Will Kaufman The Civil Rights Movement

Much of the power of the civil rights movement came with its speeches, but the movement lived just as actively through music. Whether it was blues, folk, gospel, jazz, or R&B, and whether the artist was part of the cause or simply feeling the same yearnings, the music of the civil rights movement provided focus, unity, strength, and power. Time Life's three-disc box set, Let Freedom Sing! Music of the Civil Rights Movement, not only appeared at an auspicious moment in civil rights history – early 2009, when the United States inaugurated its first black president – but it easily ranks as the most thorough look at the music that came to be identified with civil rights.

The Civil Rights movement that emerged in the United States after World War II was a reaction against centuries of racial discrimination. In this sweeping history of the Civil Rights movement in Atlanta–the South's largest and most economically important city–from the 1940s through 1980, Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows that the movement featured a vast array of activists and many sophisticated approaches to activism. Long before "black power" emerged and gave black dissent from the mainstream civil rights agenda a new name, African Americans in Atlanta debated the meaning of equality and the steps necessary to obtain social and economic justice.