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Respect

Respect
The importance of the song for the civil rights movement was summed up by activist Ben Chavis, who worked with Martin Luther King as a youth coordinator:

We always sang songs about things we didn’t have. We said, ‘We shall overcome.’ We hadn’t overcome, but we sang ‘We shall overcome‘. And when Aretha came out with ‘Respect,’ we weren’t getting any respect. Black folks were being disrespected, being beat down, killed trying to get the right to vote. It was like she was fulfilling not only an urgency of the movement of that time, but she made known through her song that we were going to get respect. And then in July of ’67, we have the rebellion in Detroit. Many people also thought ‘Dancing in the Streets’ or ‘Heat Wave’ was a call to action. And those are all great songs. But ‘Respect’ had a different tenor to it that really kind of made you pay attention, and it still does.


Songs of Freedom - The Selma Playlist
2015/6/3 - 23:58




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