Jeanne Comstock saw to it that words made it from computer to page without catastrophe. Irwin Soonachan of Goldmine Magazine generously got me in touch with many of the musicians whose voices carry the story along. Thanks to my agent, Dan Greenberg of James Levine Communications, and my editor, Deborah Brody, both of whom kept reminding me to get out of the way and let the story tell itself.
Finally, A Change Is Gonna Come is dedicated to Geoff King, who insisted that the best ideas not be left lying on the table around a pitcher of beer, and Tim Tyson, who, in addition to heroically finishing the pitcher, put the manuscript back on the right path so often he should probably be listed as co-author. It’s your turn, guys.
Section One
“A Change Is Gonna Come”: Mahalia Jackson, Motown, and the Movement
1
The Dream
Everyone knows the image and the words. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr., wiped his brow in the August heat, challenged the salt-and-pepper crowd spread out before him to create a world where children will “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Beamed by television from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado to Stone Mountain in Georgia, King’s vision of interracial harmony called forth an unprecedented display of shared faith. For one day in 1963, America transcended its history and let freedom ring.
Like its defining snapshot at the March on Washington, the larger story of the freedom movement is familiar if not altogether accurate. Bearing its anthems of redemption down the streets of the civil rights–era South, the movement called out to America’s conscience—and the country answered. Repudiating violence, King led the masses of the black South up from the shadows of slavery and segregation. Inspired by King’s compelling moral vision, mainstream America heeded the call of King’s allies, the Kennedys, and dismantled the barriers separating blacks from whites. Like Lincoln and JFK, King was rewarded for his struggle and his martyrdom with a hallowed place in the gallery of American heroes.
The images and the stories that go with them are so familiar they’ve lost their meaning. It’s not that they’re entirely false. King was an inspirational leader. For people of all colors committed to racial justice, the sixties were a time of hope. You could hear it in the music: in the freedom songs that soared high above and sunk deep within the hearts of the marchers at Selma and Montgomery; in the gospel inflections of Sam Cooke’s teenage love songs; in Motown’s self-proclaimed sound track for “young America”; in blue-eyed soul and English remakes of the Chicago blues; in Aretha Franklin’s resounding call for respect; in Sly Stone’s celebration of the everyday people and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an interracial tribe; in John Coltrane’s celebration of a love supreme. For brief moments during the decade surrounding King’s speech, many of us harbored real hopes that the racial nightmare might be coming to an end.
It didn’t. It still hasn’t. And there’s a bitter irony in the fact that King has become as much a problem as an inspiration for those seeking to fulfill his vision. Reverberating for three decades, invoked by politicians of all races and parties, quoted by his enemies to bolster causes he condemned in life, King’s words too often drown out the multitude of voices that made the freedom movement something more than a frozen image on a stamp. Representing the march and the movement requires a montage, not a close-up. When all we can hear are the words of the great man, we miss the deeper sources of the movement’s energy.
The story was larger, deeper, more troubling than any one dream. The hope was more complicated, the inspiration more profound, than our public memory admits. To hear the real story, we need to listen carefully to the voices of those who were there, starting with the gospel music that gave the marchers the strength to go on. We can begin, simply enough, by pulling back from the close-up of King’s sweat-streaked face and refocusing on a woman standing in the second row, in the shadow of the Great Emancipator. Mahalia Jackson.
2
Mahalia and the Movement
If King gave the movement a vision, Mahalia Jackson gave it a voice. By 1963, she was nearly as well known as King among both whites and the blacks whose support had lifted her out of poverty and obscurity. During the mid-fifties, Mahalia’s weekly CBS radio show brought gospel music into the homes of white Americans who would never have gone near the black churches of New Orleans and Chicago where she had learned to sing. Mahalia achieved the nearly impossible feat of becoming a major star without crossing over into the secular world. On occasion, she agreed to sing pop songs like “Danny Boy” and “The Green Leaves of Summer,” but she steadfastly resisted the producers who wanted to cash in on her powerful voice in the new interracial market for rhythm and blues.
Like Ray Charles, who played a crucial role in opening that market, Mahalia modeled her style on the singing of the black sanctified churches. Often the poorest churches in poor communities, sanctified churches valued religious ecstasy more highly than polished phrasing or perfect pitch. At times, a sanctified church could erupt with a collective energy that transformed centuries of bitter hardship into moments of pure connection—with self, community, and the soul-deep presence of the Lord. Hinted at in Brother Ray’s “I Got a Woman”—a secular remake of the gospel classic “There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names”—such moments were the core of what the white audience was just beginning to hear in Little Richard’s ecstatic whoops, lifted straight from gospel singer Marion Williams. Although Mahalia showed little interest in the spiritually suspect rock and roll, she understood the point: “I believe the blues and jazz and even the rock and roll stuff got their beat from the Sanctified Church. We Baptists sang sweet. . . but when those Holiness people tore into ‘I’m So Glad Jesus Lifted Me Up!’ they came out with real jubilation.” Mahalia’s resistance helped maintain her strong connection with the churchgoing black community—still a large majority in the early sixties—even as she gained the ear of whites ranging from my grandparents listening to her radio show in rural South Dakota, where I first heard her voice, to John Kennedy, who hosted her at the White House.
Mahalia’s presence at the Lincoln Memorial on that blistering August afternoon in 1963 was no accident. During the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott, Mahalia met King and Ralph Abernathy at the 1955 National Baptist Convention meeting in Denver. When the two young ministers asked her to lend her voice to the struggle, she embraced the opportunity. In Montgomery, she stayed with the Abernathys and performed at one of the rallies that defined the movement. Looking back, it’s difficult to imagine the pressures at work on each black person who found the courage to attend that rally. The threat of physical violence was real. Two days after Mahalia left Montgomery, a dynamite bomb went off outside the bedroom where she had slept. But beyond that, the black residents of Montgomery faced the constant threat of economic retaliation. In an economy controlled by whites, being branded a troublemaker meant being fired. And retribution could be extended to family members—elderly parents, children starting out in the world. It could mean a hasty midnight departure for the North—or a long, slow parade to the local cemetery.
Again and again, movement veterans testify to the central role gospel music played in helping them find the strength to overcome their fears. So it was crucial that Mahalia was physically present while the police and the Ku Klux Klan—not always two distinct groups in the Deep South—circled the church. That night in Montgomery, Mahalia sang “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven” and “Move On Up a Little Higher.”
Her choices illuminate the political power of gospel music, which is obvious to most blacks and obscure to most whites. When Mahalia sings that she’s going to make heaven her home, she’s most certainly singing about saving her soul. When she moves on up, her destination is a place by the side of Jesus. But she’s also, and without any sense of contradiction, singing about freedom, moving up to full participation in American society. Heaven is heaven, but it’s also a seat at the front of the bus. When, in a classic gospel cut that rocks as hard as anything the Rolling Stones ever played, Mahalia promises that