B-side of civil rights movement reaches new audience

B-side of civil rights movement reaches new audience

Two carloads of black gospel singers legally pass a slow-wheeling white farmer on a two-lane road in rural Mississippi. It's the early 1960s. The anti-black laws of Jim Crow are waning but still reign. "The farmer stopped somewhere along the way and made a phone call," said Philadelphia. Pa. native and resident Howard Carroll, 85, a founding member of the Dixie Hummingbirds and a passenger in one those vehicles nearly 50 years ago. "They put up a roadblock. They didn't take us to jail but out to some house where the guy living there was the mayor and the whole city council and everything. He looked at us, and the cars we were driving, and threw a great big fine on us." Things could have much worse, said Carroll, given the dangers of that lynching era. Though gospel artists mainly are known for their sacred songs of comfort and consolation, they also sang protests that played a role in Jim Crow's undoing. "That was part of work," Carroll said. "We felt we also were contributing." That fact is being spotlighted by Baylor University's 2-year-old Gospel Music Restoration Project, which recently has been unearthing what its chief archivist says are lesser known "B-side" recordings of civil rights protests by famous and obscure gospel artists alike. "No Segregation in Heaven," "The Alabama Bus," and "Assassination" are a sample of the 78s, 45s, LPs and tapes in assorted formats, dating back to 1919, that are among the roughly 1,600 songs cataloged thus far. "That they were on the B-side suggest a couple of things: Few radio stations, which mainly were white-owned, were doing playing gospel music at all, so they were not widely circulated. And what was on the B-side mostly was being listened to in the black community," said Robert Darden, 57, a Baylor journalism professor who founded the archives. "It was a kind of private message." Private, perhaps, but only to a point. In the 1920s and '30s, Birmingham's arm of the white-dominated AFL-CIO actually hired the local CIO Singers, a gospel quarter, to open its union rallies with a combination of straight-out, heaven-bound gospel but also protesting gospel songs. "Every community -- places where there was no other entertainment--had one of these quartets. The unions used them to promote their cause, but, more centrally, they had a lot to do with battling Jim Crow," said the Rev. George Stewart, 57, a former radio broadcaster and record company executive who founded the American Gospel Quartet Convention. Along with lay singers, gospel artists were among those who opened for civil rights pioneers such as Martin Luther King Jr. "They we would preach and we would sing. It would be a whole concert sometimes. That's how we played a part in the movement," said Roscoe Robinson, 82, of Birmingham, Ala. He sang with, among others, the prominent Blind Boys of Alabama and Blind Boys of Mississippi, Sam Cooke and the Soul-Stirrers and Highway QCs.