Melissa Harris-Perry: This is The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We're so glad to have you with us on this day, when we remember, honor, and reflect on the life and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A writer, philosopher, organizer, and strategist. King played many roles in the mid-century movement for Civil Rights, but perhaps most enduringly, King has come to represent the literal voice of the movement.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: All my friends, I return home more determined than ever before to give my life to the struggle to remove racial injustice from every area of our nation's life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Drawing from a great well of Black oratorical tradition, his deep baritone, deliberate pacing, tonal quality, and dynamic shifts are hallmarks of a voice that remains instantly recognizable.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: More determined than ever before to give my life.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A voice so singularly powerful, it's easy to mistake it as encompassing the totality of what the Civil Rights Movement sounded like.

Claire Crawford: What we miss is that there was this whole sonic experience and phonic substance to the Civil Rights Movement that really comes from the people in the crowd, who were doing the work, part of the movement in their own home spaces, their small rural communities, their urban spaces. And to them, the movement sounded different.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Claire B. Crawford. She's a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California.

Claire Crawford: The movement sounded much, in some capacities, like church.

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I know little changes to it that we come to know as like freedom songs, and it sounded like the speeches that were given by folks around them and it sounded like what was happening between them on those packed pews at mass meetings and workshops. And so, if we only hear Dr. King's voice, we forget that there was millions of other folks really sounding. He was the drum major, but who was really providing the tune to it?

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want you to walk me through the band have been. If he's the drum major, I want you to walk me through some of the instruments.

Claire Crawford: We have some really iconic voices that come out of the Albany Movement.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: The Albany Movement of 1961 and '62 was initiated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC. For decades, historians have regarded the Albany Movement as though it were a failure because it lacked both the spectacular violence and the watershed legislative games of places like Montgomery, Birmingham, or Selma, but Claire Crawford reminded us Albany is no failure because it was here that the SNCC freedom singers were born. Rutha Mae Harris is one of the original SNCC freedom singers. She spoke with Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Rutha Mae Harris: His lyrics was saying like [singing]

I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on Jesus

I woke up this morning with mind

Stayed on Jesus

We would just change the word Jesus to freedom.

[singing] I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom

Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah

Claire Crawford: Some of the lead voices I think of immediately are Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock. We might know what she sounds like now, but definitely reading and hearing her talk about over and over again that the movement gave her her voice, the voice that we know her to have today. For her, it's about her living changed a song.

Bernice Johnson Reagon: [singing] Over my head

I see freedom in the air

Claire Crawford: When we hear the song Freedom in the Air, she really writes about it over and over again how coming out of jail, you would hear she was walking, marching, going back to a mass meeting after leaving the city jail, and she started to sing. She changed the words of the song without even knowing. Then she sang out Freedom in the Air.

Bernice Johnson Reagon: [singing] I see freedom in the air

There must be

Claire Crawford: There was this really loud, powerful voice that really came out because of this fight for freedom. If we were to just like go to a pew for a second. Oftentimes, we always hear the speeches from the people who were in the pulpit, but it was really only exciting for them to give a speech because of who was sitting in the pew. Women mostly lie in the pews during the movement. This is definitely evidently true for Montgomery Bus Boycott, and how the boycott really carried on because of the women bring Johnson Reagon as this beautiful quote that singing as an organizing experience.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Singing is an organizing experience. It gathers and directs us individually and collectively.

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Listen to Fannie Lou Hamer. Really, listen. This is the entirety of the 2021 musical by a Seattle playwright named Cheryl West. Fannie: The Music And Life Of Fannie Lou Hamer reveals how this co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party used both her singing and speaking voice as organizing tools, drawing on melodic and harmonic traditions anchored in Black Southern life.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr: Is this a miracle, the land of the free and the home of the brain, where we have the fleet without telephones out for the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live a decent human being in America?

Claire Crawford: Things are on purpose. These sonic gestures that I pay attention to hums, moaning, and hollering have meaning that reach beyond the depth of just speaking words.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you point out if we're thinking about Dr. King making the call, and then I hear you saying hums, moaning, and hollering and we'll talk about murmurs as well, they're all part of the response. How is it that the response has power relative to the call? What does somebody sitting or a crew of people sitting in the pews, how do they direct the drum major? How do they make the sermon or the organizing speech move by their responses?

Claire Crawford: We have, like you said, the call and response, which a lot of folks refer to as a lingering, Africanism coming across from the Atlantic during enslavement and really being carried on and oftentimes seen in these Black church spaces. Let's say you're giving a speech or you're speaking, someone speaking from the pulpit, and you can hear the word well, coming out from someone else.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well--

Claire Crawford: Yes, there's that well, like there's that well and agreement, and then you can have the well, whereas you said something maybe speaking to the injustices that we understand and really move on, or you can have that kind of like low well, where you're just like well, where you know, it's really, well is this like conversation that's really happening between someone who is speaking and the audience that they're speaking to. The call and response was so much of a necessary part where you knew you what you were saying meant something to the folks around you because they continued to respond with you, and you didn't lose them, and they understood and they related to it.

You have like the yes, the Amens, the wells, the kind of like hmm. You can hear these being necessary even if we take Dr. King's first speech in Montgomery to his last speech how important and even how he made space for this response to really be a part of of the way that he's actually talking to folks and communicating. He's not just giving a speech for the sake of speaking, he's giving he's trying to create a feeling, and so that call and response reminds you that justice is an experience of love, justice is an experience of connection and so the way that we really change and create it, is you can hear it.

You can hear justice really being taking shape on this pew, taking shape in the Amens, taking shape in the hollers, taking shape even if we really want to get into it. You're packed on this pew. If somebody just does like a deep hmm, you can feel that in your body, on your arms, and then the pew might shape if it's a wooden pew. You know folks are having this experience that is both basically a combination of what you might call this secular political Christian Judeo experience in one space that's familiar for y'all.

