“This Little Light of Mine” vs. “Jews Will Not Replace Us”
Implications of Singing and Chanting in Danville, VA 1963 and Charlottesville, VA 2017
By Cheryl C. Boots, Boston University
John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and Julian Bond—giants of the Southern Freedom Movement in the mid-twentieth century—have made the claim that without the music, there would have been no freedom movement. Singing was integral to creating a “beloved community” as Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed the goal of racial and economic equality. Some social commentators today observe that the current wave of protesters do not sing. They chant. They have no widely-recognized “anthem.” They do not sing together. How are we to understand what the shift from singing to chanting in social activism means? A closer investigation of the events in the Virginia cities of Charlottesville and Danville provides evidence for consideration.
Two small cities in Virginia. Five decades apart. In both Danville (1963) and Charlottesville (2017) groups of activists took to the streets to assert their political and social agendas. The Danville Movement, as part of the Southern Freedom Movement, confronted entrenched racial segregation powers to contend for full access to educational, political, and community resources for persons of color. The Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville brought together members of multiple white supremacist organizations, ostensibly to protest the removal and relocation of statues celebrating the Confederacy, but more explicitly to appropriate first amendment protection for their inflammatory language of violence against people of color, Jews, Catholics, women, and non-heteronormative persons. Their convergence from around the nation prompted a corresponding response from counter protesters who rejected the Unite the Right’s agenda. Music and chants in the Danville movement affirmed African Americans’ identity and humanity. Music countered boredom and chronicled injustice; it comforted the incarcerated, energized the weary, and encouraged the down-hearted. Music created community. Chanting in Charlottesville built the Unite the Right’s cohesion by taunting listeners, threatening observers, and challenging opponents. Charlottesville counter-protesters responded with their own chants and a few invoked music from the Southern Freedom Movement.
While both Charlottesville and Danville are small cities in Virginia, their origins and histories differ considerably. Charlottesville is a county seat and education center of roughly 48,000. It is the home of the prestigious University of Virginia whose founder and original architect, Thomas Jefferson, brought a mixed legacy of neoclassical values and slaveholding economics to the city. Today, the University, including the Health complex, employs 28,000 people. Charlottesville census figures show 69% of the residents are white; 19% Black or African American; 6% Asian. Demographics reported by the UVA show 61% of UVA students are white; 12% Asian; and 10% Black or African American.
Danville, by contrast, hugs the Southern border of the state along the Dan River which separates Virginia from North Carolina. An industrial town devoted to tobacco and textile production, Danville has been literally controlled by the Dan River Mills Corporation in terms of town governance and its judicial system. Roughly two-thirds of Danville’s 50,000 residents in 1960 were white. Racial segregation was in full force as the Southern Freedom Movement simmered and boiled both near and far.
DANVILLE, VIRGINIA 1963
“Freedom”
All: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom
Leader: Everybody wants
All: Freedom
Leader: Everybody wants
All: Freedom
Leader: Everybody wants
All: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom
Leader: Got to have my
All: Freedom
Leader: Got to have my
All: Freedom
Leader: Got to have my
All: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom(Additional verses)
Let me hear you sing for (Freedom)
Don’t you want to have your (Freedom)
Tell the people ‘bout your (Freedom)
Sing it louder ‘bout your (Freedom)Refrain: Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, Freedom (Core Freedom Songs, 17)
In 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, many Americans were shocked when they saw Southern Freedom Movement violence: Sheriff “Bull” Connor’s brutal responses to non-violent direct-action demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Men, women, and children peacefully protested on behalf of African American freedoms. Images of fire hoses blasting protesters off their feet and attack dogs biting adults and school children filled the nightly TV news and major Northern newspapers. That same summer, only five hundred miles away, authorities used similar brutal techniques in the little-known textile town of Danville, VA.
Frustrated by the inability of the local NAACP to change racial segregation and political exclusion of people of color in Danville, organizers created The Danville Christian Progressive Association (DCPA) as an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In keeping with SCLC expectations, the DCPA clearly articulated its goals: to have equal access to the town facilities, to include Blacks in town governance, and to employ Blacks in downtown businesses. Both SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent staff to Danville to help organize the protests and to teach non-violent protest strategies.
