The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: How Art is Used for Liberation

“The freedom songs are playing a strong and vital role in our struggle…They give the people new courage and a sense of unity. I think they keep alive a faith, a radiant hope, in the future, particularly in our most trying hours”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

In our last blog post, Dr. Osei defines the ideas of freedom and liberation for us, be sure to read that here. In short, freedom refers to the state of being in captivity, while liberation is less about one’s physical state of being captive and more about the oppressive systems that have been built to keep Black people, women, disabled people, etc from advancement or equality in this country. While we are centuries removed from the trans-atlantic slave trade, there are so many systems and even more oppressive mindsets that have been cemented into the fabric of American society that affect the Black population in America. No, Black people are not bought and sold in the same ways we were in 1619, but the carceral system preys upon young Black men at disparaged rates that only continue to worsen. The Trump administration has deployed fascist rhetoric and policies, eager to reverse any and all freedoms granted to anyone Black, immigrant, LGBTQIA+ in recent history. The idea that we are “free” in itself has proven to be dependent on what administration is in office or what justices are on the Supreme Court. As long as there are systems in place for racism to work, we will always be fighting for liberation.  

When so much of the fight for freedom and liberation has been done through social and political organizing, what does art do for the resistance? In a world where an artist can make more money selling art than being an activist, how can it really be used as resistance, revolution, or rebellion? Can art really push forward the fight for ultimate freedom and Liberation? Well, yes! Art has long been a medium for socio-political messaging. Some of the most well known revolutionaries were also artists,and vice versa. In similar ways, activists and artists have used their voice, their bodies, and their ideas to connect with others. With art uniquely, the act of alchemizing pain or emotion into something conceptually derived is quite revolutionary. In a conversation about the importance of music and performance in the struggle for Black liberation, scholar Rickey Vincent quotes Nina Simone’s memoir: "After the bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers…I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone…instead I went to my piano and the music [Mississippi Goddamn] erupted out of me faster than I could write it down.” Despite the widespread censorship of “Mississippi Goddamn,” it inadvertently called even more attention to the injustices in communities across the US suffering in the same ways. The discomfort that “Mississippi Goddamn” brought white audiences, especially the one present at the 1964 Carnegie Hall performance, was a part of Simone’s protest. It forced people to confront the truth, regardless of whether it changed them or moved them.

Long before Mississippi Goddamn, The Harlem Renaissance (also referred to as the New Negro Movement) of the early 20th century saw some of the most revolutionary Black artists making art about the injustices they were facing. 

The Harlem Renaissance

Paul Robeson is often described as the epitome of a renaissance man - an athlete, musician, actor, linguist, scholar, lawyer, organizer, and more. Fed up with the racism he experienced working as a lawyer in New York, he took up acting full time in the city. While he was able to represent many of the issues and injustices Black people in the US felt on screen and on the stage, he soon became “too radical” for the entertainment world. He was “banished from the stage” after becoming more and more outspoken about civil rights and communism. Robeson was a standout revolutionary, along with countless writers, dancers, sculptors and others who sought to realistically portray what it meant to be Black in America during this time. Harlem housed various Black-owned publishing houses, music labels, nightclubs; the beginnings of putting ideas of “self determination into practice.” James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, W.E.B Du Bois, Augusta Savage, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen; there were intellectuals and artists of all types creating work from a uniquely Black perspective. This is largely why the Harlem Renaissance was regarded as revolutionary. However, it being one of the first moments in history of its unique kind, many believed the Renaissance still existed within the context of what white America deemed ”art” enough to recognize. Regardless, the artists and thinkers of the Renaissance gave new purpose to artists for decades to come. If it wasn't for Langston Hughes, there would be no Gil Scott Heron that we know today. 

