Page 18 - WTP VOl. XII #1

It’s Time (continued from preceding page) ~
Our final event in Birmingham was with a shivering middle and high school chorus at an outdoor gazebo in 29-degree Kelly Ingram Park. One of the songs they sang to us was “Turn the World Around,” a song which Harry Belafonte popularized. The chorus is an apt illustration of the SANS mission to reach across boundaries:
Do you know who I am? Do I know who you are? See we one another clearly
Do we know who we are?
For the students, we sang Donnell’s more staccato arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem. The students stood across from us, mouthing the words and swaying along with the music. Our singing of “I Have a Dream,” one of the songs written by Donnell, based on Martin Luther King’s words, included a stirring solo by a Black woman in our chorus named Sayida. As she was singing, I noticed two of the high school girls’ jaws drop. It was a power- ful image of the awe and hope music can inspire.
At the end of our time together, we jointly sang a South African song that both choruses knew called “Shosholoza.” It’s a work song, originally sung by gold miners, with words in both Zulu and Ndebele. The words translated into English are four lines that are repeated in different configurations:
Moving fast and strong Through these mountains Train from South Africa You are leaving
Nelson Mandela is said to have sung this song during his imprisonment on Robben Island, imagining it as
a song that links the apartheid movement with the motion of a train. So, here we were, an adult chorus from Massachusetts, with a student group in Birming- ham, singing a song that was part of the struggle for freedom in South Africa.
During our four days in Birmingham, Martha brought us together with many people, as a means to “see one another a bit more clearly”—a message that
it’s up to each of us to turn the world around. It was there that we were able to soak in the history that
“changed the world”—through the pews we sat in, the floors we stood on, the pavement we walked upon, and from the stories and songs of the people we met. The events in Birmingham are credited with drawing national attention to the civil rights struggle in the south, leading to the eventual passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965, respectively. That history is now part of me in a more intimate way. In her own presentation to us on Fred Shuttlesworth, Martha had opened with the 1950s song “I Hear You Knocking” (but you can’t come in...), evoking the barriers that exist between people, and noting Rev. Shuttlesworth’s admonition that some- times you have to “take the hinges off the doors” to remove those barriers, something she asked us all to take to heart.
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My thirty-one-year-old son, Miles, had also come to Birmingham from Austin, Texas for those four days, mostly to see me and the concerts, but also because Birmingham was a host site for the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. He loved the Carlton Reese Choir concert, commenting to me how much he liked “church” music, even though he too is an atheist. During the concert, I had glanced towards Miles sitting near the back of the auditorium and wondered what he was making of this. It pleased me that he had liked the music and appreciated what
his dad was doing. Miles particularly enjoyed the choir’s rendition of “Glory,” with the retired police chief’s rap. I told Ms. Nunn at our post-concert dinner how much my son had enjoyed her rapping, and she replied, “It’s all about the young people.” A week later, we would all once again witness the truth of that, when the young legislators and students in Nashville protested the legislature’s inaction on gun violence.
The afternoon before the concert, Miles had joined me for lunch at Niki’s West, a jam-packed cafeteria- style restaurant, where you select your meat and your two sides and you had better be quick about it because the line moves along whether you’re ready or not. During lunch and later after the concert, Miles admitted that he knew very little about the history
I was experiencing in Birmingham, and what he did know seemed like ancient history—a feeling echoed by others of his generation whom I later told about the trip. Listening to the stories of the women in the choir who had been arrested as children shifted his perspective. As he put it, “hearing first-hand accounts about this stuff from spry people forced me to recog- nize and come to terms with the fact that all this stuff
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