How Did Music Influence The Civil Rights Movement

Rose Valentine

Brandon McCoy

English 1101

08 December 2016

The Influence of Music in the Fight for Rights Throughout the world and the United States, minority groups have always faced discrimination. In the past 75 years, the world has seen the hardships of racially diverse people. The Civil Rights Movement was thought to have been over long ago, but events in the past several years have proven that the movement is still going strong. In the fifties and sixties, when the movement was at its strongest, many events, people, and ideas influenced the thoughts of people of all races. Music has always had a way of bringing people together. Whether it’s in celebration, or a musical, music has a way of speaking to people that no one understands. New

They are speaking out and inspiring people, young and old, to not stand for disrespect and discrimination. Music was a major contributor to the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, and it continues to persuade people to stand for what they believe in, to this day. In the early twentieth century, a new genre of music arose. Out of the black culture came a new type of music that spread through the country, and the world like a wildfire. Jazz is described as an improvised and syncopated variety of music made with mainly brass and woodwind instruments along with a piano to create a raspy, rough, and soulful kind of music that is unique to its individual maker. Louis Armstrong is known as the “Father of Jazz,” and for many years never spoke of racial issues, despite being a well-known black artist. However, in an interview in 1957, he finally broke his political silence. He called President Eisenhower “two faced,” and he called, Arkansas Governor, Orval Faubus an “uneducated plow boy.” In the 1960s, a jazz artist named John Coltrane was a popular and loved. He was well-known because of his new take on jazz music. He was one of the artists that started what is known as the

The Civil Rights movement officially ended in 1968 with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. However, in the past several years, we, mainly in America, have seen many issues with deaths that seem to have been caused by the race of both the victim and the killer. This led to the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was officially established in 2012 after the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy named Trayvon Martin. When his killer was not held accountable for his actions, people protested by creating the Black Live Matter movement. This sadly shows how, today, in 2016, the Civil Rights Movement is still ongoing. The Black Lives Matter is an “ideological and political intervention” to help stop the murder of innocent people for the color of their skin. The Black Lives Matter movement gained more attention after the death of Michael Brown. Brown was an eighteen-year-old black boy who was killed, unjustifiably by a white police officer in St. Louis, Missouri in 2014. Through various social media websites and events the Black Lives Matter movement has become a well-known and very controversial