Freedom Songs Symbol Analysis

The freedom songs that Dr. King and his fellow activists sang during the Birmingham campaign symbolized both the sense of hope and the resiliency that the civil rights movement adopted in its push for racial equality. Throughout Why We Can’t Wait, Dr. King says several times that these songs helped him and others in the movement remain hopeful in the face of extreme adversity. For instance, when white supremacists bombed his brother’s home, Dr. King spoke to him on the phone and, though the atmosphere was obviously stressful and frightening, he heard people singing “We Shall Overcome” in the background of the phone call. Hearing the song, Dr. King took heart in the fact that, “in a moment of such tragedy,” Black Americans were still able to act “with hope and with faith.” Freedom songs were particularly well-aligned with Dr. King’s values because many of them originated from church hymns and other spiritual songs, thus tapping into Dr. King’s Christian worldview and his tendency to call on his religious faith in times of hardship. What’s more, freedom songs were historically sung by enslaved Black Americans while they worked in the fields. In the same way that these songs gave enslaved people a small sliver of hopefulness, then, they uplifted Black activists in the 1950s and 1960s, thus representing the power and importance of such hopefulness in moments of great hardship.