This Little Light of Mine: Music of the Civil Rights Movement Shines On in Albany

Every second Saturday of the month, the Albany Civil Rights Institute Freedom Singers engage visitors through an oral history presentation featuring songs and stories of the Civil Rights Movement. Led by Rutha Mae Harris, a founding member of the original SNCC Freedom Singers, the group performs emotionally charged versions of freedom songs including “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “Woke Up This Mornin’ with My Mind on Freedom” and “This Little Light of Mine.” Author Brian Ward eloquently wrote that these songs “conveyed the moral urgency of the freedom struggle, while expressing and helping to sustain the courage of the extraordinary people who were at the heart of it.”

In the fall of 1961, Civil Rights activists in Albany and southwest Georgia were mobilizing to organize voter registration drives, sit-ins at bus stations and lunch counters and marches on City Hall to protest racial segregation and inequality. In response, local police avoided violence but repeatedly conducted mass arrests of peaceful demonstrators. Both times Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Albany, he was arrested for his participation in local demonstrations.

In 1962, folk singer Pete Seeger traveled south to support the Albany Movement and was taken aback by the power of the singing at the mass meetings. He suggested that a singing group could be a successful tool to raise awareness and money for the Movement. Cordell Reagon, a visiting Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary and tenor from Nashville, organized a quartet with Charles Neblett, another field secretary and bass singer from Cairo; Rutha Mae Harris, a 21-year-old Albany student, activist and soprano; and Bernice Johnson, an Albany student, activist and alto.

The SNCC Freedom Singers set out in a Buick station wagon in 1962 and traveled 50,000 miles across the nation, performing at colleges, universities and in living rooms. The group helped entertain the crowd in Washington D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963, before the march to the Lincoln Memorial, where Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The Freedom Singers recorded one album for Mercury and their 1963 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival was released as a live album. The group disbanded late that year and in 1964 an all-male version re-formed.

The Freedom Singers perform at approximately 2 p.m. every second Saturday at the Albany Civil Rights Institute, located at 326 Whitney Ave. The museum is open from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. For more information, call (229) 432-1698.