Freedom Singers

In the early ‘60s, Albany, Ga. was in its short-lived but influential Albany Movement. Students from Albany State College, with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were campaigning to register Black voters — about 500 of them had been jailed. When Martin Luther King Jr. came down to help, he was thrown into jail, too.

Rutha Mae Harris was 21 years old then. Born and raised in the house her preacher father had built in 1932, she had been sheltered from the discrimination, humiliation and violence that marked the Jim Crow years in places like Albany.

“I am a ‘PK’, which means a preacher’s kid. So, growing up in that house was a wonderful thing, because my dad sheltered us from a lot of the ills of segregation. I knew that I went to a school with just Black people, but I thought that’s just the way it was. And, of course, my dad said, ‘You don’t have to go to the movies ‘cause I bought a TV.’ He said, ‘You don’t have to go to the hotels because you have a bedroom, and you don’t have to go to restaurants because you have a kitchen.’ And so that’s why I say he sheltered us from all of that.” 

But after her father’s death, and while the city fell deeper into turmoil, Harris was approached by one of the SNCC leaders. “He asked me if I wanted to be free. So, I told him, ‘I am free.’ I thought I was free. But [after] singing at mass meetings, marching, doing picket lines … I found I was not free, so I joined the movement.” 

First photo courtesy of the Libarary of Congress. Photo 2 of The Freedom Singers, circa 1963, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Albany was a city famous for the congregational singing in its Black churches, among them was popular young singer Ray Charles. And when folk singer-activist Pete Seeger visited the city and heard the singers, the passion and power he experienced in those voices made him realize something: this was the very thing the civil rights movement needed — songs to sing, voices to unite.

Seeger suggested to the SNCC leadership that a touring group of singers could be a terrific fundraiser and carry the movement’s message far beyond the South. Cordell Reagon, a field secretary for SNCC and a fine tenor, set out to form a quartet. He picked Charles Neblett, a bass from Cairo, Ill., and two young women already famous in Albany’s Black church community: Bernice Johnson and Rutha Mae Harris.

The Freedom Singers group was born.

The group’s songs were spirituals, rhythm and blues, gospel, and all familiar tunes from the Black church, so there was a connection made from the start between the divine call for justice and the political context in which people were gathered. “Only thing we did was change the lyrics,” Harris says. “Say, for instance, ‘I Woke up this Morning with My Mind on Jesus’, the only line we had to change was ‘I Woke up this Morning with my Mind on Freedom.’ We chose songs like that because people knew the tune, but they didn’t particularly know the words. ‘We Shall Overcome’ came from ‘I’ll Overcome Someday.’”

“The Lord gave me this voice. And I’m still using it today.”
— Rutha Mae Harris

Photos courtesy of Albany Visitor and Convention Center.

The Freedom Singers hit the road in a Buick station wagon, performing at churches, house meetings, schools, colleges and demonstrations, getting the nation singing freedom songs together. Martin Luther King Jr. called these songs “the soul of the movement.”

“We traveled 50,000-plus miles in nine months, and we covered 46 (of the lower 48) states. And the only reason we didn’t go to the other two states was because I got tired and I had promised my mom I would come back and finish my education. That’s why we missed Washington state and Oregon.”

In 1963, they were performing in California when they got a call to march in Washington, D.C. Harry Belafonte chartered a plane, and they flew with Rita Moreno, Charlton Heston and Sidney Poitier. On the day of that famous March on Washington, singing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, she stared out at the biggest crowd she had ever seen: 350,000 people. “They looked like little gnats, there was so many.” But that didn’t spook her. “I’m cool. I’m always cool. People ask me, ‘You don’t be afraid?’ [But] I’ve never been afraid to sing.” She and the group rocked the crowd with a rhythmic “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

Great as it was, the March on Washington was not the musical pinnacle of Harris’ life. “Singing at the Apollo Theater — that was one of the greatest experiences of my life. And Carnegie Hall. I’ve had the privilege of singing at the Chicago Lyric Opera House. So those are moments.” One reviewer of her Chicago concert called her “little Mahalia,” she remembered proudly.

Harris spent her career as a teacher back at Monroe High School in Albany, the very school she graduated from in 1958, teaching there for 30 years until her retirement. In 2022, the school honored her by naming its auditorium the Rutha Mae Harris Performing Arts Theater.

Harris has never stopped singing, though. To keep the old freedom songs alive, she organized a group of singers in 1998 to perform every month at the Albany Civil Rights Institute. As we interviewed her, she demonstrated the kind of spiritual categorized as a “sorrow song” by singing a verse of “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.” Her 82-year-old voice hit us like a steam engine. “The Lord is good,” she says. “He keeps preserving this voice.”

Rowland Scherman Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries. Bob Dylan leading performers on stage, Newport Folk Festival: Left to right: Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers, Paul Stookey, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Bernice Reagon, Cordell Reagon, Charles Neblett, Rutha Harris, Pete Seeger, July 1963. 

Seen in the June/July 2024 issue of Augusta magazine.