Music in the Wake of the Sixteenth Street Church Bombing, 1963/64
During the Civil Rights Movement, music was a powerful means of protest. Activists sang as they marched, and Black religious music was commonplace at mass meetings, where congregations organized their next movements and emboldened their spirits. In a description of a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote,
“The opening hymn was the old familiar ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ and when that mammoth audience stood to sing, the voices outside swelling the chorus in the church, there was a mighty ring like the glad echo of heaven itself.”
As I briefly mentioned in a previous blog, the year 1963 was a tumultuous and important time in Birmingham, Alabama for the Civil Rights Movement. Musicians played a key part in raising awareness for the movement and financially supporting boycotts and protests. In August of 1963, Birmingham hosted the “Salute to Freedom” concert, where musicians like Ray Charles, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald performed at Miles College to celebrate (and test the reality of) the Birmingham Campaign’s success at ending segregation in the city.
Just over a month after that concert, four KKK members bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a Black church that was an…