Archival film footage of local news coverage shows African American protesters marching up the streets in Danville. Five and six abreast, they sing “We shall not be moved” and “Freedom” as well as rhythmically chant “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and “Freedom Now!” Similarly, television film of protesters on the City Hall steps captures a sit-in where participants sang “Freedom” as they clapped in time. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) published “Freedom” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” in the 1962 CORE Sit-in Songs. Inexpensively produced, the booklet contained 19 songs that were recorded as an album following the Freedom Highways project in 1962. The Freedom Highways project was direct action “to open chain restaurants along major federal highways to all persons.” These songs had been part of the Southern Freedom Movement for years, some since the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 (Core Sit-in Songs, Foreword). The tune for “Freedom” originally was an African American spiritual with a call and response format. The lead voice told a story or made observations and the group responded with “Amen. Amen. Amen.” Structurally, the song was readily adapted to Southern Freedom Movement purposes by substituting “Amen” for “Freedom” and creating verses that either were relevant to the large-scale struggle for rights and freedom or spoke to the specific needs and conditions of a local movement.
Other film footage from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities shows police and firemen dragging hoses into position. Still photographs present the destruction and violence of the hoses. What has been called “A Night of Infamy” in Danville began with a gathering of protesters to respond to the incarceration of young people the week before (“Danville,” Virginia Historical Society).
On June 10, Rev. H.G. McGhee had led a group of about 50 people to city hall. McGhee’s group knelt en masse between the municipal building and the jail “to pray for our brothers and sisters.” As they prayed, State troopers blocked the end of the ally, cutting off any exit for the praying activists. When they stood up, they heard the command “Let them have it!” At that point, city police, firemen, and garbage collectors who had been deputized for this purpose, attacked the demonstrators with clubs. Then high intensity fire hoses blasted the stunned crowd, “washing people down the street like so much trash. Gloria Campbell (wife of the influential Rev. Lawrence G. Campbell) received such a high-intensity stream of water, it tore her dress off…” (Katherine Calos, “Civil rights participants remember Danville’s ‘Night of Infamy,’” Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 3, 2013). While the network television and major newspapers reported Birmingham, Alabama’s violent strategies, the same approach in Danville escaped the same level of national attention.
Inside the Danville jail that night, 17-year old Randy Adams didn’t feel the fire hoses’ punishment. But he did experience the harshness of prison conditions. “In jail, the demonstrators sang freedom songs and prayed with the black ministers who were among the leaders,” he recalled. “I remember us singing and hearing other people singing as well. I think it was just the point of us being together and doing something to pass the time and, especially the younger people, to make them feel comfortable and to know they were not alone” (Calos, “Civil rights participants remember Danville’s ‘Night of Infamy’”). Like the demonstrators depicted in the films broadcast on local TV, Adams probably sang “Freedom” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
SNCC operative Mary King wrote about her front-line experience in Danville in her memoir of the movement, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. King had familial ties to Danville extending back five generations. She recalled her father reminiscing about waking to the shrill whistle of the cotton mills when he was a thirteen-year-old school boy. In the summer of 1963, King went to Danville and participated in the picketing at the mills to press for fair employment: “Of the mills’ twelve thousand employees approximately eleven hundred were black, most of them doing menial work (Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987).
Walking back and forth carrying a sign, King soon discovered that demonstrating was hard work: “Picketing was not exciting. It was not fun. It was not even interesting. It was boring, tiresome, dull, and tedious.” She decided that she could better serve the Danville movement by spending time in the local SNCC office. There she applied her expertise: coordinating communications with the media and with the SNCC office in Atlanta. “Direct action without good communications was of little consequence” (Mary King, Freedom Song, 113).
In contrast to the tedium of picketing, King found more energy and enthusiasm at the mass meetings held nearly every night in Danville churches. She observed that “The mass meetings and the singing of freedom songs were a form of inchoate planning for the community…The soul-stirring singing, a crucial part of the black community’s mobilization in Danville as everywhere, bonded participants together emotionally, giving individuals strength, and forming a collective shield” (Mary King, Freedom Song, 98).
Freedom chants helped demonstrators deal with the boredom of picket lines and long marches. Freedom songs helped participants in the struggle feel a sense of community in the face of violent oppression. Freedom songs served another purpose in the Southern Freedom movement: recording grassroots history.
