African-American Protest Music from the 60s
A true reading of American history reveals this society as profoundly unfree in its origins, its history, and its psychology. That one of the greatest expressions of human freedom should be manifested in our Constitution by men who were mostly slave owners themselves, including the brilliant and profound Thomas Jefferson, is one of the ironies and contradictions with which our history is filled. Because of the incessant propaganda about our being the best country in the world that fills our airwaves and private conversations, a realistic and mature evaluation of own true national faults and virtues is difficult.
The simple facts are known by most people: we conquered, killed, and imprisoned most of the indigenous inhabitants, and imported as many as 20 million Africans, two-thirds of whom did not survive the horrors of their ocean passage, to produce capital for a relative handful of white landowners, particularly where the climate favored large-scale plantation farming of crops such as cotton and tobacco. These African slaves who were forcibly captured and transported here from the 16th to the mid-19th century were subjected to inhuman degradation and gross and incessant violations of all human rights. They were considered as a literal embodiment of the capitalist notion of a commodity รป human beings whose only value was monetary, both in their being and in their capacity to create wealth for their oppressors.
From the earliest reports of European travelers we hear of the Africans' innate love of and capacity for music. Richard Jobson, an English sea captain who voyaged to Africa in search of trade in 1620 described the bells, gongs, rattles, drums, xylophones, hand or thumb pianos, harps, horns, flutes, lutes, and fiddles played by the natives, and remarked that "there is without doubt, no people on earth more naturally affected to the sound of musicke than these people: whic...