The601Blerd

June 27, 2024

Nina Simone:  A Voice Silenced for Liberation [Excerpt from my 2023 Thesis:”When Hiding isn’t Enuf: How has the Expression of Queerness within Black Feminism

Changed Over Time”]

The assassination of Medgar Evers in the summer of 1963 and the horrific bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls in September of the same year inspired Nina to write “Mississippi Goddam.” This became her first Civil Rights song, and it was met with admiration and disgust. Advertisements from that year onward criticized Nina for performing the song. Some reviewers resorted to calling the protest song raucous and kooky, but Nina did not care.  She recalled her initial feelings after the 16th Street Baptist church bombing saying “When they killed those children is when I said, I have to start using my talent to help Black people.” For her, she could not just sing “I Love You, Porgy” and not address the issues that affected her Black listeners. 

Despite her label and her husband’s anti-protest sentiments, Nina continued to perform these songs. The politically charged lyrics of “Mississippi Goddam” asserted her anger, and challenged the conservative perspective of the movement at that time. Throughout the sixties, Nina’s protest of white supremacy continued through her dress, lyrics, and activities. She mocked and questioned the role of nonviolence and respectability politics in the movement. “They keep on saying “Go Slow!” But that’s just the trouble.” She did not agree with the antics and ideals of the nonviolence coalition of the Civil Rights Movement.  The song “Backlash Blues” released in 1967 and showed similar sentiments against discrimination towards Black people in America. Written by Langston Hughes before his death in May of 1967, the song spoke out against the Vietnam War and the racist white supremacist policies of Lyndon B. Johnson’s America. Other protest songs such as “Sinnerman”, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Be to Be Free”, and her rendition of the Billie Holiday classic, “Strange Fruit” positioned Nina as a new voice of protest that highlighted the conditions of Black women. Pete Townshend recalls Nina as towering and formidable, describing her as the first true music industry radical feminist.

In one interview, Nina sees it as her duty to “make them [Black People] curious enough or persuade them, by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there, and just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them and I will do it by whatever means necessary.” The blackness that she speaks of is presented in her African attire, her hairstyles of Zulu Topknots and Edamburu, her dances, and her lyrics. Her ultra-Black agenda and presentation embraced the new identity of the “Black is Beautiful” campaign and provided Black women with an example of unapologetic confidence and integrity.

When it came to her bisexuality, Nina absolutely abhorred her attraction to women and didn’t understand the gay community’s admiration for her. She never came out publicly. She hung out at Trude Heller, a New York lesbian bar but stopped after her career took off in the late 1950s and had relationships with women. Perhaps her hatred of her queer identity could have stemmed from her Christian upbringing as well as her ex-husband Andrew Stroud’s anti-gay sentiments and abusive treatment. She did not want to be seen as a bisexual woman. For Nina, silence overshadowed their homosexuality. Nina’s bisexuality barely scrapes the surface in any writings by and about her. This silence is not anything to be disappointed in but should be recognized as a tool of advancement for the bigger cause of Black liberation. Especially with Nina, this choice to not act on her bisexuality represented her willingness to preserve the movement and allow the focus to be on Black liberation. For her, the movement weighed more heavily than her own queerness.