“Legend of Danville” as Grassroots History
1. In Danville on June the tenth
In the year of sixty-three,
From Bibleway Church to the courthouse
Some people marched to be free.2. The night was dark and the journey long
As they marched two abreast
But with the spirit of freedom’s song
They didn’t need no rest.3. As they fell down on their knees
Led by Reverend McGhee
He looked up and cried, “Lord, please
We want to be free.”4. They heard the voice of Chief McCann
As it cut across the prayer
I’ll never forget those violent words
“Nigger, get out of here.”5. And as they heard those brutal words
They didn’t turn around
And the water from the firehose
Knocked them to the ground.6. And as they fell down on the ground
They were hit with the billy sticks
I’ll never forget that terrible sound
As the people’s heads did split.CHORUS and INTERLUDE
Don’t you stumble brother, don’t you falter,
Oh mother, don’t you weep,
We’re climbing up to our freedom
Although the road is steep.7. On June 13th we marched again
They used the tear gas bombs.
The grand jury indicted us
On five thousand dollar bond.8. In Danville town’s corrupted courts
We got no justice done.
We were found guilty before the trial
And the judge he wore a gun.Chorus: Move on. Move on, Move on with the Freedom fight.
Move on. Move on. We’re fighting for equal rights.(Matthew Jones, “Legend of Danville,” Sing for freedom: the story of the civil rights movement through its songs, Guy and Candie Carawan, eds., 120-121)
Danville native, and U.S. Army veteran, Matthew Jones wrote this ballad, “The Legend of Danville,” which documents the night marches, as well as the daytime protests and names the leaders of the civil rights advocates, Rev. McGhee, and Police Chief McCann. Jones’s lyric recalls the power of the firehoses that “knocked them to the ground” and being beaten by policemen with billy clubs. The last two verses also witness to the police violence and the judicial system controlled by the Dan River Mills company.
The judge referred to in “The Legend of Danville” was Archibald M. Aiken, Jr. who did, indeed wear a gun. He invoked an 1859 Virginia statue prohibiting anyone from “conspiring to incite the colored population of the State to acts of violence and war against the white population.” The statute had first come to light in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion and was the legal basis for John Brown’s execution after the Harper’s Ferry raid. In the Danville freedom movement, legal actions using this statute extended to SNCC organizers who worked behind the scenes as well as lawyers representing the individuals who had been arrested. SNCC workers Bob Zellner and Dottie Miller fled the city when they learned the grand jury was on the verge of indicting them. Dottie and photographer Danny Lyon “were driven out of town, hiding on the floor of a car, at high speed by a local resident.” They used pseudonyms to make their plane reservations at the airport, for fear that their actual names would be recognized and lead to their apprehension (Mary King, Freedom Song, 113-114). In a time when local media ignored the protests and national news coverage focused on larger urban demonstrations, Matthew Jones’s ballad kept alive the experience and details about the Danville movement.
Like SNCC staff Bob Zellner, Dottie Miller, and Danny Lyon before her, Mary King escaped Danville under threat of grand jury indictment. Hunched down on the floor of a local resident’s car to make her getaway, she took up temporary residence across the Dan River in a Roman Catholic convent in North Carolina. The grand jury delivered on their threat against her in absentia. So, unable to be of any use to the Danville movement from the far side of the river, Mary returned to Atlanta and continued her work in communications with Julian Bond and others at the SNCC central office. Her case continued on the books until 1973 when it was part of the last group of sentences that was finally suspended (Mary King, Freedom Song, 114-119).
Many people today consider the violence of the local and state authorities against the Danville freedom movement as an aberration in Virginia’s record of civil rights activity during the 1950s-60s. In other Virginia cities at the time, direct actions were non-violent and led to negotiations that produced changes in access to public facilities, in expanded enrollment of eligible voters, and in hiring practices that included African Americans. The results in Danville were uneven: an African American policeman was hired in 1963. In 1966 Danville voters elected a Black councilman. However, it would take until 1970 to desegregate the Danville public schools.
