Drapetomaniac Music: The Soundtrack To Black Liberation
Protest music has been omnipresent in the Black American psyche, ever since this land was reconfigured in the image of white colonization, and they nearly eradicated Indigenous peoples while subjugating Africans and their descendants to chattel. Our subordination has never equated to the severing of melodies linking us beyond time, borders, and language.
Music is the electrical current igniting our collective heartbeat, the drawstring that envelopes us within the intimate interiority of our world, a space even social media cannot manufacture for outsiders, though it tries. Our concerted disobedience — once pathologized as drapetomania, a mental disorder afflicting enslaved Black people refusing captivity, and referenced on the Star Line album by Chance the Rapper — has always motivated our collective march towards freedom of mind, body, and spirit.
A people chronically surveilled and stolen from are an agile and creative people, crafted from nature and nurture, definitive innovators who give rise to a myriad of musical genres, whisked into the rhythms of our protests. Our “melodies from heaven” are carried out in social movements and moments of solitude alike, building shared power, painting our demands within bloodshed, and activating us to strike the ground with our ordered steps in pursuit of liberation.
From the a cappella and banjo-tinged tunes of the antebellum period, to the piano riffs of the jazz era, the synth-laden beats of the 80s and early 90s, and heavy bass lines of contemporary hip hop, Black people have been clapping our hands, beating our feet, plucking strings, and hooting and hollering alongside our flat-footed singers for generations. We are a people, a derivative of a beautiful blend of West African culture, reimagined and crafted across many Transatlantic trips where hell awaited on the other side and the ocean became salvation, for fire is inert when met with water.
The pressure of water blasting against our ancestors activated subsequent generations to stand ten toes down, repurposing the chorus of a commercial hit rap song by Atlanta rapper Ludacris to declare “move bitch, get out the way” as a protest chant—demanding, quite literally, that law enforcement step aside. Once again, we remixed the popular refrain as “Move Trump, Get out of the Way,” a direct challenge to racist authoritarianism overtly subsuming the North American political and social consciousness.
We are once more living in a seminal moment of history. This instance requires us to build on the wisdom of our ancestors and actively embody the philosophy of Sankofa. It is an Akan word meaning “to go back and get it,” derived from the longer Akan Twi expression “Se wo were firi na wosan kofa a, yenkyiri,” meaning “To wit, it is not taboo to go back and get something after you have forgotten it.” As rampant consumerism, individualism, wealth disparity, and political entities sow misinformation like a heat-seeking missile targeting our collective power, we must return to our innate collectivism and to the music, the heart of movement.
To build on the previous article, “Where Are The NWAs? A Call For The Return Of Protest Music”, let us reflect on how music has transported liberatory demand and action to material change.
Strange Fruit – Billie Holiday (1939)
Originally a poem by communist and schoolteacher Abel Meeropol centered on the published imagery of lynchings, Strange Fruit, once set to music and performed by Baltimore native Billie Holiday, became one of the first songs of the Civil Rights era. Crooning lyrics like “scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh…” caught the attention of the U.S. government, leading to a relentless pursuit of Lady Day to quell the anti-lynching movement. Despite the government’s best efforts to silence Billie through incarceration, falsified evidence leading to criminal proceedings, and enforcing medical neglect that summoned her to an early death, the song still galvanized a prolific sociopolitical movement that birthed Black Civil Rights activists like Ella Baker and Malcolm X, among many others.
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Fannie Lou Hamer (1963)
Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and child of the Mississippi Delta, was a force in the Civil Rights movement. In the “Strange Fruit” era, post-Reconstruction, there was the introduction of renewed Black Codes, increased barbaric lynchings, and medical racism like the “Mississippi Appendectomy” that mutilated Fannie (and other poor Black women of the South) and thwarted any chance of her carrying biological children. Despite the inhumane conditions, Hamer embodied the gospel lyrics “go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere…” leaning on the folk and gospel traditions of the South to inspire and organize her community in service of building collective power and asserting agency over the hellfire white supremacy wrought. In community, Fannie was able to establish the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), which fed and employed people outside of the traditional labor market and as part of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) gave testimony during the 1964 Democratic National Convention that challenged an all white delegation on a nationally televised stage. Fannie spoke truth directly to power and pushed for voting rights, ultimately leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Angola – Gil Scott-Heron (1978)
The 1970s began the surge in mass incarceration and the ballooning of the prison-industrial complex that took advantage of imprisonment as a form of legalized enslavement. Gil Scott-Heron, a musician and poet raised between Tennessee and New York City, put to wax the story of a Black boy, Gary Tyler, falsely accused of murder when attempting to integrate a Louisiana public school. In 1975, 16-year-old Tyler was sentenced to life on the former “Angola” slave plantation, now a maximum security prison known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary, for the death of a white boy who died at the riot to stop Black children from integrating Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Famed for works like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Gil reflects, “yeah, but injustice is not confined to Angola, Louisiana. Well, it can be in your living room,” forcing the audience to reckon with the insidious, pervasive nature of state violence. A forefather of hip hop, Gil Scott-Heron raised public consciousness of mass incarceration, the political establishment, and the social injustices permeating society.
