9.2. Black pride

Soul wasn’t just a social mode of self-appreciation for black people. It was also the biggest platform for black women to push through their gospel, blues and jazz roots and be heard on the same level as the men, both black and white. A fundamental component used in this process was emotion, as Collins (2003) explained when she gave Billie Holiday’s powerfully moving rendition of Strange Fruit as an example of emotional delivery “to render a trenchant social commentary” which inspired Aretha Franklin’s proclamation for “respect” back in 1967. She also went onto say that, like the black community as a whole, “the suppression of Black women’s efforts for self-definition in traditional sites of knowledge production” had directed black women towards outlets such as music to convey the black feminist conscious (Collins, 2003, p.48)
40 years after the Harlem Renaissance came another reawakening for the black community. The 1960s saw a further rise in black pride, with numerous collectives and groups forming to solidify the movement. In 1965, the Black Arts Movement (or BAM) was formed as the artistic arm of the Black Power movement, headed by black scholar Amiri Baraka. He wrote a study of Afro-American music called Blues People (Negro Music in White America) in 1963 and an anthology of journalistic essays called Black Music (both under the name LeRoi Jones) where he discussed jazz music and its evolution (Baraka, 1968). In the former, every aspect of black music categorised as “negro music” was analysed where Baraka claimed the conformity of black population to the prevailing white ideals of the US could be examined through their music