“God has wrought many things out of oppression,” begins Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essay occasioned by the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. “He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy.”
There were names like Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, and Roland Kirk on the bill. The 1964 festival was the first of the series, and it stood as a celebration of the genre, a recognition of the global impact of jazz. And now a big name was lending his support to the music: civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
In an earlier visit to Berlin, King had talked about the freedom movement’s work throughout the American South, and how he believed that “the Negro is called to be the conscience of our nation.” Nowhere was that call clearer than in jazz. Although King did not attend the festival in person (as scholars later confirmed), his address appeared in the program. There, in that divided city, King, a man who was fighting so hard against the divisions in his own country, was making the connections between the music and the movement.
It was beautiful music, no doubt about it. It was joyful, contemplative, and moving. But it was also a powerful tool in the fight for civil rights. It was music whose greatest stars were Black, and in a country filled with oppression of Black people, that was revolutionary. By the time King gave his speech, the connections between jazz and activism were only getting stronger, both at home and globally. The question isn’t so much why King would speak about the music, but how much of a role jazz played in Black liberation.
There are too many moments, too many painful scars, to name: Emmett Till. The Little Rock Nine. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Too many names and dates and times and places that all amounted to an understanding shared by so many Black Americans: we are not safe. Any of those could have been the one hurt too many that pushed the music into the activist world. Jazz was the perfect artform for the struggle, as just the act of performing, of seeing these powerful Black men and women commanding stages and demanding to be seen as artists was itself “a rebellious political act,” as the scholar Ingrid Monson points out in the Black Music Research Journal. Jazz was changing. While the big band era was a popular and successful one, by the 1940s, younger musicians were looking for a bolder way to assert themselves musically, and bebop was just the thing.