Were You There? Thinking Black Death
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson’s book April 4, 1968reads: “You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death,” to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There’s a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death.
I mean, more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death—the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments—all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it’s been in the province of black creative expression—Black Genius more broadly—that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea of death, as a process, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.
When JC White of the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 “Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?” it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle.
“Were You There” was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang it’s words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.
“Were You There?” was featured on a brilliant recording by the Max Roach called Lift Every Voice and Sing, which paired the legendary drummers regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. “Were You There?” begins as a dirge—a literal death march—musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in April of 1968.
But just as you could imagine the collective black body kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song’s tone changes. Like the phoenix, the collective black body musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, “Were You There, When They rolled away the stone?,” as in the Resurrection—the place and space of death, the physical and psychic—transformed into something like a freedom, a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like “I’m—We’re still here.”
Roach’s Life Every Voice and Sing was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King’s murder. Nina Simone’s “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King’s murder as inspiration. In the middle of Simone’s live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding. Simone then asks aloud, “Do you realize how many we have lost?”—reinforcing the idea that at the time of King’s murder, Black Death was literally in the air.
The power of these songs—cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of Black life in the Americas—is that they are so easily recalled at a moment of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response—the way that Blackness thinks death.
***
Originally published in April of 2008 at Critical Noir (Vibe.com), on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder and six weeks after the death of my father.
by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The very first sentence of Michael Eric Dyson’s book April 4, 1968reads: “You cannot hear the name Martin Luther King, Jr. and not think of death,” to which specifically, I might add, you cannot help but think of Black Death. And perhaps that is as it should be. There’s a certain logic to the fact that a culture that has been so obsessed with questions of freedom, subjugation, liberation and incarceration would have an equally striking obsession with death.
I mean, more than any culture in the Americas, Blackness has had to come to terms with the idea of death—the Middle Passage, Lynching, the Underground Railroad to mark just a few historical moments—all framed by acts of movement, resistance, retribution, in which death, Black Death, was tangible and visceral. And indeed it’s been in the province of black creative expression—Black Genius more broadly—that Blackness has found the space to think through the idea of death, as a process, not just as a grieving process, but an act of freedom in its own right.
When JC White of the JC White Singers, bravely asked in 1971 “Were You There, When They Crucified My Lord?” it was something more than just another memorial recording marking the passing of the greatest symbol(s) of Black liberation struggle.
“Were You There” was one of those timeless spirituals of Negroes Old, but at the moment that the JC White Singers sang it’s words, it became a defiant response from a culture that long understood that filling the air with the sound of black grief and black trauma was perhaps the most defiant act possible.
“Were You There?” was featured on a brilliant recording by the Max Roach called Lift Every Voice and Sing, which paired the legendary drummers regular jazz band with the JC White Singers. “Were You There?” begins as a dirge—a literal death march—musically transporting listeners to the horse-driven carriage that so many boldly walked behind on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral in April of 1968.
But just as you could imagine the collective black body kneeling at yet another grave, for yet another murdered soul and succumbing to an unfathomable despair, the song’s tone changes. Like the phoenix, the collective black body musically rises and when the JC White Singers ask the subsequent question, “Were You There, When They rolled away the stone?,” as in the Resurrection—the place and space of death, the physical and psychic—transformed into something like a freedom, a freedom not explicitly in the traditional sense of the world, but something more philosophical as simply represented in a phrase like “I’m—We’re still here.”
Roach’s Life Every Voice and Sing was among the many recordings released in the aftermath of King’s murder. Nina Simone’s “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” is perhaps the most popular and one that was written explicitly with King’s murder as inspiration. In the middle of Simone’s live 12-minute version of the song, she directly addresses the crowd, recalling the then recent deaths of John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, and Otis Redding. Simone then asks aloud, “Do you realize how many we have lost?”—reinforcing the idea that at the time of King’s murder, Black Death was literally in the air.
The power of these songs—cultivated in the darkest and most dire moments of Black life in the Americas—is that they are so easily recalled at a moment of great distress. These songs were not simply emotional responses to loss, but really an important intellectual response—the way that Blackness thinks death.
***
Originally published in April of 2008 at Critical Noir (Vibe.com), on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder and six weeks after the death of my father.
Title: Were You There? Thinking Black Death
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Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
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