“Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words.” I caught my grandmother singing Lauryn Hill in the kitchen. So I thought. How she know that? “Killing me softly with his song,” I whispered back from behind her. Startled, she asked what I knew about that, about Roberta Flack. We played this game often, she, my mom and I, testing which tracks were original, sampled and remade. “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” by 2pac or “Don’t Leave Me” by Blackstreet or “A Dream” by DeBarge? Winning was not the point. It was the lesson that anything that’s a good thing grows from something. This lesson complicates a culture that celebrates Black firsts, founders and influencers. Of course, pioneers are important. But people make pioneers possible in fashion, music and social movements. Kanye’s musical innovations are partially owed to radical poet Gil Scott-Heron, whose words were inspired by Langston Hughes, whose grandparent Mary Patterson told stories about race, resistance and slave rebellion. And hundreds and thousands of people whose names and stories we’ll never know made her possible, too. This is also true for activism. We Charge Genocide, the grassroots coalition in Chicago that helped to secure reparations for victims of police violence in 2015, is named after the 1951 petition to the United Nations edited by William Patterson, signed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson and Mary Church Terrell among others, to seek relief for Black people from state-sanctioned violence. Calls to defund and abolish the police are neither new nor reactionary; they are demands from a tradition of Black activism for freedom, peace and power. What we decide to do with these traditions is up to us. I enjoy finding the histories of the songs that make us dance and sweat, harmonise and weep, find fellowship and fight. Included herein are some of the more powerful selections to inspire those reactions. I hope you enjoy this playlist, and discover the traditions that make you and your future possible, too. —Derecka Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer and organiser whose work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Appeal, Truthout, Slate, Boston Review and HuffPost.