The Black Arts Movement

Decades after the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement swept the country with an outpouring of Black art for the resistance. Like in the early 20th century, this movement of Black arts started in Harlem. Poet Amiri Baraka (born LeRoi Jones) established the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem in 1965 as a “place for Black artistic expression.” Characterized as the second renaissance, the Black Arts Movement was all about Black artists telling their stories and seeking liberation through the sharing of these ideas. However during the 60’s, there was a sharing of more radical ideology and protest in the art as this time period paralleled the Civil Rights era, the Black Power Movement, and the passing of Malcolm X. The Poetry Foundation highlights this point further explaining, “As with that burgeoning political movement, the Black Arts Movement emphasized self-determination for Black people, a separate cultural existence for Black people on their own terms, and the beauty and goodness of being Black. Black Arts poets embodied these ideas in a definitely Black poetic language that drew on Black musical forms, especially jazz; Black vernacular speech; African folklore; and radical experimentation with sound, spelling, and grammar.” Building upon the groundwork laid-out in the 1920’s, this movement sought to pour into one’s own community establishing new Black owned businesses to house and showcase all the art created during this time period. The Black Arts Movement extended far beyond Harlem to Black cities across the country, and was the catalyst for cultural movements that followed among Asian American, Latinx, and Native communities. The movement would also rise concurrently with global efforts towards decolonization and liberation across the African continent and the Caribbean. Bob Marley - hailing from Nine Mile, Jamaica - became known for his spiritually charged ballads preaching Rastafarian doctrine, freedom from mental slavery, and an end to inhuman suffering inflicted on African-descended peoples. The Black Arts Movement pushed forward a new way of thinking, connecting Black people all over the globe like no other movement before. 

The Hip Hop Revolution

Most important, the Black Arts Movement helped lay the foundation for modern-day spoken word and hip-hop in the States. Like briefly mentioned before, Gil Scott Heron was a notable voice in the 70s, influenced by the words of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, and molded by his family’s musical lineage. His organic transmutation of syncopated spoken word and poignant critiques to the socio-political landscape of America to soulful poetic albums made him one of the earliest influences to modern Hip Hop and Rap. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” off his debut album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (1970) continues to be one of the most widely used interpolations/ lyrical references.

The Black Arts Movement gave way to Hip Hop’s birth in 1973; a genre of music defined by the idea of “For us, by us.” One of Hip Hop’s earliest hits with social commentary was “The Message” by legends Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Released in 1982, “The Message” was a brutally honest funky jam discussing the reality of being Black in New York City. Originally a response to the 1980 NYC transit strike, members Melle Mel and Duke Bootee addressed everything from poverty, to drugs, to suicide, to police brutality. 

Songs like “The Message” inspired a new breed of socially conscious rappers and MCs; namely Public Enemy. As writer Rashad Grove states, “With their Black nationalism philosophy, Afro-centric imagery, and their politically charged lyrics, Chuck D, Flavor Flav, the S1Ws and the production of The Bomb Squad were uncompromisingly Black…"Fight the Power" (1989) became the group’s signature song and mission statement.” “Fight the Power” was actually taken from an Isely Brothers song, and given new life, a new voice, and a new purpose 14 years later. From Public Enemy, to Queen Latifah, to Lauryn Hill and the Fugees, to Kendrick Lamar, to Rapsody - there is a powerful lineage of rappers who used their art to give voice to the voiceless. However, the use of music in a socio-political, dare I say revolutionary, manner becomes more nuanced as Rap and Hip Hop became one of the most profitable lanes of music. Scholar Rickey Vincent elaborates on this stating, “I see glimpses from the current crop of popular Black entertainers (Beyonce, Bruno Mars, John Legend, and others) to enlighten and inspire as well as entertain, but they are swimming against a corporate driven current that would like nothing more than to see Black youth operating as individuals (not in bands or crews) gossiping and spitting petty beefs at each other endlessly for profit.” There is still the ever-present fire of resistance and revolution within music during times of unrest: the Ferguson protests after Mike Brown was murdered, the 2020 protests after George Floyd was murdered, and the ongoing genocides in Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan. Rapper redveil used the Flog Gnaw festival stage to honor the names of the Palestinian children who’ve been murdered just in 2024; using his art not just to discuss the state of humanity, but to amplify a needed message to a crowd of majority young white people. Not something a lot of emerging young artists would commit to in the contemporary landscape. 