In Danville, anti-segregation activists used chants and songs to advance their goal of a “beloved community,” a town where all residents had equal access to political participation, to employment opportunities, and to tax-supported services. Chants and songs countered the boredom of the picket line, energized the gathering of the activists and their allies, and chronicled the violence perpetrated against nonviolent protesters. Over five decades later, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally took to the streets to promote a completely different agenda.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA 2017
On Monday, August 14, 2017, Joe Heim of The Washington Post produced a thorough outline of the Charlottesville events. Heim identified three groups involved at Charlottesville: the white nationalists, the counter-protesters, and state and local law officers (Joe Heim, “Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death,” The Washington Post, August 14, 2017). Keep in mind that each of Heim’s terms is an umbrella term. “White nationalists” is a collection of right-wing groups including neo-Nazis, white militia, and other alt-right affiliates. “Counter-protesters” include UVA students, #BlackLivesMatter marchers, clergy who came at the invitation of Charlottesville clergy, and anti-fascists (known as Antifa).
Starting with the rumored but so-called “surprise” tiki torch march for Friday night before the “Unite the Right” rally on Saturday, the article’s timeline continues on through the next day’s demonstration and counter demonstration. The article culminates with the three deaths related to the Charlottesville protests: the death of counter protester Heather Heyer hit by a car allegedly driven by James Alex Fields, Jr. a “Unite the Right” participant, and the deaths of two state police troopers, Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Berke M. M. Bates, whose helicopter crashed after they had been observing the rally (Joe Heim, “Recounting a day of rage). Understandings of what happened at Charlottesville depend on what individuals observed, when they made their observations, and what their sympathies were prior to the event.
Visual footage of the “surprise” march on Friday night shows about 250 khaki-clad white nationalists, most of them men, carrying tiki torches and chanting. “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” Another chant came in a call and response format, part of the group shouting “Whose streets?” and the remainder yelling “Our streets!” The long line marching in pairs wound across Nameless Field on the UVA campus and toward the statue of Thomas Jefferson. At the statue a small group of students faced the torch-bearers. Behind a sign reading “VA students against white supremacy,” these counter-protesters encircled the statue, arms linked. They chanted “Black lives matter!” and “No Nazis! No KKK! No fascist USA!” The white supremacists surrounded the statue and the counter protesters (Vice News Tonight, HBO). Once they confronted the counter-protesters at Jefferson’s statue, the white-supremacists chanted “White lives matter!” Initially a single campus police officer was at the statue. Eventually a phalanx of law enforcement personnel in riot gear took position and moved to disperse the crowd. Reporter Heim described what happened: “Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants. Many marchers threw their torches toward the statue and the students.” Individuals in both groups sustained injuries before law officer reinforcements arrived. Casualties were eventually treated by first responders (Joe Heim, “Recounting a day of rage).
Heim’s timeline for Saturday includes an entry about counter-protesters who gathered at Emancipation Park. “9:30 a.m. Strains of the Civil Rights Freedom Song ‘This Little Light of Mine’ wafted across the park.”
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m gonna let it shine.
This little light of mine
I’m gonna let it shine.
Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine.(“This Little Light of Mine,” Sing for freedom: the story of the civil rights movement through its songs, Guy and Candie Carawan, eds. 21-23).
This song was a staple of the Southern Freedom Movement. A traditional African American spiritual, it became a mainstay for a number of reasons. Its repetition and simple tune made it easy to learn and remember. Verses could readily be improvised depending on the location of the singers and the conditions of the protest. The imagery of light can be interpreted creatively and dynamically. So it is not surprising that “This Little Light of Mine” formed part of the soundtrack for Charlottesville. There the 30 singing clergy clasped their arms as they sang only 20 feet from the shouting demonstrators. Their voices prompted white nationalists to respond with chants “Our blood, our soil!”—a common chant of the 20th century Nazi movement in Germany. The contest between voices of the Unite the Right conglomerate and the counter protesters would continue throughout the day (Joe Heim, “Recounting a day of rage”).
