How It Feels to Be Free
Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement
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- $38.99
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- $38.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Benjamin L. Hooks National Book Award
Winnter of the Michael Nelson Prize of the International Association for Media and History
In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Then she began to sing: "Alabama's got me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!" Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers.
In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of gender amid their demands for black liberation. Feldstein focuses on six women who made names for themselves in the music, film, and television industries: Simone, Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, and Cicely Tyson. These women did not simply mirror black activism; their performances helped constitute the era's political history. Makeba connected America's struggle for civil rights to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while Simone sparked high-profile controversy with her incendiary lyrics. Yet Feldstein finds nuance in their careers. In 1968, Hollywood cast the outspoken Lincoln as a maid to a white family in For Love of Ivy, adding a layer of complication to the film. That same year, Diahann Carroll took on the starring role in the television series Julia. Was Julia a landmark for casting a black woman or for treating her race as unimportant? The answer is not clear-cut. Yet audiences gave broader meaning to what sometimes seemed to be apolitical performances.
How It Feels to Be Free demonstrates that entertainment was not always just entertainment and that "We Shall Overcome" was not the only soundtrack to the civil rights movement. By putting black women performances at center stage, Feldstein sheds light on the meanings of black womanhood in a revolutionary time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feldstein (Motherhood in Black and White) examines the ways in which a loosely-connected group of black women mingled art and activism in the 60s and 70s. The group includes Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, and Cicely Tyson artists who played an important role in disseminating messages about the civil rights movement, asserting the rights of blacks as citizens, and renegotiating "power relations." In addition to grappling with pervasive racism, these women faced the male-dominated worlds of jazz and film, which often framed the critical reception of their work as well as the artistic choices they were allowed to make: Abbey Lincoln, for example, didn't record an album for 12 years after a critic took a disliking to her political stance. Feldstein shows how these women's actions promoted, interacted with, and anticipated both black power and second-wave feminism. Many of the battles discussed are still being fought by contemporary black artists, and Feldstein's investigation provides valuable context for the ongoing struggle, "render these social movements in all of their messy complexity and richness."