- Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. [Frederick Douglass, public address (1886).]
- We are not to simply bandage the victims beneath the wheels (of injustice), we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself. [Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1933).]
- The values we care about the deepest, and the movements within society that support those values, command our love. When those things that we care about so deeply become endangered, we become enraged. And what a healthy thing that is! Without it, we would never stand up and speak out for what we believe. [Fred Rogers.]
Opposing injustice is standing up in the public arena.
Real
True Narratives
Boxer, civil rights advocate and humanitarian Muhamad Ali told white America some uncomfortable truths in the 1960s. Remarkably, he became a cultural hero. The following statement is not entirely in his words, though the last few sentences are.
I ain't draft dodging. I ain't burning no flag. I ain't running to Canada. I'm staying right here. You want to send me to jail? Fine, you go right ahead. I've been in jail for 400 years. I could be there for 4 or 5 more, but I ain't going no 10,000 miles to help murder and kill other poor people. If I want to die, I'll die right here, right now, fightin' you, if I want to die. You my enemy, not no Chinese, no Vietcong, no Japanese. You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won't even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won't even stand up for my right here at home. [attributed to Muhamad Ali] (Ali on “Firing Line” with William F. Buckley)
I had a colored friend, a man from my native place, in whom I had the most implicit confidence. I sent for him, and told him that Mr. and Mrs. Dodge had arrived in New York. I proposed that he should call upon them to make inquiries about his friends at the south, with whom Dr. Flint's family were well acquainted. He thought there was no impropriety in his doing so, and he consented. He went to the hotel, and knocked at the door of Mr. Dodge's room, which was opened by the gentleman himself, who gruffly inquired, "What brought you here? How came you to know I was in the city?" / "Your arrival was published in the evening papers, sir; and I called to ask Mrs. Dodge about my friends at home. I didn't suppose it would give any offence." / "Where's that negro girl, that belongs to my wife?" / "What girl, sir?" / "You know well enough. I mean Linda, that ran away from Dr. Flint's plantation, some years ago. I dare say you've seen her, and know where she is." / "Yes, sir, I've seen her, and know where she is. She is out of your reach, sir." / "Tell me where she is, or bring her to me, and I will give her a chance to buy her freedom." / "I don't think it would be of any use, sir. I have heard her say she would go to the ends of the earth, rather than pay any man or woman for her freedom, because she thinks she has a right to it. Besides, she couldn't do it, if she would, for she has spent her earnings to educate her children." [Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Chapter XLI, “Free at Last”.]
Perhaps no episode in human history is more full of hope for a profoundly better and more just future than the story of race relations in the United States. This story begins with the forced migration of African peoples into North America, and their sale and purchase into slavery. A government would be founded on principles of universal rights and equality, only to turn a blind eye to the plight of slaves; and worse, to perpetuate laws and customs condoning the practice. The nation fought a civil war in the 1860s, some fourscore years after its founding, during which President Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation. The side favoring emancipation and an end to slavery won the war, and only three years later the reconstructed nation amended its Constitution to guarantee due process and equal treatment for all United States citizens, which by definition was now to include all persons born in the United States.
Tragically, this was not a happily-ever-after ending to the story. African Americans continued to be denied equal treatment in the United States for another century, and even now the remnants of this anti-humane past haunts the lives of millions. Jim Crow laws went into effect, especially in the American south, codifying and perpetuating disparate treatment of African Americans.
- William Henry Chafe, et. al., eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segretated South (New Press, 2001).
- Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1991).
- Jennifer Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890-1940 (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
- Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press, 1996).
- Michele Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010).
By no means was the American north immune from these conflicts.
- Davison Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865-1954 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Racial segregation remains a fact of American life to this day. For many years, the United States Supreme Court gave it the force of law on the pretext that obviously inferior facilities for African Americans were “separate but equal”.
- Derrick A. Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (Oxford University Press, 2004).
In the 1940s, the United States fought a war against Nazi Germany, a regime dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish people and world domination by a supposedly master Aryan race. African Americans served with distinction in that war, and perhaps from that experience emerged at long last an American sensibility that disparate treatment was wrong. The civil rights movement became visible in the 1950s, became more insistent in the 1960s and achieved an expansion of legal rights not only for African Americans, but for persons in traditionally disfavored racial and ethnic groups.