One of the counter-protesters, Kristen Adolphson, a 41-year old UVA alumna now living in New York City, had come to Charlottesville previously when the KKK had demonstrated there. As a Buddhist, she eschews violence: “I was vacillating between fear of violence and the importance of standing up against this hatred as a white person. By not going out there, I’d be basically saying, ‘Everything is fine.’” On Saturday morning, she faced her fears about the armed alt-right protesters and went to participate with the counter-protesters. According to Adolphson, “Many of the counter-protesters were occupying Lee Park—or Emancipation Park, as it’s now known—which has the Robert E. Lee statue, supposedly the issue of contention… Some skirmishes started breaking out and the state police, in their riot gear, started clearing everyone out. Generally, I didn’t feel like the cops were out there to be violent toward us, or valuing—like at the K.K.K. rally—certain people’s rights versus others.” (Charles Bethea, “A Witness to Terrorism in Charlottesville,” The New Yorker). After leaving Emancipation Park, Adolphson walked through other parts of the city. The word had spread that white supremacists had marched through Friendship Court and reportedly “tried to cause problems” in the “a low income housing area where many minorities live.” “So,” she explained, “we marched by, in silence. We didn’t want to make a scene. We just wanted to be in solidarity with the people there.” After leaving Friendship Court, she saw a different group of counter-protesters on Second Street. “We all were cheering together, marching together, clapping and chanting. There was no one else around. No standoff. We were just marching, being peaceful. This was around two o’clock, I guess. It was a very exuberant feeling of solidarity, community, all that” (Charles Bethea, “A Witness to Terrorism”).
In his article for the Los Angeles Times, Matt Pearce quoted “Leftist anti-fascist organizers from Washington, DC”: “Before the attack occurred, we chased the Nazis out of their park, removing their platform… We were at our most powerful, all of us together chanting with enthusiastic support from the people of Charlottesville. That was the moment that we were attacked” (Matt Pearce, “Who was responsible for violence at Charlottesville? Here’s what witnesses say,” LA Times, August 15, 2017.).
Pearce also cited reports from Charlottesville posted on the far-right website Occidental Dissent. One blogger using the name “Marcus Cicero” mobilized as part of a group called League of the South. He stood in a line of shield bearers. “As we advanced down the street toward the park, I immediately noticed a horde of Antifa, BLM terrorists, and other assorted genetic refuse ready and willing to block the street leading up to our destination.” Another Occidental Dissent blogger, Hunter Wallace, described the same scene: “[The counter protesters] immediately launched an attack on our group with mace, pepper spray, bricks, sticks and foul liquids. The police stood idly by on the sidelines while a brawl was allowed to ensue. We had to fight our way into Lee Park and dozens of our people were injured by mace and pepper spray as we marched through the gauntlet.” Matt Parrott of the white supremacist group Traditionalist Youth Network noted: “With a full-throated rebel yell, the League broke through the wall of degenerates [blocking the Lee Park entrance]”( Matt Pearce, “Who was responsible”).
These accounts from Charlottesville vary in intensity and each bears the marks of the participant’s alliances. Chanting without an opponent was, at least for Adolphson, part of a peaceful camaraderie on the Charlottesville streets. Both “leftist anti-fascists” and right wing bloggers associated chants with power and aggression. The difference between Kristen Adolphson’s account and the others may be due to her pacifist beliefs as well as the non-confrontational atmosphere at that particular moment and place. By contrast, in different contexts, shouting chants at each other encourages aggressive behavior which can escalate dangerously. Chanting may not have caused Heather Heyer’s death, but it contributed to an environment of verbal and physical aggression that led to her murder. The Unite the Right “surprise” tiki torch march started aggressive chanting on Friday night.
The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally scheduled for Saturday, August 12, 2017 and the unscheduled night march August 11 contrast in many ways with the June 1963 Danville movement. The white supremacist participants who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017 held political and philosophical views in diametrical opposition to the cause of the 1963 Danville movement protesters. While the Danville movement organizers worked with telephones and the mass media of television, newspapers, and radio, most of their organizing efforts were face-to-face. Fifty-four years later, Charlottesville demonstrators and counter-demonstrators largely used the Internet and social media, particularly to communicate with their support base; they provided information to electronic and print news media outlets for wider distribution outside their right-wing networks. On television in 1963, Americans viewed the physical oppression by law enforcement agencies, violently wielding firehoses and attack dogs against the Southern Freedom Movement non-violent activists. TV coverage of movement violence has been credited with motivating President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy to abandon their conciliatory political tactics with Southern white politicians, eventually becoming more supportive of racial equity. In contrast, the Charlottesville rally emerged in the midst of a national environment where the agendas of white supremacists have been given increasing visibility and legitimacy at the highest levels of government and in public venues.
