As was mentioned earlier, spirituals were the backbone of the movement to begin with, but gradually songs from both outside the church and the black community became just as important to the people on the ground in getting the movement's message out to the world at large. Young white musicians like Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez were key in ensuring that young educated white audiences in the northern states at least were aware of the issues, if not inspiring them to take an active role in protesting. Perhaps the most famous song associated with the civil rights movement of the early 1960s was "We Shall Overcome" and there's a nice little bit with Pete Seeger, where he makes sure to stress that all he did was introduce the song to people, and they were responsible for its genesis into the powerful protest song it became.
While some of the conversations with the musicians are interesting enough, some of them bear a striking familiarity to ones that I've seen in other documentaries. The interviews that are most fascinating are those with individuals who had been active in the movement. Not only are they each articulate about their experiences, they are also able to tell us just what music has meant to them and how it helped them through difficult times while protesting. Music not only has the power to inspire crowds, as it did in one man's memories of spending the whole night in jail singing, it also could give individuals the strength to stand up to the abuse heaped upon them by the counter-demonstrators.
While there's no denying the veracity of the history presented in Let Freedom Ring, and on the whole the music is a decent cross-representation of the era as it related to the civil rights movement, there is a little too much emphasis on the music that had crossover appeal for white audiences in the 1970s. While there is acknowledgment of the rise of black power, that whole aspect of the history is skirted over aside from a brief speech given by Stokely Carmichael and some pictures of various Black Panther members like Angela Davis. Perhaps most annoying is that there's almost no mention of Malcolm X, any references to Huey Newton and his false arrest on manslaughter charges, or any of the various efforts made by the FBI to discredit not only the Panthers but even mainstream leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.
Article comments