The Nonviolence Project

“Soapbox” in Review

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Disclaimer: The following blog post is not a reflection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opinion on the below topics.

By Axell Boomer

From September 2023 to December 2024, I hosted a radio show titled Soapbox on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s student radio station, WSUM 91.7FM Madison. Using songs as primary sources or thematic markers, I developed the show to explore protest movements throughout history and the music genres that communicated their goals. Admittedly, not every song I covered was expressively nonviolent or political; at times the content of the lyrics promoted physical resistance or simply participated in a musical tradition closely tied to political movements (e.g. folk music and the labor movement, or reggae and anti-imperialist movements). For the purposes of this article, I have selected three episodes, “Freedom Summer,” “Resurrection City,” and “John Steinbeck Committee” to signal the prominence music plays in nonviolent resistance and the utility of music in narrativizing history.

Before I supply these playlists, please entertain this brief caveat:

James Mangold’s recent film, A Complete Unknown (2024), introduces Pete Seeger (played by Edward Norton) in a courtroom.[1] Seeger is on trial for “refus[ing] questions under federal subpoena”—for performing a presumably controversial song and for not supplying the names of the people he had performed it to. While the film leaves Seeger’s audience up to interpretation, the final shooting script identifies these folks as “Communist people.”[2] Responding to the judge, Seeger recalls the words of Woody Guthrie, “a good song can only do good,” explaining, “the song I’m in hot water for here, it’s a good song; it’s a patriotic song, in-fact.” In protest of the guilty ruling, Norton’s character offers to perform the song in court, but the judge refuses. Leaving the courthouse, Seeger is greeted by journalists and protesters. He readies his banjo. Cue Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (1945).

“This Land Is Your Land” advocates for equitable access to materials: food and land for the hungry and homeless. Guthrie’s popular tune can be understood—especially in the context of Mangold’s film—as representative of folk protest music. But is it nonviolent? In recent years, Indigenous musicians and artists have surfaced the settler subtext of Guthrie’s song.[3] Asserting that the North American continent belongs to all of us, Guthrie dismisses Indigenous sovereignty. What happens when we view a settler anthem as nonviolent?

Let’s go back a few decades and look at another song, “It’s Your Land and My Land” (1923). Written by F. Eugene Farnsworth, a King Kleagle of Maine’s Ku Klux Klan, “It’s Your Land and My Land” shares a similar title to Guthrie’s song but relays the message in a separate way. Detailing the history of America, Farnsworth’s song proclaims that “Heroic men of yore Built… a nation” after protecting the land “From the wilds of the s***ge, From tempests storm and flood. According to Farnsworth, settlers “shielded” the land “And christened [it] with their blood.”[4] As descendants of these men, Farnsworth calls on his audience “to own, to rule, [and] to love” the land, closing with the sentiment, “It’s your land, and my land, and while the world shall be, We’ll fight to keep it our land, America, the Free.” Dehumanizing Indigenous Americans, the song views settlers as protecting North America from Indigenous people. Furthermore, the song argues that Americans now have the responsibility to protect this land, to fight for it.

Is singing or producing music inherently nonviolent? When we look at “This Land Is Your Land” and “It’s Your Land and My Land” beside one-another we can see the precarities of assigning “nonviolence” to musical performance. What determines the “nonviolence” of a song? The contents of its lyrics? The perspective of its performer? In assuming the writing and performing of songs as nonviolent, historians risk misrepresenting the intent (or consequences) of protest movements. For the first two Soapbox episodes featured in this article, “Freedom Summer” and “Resurrection City,” I feel comfortable placing them in the “nonviolent” camp, as the songs in the playlists were either featured in nonviolent demonstrations or were employed by my show to narrativize a nonviolent movement. For the third episode, “John Steinbeck Committee,” I encourage skepticism. While lyrics of the songs on this playlist are not violent nor featured popularly in violent protests, by labeling these songs as absolutely “nonviolent,” I could rob agency from the song’s performer and the song’s recipients.

In any case:

You’re listening to WSUM 91.7 FM Madison. This is Soapbox. I’m your host, DJ Dogma. The theme of today’s episode is:

Freedom Summer

  • Lead Belly, “Take This Hammer,” Lead Belly The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
  • Bob Dylan, “Oxford Town,” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
  • Phil Ochs, “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” I Ain’t Marching Anymore
  • Martin Luther King Jr., “Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs
  • Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Ain’t That Good News
  • The Harmonizing Four, “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” Negro Spirituals
  • Odetta, “Got My Mind on Freedom,” It’s a Mighty World

I used this playlist to relay my Nonviolence Project article, “Teaching History as an Act of Nonviolent Protest,” a history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Freedom Schools which operated in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. SNCC’s Freedom Schools provided educational materials and lessons for underserved Black youth to challenge institutional racism in the American South. These schools also played a fundamental role in the training and political development of college activists—like Mario Savio—as volunteers directly witnessed the mistreatment and violence experienced by Black communities in the Jim Crow South.[5] Lead Belly’s “Take This Hammer” communicates the legacies of slavery in the American South through the lens of a prison labor worker—legacies recognized in SNCC’s Freedom School curriculum. From there, Dylan and Ochs sing of the racial environment in 1960s Mississippi. While not a member of SNCC, I included an audio of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to highlight child participation in the Civil Rights Movement. Speaking during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, King encourages children to join in protests, celebrating their fundamental role in realizing civil rights, while also prioritizing their protection. In a similar fashion, SNCC’s Freedom Schools focused, valued, and bolstered student resistance. “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” gestures toward the prominent role churches played during Freedom Summer, operating as classrooms. Odetta’s cover of “Got my Mind on Freedom,” released the same year as Freedom Summer, captures the liberational sentiment of the movement, as she sings, “I’m walkin’ and talkin’ with my mind / Set on freedom.”

