Echoes of Freedom: Artivism, Censorship and the Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights era was not only a period of political revolution but of profound cultural revolution. Led by Black artists radicalized by the political and social realities of the time – the segregation, disenfranchisement and racial violence that was Jim Crow – the cultural revolution both represented the Black experience and imagined a future freed. Black artists did this, despite facing censorship and threats of violence for the political nature of their work.

In this episode, we use critical race theory to situate three pieces of art in the civil rights tradition: Sam Cooke’s 1963 song, A Change is Gonna Come; Faith Ringgold’s 1971 painting, For the Women’s House; and, William Eric Water’s 2000 poem, “Even a Black Poet is Considered Armed and Extremely Dangerous”. We ask what are the civil rights legacies of these pieces and the artists that created them and what kinds of resistance did they meet and why?