The Aesthetics of Transcultural Revolution: Freedom Songs in Halifax and Toronto, 1965 to 1967

Abstract

The story of the 1960s civil rights movement is conventionally viewed as a distinctly American phenomenon arising from that nation’s longer history of slavery, civil war, segregation, and racial violence. The following paper challenges this convention by looking at the dynamic relationship between black activists in Halifax and Toronto and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a radical organization based in southern states from 1965 to 1967. Indeed, neither SNCC nor Canadian activists saw themselves in local or even national terms. While their aim was to transform local injustice, their sightlines were transnational. In this, singing proved instrumental. This paper takes two instances from 1965—the Selma, Alabama, solidarity protests in Toronto and the Freedom Singers Maritime Tour—to chart how activists on both sides of the border recognized music’s strategic importance to public protest. Both events mark a high point in SNCC/Canadian solidarity. However, the productive intersection of north-south activism with singing was fleeting. By 1966 SNCC’s internal transformations had adverse repercussions on its Canadian support base. At the same time, singing’s place as the dominant realization of culture with revolutionary praxis also changed in ways that would privilege the visual over the aural.