagon also curated the traveling exhibition of the same title, produced by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. More information: SIRIS | Smithsonian Institution Research Information System.

The soundtrack to the phenomenal PBS miniseries was created by Bernice Johnson Reagon, and is a glorious mix of all kinds of music from the period, from Irish love songs to the intense “Bones Speak” pieces. Many of the songs are performed by Reagon with her daughter Toshi Reagon. The searing PBS miniseries examines slavery in a whole new light. Of the original compositions created for the soundtrack, Reagon stated, “I composed choral sounds for this series I never would have created under any other circumstance.”

The Emmy award winning documentary film, We Shall Overcome, tells the story of the song that became a Civil Rights anthem. The song was found in Baptist and Methodist congregations at the turn of the century as I Will Overcome or I’ll Overcome. In 1901, Rev Charles Albert Tindley, copyrighted his hymn, I’ll Overcome Someday.

During the thirties, in Charleston, S.C. Black members of a tobacco local included this song in all of their organizing meetings and sang it on the picket line during their 1940s strike against the American Tobacco Company. In the mid-’40s, the Charleston local brought the song to a workshop of union workers at the integrated Highlander Folk School in New Market, TN. The music director, Zilphia Horton included the song in her workshops and taught it to Peter Seeger who sang it at Union rallies across the country. Folksinger Guy Carawan became Highlander’s music director in the late 50s and taught the song to the student leaders of the Nashville Sit-in Movement.

The song became the theme song of the building Movement at a gathering of Sit-in leaders and SCLC in spring 1960. As these students spread out across the south as organizers, they took the song as the anthem of the struggle. The SNCC Freedom Singers brought the song to Northern colleges and community groups, Joan Baez sang it as marchers gathered for the March on Washington in 1963 and Mahalia Jackson lead the anthem as the closing song. Later, the song became an international symbol of organized resistance to oppression.

Narrated by Harry Belafonte, We Shall Overcome includes interviews with Pete Seeger, Peter Yarrow, veterans of the Civil Rights Movement and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Bernice Johnson Reagon served as music consultant.

In 1972, an interdisciplinary committee of Black cultural workers and scholars gathered in Washington, DC with the goal of creating a concept for the presentation of Black cultural materials at the annual Smithsonian Institution’s Festival of American Folklife. The developed program explored African American culture from the viewpoint of the diaspora, the dispersal of Black people throughout the world by slavery and migrations. Following the Festival, the program continued the research and presentation of African American Culture and evolved into the Program in African American Culture, part of the National Museum of American History, in 1982. The establishment of the program was the first time, apart from the Festival of American Folklife, that research into African American cultural history was given a permanent place at the Smithsonian. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the program, served as director until 1989.