Nourishment & Resilience

Apple Music
Nourishment & Resilience

Movements aren’t made out of demands for legal and public policy reforms alone. Movements are in part made, shaped, and sustained by art and culture. Music in particular has played a major role in helping give voice to the pain and longing of the dispossessed and the marginalized. If I’d have been braver I probably would have become a musician, because as a writer and activist, music as an art form has probably played the most critical role in shaping who I am as a person. And for Black people in America, music has played a big role in social justice movements—from Civil Rights and Black Power to Stonewall and BLM—and can be a tool in furthering the message of the work of organizers and activists. Music can show that the suffering we face as Black people (and whatever other identities are layered onto that) is not the way things have to be and there’s a way forward through resistance and struggle. These songs, from a range of genres and eras, are all from my own personal collection. Many were a part of my own political awakening, and some are newer songs that have helped me think about the current moment we’re in. I hope that for each listener, wherever you may reside and however you may identify, this will help you feel seen and heard, and/or help you understand the rage of the oppressed. We entered this year with as much precarity as we left the last year, but I do hope by this time next Black History Month, we will have marched even closer to freedom and liberation. —Kenyon Farrow, an author whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Out, HuffPost, BET.com, and Colorlines, is co-editor of Letters From Young Activists: Today's Rebels Speak Out and Stand Up!: The Shifting Politics of Racial Uplift.

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