In 1975, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes laid down a melodic mandate that applies to our times: “Wake up, everybody / No more sleepin’ in bed,” Teddy Pendergrass, the former lead singer of the group, commands. “No more backward thinkin’ / Time for thinkin’ ahead / The world has changed so very much / From what it used to be.”
“Wake Up, Everybody” meditates on bigotry, poverty, and other hardships that plagued Black Americans after the Civil Rights Movement, when Richard Nixon rode into the White House and championed policies that chipped away at Black prosperity and criminalized Black communities. But the song, which mirrors the social consciousness of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 anthem “What’s Going On,” does something else, too: It shines a light on how Black Americans have long responded to political chaos by leaning into the arts.
For centuries, creativity has been a balm that’s helped us to endure racism. This salve will be all the more crucial as we brace for a new presidential administration poised to pursue an agenda that will likely be catastrophic for Black Americans and other vulnerable communities.
Past is prologue, as Black Americans search for ways to persevere in what’s expected to be a chaotic political environment once President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House. Already, Trump has named Stephen Miller, who contributed to Project 2025 and seems to be dead set on weaponizing civil rights protections, to be his deputy chief of policy.
We’ve used music, poetry, film, and more “not just to make sense of what’s happening — the pain and the trauma — but also to make sense of resistance itself, to be in the know, to be woke, to use a term that came out of the Black Arts Movement,” Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a historian at the Harvard Kennedy School and the former director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, told Capital B.
This is a view that Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering scholar of critical race theory and the co-founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, endorses wholeheartedly.
“One of the issues I hope has brought concern is the effort of folks who want to suppress us by suppressing our artistic production,” Crenshaw told Capital B. “When you look at the book bans, for example, the stats show us that nearly 40% of the books that are being banned are those that depict the stories of people of color and LGBTQ people. And we know that when things are taken away, it’s because they’re valuable — because they make a difference.”
By engaging with Black cultural institutions, embracing activism, and tapping into creativity, we can navigate these hostile political waters — we can “gather everyone, gather all together / Overlooking none,” as The Isley Brothers soothe on 1976’s “Harvest for the World.”
Coping with the killing of Trayvon Martin and more
A vendor rolls up a photo of Trayvon Martin as another holds a smaller poster of Michael Brown during the 2014 “Justice For All” march in Washington, D.C. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
After the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, Phillip Agnew and other members of the Dream Defenders, a human rights group focusing on police violence, met with Harry Belafonte. They wanted to strategize with the legendary activist, who was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidants, and learn from his experiences on the front lines.
Their gathering spot? The Harlem-based Schomburg Center, which for almost a century has preserved Black history and nurtured Black minds. Alex Haley relied on it for his research for Roots, and James Baldwin went to the 135th Street Library, as it used to be known, “at least three or four times a week,” reading “everything here”: “I was trying to make a connection between the books and the life I saw and the life I lived,” he wrote.
During troubling times, Black cultural institutions such as the Schomburg Center have served as forums for public education and provided a kind of succor, reinvigorating Black Americans in the face of uncertainty.
“This moment affords us an opportunity to remind ourselves of the power of the institutions that we have on our own,” Muhammad said.
Black churches are one of our most enduring cultural institutions, and have long played a major role in energizing Black communities.
During the Civil Rights Movement, as Nina Simone was singing about wanting to “break all the chains” holding her, Black churches functioned as hubs for political organizing. There was the Birmingham campaign, when dozens of pastors drew attention to the stubborn persistence of segregation and to actions — sit-ins, boycotts — that might dismantle it.
Two ministers lead protest marchers in a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963. The march was later broken up by police. (Horace Cort/Associated Press)
“You had more than 60 Black churches involved, hosting meetings for their congregations to make sure that they were aware of what was going on,” T. Marie King, a racial justice activist based in Birmingham, told Capital B in 2023, around the 60-year anniversary of the infamous church bombing that killed four Black girls as they were changing into their choir robes.
She added that there were lots of ways people contributed to the movement: “You had Shelley Stewart, who was a DJ and used the airwaves to keep people informed. You had [the Rev. Fred] Shuttlesworth, who’d gathered folks around smaller challenges and was now saying, ‘We have a larger system to tackle. This is how we’re going to do it.’”