If I had to point to another artist today who really does use art as a means of resistance, it’s Noname. She first took an interest in creating art that incorporated stories about her roots in Chicago and her vibrant pro-Blackness after reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. From songs such as Blaxploitation and Rainforest, to the inception of Noname Book Club; Noname (born Fatimaah Nyeema Warner) has made it her mission to not just rap about it but to be about it. “I believe in the necessity of revolutionary art, but I don’t think that, as artists, it’s helpful or even really productive for us to exclusively make that type of art,” she comments in an interview with Crack Magazine. She started Noname Book Club from the need to expand her work beyond making “revolutionary art,” and better educate herself on anti-capitalist, pro-liberation work written by Black authors. She’s discussed many times confronting her own ignorance to crucial theory and her own complacency within the white-capitalist machine of music, to the point where operates in her own lane of art and advocacy. She has since expanded the initiative into a Radical Hood Library headquartered in Los Angeles, and multiple prison chapters of the Book Club. “I guess my music would be the theory and the book club and the library would be the practice,” she explains. “I try as best I can to live the politics I espouse.” Noname is a part of a long lineage of Black artists who against all odds live the message they speak in their art. 

Throughout history, we’ve seen the evolution of Black artists using their mediums to freely express their frustration, love, suicidality, contempt, and heritage as a means of amplification. Art has always been a vehicle to make people look and listen, and to hopefully learn. From the Harlem Renaissance, to the Black Arts Movement, to the Golden Age of Hip Hop to today - artists have always documented revolutions and created words and images to connect people to the cause. Art can be so provocative, it can change someone’s thinking, but it can also be so moving it snaps us out of this desensitization to inhumanity many of us exist in. And for that, art is one of the most effective catalysts for revolution in the struggle for liberation.

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Sources:

1 The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute @ Stanford. 2022. “Songs and the Civil Rights Movement.” Songs and the Civil Rights Movement. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/songs-and-civil-rights-movement.

2 AAIHS Editors. 2021. “Sounds of Freedom: The Music of Black Liberation.” African American Intellectual History Society. https://www.aaihs.org/sounds-of-freedom-the-music-of-black-liberation/. 

3 National Museum of African American History & Culture. n.d. “A New African American Identity: The Harlem Renaissance.” National Museum of African American History and Culture. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/new-african-american-identity-harlem-renaissance.

4 Poetry Foundation. n.d. “The Black Arts Movement.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/148936/an-introduction-to-the-black-arts-movement.

5 National Archives. 2021. “Black Arts Movement (1965-1975).” National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/black-power/arts.

6 Civil Rights Teaching. n.d. “SOS — Calling All Black People: Introduction to the Black Arts Movement.”.

7 Lesso, Rosie. 2025. “What Was the Black Arts Movement? (Artists & History).” The Collector. https://www.thecollector.com/what-was-the-black-arts-movement/..

8 Bennett, Joshua. n.d. “Gil Scott-Heron.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gil-scott-heron.

9 Grove, Rashad. 2024. “The Power of Our Songs: Black Music As Resistance.” BET. https://www.bet.com/article/ijy7wd/the-power-of-our-songs-black-music-as-resistance.

10 Mejía, Paula. 2025. “Noname: Speaking Truth | Cover Story.” Crack Magazine. https://crackmagazine.net/article/profiles/noname-cover-story-interview/.

11 Bloom, Madison. 2020. “Watch Noname Talk About Her Book Club, Quarantine, More on Desus & Mero.” Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/news/watch-noname-talk-about-her-book-club-quarantine-more-on-desus-and-mero/.