Mississippi Goddam by NINA SIMONE

Mississippi Goddam was written in 1964 by Nina Simone. It was a response to the upheaval brought about by the assassinations and threats carried out by white supremacists against Civil Rights activists in US Southern states.

Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

The civil rights movement’s main aim was to ensure legal rights for African-Americans in the USA. During the 60s, the movement gained force by organizing protests based o non-violent campaigns and civil disobedience.

These activities were seen as a menace by the white supremacists and other racist groups, which took terrorist actions. The most outrageous ones took place in the Southern states. In the song, Simone mentions three examples:

Alabama: The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. An act of terrorism which killed four girls and injured 22 others on 15th September 1963.

Tennessee: Civil Rights lawyer Zephaniah Alexander Looby died at the bomb attack of his house in Nashville on April 19th, 1960.

And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

The most conspicuous of these acts was the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963 by a member of the Ku Klus Klan.

Medgar Evers was a World War II veteran and a Civil Rights activist whose aim was to end segregation. He lived in Jackson, Mississippi, immersed in a white supremacist population and enduring constant threats of death.

For this very reason, both FBI and local police officers regularly escorted him home. However, on the day of his assassination, the police forces were inexplicably not present.

According to the sources, he was shot from his back, and when taken to the hospital, he was refused entry, as people of colour were not allowed to enter.

In the trial, an all-white jury could not agree on a verdict and, as a consequence, the accused was acquitted.

Not until 1994 was he convicted following a new trial based on new evidence and after Evers’s body had been exhumed for an autopsy.

In 1964, Bob Dylan released a more explicit version of this song, giving his personal interpretation of Medgar Evers’ assassination. The song is called "Only a Pawn in Their Game" and assumes how poor whites are manipulated by the rich whites to avoid responsibility.

Here you can listen to Dylan singing the song during a march in Washinton in  August 1963.

 but this whole country is full of lies
I don't trust you any more

Mississippi Goddam was Simone’s first civil rights song. According to her words, it was written “In a rush of fury, hatred and determination” and it was supposed to be “like throwing ten bullets back at them”. The single was boycotted in some Southern radio stations and in some cases they even destroyed the copies and sent them back to the record company.

From that moment on the American music industry was reluctant to publish her music. She became so disappointed and frustrated that she left the country in1970, first she flew to Barbados and then she lived in different countries for the rest of her life.

Yes you lied to me all these years
You told me to wash and clean my ears
And talk real fine just like a lady
And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie

These lines referred to the relations between races in the USA during decades. The roots of the term Sister Sadie can be found in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Sadie was Slave Jim’s wife and Widow Douglas’ cook.

Sadie became the female counterpart of Jim Crow, a character used to portray African-Americans in an offensive way. What Simone is trying to say here is that the message they received was that if you looked like a lady and behaved like a lady, the whites wouldn’t call you Sister Sadie, but call you by your real name. In other words, what was the use of doing things according to the rules if you were not treated as equal?

This is a show tune
But the show hasn't been written for it, yet

This is an ironic remark aimed at an audience that was partially white. It’s supposedly meant to contrast the dramatic facts described but later on she says:

I made you thought I was kiddin'

What makes us realize that she’s really enraged and she’s talking in earnest.

Picket lines
School boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister my brother my people and me

With these lines, Simone is addressing The COINTELPRO (Portmanteau word from COunter INTELligence PROgram), a programme launched by the FBI to discredit the civil rights movement by describing their members as communists.

Americans have never held communists under a high esteem, but you can imagine the public opinion  just in the middle of the Cold War era ad having into consideration the URSS-USA relationships (see 1960 Bay Of Pigs Invasion and  1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,  and maybe you will begin to understand why Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 was also considered a plot).

Desegregation ad reunification

The civil rights movement and the fight for equal rights was a long-term battle that lasted decades. The trouble and strife of the African-American population are reflected in music, cinema and literature.

The screen version of Medgar Ever’s assassination was released in 1966 and titled Ghosts of Mississippi, however, the plot is based on the story of the 1994 trial. Here you can see the trailer.

A much more successful depiction of the racist scenario is accomplished in 1988 Mississippi Burning. Set in a fictional Mississippi county and loosely based on the disappearance and assassination of three civil rights workers in 1964.

Here you can see the trailer of Alan Parker’s film starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as two FBI agents investigating the case and meeting the hostility of both residents and local authorities.

As for literature, we can find an excellent example in Clock Without Hands, a novel published on September 18, 1961, offering a plausible plot which describes with mastery contemporary characters and situations from the point of view of a reliable eye-witness, the Southern novelist Carson McCullers.

Here you can read one of the few reviews of this book:

A Clock Without Hands Review

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960, is another example of a novel inviting to the  discussion of the right of a human being to kill or spare the life of another, apart from that, the author also tells us the story of the family of a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping the daughter of a white family

Here you can read the original review published in the New York Times:

To Kill A Mockingbird Review.