- Paul Kix, The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France’s Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando (Harper/HarperCollins, 2017): Robert de La Rochefoucauld and the French Resistance
Tragically, the political successes of this too-long-delayed movement for equal treatment under the law met with a backlash. Richard Nixon was the first Republican president to run on a “Southern strategy”, which was a thinly veiled attempt to capitalize on Southern white sentiment against racial equality for the purpose of achieving a political majority. Since then, the Republican party has quite consistently and quite indefensibly continued to pursue this quasi-racist strategy to win and consolidate political power. Ronald Reagan kicked off his successful 1980 campaign for president in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the 1964 murder three young civil rights activists. George H. W. Bush fanned racial sentiment in 1988 with the infamous "Willie Horton" advertisement, which portrayed the unsavory image of an African American criminal convict who had been pardoned by Bush's opponent Michael Dukakis. Not surprisingly and yet shockingly, white southerners bolted the Democratic party to turn that entire region of the country from reliably Democratic to reliably Republican. Race was a central factor in this conversion, a sufficient factor to hand control of the government from one political party to the other throughout at least forty years of American history.
This may seem to some like a politically charged statement, but barely less shameful is the history of the Democratic party before 1964. In that era, it was the Democratic party that pandered to American racism. In the broader lens of history, if our nation achieves racial justice, this long period in national history, and each major political party's contribution to it, will be seen as shameful.
- Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Arlington House, 1969).
- Earl Black and Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Belknap Press, 2002).
- V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (University of Tennessee Press, New Edition, 1984).
- Alexander P. Lamis, Southern Politics in the 1990s (Louisiana State University Press, 1999).
- Charles S. Bullock, III and Mark J. Rozell, The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Fourth Edition, 2009).
Nevertheless, there is good and inspiring news to tell. The story of the American civil rights movement is one of the great reads in historical literature. For one of the few times in history, a people steeped in its own tawdry history of racism transformed itself. Today, the emerging generation of Americans appears ready to depart from the racism that blackens American history. Consider and partake of the following.
- Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster, 1989).
- Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
- Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
- Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (Basic Books, 2002).
- Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics (Verso, 1996).
- Derrick A. Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (Basic Books, 1987).
- Kellie Carter Jackson, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance (Seal Press, 2024) “explores the many forms of activism that oppressed people have resorted to and offers a more nuanced picture of their lives.”
- Hahrie Han, Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church (Knopf, 2024): “. . . Han follows four people involved with Undivided over the course of several years: a Black woman, a white woman, a white man and Undivided’s co-founder Chuck Mingo, a Black pastor at Crossroads. She depicts them forming friendships, asking questions, challenging one another, shifting their politics, volunteering and finding the courage to stand up to casual and systemic racism around them.”
Other narratives, on opposing injustice in various forms:
- Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (Knopf, 2011): Gandhi as social reformer.
- Ilia Calderón, My Time To Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race (Atria, 2020): “She was the first Afro-Latina to anchor leading national newscasts in Colombia and on a major Spanish-language broadcast network in the United States.”
- William G. Thomas III, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (Yale University Press, 2020): “Remembering the Enslaved Who Sued for Freedom Before the Civil War”.
- Dorothy Wickenden, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights (Scribner, 2021): “Entwining these three asymmetrical lives as deftly as Wickenden does proves illuminating. Tubman’s actions reveal the existential stakes of Wright’s and Seward’s agitations.”
- Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021) “tracks literary manifestations of feminist anger from the second half of the 20th century to now.”
- Louisa Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (Riverhead Books, 2022), “dismantles the received wisdom about Hong Kong’s history and replaces it with an engaging, exhaustively researched account of its long struggle for sovereignty.”
- Elisabeth Griffith, Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality: 1920-2020 (Pegasus Books, 2022): “. . . by examining 100 years of history through a feminist lens, a pattern emerges: Each blow from the patriarchy is countered by a well-aimed and calculated retaliation from American women.”
- Jonathan Freedland, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (Harper, 2022): “‘If the Jews knew what was coming,’ Jonathan Freedland writes in ‘The Escape Artist, his riveting chronicle of Rosenberg’s escape from Auschwitz and subsequent effort to rally the world to action, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them?’ Even a small amount of resistance could be enough.”
- Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist (Hachette Books, 2023): “To Restell, a grandmother in her late 60s, (her final arrest) was merely the latest in a long line of tedious interruptions to her business.”
- Jared Sullivan, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024): “A concise summary of Jared Sullivan’s ‘Valley So Low’ is offered halfway through the book by its hero, Jim Scott, a plain-talking, suspender-wearing, Skittles-addicted plaintiff’s lawyer: ‘They had a toxic tub of goop, and it blew up.’”
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (Random House, 2024): “Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad. . . . He used to get criticized for being too fatalistic, too despairing, too insistent on presuming the world is what it is. Now, in ‘The Message,’ he addresses himself to ‘young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.’”
- Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (Basic Books, 2025): “Across the southern German-speaking lands, . . . groups of peasants . . . were fed up with obeying restrictions on taking wood out of forests and fish out of ponds; watching their fields get ravaged by aristocratic hunting parties; and paying nonsensical and onerous taxes, death duties and marriage fees to lords who, as their own wealth increased dramatically, offered their serfs little in return besides lives on a short leash.”
Evil triumphs when good people do nothing. Here are narratives about people who remained silent and inactive in the face of evil.
- Peter Hayes, Why? Explaining the Holocaust (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017): “After a few minutes prisoners appeared with stools and hair-cutting equipment: Their job was to shave the women. It was ‘at this moment that they were struck by the terrible truth. It was then that neither the women nor the men – already on their way to the gas – could have any illusions about their fate.’”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Mugabe and the White African: white farmers in Zimbabwe face down racism to keep their farm, which sustains them.
- Bay of All Saints: three women try to keep their community from being bulldozed.
- Gulabi Gang: the group takes up the struggle against several forms of injustice.
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels and stories:
- Ursula Hegi, Children and Fire: A Novel (Scribner, 2011): “And We Did Not Speak Out”
- Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017): “Set in India in the present decade (with back stories extending into the 1950s), it is a novel about social and political outcasts who come together in response to state-sponsored violence.”
- Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony (Wave, 2020): calling out political torture and other costs of colonialism
- Megha Majumdar, A Burning: A Novel (Knopf, 2020): “. . . a Facebook post by a young Muslim woman named Jivan, living in a Kolkata slum. She has just witnessed a group of men torch a stalled train, killing almost 100 people, while the police looked on. When Jivan shares this message online, sorrowing and outraged (but also, she confesses, hoping for a robust number of “likes”), she has no way of knowing that she is about to be arrested for the crime, and that her post will be entered as evidence.”
- Joseph Andras, Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us: A Novel (Verso Fiction, 2021): “Andras gives an unsparing account of the capture and execution of the real-life revolutionary Fernand Iveton at the hands of the French Army” in a novel whose hero’s ethics are questionable.
- Kate Manning, Gilded Mountain: A Novel (Scribner, 2022): “In a Colorado mining town in the early 1900s, a young woman sees the disparity between the haves and the have-nots and takes action to close the gap.”
- John Sayles, Jamie MacGillivray, The Renegade’s Journey: A Novel (Melville House, 2023), “manages to be both sweeping and intimate, to deliver to the reader the tides of political history but also a moving and internalized portrait of two young people swept along on these tides.”
- Leila Aboulela, River Spirit: A Novel (Grove Press, 2023), “follows an enslaved girl in a turbulent 19th-century Sudan.”
Poetry
The night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.
Under a dead blue sky on a distant beach,
I was dragged by my braids just beyond your reach.
Your hands were tied, your mouth was bound,
You couldn't even call out my name.
You were helpless and so was I,
But unfortunately throughout history
You've worn a badge of shame.
I say, the night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark
And the walls have been steep.
But today, voices of old spirit sound
Speak to us in words profound,
Across the years, across the centuries,
Across the oceans, and across the seas.
They say, draw near to one another,
Save your race.
You have been paid for in a distant place,
The old ones remind us that slavery's chains
Have paid for our freedom again and again.
The night has been long,
The pit has been deep,
The night has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.
The hells we have lived through and live through still,
Have sharpened our senses and toughened our will.
The night has been long.
This morning I look through your anguish
Right down to your soul.
I know that with each other we can make ourselves whole.
I look through the posture and past your disguise,
And see your love for family in your big brown eyes.
I say, clap hands and let's come together in this meeting ground,
I say, clap hands and let's deal with each other with love,
I say, clap hands and let us get from the low road of indifference,
Clap hands, let us come together and reveal our hearts,
Let us come together and revise our spirits,
Let us come together and cleanse our souls,
Clap hands, let's leave the preening
And stop impostering our own history.
Clap hands, call the spirits back from the ledge,
Clap hands, let us invite joy into our conversation,
Courtesy into our bedrooms,
Gentleness into our kitchen,
Care into our nursery.
The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain
We are a going-on people who will rise again.
And still we rise.
