perspective changing with time and with legal conclusions . Like Coltrane , Nina Simone first performed her response to the events ( and to the earlier , gruesome murder of Emmett Till ) in Greenwich Village and later at Carnegie Hall , where the song was recorded and released as a single . It was the kind of release that a certain persuasion of disc jockey liked to snap in half on air and mail back to the label . She conceded that that was probably a good sign , getting under the racists ’ skin . The song was hated in the white South because of its unflinching call for equality and its broader condemnation not just of single events but of structural oppression across Tennessee , Alabama and Mississippi goddam !
She had said at Carnegie Hall that it was a show tune for which the show hadn ’ t been written yet , providing critics with a perfect tagline to describe it ever since . She had made it to that hallowed venue , but not in the circumstances she might have hoped . Her most powerful record went out with the potentially offending word beeped and rendered as *@!!?*@! on the sleeve , prompting more than a few to comment that the real blasphemy and obscenity had already taken place .
Why jump forward nearly eight years in the Nina Simone moment to this point ? Because if the “ show ” still hadn ’ t been written in 1964 , and was still being scripted and rescripted nearly fifty years later in the Black Lives Matter movement , back in 1956 America was even deeper , even further back in the dark cave of racism . Ninety years on from the horrors of Reconstruction , it was clear that the Civil War had only further exposed rather than closing a deep rift in American life , one that had been enshrined in state constitutions that only recognised a black man or woman as half a person for the
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