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"Meeting Over Yonder": Using Music to Teach the Movement in the North

2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/oahmag/oar056

1938-2340

Claire Werner,

Diverse Educational Innovations Studies

Luther King, Jr., moved his family into a tenement in a blasted neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.Situated just outside the hotbed of modern gospel, soul, and electric blues in "Bronzeville," the city's long-established South Side, King sought to draw attention to the plight of those who had gained little from the civil rights movement's success in the courts, Congress, and the battlefields of the South.As they had in Birmingham and Selma, the "foot soldiers" of the Chicago movement, also known, tellingly, as the "Open Housing Movement," turned to music for inspiration, embedding it in their organizational strategies.A mimeographed songbook circulated to supporters at black churches, for example, included movement standards such as "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round," "Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Set on Freedom," and "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize," adapted from Mahalia Jackson's gospel hit "Keep Your Hand on the Plow," itself a version of a song sung in black churches for decades.No doubt seeking to reach young northerners, the songbook also included R&B hits, lyrics adapted to serve the needs of the moment, including several songs by The Impressions, a Chicago group headed by Curtis Mayfield, who'd grown up in the Cabrini-Green housing projects (Figure 1).Well aware of the harsh realities of black life in his native city, Mayfield was a committed supporter of the civil rights movement.He and his business partner Eddie Thomas accepted invitations to play at movement benefits and took pride in the fact that activists referred to "Keep on Pushing" and "People Get Ready" as the "soundtrack of the movement."One of Mayfield's compositions included in the songbook was "Meeting Over Yonder," a version of a song he remembered from the storefront church his grandmother pastored on the West Side, not far from where King had taken up residence.Updating a strategy that went back to slavery times, the recorded version of the song sounded like a cousin to Sam Cooke's "Having a Party" or "Amen," The Impressions' hit version of the gospel song which appeared on the soundtrack to Lilies of the Field (1963).Capitalizing on the success of the feel-good integrationist film, which propelled Sidney Poitier to stardom, "Meeting Over Yonder" snuck onto popular radio-at the time highly resistant to any mention of religion or politics-mostly because it felt apolitical and safe.In the hands of Chicago organizers, the song became a direct call to action."There's a meeting at Grant Park.""Dr.King's gonna be over yonder."Like the music that inspired and empowered the movement in the South, the music in the Chicago songbook was much more than background or a soundtrack.It was an active part of the movement, providing the marchers who followed King from Soldier Field to City Hall on July 10, 1966, with a unified sense of purpose.It was a source of information and a way of transmitting the movement's vision to potential supporters, especially young whites who encountered the songs primarily via radio and records.On one level, this marks an extension of patterns historians including Brian Ward, Marc Anthony Neal, and Peter Guralnick have firmly established in relation to the South (1).As they demonstrate, even the ostensibly "apolitical" music of the post-World War II years was intended and understood as a contribution to the transformation of American race relations.