[Maya Angelou, “Million Man March Poem”]
Books of poetry:
- Will Alexander, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten (New Directions, 2021): “A rich matrix of language, obscure or arcane vocabulary, ever-shifting waves of imagery and a kick back against historical colonial injustices feed into this alchemical volume of verse.”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
African-American jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk could pull musical tricks that most of the finest musicians could only imagine. Extraordinarily versatile and intuitively gifted for music, he never attained the popularity his talents and his performances merited. While The Everly Brothers were becoming rich, he lived the hard-knocks life of the jazz musician, his work too sophisticated for most audiences. Perhaps in response – and keeping in mind that he was an African-American musician in the United States in the 1960s – he took “the man’s” music and played it in ways “the man” wouldn’t like, adding obvious musical jabs and absurdities to top-40 tunes. Miles Davis observed: “It was the time of black power and black pride . . . When Rahsaan would hold that saxophone up after a solo, he was really saying, 'Here I am! The Miracle of the Saxophone!'” Lawrence Welk’s audiences may not have appreciated him but his slams at contemporary culture were no mere gratuitous fits of an immature temper; they were brilliant. Though he died young, Kirk left us with a wealth of eminently enjoyable music laced with social commentary that takes us back to that maddening time. The title track of his “Volunteered Slavery” album sums up Kirk’s in-your-face human-with-an-edge. Here he is live in France in 1972, and in Lucerne in 1967. Here is a documentary film about him, and a link to his playlists.
Oumou Sangaré has focused on issues of justice and injustice as a woman from Mali. “Her career and her recordings remained branded by these two salient dimensions: being a woman and coming from a social background that made her singularly sensitive to all forms of injustice.” “. . . the Malian artist has confronted kings and defied her country’s restrictive standards for women.” “‘I sing for women's rights!’ she cries in French before expounding in song, and in her native Bambara, on the injustices of life in West Africa: polygamy, arranged marriages, the price of a bride, the taboo of childlessness.” Here are links to a documentary film, an interview, and her releases.
Antonín Dvořák, Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, B. 141 (1885) (approx. 36-38’), is “characteristic for its dramatic expression and sombre atmosphere of grave uncertainty and obstinate defiance.” “Culture wars, political dysfunction and rising ethnic tensions—these were the problems that plagued Austria-Hungary in the 1880s, and the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák would be caught in the cross-hairs.” “The genesis of the Seventh Symphony came to Dvořák in the Prague train station where his fellow countrymen were arriving in preparation for a concert at the National Theatre to benefit political struggles: 'The first subject of my new symphony flashed in to my mind on the arrival of the festive train bringing our countrymen from Pest.'” “'My new symphony,' Dvořák wrote to a friend during the creative period of 1884, 'must be such as to make a stir in the world.'” Great recorded performances are conducted by Talich in 1938, Szell in 1960, Kubelik in 1971, Neumann in 1981, Païta in 1982, Marriner in 1985, Dohnányi in 1985, Sawallisch in 1990, Iván Fischer in 2010, Bělohlávek in 2014, and Bychkov in 2024.
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, “Leningrad” (1941) (approx. 75-85’), is a musical commentary on Stalin, as well as Hitler: “In Soviet Russia, where life was a challenge to begin with, survival during World War II became precarious. Composers were enlisted to produce propagandistic pieces to support the Soviet efforts in the Great Patriotic War, as it was generally known there. While the hostilities were going on, Dmitri Shostakovich created two, and perhaps three, ‘war symphonies’ that related directly to the experience of Soviet citizens. The first of them was his Seventh, the Leningrad Symphony.” “According to an interview with Flora Litvinova, the composer’s friend and neighbor in Kuibyshev, in Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, Shostakovich conceived the 'Leningrad' as a work about the struggle against fascism, but not just in its Nazi form. '"National Socialism is not the only form of fascism; this music is about all forms of terror, slavery, and bondage of the spirit.” Later on, when Dmitri Dmitriyevich got used to me and started to trust me, he told me straight out that the Seventh Symphony, and for that matter the Fifth as well, were not just about fascism, but about our system, or any form of totalitarian regime.'” “Stalin’s grip on power was sustained by the fact that nobody dared speak their mind – not even to their wives or brothers. It was a terror of silence.” Top performances are conducted by Toscanini in 1942, Bernstein in 1988 ***, Maxim Shostakovich in 1993, Temirkanov in 1995, Caetani in 2003, Masur in 2005, Gergiev in 2012, Vasily Petrenko in 2013, and Paavo Järvi in 2015.
Music of and inspired by the French Resistance against Nazi Germany:
- Arthur Honegger, La Danse des Morts (The Dance of Death), H. 131 (1938) (approx. 30’): “Arthur Honegger's oratorio, inspired by the famous medieval image of the Dance of Death, dates from 1938, and is widely regarded as capturing the atmosphere of terrifying uncertainty in the months before the second world war.”
