Sam Cooke: Song Analysis

In 1964 world famous Motown singer Sam Cooke released a “A change is going to come.” This song included rhythmic melodies and soulful sounding lyrics, but this song contained and obviously deeper undertone of race relations in America. It sounds as a description of Cooke’s life up until this time and how he believes with the tide of civil rights activist a change was evidently going to eventually come. In this song Cooke chooses his lyrics in an ambiguous way to leave it to interpretation. These questions of the lyrical choice center on the American identity and who Cooke was referring to. Cooke begins the song by saying “I was born by the river in a little tent and just like the river I 've been running Ever since” (Same Cooke). This part

White are attached to their own identity and violate the civic solidary of others because they expect others conform to these ideas or be oppressed and have to feel unwelcomed. Many people like Sam Huntington “calls for immigrants to assimilate into America 's “Anglo Protestant culture” (Song). If this culture seems to be violated then people can become defensive of it and violent. As Lorde says, “there must always be some group of people who, through systemized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior” (Lorde). This group was blacks for many years and in the future any other minority could take the mantle as the oppressed because it violates one’s ideals and expectations of others. A system that we currently live have led to the hate and feeling expressed in Cookes song. When Cooke does anything like even go to the center of town people say, “And I go downtown somebody keep telling me don 't hang around” (Cooke) In a country where a certain group of people are not allowing follows the conformist ways of America and how the racism seeps in to everyone’s

I believe he is reaching out to whites for help, because we are the only people who have power to enact change in government. Blacks are giving a plea for help, but because the ideals of many whites have been challenge after civil rights legislation gets past there is a backlash. This backlash comes from whites feeling the need to “just approve of those commitments; it entrenches them and guards them against a time when there might well be a weakening or a loss of the commitments” (Belgrami) The 70s were this backlash during Nixons time. As a result, since the change that had come in Cookes time that he believed ‘But now I think I 'm able to carry on It 's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will” However, once this change came there was so much more that had to be done and legislation ceased to exist for blacks and many racist acts still occur. To Audre Lorde this continuation of racism is seen “Somewhere on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “That’s is not me” In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male young, heterosexual christen and finically secured.”(Lorde) This is the accepted definition of