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Civil Rights activist, calypso singer and actor Harry Belafonte said that in her time, Mahalia Jackson was the “single most powerful black woman in America,’’ by which he meant there was not a Black American “who did not respond to her civil rights message.” Best known as the finest gospel singer of her era—and, arguably, of all time—Jackson’s role as a towering figure in the Civil Rights Movement is often overlooked. Bestselling author Timothy B. Tyson (The Blood of Emmett Till) and acclaimed gospel singer Mary D. Williams explore the impact of Jackson’s activism in Mahalia Jackson, Moving On Up a Little Higher: The Story of an American Civil Rights Pioneer.
Born in 1911 New Orleans, Jackson was raised by her aunts after her mother died. Her childhood was difficult, the authors write, one of “poverty, loss, and abuse.” But despite the hardships she endured in New Orleans, the city’s close-knit Black community “imbued her with the strength to push back against that river of oppression for the rest of her life.” So too did New Orleans’ “irrepressible medley of blues, jazz, vibrant dirges, favored hymns, work songs, and traditional spirituals” influence her singular sound. When she was 20, one of her aunts brought her to Chicago, where her star was born.
Jackson did not compartmentalize her faith in God, her art or her politics. Her politics, the authors note, was based on “the moral vision of the Black church in slavery, in her belief that all of humanity were God’s children, and that all stood as equals before the throne of a loving God. But her theology did not exclude the need for power from the desire to do good.”
From the time Martin Luther King Jr. invited her to sing at the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, Jackson was a staunch supporter of King’s ministry and prominent figure at Civil Rights functions. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, she urged King to depart from his prepared speech and “tell ’em about the dream, Martin, tell ’em about the dream.” The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s in showing Jackson’s lifelong work behind the scenes that Mahalia Jackson, Moving On Up a Little Higher especially shines. Tyson and Williams reveal Jackson to be a unifying figure among disparate factions of the Black liberation movement, a savvy political organizer and brilliant changemaker. Even as she became a national icon, she continued to sing at and support Black churches and community organizations, using her voice and vision to drive political and social change in ways great and small.