How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein
How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

How It Feels to Be Free
Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement

Author: Ruth Feldstein

Narrator: Adenrele Ojo

Unabridged: 9 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/14/2021


Synopsis

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers.

In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of gender amid their demands for black liberation. Feldstein focuses on six women who made names for themselves in the music, film, and television industries: Simone, Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, and Cicely Tyson. These women did not simply mirror black activism; their performances helped constitute the era's political history. Makeba connected America's struggle for civil rights to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while Simone sparked high-profile controversy with her incendiary lyrics. In 1968, Hollywood cast the outspoken Lincoln as a maid to a white family in For Love of Ivy. That same year, Diahann Carroll took on the starring role in the television series Julia.

How It Feels to Be Free demonstrates that entertainment was not always just entertainment and that "We Shall Overcome" was not the only soundtrack to the civil rights movement.

About Ruth Feldstein

Ruth Feldstein is associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Morgan

A really interesting look at performing race--meaning, how race is seen visually (through hair, clothing, accessories), how it is viewed aurally, and how female performers, in particular, had to negotiate all kinds of issues. This focuses on Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Ab......more

Goodreads review by May

I would 10/10 recommend adding this to your want to read list!!! This book is educational, interesting, and thorough in its exploration of how identity, culture, politics, and history intersect in this time period. This book is a must-read for those exploring culture or politics in the ‘60s, and I h......more

This is a great companion piece to the PBS documentary of the same name. This book is extremely well researched and enjoyable. I would highly recommend it as a great biography of these fantastic women and their experiences fighting racism and sexism in the 1960s and 1970s.......more

Goodreads review by C.R.

This book makes me want to fight the patriarchy.......more