Today, Black churches remain at the center of efforts to keep our communities alert.
Crenshaw said that she wouldn’t be surprised to see attempts to revitalize other institutions that have seen us through. We’ve already seen renewed interest in supporting historically Black colleges, as other schools eliminate policies intended to incubate diversity.
Organizing after the murder of George Floyd
Toward the end of her young life, 34-year-old Lorraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun, wondered, “Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually — without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts?”
Not knowing that she would soon die from cancer, she answered, “I think when I get my health back I shall go into the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.”
Despite her illness, Hansberry couldn’t look at what was happening in the South in 1965 — dogs attacking Black children, police officers brutalizing peaceful Black marchers — and do nothing.
This desire to organize — as Hansberry put it, “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world” — is a posture adopted by many Black Americans when confronted by a political crisis.
There have been more recent examples of upheaval sparking action.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country — and around the world — as Black Americans refused to let anyone turn away from the ongoing menace of police violence.
“[The 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising] became the largest social protest movement in American history, representing a continuation and expansion of reconstructionist segments within the nation,” Peniel E. Joseph writes in his 2022 book, The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.
The demonstrations also fueled art, as people used ink, film, paper, and more to commemorate a life that had been tragically extinguished.
Trump’s reelection to the White House threatens much of the period’s momentum. But it seems very likely that organizing will flower during this new era of tumult.
Surviving “Red Summer” and Malcolm X’s assassination
One of the best examples of how Black Americans have responded during moments of political crisis came from the Harlem Renaissance, which emerged in the early 1920s after a particularly turbulent period.
During the “Red Summer” of 1919, there were something like 30 instances of white terrorism in the U.S. The Harlem Renaissance was, for Black Americans, a means of describing life in the wake of these assaults and also locating strength and agency.
The movement illustrates how, when forced to grapple with bleak political realities, a remarkable alchemy can occur: Black Americans can transform rage into art.
This alchemy was on display again several decades later, during the 1960s.
Some say that Malcolm X inspired the Black Arts Movement — or that his assassination in 1965 did, at least. The day after Malcolm X was gunned down, LeRoi Jones, who changed his name to Amiri Baraka, declared that he was quitting New York City’s integrated Lower East Side and going to Harlem. He later moved back to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, where he opened Spirit House.
In Harlem, Baraka established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, which staged plays and hosted workshops on everything from music to painting.
The school operated for less than a year. But it was a crucial part of the Black Arts Movement, which developed talents including Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and Ntozake Shange, and became a way to reclaim Blackness — to make it prideful. As the poet Larry Neal wrote, the movement was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”
Poet Nikki Giovanni is shown in her office in 1973. (Getty Images)
The arts have lost none of their power in more recent years, said Muhammad, the Harvard Kennedy School historian, and they’ll likely only take on new urgency under an administration that has vowed to inflict maximal suffering on its supposed enemies.
“I can tell you from personal experience that I saw, on many occasions [as the director of the Schomburg Center], young Black activists of that time such as Brittany Packnett Cunningham and DeRay Mckesson go there to be inspired by the archives,” he said, noting, by way of example, that the archives contain Emory Douglas’ collection.
Douglas, the former Minister of Culture and Revolutionary Artist for the Black Panther Party, shaped the aesthetics of Black protest during the Civil Rights Movement: “Art is a powerful tool, a language that can be used to enlighten, inform, and guide to action,” he once remarked.
“Seeing up close the work of a creative of that caliber, of someone who gave visual voice to the Black Power struggle of that generation, helped to inspire a younger generation,” Muhammad explained.
Crenshaw shared a similar sentiment about the crucial role of the arts in Black organizing.
She highlighted the #SayHerName campaign, launched in 2014, which includes not only the names of Black women who’ve been killed by the police, but also a song created by Abby Dobson, a recording by Janelle Monáe, and a book of stories published by AAPF.
“We know that — for our survival — we must be able to engage right-brain and left-brain, facts and aspirations, narrative and song,” she said. “All of these have been the core dimensions of Black expression and advocacy over the course of our history.”
The post How Music and Art Have Helped Black Americans Weather Troubling Times appeared first on Capital B News.