Resurrection City

  • Martin Luther King Jr., “We Shall Overcome,” The Best of the Speeches
  • Marvin Gaye, “Abraham, Martin and John,” That’s the Way Love Is
  • Johnny Cash, “They Killed Him,” Singles, Plus
  • Gil Scott-Heron, “Washington D.C.,” Moving Target
  • Ralph Abernathy, “Rev. Ralph Abernathy,” Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs

Like the former episode, I developed this playlist to narrate another Nonviolence Project article, “Resurrecting King and Resurrection City.” Originally conceptualized by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the Resurrection City encampment occupied the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the summer of 1968 to protest racial and economic inequality as well as the war in Vietnam. Occurring in the wake of King’s assassination, the encampment’s leaders and participants defined King’s legacy as they understood themselves as embodying it. Accordingly, two songs on the playlist—“Abraham, Martin and John” and “They Killed Him”—are pieces that eulogized King in the years after his death. While recorded after the encampment, Gil Scott-Heron’s “Washington, D.C.,” captures the cultural critique Resurrection City hoped to deliver. In-part, the encampment’s organizers hoped to display the conditions of impoverished Americans to D.C. lawmakers, pressing them to enact policy that aids lower classes. Similarly, Scott-Heron’s song discusses the irony of D.C. citizens existing in economically desperate conditions despite living in the nation’s capital—the symbol of a supposedly democratic, equitable, and prosperous nation. The playlist closes with an audio of Reverend Ralph Abernathy (recorded several years prior to Resurrection City), bringing his voice to radio and showing the audience a leader of the encampment.

John Steinbeck Committee

  • Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” Haywire Mac
  • Elizabeth Cotten, “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes
  • Mumford & Sons, “Dust Bowl Dance,” Sigh No More
  • Woody Guthrie, “Tom Joad, Pt 1.,” Dust Bowl Ballads
  • Kris Krisofferson, “Here Comes That Rainbow Again,” The Winning Hand
  • Bruce Springsteen, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” The Ghost of Tom Joad
  • Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd,” Dust Bowl Ballads
  • Lead Belly, “Get Up in the Mornin’,” Midnight Special – The Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1
  • Aunt Molly Jackson and John Greenway, “Dreadful Memories,” The Songs and Stories of Aunt Molly Jackson
  • Golden Gate Quartet, “God’s Gonna Cut Em Down,” Gospel Greats 1946-1950

This episode explored the impact of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) on folk music and the Grapes of Wrath Evening, a benefit concert developed to support the John Steinbeck Committee for Agricultural Workers (a proto-Farm Aid). I divided the playlist into three sections: the first two songs reflect the attitude of Tom Joad (the novel’s protagonist) at the outset of the book, the next four are songs inspired by the novel, and the final four songs are by artists that performed at the benefit concert. While many consider George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh (1971) the first modern concert developed to aid a social cause, the Steinbeck Committee’s Grapes of Wrath Evening (1940) presents a moment in American history in which music was utilized to raise funds for protest movements.

In Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads—the main characters of the novel—are displaced by the Dust Bowl and seek agricultural work in California for financial security. Appreciating Steinbeck’s compassionate portrait of American laborers impacted by the environmental and economic disasters of the 1930s, folk musicians dedicated to the Labor Movement aligned themselves with the author. The Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization (quickly renamed the John Steinbeck Committee for Agricultural Workers after its creation) endeavored to support the unionization of Dust Bowl migrants in California.[6] In the face of strikebreakers and “intimidation, blacklists, espionage, strikebreaking, pressure for antipicketing legislation, and vigilante attacks,” refugees of the Dust Bowl required a mobilizing force.[7] To financially support the agrarian labor movement, the Committee developed a concert in New York City, featuring the likes of Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson, Lead Belly, and the Golden Gate Quartet.[8] Benefit concerts continue to be tools of political protest movements.

[1]A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold (Searchlight Pictures, 2024).

[2]A Complete Unknown, written by James Mangold (Searchlight Pictures, 2024), 4, https://assets.debut.disney.com/documents/A%20COMPLETE%20UNKNOWN%20–%20FINAL%20SHOOTING%20SCRIPT_v2.pdf.

[3]Mali Obomsawin, “This Land is Whose Land? Indian Country and the Shortcomings of Settler Protest,” Folklife, June 14, 2019, https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/this-land-is-whose-land-indian-country-settler-protest; Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, “The Blind Spot In The Great American Protest Song,” NPR, February 3, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/03/963185860/the-blind-spot-in-the-great-american-protest-song.

[4]F. Eugene Farnsworth and Milton Charles Bennett, “It’s Your Land and My Land,” 1923, https://www.mainememory.net/record/42212.

[5]Jon N. Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. (Columbia University Press, 2016), 182-183. https://doi.org/10.7312/hale17568.

[6]James R. Swensen, “Focusing on the Migrant: The Contextualization of Dorothea Lange’s Photographs of the John Steinbeck Committee,” in A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, edited by Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh and Simon Stow, 191-226, (University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 192, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tv6qw.13.

[7]Ibid., 196.

[8]Andrew S. Grenade, “The Transient Journey,” in Harry Partch, Hobo Composer, (Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt6wp8md.8.