Revolution – Arrested Development (1992)
Before Andre 3000 stated “The South got something to say” at the 1995 Source Awards, the burgeoning Atlanta rap group, Arrested Development, produced music for the 1992 Spike Lee film Malcolm X. The group was often juxtaposed against the popular bravado laden, gangsta rap of the 90s, garnering attention for reimagining hip hop inclusive of the Black experience outside of urban centers, encouraging solidarity, social consciousness, reflection, and introducing more nuance to the genre within the mainstream. Calling back to the Black social movements of their elders, the lyricists rapped “…I have marched until my feet have bled. And I have rioted until they called the feds” surfacing collective memory of Black activism, imploring audiences to shift from the belief “that the system had us in mind when it promised, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and in due time it will make its way to us all.”
Black Rage – Lauryn Hill (2014)
East Orange, New Jersey, and Showtime at the Apollo alum, Lauryn Hill, rose to fame as the frontwoman of the rap group The Fugees, a name derived from the word “refugees”—a pejorative that points to the Haitian immigrant community from which her bandmates were sons. As a soloist, she continued to pen thematic works rooted in Blackness, spirituality, sociopolitical activism, Black love, and Black womanhood. The through line from her song “To Zion,” written as a love letter to her son, and “Black Rage,” born out of the murder of Michael Brown, weaves together all that Hill stands for. Lauryn lays her voice across the song as a mother over a son, protecting his life, crying out “deafening silence and social control. Black Rage is founded on wounds in the soul!” Dovetailing sonically evocative vocals with socially conscious language further heightened attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and functioned as a timely anthem to the pain and power reignited.
Don’t Shoot – Shea Diamond (2019)
Building on the Black Lives Matter movement, Shea Diamond weaved together connections and nuances within the space to raise public consciousness about the disproportionate murders of Black trans women while integrating her own experiences within the criminal legal system and prison industrial complex. Hailing from Flint, Michigan by way of Little Rock, Arkansas, Shea found her purpose through songwriting, penning lyrics like “they say they don’t see color but the bloodstains show the proof. Hands up, please don’t shoot” while incarcerated, showcasing the ways in which Black queer folks are vilified and met with undue violence exemplifying the disposability of Black life in America.
Song 33 – Noname (2020)
2020 saw mass political activations that had been relatively dormant for a time, as well as a global pandemic that snatched the lives of countless people. In this transformative era, Chicago-native poet-turned-rapper Noname pivoted from traditional markers of entertainment industry success to create a library program that delivers literature to incarcerated folks. Her national book club aims to imbue the community with political education in step with the Black radical tradition as well as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a 19th and 20th century Chicago-based journalist and anti-lynching organizer. Just as Wells-Barnett was a leader of her era, Noname speaks of the collective power building during the 2020 uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement, melodically recording “we democratizin’ Amazon, we burn down borders. This a new vanguard, this a new vanguard. I’m the new vanguard.” In “Song 33,” she goes on to name the killing of activist Toyin Salau, violence against Black trans women, and the abductions of Black girls nationally, expanding the aperture of the BLM vision to be more inclusive of Black women and femme-presenting folks, adding lumens to the light shed on the #SayHerName campaign.
Black protest music is Sankofa in motion. Our continued drumming and chanting call in reinforcement from the ancestors and build the momentum that sustains movement in the long arc of justice. It archives where we have been and is a creative expression of movements that make our demands to each other and those in opposition to our humanity clear. Our chorus of voices carries our message beyond borders demarcated by skin, class, gender, and geography. When we sing together, march together, and create together, we commune through somatic release, we become who we’ve been waiting for, we become our own liberators.
Danika is a radically curious reader and narrative writer in the Washington, D.C., area. Her creative locus centers on the history and contemporary experience of marginalized peoples throughout the diaspora. For more information, visit ayedanika.com.
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