I always think it's interesting when we say go back to the fact that they used churches because we know that churches weren't the biggest spaces, but sometimes they were the most comfortable familiar ways to change a setting into something deeper. It's already a meaning of deep meaning space, and so now you're just like now we're going to add justice into the mix and really get people to catch onto that. I would say that's how I would describe what's happening for folks and why that call and response is so necessary and important.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Claire, stick with me. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to make sure we don't just stay in a liberation story about the 1950s and '60s. I want you to talk to me about what liberation sounds like right now today. Take a quick break right here. I am back in continuing my conversation about the sonic landscape of Black liberation with doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, Claire Crawford.

You've walked us through a lot of what power sounds like in the moment that is the mid-century Civil Rights Movement but that is not the end of a movement for Black liberation. Skip over a whole lot of history, a whole lot of time, and just come up with me through the contemporary moment and tell me what exactly is trap.

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Claire Crawford: All right, so trap music we can think of it as a subgenre of southern hip hop that really begins in the late '90s, has very key similarities to that of southern hip hop. We have the huge bass, the 808s, that kind of beating on the sound. The rapid speed is what it brings and so trap music sonically gives you that particular experience of what you hear.

Lil Baby: [singing] People speaking for the people, I'm proud of them

Stick together, we can get it up out of them

I can't lie like I don't rap about killing and dope, but I'm telling my youngins to vote

I did what I did 'cause I didn't have no choice or no hope, I was forced to just jump in and go

But it's time for a change

Got time to be serious, no time for no games

We ain't takin' no more, let us go from them chains

God bless they souls, every one of them names

Claire Crawford: Now, what the voices sound like over those beats sometimes are a little different than maybe what we might characteristically call southern hip hop if we were to look at a group like OutKast. We might look at them a little bit differently, but what we really hear in trap music is in the early 2000s, maybe 2010s, this is a little bit of a change. They're really pulling in this combination of true gangster rap that we might associate with the West Coast, and bringing it to the south, and they're also mumbling so we get introduced to this idea of mumble rapper.

You have folks rapping about trapping so trapping a course now here trapping is the actual economy of what is happening in urban southern spaces, but also in other spaces as well, but they refer to as trapping particularly in Atlanta. In the early 2000s in the south, they're standing outside the trap house which becomes this misnomer for a place of community, oftentimes for young Black men who might not have what we call a legal ways to business so they're selling drugs. They're cooking drugs in the trap house, they're selling it out the trap house.

They're making music because of the drugs in the trap house and so it's really about this raw experience of like you gave us grimy spaces to exist in social politically in these abandoned urban southern spaces, and so now, we're going to turn them into something that really means something for us, and so that's the trap house.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it sound like?

Claire Crawford: Really, what it sounds like is the beats stuttering kick drums, the Hi-Hats, you have a lot of synthesizing that happens in trap music. It sounds deep. I feel like you can feel it when you listen to it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Claire, you just had us sitting on a wooden pew in Albany Georgia with Bernice Johnson Reagon, what in the world does the 808 have to do with this history?

Bernice Johnson Reagon: [singing] Over my head

I see freedom

Claire Crawford: For me, I see it as this continuation of the historical continuity. I guess this is where we could talk about murmurs, where the murmuring comes in. For me, murmuring really begins and in my work with the reading of Du Bois and Souls of Black Folks where he talks about his trip to Albany. In his trip to Albany, he really talks about that he's going to this land where half-intelligible murmurs are coming from the far beyond, and so oftentimes, when we think about Du Bois sound, we go to spirituals that or the way that he's calling them sorrow songs.

If we go to this murmur as being a part of a way to how southern Black folks are using what we might call improper speech to produce what we come to know as in some capacity a dialect of the Black southern tongue. Murmuring and mumbling as being a part of speech breaking as escaping proper language bounds. If we are to jump almost 40 years, 30 to 40 years ahead of time, how does that relate, and so for me, I think about the way that Regina Bradley uses the idea that the mountaintop ain't flat.

We know it's a play for her on King's last speech where and unfortunately until we get to the top of the mountaintop folks think that racism is done in the south that there's these new opportunities, and so we have a lot of complicated history that obviously happens after the passing of Dr. King. Still though we are not having what we might consider this traditional leadership for particularly Black male leadership that we know is a huge part of Black politics. She says maybe the rappers decide. They have to talk for their communities now, they have to be the storytellers.

In some capacity, they have to be the drum majors for the spaces that they come out of. I think that is a direct lineage of this kind of like political leadership and it's taking place of what we know because in Black southern politics, a lot of times, there are these huge storytellers across time that are reminding us that shadow, that mumbling of the land and the murmuring is still here in present.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to hear you reflect for just a moment on the sonic power that exists.

Claire Crawford: I think about Black folks who have been told, "You're not speaking proper English," who have been told that, "Those words aren't real, that what you're saying isn't legitimate sounding, your voice isn't doing it, it isn't matching what we might consider to be standard ways of speaking." I think that desire and that chasing to remain raw is to always be a part of that community, and it's that desire to remain speech-breaking. Even with King, he was really trying to empower folks on the pews more so than the nation sometimes because he wanted them to remain in love.

He wanted them to see the possibilities that could happen. Trap music speaks to it which is why I say it has liberatory potential. If we're saying that you don't get it, maybe it wasn't meant for you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Claire Crawford, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California. Soon will be my colleague at Wake Forest University. Thanks for taking the time with us here on The Takeaway, Claire.

Claire Crawford: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We also want to thank the New York City Municipal Archives, which is the source of the brief portion of a speech from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which we heard a bit earlier.

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