“A revolution is unfurling—America’s unfinished revolution.” These words of A. Philip Randolph are the first you read in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to the legendary 1960 jazz album We Insist!: The Freedom Now Suite featuring drummer Max Roach and singer Abbey Lincoln with lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr. The Black revolution, Randolph’s epigraph went on, was “unfurling in lunch counters, buses, libraries and schools—wherever the dignity and position of men are denied. Youth and idealism are unfurling. Masses of Negroes are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom now!” The album, a seminal work in what has been called “civil rights jazz,” typified this moment: bold, militant, insisting on new directions—both musically and politically.
Randolph, a union leader and towering figure in the mid-century Black freedom struggle, emphasized the political content of the album, but he just as easily could have been talking about the music. Roach and his collaborators—including several others besides Lincoln and Brown, among them saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—pushed the boundaries of “straight-ahead” jazz into the “new thing,” developing an early use of modes in place of familiar tonal centers, compositions without harmonic structure, and an emphasis on rhythm and African drumming. Released the same year seventeen countries in Africa gained their independence, the work also expressed the increasing radicalization and internationalization of the Black freedom struggle. The cover of the album featured three Black men at a lunch counter, a reference to the explosion of lunch counter sit-ins from earlier that year, where thousands of young Black civil rights activists occupied segregated public facilities and demanded to be treated as equals. Freedom now, their actions called; we insist, the album echoed.
The album pushed the revolutionary elements of Black arts forward in two directions. On the one hand, Roach and his collaborators picked up the power of the imagery—of the movement “unfurling” all around them, of the radicalization of movement activists—to produce a musical composition that remains an indelible contribution to both the politics of Black freedom and the expansion of musical horizons in mainstream jazz. On the other hand, they refused the choice between great art and political art, embracing a new unity of social context, personal expression, and artistic experimentation. We Insist! thus established itself as simultaneously a great work of art and a political one, and it has become a lasting testament to the expansive horizon of Black freedom.