The African American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was a fight for social justice among African Americans. The African American Civil Rights movement developed into the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which encouraged blacks to have racial pride and to create institutions that helped their race grow. The modern Black Lives Matter movement goals are to end police brutality towards African Americans and demilitarize law enforcement. Music can cause people to feel joyful, unhappy, or enraged. Music is imperative in bringing communities together by notifying more individuals about matters concerning the world. Nina Simone wrote a song in 1964 called Mississippi Goddam. The meaning of the song is Simone is furious about what happened in Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi. This song was prominent in the African American Civil …show more content…
The song is about Grandmaster living in the ghetto in New York and how that affects him mentally, economically, and educationally. This song is prominent in the Black Power movement because it discusses the life of a black man in ghetto America. Grandmaster talks about his living conditions in verse 1, where he wants to move out because he “can’t take the smell, can’t take the noise” (Grandmaster). The streets where he lives are filled with glass, there is pee on the stairs, there are disgusting insects in his room, and there are junkies in the allies. In verse 3, Grandmaster discusses not being able to pay his bills on time because of the “bum education” he got while growing up (Grandmaster). In his last verse, Grandmaster talks about the issue of African American children only seeing gangsters with expensive cars and money in their ghetto neighborhoods. He thinks this encourages black children to want to drop out of school and want to be like gangsters when they grow up. Additionally, Grandmaster wonders how he survived in ghetto New