Mississippi Goddam

Subject: Mississippi Goddam

I was listening to a program yesterday describing the life story of Nina Simone.
I first came across Simone when I was young and was particularly struck by her record "Mississippi Goddam". A recording in which she threw, in your face an emotional diatribe about the iniquity of being a black person in America in the 1950s and 60s. 

I  naturally hadn't grasped the depths of pain and resentment felt by black people towards who they saw as their oppressors, the white person as represented by the ordinary white citizen living in the Southern States of the USA. 

Growing up in any society one accepts unquestioningly the norms of the society other than to ask why. Why am I disdained for my colour. Why am I rejected because my skin is black. Questions a white person never has to ask. Their rejection might be, because I lack education or speak with an accent but not because of the colour of their skin. 

We would be naive not to understand that the way you look doesn't send signals from which opinions and prejudice are formed. A beautiful woman with invoke a different reaction to a disabled person, and that whilst an erudite person will attract more attention than someone who displays non of those skills the judgements are interactive not just grouping people with a prejudice because of the colour of their skin. 

We judge people continually, it is said that in the first 10 minutes we form a view which stays with us and is difficult to shake off, and that much of our judgement is based on our environmental upbringing.  If I come from a tribe living in the remote forests of Papua New Guinea, the sight of someone from outside my experience is dramatic.  If I live in a remote province of China then the sight of a westerner is alien. Our own prejudice is rooted in they way we were brought up and what we are exposed to, as well  and what the acceptable norms are in the society around.
Simone grew up in an era where, in the not too distant past a black person had been a slave with no rights, a second class citizen in all and every way. Her experience growing up was to do as all people do, to file away her unpleasant experiences and accept them as normal and it was only as she recognised her talent for playing the piano, writing songs and singing in in the clubs, that she formed the ideas of her black community and began to embark on empowerment and an identification with her people and their cause. 

Her fame led her to meet and know the Black Power movement of Malcolm X, and the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King Jr and others and in this hot bed of political activity she penned her powerful and personal protest "Mississippi Goddam".
Listening to her emotional rant against white society and their connivance, as she saw it with the extremism of the KKK and their rejection of black people, the importance was lost on me sitting in leafy England but her frustration and condemnation were not lost in the lyrics of this memorable song with its call to consider the inequity, the violence, the unjustness, not only of that bigoted segment of the white community living in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee but of the whole Establishment, not only the Governors and legislators of those states but also the Federal Government which had dragged its feet for so long. 

Reading the story of the "Civil Rights Movement" is to read the Apartheid movement in South Africa. The difference being that it was never overt Federal Policy as it became under the Verwoerd government.

The murder, the shootings, the hangings, the whipping were all pretty common and hers was an angry cry from the heart to make it stop.

Type into your Google, 'Nina Simone Mississippi Goddam' and tell me after listening to her song that you aren't emotionally effected.