- Honegger, Symphony No. 2 in D Major, H. 153 (1941) (approx. 24-26’): “. . . post-war critics have understood the symphony as a portrayal of the misery, violence and depression in Paris during the early years of the Occupation . . .”
- André Jolivet, Les trois Complaintes du Soldat (The Three Complaints of the Soldier) (1940) (approx. 18-20’) (lyrics)
Other compositions:
- Max Richter, “On the Nature of Daylight” (2004) (approx. 62’): “Richter has . . . said the song is a protest against violence, specifically related to the Iraq war which was happening at the time of writing. It was an attempt, the composer has said, to create ‘luminous music out of the darkest materials’.”
- Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, O Lungo Drom (“The Long Road”) (2012) (approx. 66’): “In my music I wish to address issues of the human condition. This may take the form of sociopolitical criticism, setting musically images of human frailty and strength, of human hypocrisy and glory, of giving thanks, of redemption and hope, and reflecting on matters of spiritual and existential import.”
Albums:
- Gordon Grdina Septet, “Resist” (2020) (49’): “. . . the centerpiece is the 23 minute title suite, an earthy, free-flowing amalgam of all Grdina's thoughts on the sad state of affairs in which the world finds itself. Emotive to the plight of all, he lets his players speak their minds, expressing their concerns and hopes. . . . The piece then weaves all together—as it should, as the world should—building, fluttering, falling back, culminating in a swelling, hopefully optimistic finale.”
- Michael Hill’s Blues Mob, “Bloodlines” (1993) (61’): “The group's compositions feature lyrics which discuss issues and ideas as much as romantic situations and dilemmas, and Hill's vocals aren't pleading, but defiant, triumphant and aggressive.”
- Sylvain Rifflet, Jon Irabagon, Sébastien Boisseau & Jim Black, “Rebellion(s)” (2020) (42’): “Rebellion(s) is the child of two outstanding saxophonists, Sylvain Rifflet from France, and Jon Irabagon from the US, and was born of their conviction that even today jazz can act as a megaphone for the most burning social issues of the day. The basis for these compositions are emblematic speeches from past and present, and they show the diversity of voices of resistance in various areas.”
- Charlie Haden, “Ballad of the Fallen” (1982) (52’) is a protest album “against America’s meddling in the affairs of South America”.
- Wynton Marsalis, “Black Codes (From the Underground)” (1984) (51’) presents “seven songs of hard-swinging jazz that addressed, if in abstract fashion, the lingering societal effects of the Black Codes, the notorious post-Civil War laws that his native Louisiana and other Southern states used to keep black citizens in a violent state of oppression.”
- Janne Fredens & Søren Rastogi, “Upheaval” (2024) (61’): “Here are four works for cello and piano composed between 1911 and 1919 by women composers, one Dutch, one Croatian, and two French.”
- Aziza Brahim, “Mawja” (2024) (35’): “The album is a mixture of the upbeat with the melancholy, influenced as it is by the plight of the displaced Sahrawi people . . .”
- Mdou Moctar, “Funeral for Justice” (2024) (39’): “What does it mean to be free in these times? Can the world be liberated from the colonial mindstate that has caused such harm and mistrust? Can we mourn our losses yet build anew to form something more astounding, more fantastic? Funeral For Justice says we can.”
- Black Art Jazz Collective, “Truth to Power” (2024) (63’) “offers ten exciting and unique works that speak to both artistic freedom and musical sensibility relative to the tenor of our times.”
- Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis, “Freedom Justice & Hope” (2024) (77’) “is a stirring experience that explores Black Americans’ pursuit of equality through music and spoken word.”
- Songhoy Blues, “Résistance” (2017) (45’): “Malian guitar band ready to take on the world”.
- Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith, “Defiant Life” (2025) (54’): “Anchored in the idea that, despite all obstacles, the human experience casts a net of possibilities, Defiant Life – Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith second duo recording for ECM – proves a profound meditation on the human condition and both the suffering and resilience it entails.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Sam Cooke, “A Change Is Gonna Come” (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Salvador Dali, Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940)
Film and Stage
- The Life of Emile Zola, an autobioraphical filmabout the French novelist who was railroaded for trying to expose an injustice, and for being Jewish
- The Stars Look Down, about injustices in a mining community
- The Citadel, a television mini-series chronicling a young doctor’s integrity in a profession peopled by unscrupulous men
- The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da Guan Si), this story of a young woman’s frustrated search for justicein a Chinese village presents the idea of opposing injustice at the family level
- Selma, a dramatic recreation of a pivotal episode in civil rights in the United States