Ask An Expert: How to introduce protest songs to children
As demands for equity and racial justice permeate the public discourse, many parents are wondering how to speak about the power and effectiveness of protest with their children.
In such a context, the use of music has been a powerful educational tool. One that not only allows parents to communicate important ideas to our young ones, but also as a gateway to discuss important moments that define the civil rights movement.
To get a better understanding of both the implication and application of protest music, we spoke with Dr. Tammy Kernodle, musicology professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and the current President of the Society for American Music.
To start, Dr. Kernodle explains, it’s important to understand that not all protest songs began that way.
“A protest song, for me, is any song that is used in the midst of someone engaging in resistance,” Dr. Kernodle explains. “By resistance, I mean that [the performer] is speaking to something particular that may be impeding their progress towards achieving a certain goal. So protest songs exist in moments of protests, like what we see with the marches, but protest songs also exist in everyday activities that speak directly to those things that are oppressing or limiting them. The notion is that you inspire or you enact people to move to change.”
Dr. Kernodle points out that, unlike Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or Aunt Molly Jackson’s pro-union activist anthems, the type of protest music that was utilized by the civil rights movement were often songs written for other purposes that were customized in order to address the specific situation.
“It became a strategy of nonviolent resistance,” she says, citing for example the spiritual, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”
“If you put your cigarette out on me and I subscribe to nonviolent resistance, I can't react to that. So what's my reaction? If I sing ‘Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.’ And then in the midst of that, I say, well, you know what, I'm not gonna let [Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama] Bull Connor turn me around, that's twining that song with actual action that's happening in the moment. The song becomes multi-directional and multi-functional, depending on who's engaging with it.”
In the context of Black Lives Matter protests, Dr. Kernodle offers as analogue the song “Hell You Talmbout”
“[Shortly after its initial 2015 release] Janelle Monáe posted an instrumental version on Soundcloud and invited people to do their own versions. The first community that responded was the trans community. [Transgender rights advocate Vita Elizabeth Cleveland recorded an answer song] listing the names of Black trans women who had been killed. I think that that is going to be an immortal protest song going forward. It started as a hashtag and now it’s part of the soundscape [of the current protest movement].
For educational purposes, Dr. Kernodle suggests parents would be wise to start with songs that came out of the church. Below, she highlights three:
“This Little Light of Mine”
“This Little Light of Mine” is a good one to start with largely because it's easy, but then you can also link that to Fannie Lou Hamer. And you can also link it to The Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 because they were kids—we're not talking about teenagers, we're not talking about college students, we're talking about children as young as seven and eight. They left the public schools and came out into the street. They pulled their parents into the movement! They said ‘we want better schools. We want new opportunities,’ it was very much centred in their experience, not just these larger things that their parents were talking about.
More info on the Birmingham Children’s Crusade is available here.
“Wade in the Water”
Especially in the summertime, we talk about swimming pools and beaches. A song like “Wade in the Water” would have been used when they were doing wade-ins, trying to desegregate the beaches. That’s a good song to use to tell a larger story. For example, you can go to your local pool and explain that, at one point in time, if you were Black, you couldn't go into the pool. And then you can layer another story on top, build it up from there. The Black civil rights struggle gave birth to most of those social movements that we see coming out of the ‘60s: The LGBTQ movement, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, etc. because the people who came to Mississippi and Alabama and Virginia and all those places and did the Freedom Rides, at some point in time, they became disillusioned with the Black civil rights struggle, and they became involved in these other social movements, And they took the songs with them.
“We Shall Overcome”
These songs represent the power of the voice. Often times, they start with one voice, but many voices then join in. That's what we see in this very moment, the power of our voice. People oftentimes think, ‘Well, who am I? What can I do?’ but your voice can make a difference. Whether it's a speaking voice or a singing voice, it makes a difference. And the thing I love about these protest songs is, man, nobody cares how you sound. They didn't care if you could sing or you couldn't sing. The notion was that you sing! You got more looks if you didn't sing? So it really equalized and internalized this notion that my voice, your voice is very important.
MORE ON PROTEST MUSIC AND CHILDREN:
NYT: Lesson Plan | Teaching With Protest Music
NPR: 'This Little Light Of Mine' Shines On, A Timeless Tool Of Resistance
TEACHING TOLERANCE: Music and the Movement