The contemporary protest scenario in Charlottesville and elsewhere has taken to chanting as a means of expressing group cohesion and force. The Saturday morning performance of “This Little Light of Mine”—a flashback to the Southern Freedom Movement—prompted white supremacist yelling, and one might wonder if the sound of singing prevailed despite the shouting. In contemporary American culture, group singing has dwindled for several reasons. Popular culture characterizes singing as “weak” and ineffective, even though countless participants in the Southern Freedom Movement at large and in Danville specifically vouched for the power of group singing to establish communal connection across space and time. Comic parodies of children or naive campers sitting around the fire singing “Kum Ba Yah” have effectively made group singing a joke. The relationship of congregational singing and religious services in an increasingly secular society may also undermine the popularity of informal music-making. Furthermore, self-consciousness among singers seems to have increased in the intervening decades, especially since the 1980s, when public school budgets began cutting monies for music teachers and music programs. And one more nail in the coffin of widespread group singing is the ready availability of commercially recorded music for individual listening. Commercially successful songs in rap, hip-hop, and other genres now include spoken word, so chanting in lieu of singing may be a more comfortable group expression due to its familiarity. R&B, rock and roll, Motown, and folk-rock of the 1960s, along with spirituals like “This Little Light of Mine,” powered the Southern Freedom movement through amateur voices accustomed to singing to entertain themselves. Increasingly sophisticated technology now brings professionally mastered and remixed performances into any spare moment of people’s lives. The highly produced professional recordings help lead potential singers to claim they “aren’t good enough” to sing anywhere other than in the shower.
Chanting on the front lines of social activism is a current practice and may well continue to be so in future direct actions. Shouting chants can offer group members a sense of belonging and solidarity, whether their political affiliation supports or rejects human equality. Shouting Nazi chants such as “Blood and soil!” provides a quick connection with fascism that satisfies its members and chills its opponents. In that sense, chanting may be meeting the white supremacists’ groups’ needs for expressing their anger and violence. Chanting may meet the needs of counter protesters to validate their determination and strength, to express their power as well. But the chants fall short of telling and preserving a current history, like Matthew Jones accomplished in his “Legend of Danville.” Neither can chants provide a diversion and solace like Randy Adams experienced in the Danville jail. Shouted slogans as performances produce a sparse rhetoric that discourages thoughtful—even if contradictory—exchanges of ideas. In these challenging times, we need to find ways to communicate across chasms of difference to work toward unity, not unanimity. Finding ways to expand our conversations, not constrict them, will move us closer to being a community, if not a “beloved” one.
Works Cited
Bethea, Charles. “A Witness to Terrorism in Charlottesville” The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/a-witness-to-terrorism-in-charlottesville Accessed Oct. 24, 2017.
Calos, Katherine. “Civil rights participants remember Danville’s ‘Night of Infamy’ Richmond Times-Dispatch. February 3, 2013. http://www.richmond.com/special-section/black-history/civil-rights-participants-remember-danville-s-night-of-infamy/article_f12c761c-85e2-5bbd-8af7-993f712ccd36.html Accessed October 23, 2017.
Congress on Racial Equality. Core Sit-in Songs. n.d. http://www.crmvet.org/docs/core_sitin-songs.pdf
Heim, Joe. “Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death.” The Washington Post. August 14, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.e040d7e70149 Accessed 10/16-17/2018.
HBO. Vice News Tonight . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIrcB1sAN8I Accessed 10/16-17/2017.
King, Mary. Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1987.
Pearce, Matt. “Who was responsible for violence at Charlottesville? Here’s what witnesses say LA Times Aug. 15, 2017 http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-charlottesville-witnesses-20170815-story.html Accessed October 24, 2017.
Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs. Guy and Candie Carawan, eds. Montgomery & Louisville: New South Books, 2007.
University of Virginia. “Facts” http://www.virginia.edu/facts Accessed October 21, 2017.
Virginia Historical Society. “Danville.” http://www.vahistorical.org/collections-and-resources/virginia-history-explorer/civil-rights-movement-virginia/danville Accessed October 21, 2017.