The song i have chosen to write about is "Mississippi Goddam" by Nina Simone. This song is very comedic yet expresses a lot of thought of racism at the time. Nina was giving off a very strong message of equality and change in this song.
Nina addresses "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn" which, at the time had a lot of African American inequality. In specific, she was referring to a bombing of an Alabama church for "Alabama's got me so upset" and the murder of civil rights activist, Medgar Evers in Mississippi. ("everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn") I felt strongly about this song and I really understood the pain and message she was trying to give.
The secondary text that I felt corresponds to this song would be "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes. Langston addresses that everyone has flaws and too many blacks were scared of their flaws as opposed to a white man being superior at the time. I feel like this poem coincides with Nina's "Mississippi goddamn" because white people were superior at the time, but too many black people were letting it happen about. The black community didn't try hard enough to accomplish equality. The most outstanding lines to me from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" is
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- "The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express
- our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
- If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
- it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.
- The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people
- are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
- doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
- strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain
- free within ourselves."
- -I believe that his poem and her song go hand in hand beautifully.
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