Mississippi Goddam

“Can't you see it

Can't you feel it

It's all in the air

I can't stand the pressure much longer

Somebody say a prayer”

Nina Simone’s music encapsulates many unsettling emotions of the civil rights movement vividly: the violence, the anger, the hopelessness and all the frustration that comes with it. It was not just her music that spoke about the movement; her own life rendered it, and the line separating the two blurred somewhere in the struggle. The civil rights struggle not only gave purpose to Nina Simone’s stage but also offered meaning to her life. This is manifested in the fact that she would only sing political pieces at a part of her life, little caring about how it would impact her career.

A part of the documentary I would point towards is of her interview where she says the following:

“I’m sorry that I didn’t become the world’s first black classic pianist

I think I would have been happier

I’m not very happy now”

This is the life of a person who does not sing to raise hopes for a better tomorrow. When one speaks of Nina Simone, they speak of a performer that had no faith in the country. This is a person who would refer to the USA as the “United Snakes of America”. Nina Simone’s work enters a stage only when words fall short to express the suffering of the black person or relay the anger of a black person. Simone sings for every black person wronged by the masters at the slave plantations to the government of the United States. Similar to the radical movement, her music sees no bound, no allies and maybe no hope.

Simone’s music coming together with the movement can be understood by referring to one of her concerts. This was held outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965 at the request of Martin Luther King. The audience for this concert was around 3000 marchers coming back from Selma after being pushed back by state troopers with “clubs, whips and teargas”. (The New Yorker) This was the same night when Simone met King and made her infamous “I am not nonviolent” remark. Her music had transcended the categorisations of genres such as R&B, Jazz, Classical or Blues. What Simone was singing for her audience in Alabama was what one may call “civil rights music”. This was music that was giving purpose to everyone that had suffered at the hands of the United States government. This was music that spoke to every black soul standing exhausted and frustrated in front of her. Then it is only fair to say that her music took over where words were not enough to express the grief and anger that came with the movement.

Simone’s songs were never sugarcoated. She sang the shameful, naked truth. To quote her infamous piece Backlash Blues. She sings

“You give me second class houses

And second class schools

Do you think that all coloured folks

Are just second class fools”

Her words would bear witness to little but the condition of truth. Maybe it was her familiarity with this truth that first fueled her anger, and later channelled her anger into something that got difficult to control. Nevertheless, Simone’s music held everything the movement stood for and all that was needed to inspire countless black performers towards the radical idea of freedom.