ontinue the idea of values. What ideas are being presented in these protest songs that echo back to the older works we’ve looked at?

The protest songs that we looked at for today are all chalked full of ideals from the slavery period. They take feelings and sentiments from the pre-civil war era and make them into songs about overcoming segregation and inequality. This is shown strongly in Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round one of the lines is even; Ain’t Gonna let segregation turn me round. This shows a boldness that was found while slavery was still a problem and motivator for songs such as this and adapted into a song of protest against inequality. Strange Fruit is another protest song that does its job by reminding people of what used to happen in the south. The vivid imagery in this song Is so shocking that it can do nothing but remind people what African Americans have been through and show the very basis for the protests. This is important in that it shows the values present in slavery times and brings them into the civil rights movement. The last song We Shall Overcome is a hymnal that was adapted in the 1950’s for the civil rights movement and became its unofficial theme. This song displays the ideals and values of the slavery period through perseverance. This theme is present throughout the slavery time period in many ways such as The Ballad of John Henry. This ties into the song of the day that protested inequality as opposed to slavery. The shocking thing to me is that the same values that came from when African Americans were literally someone else’s property was able to shine through in getting them to be equal with those who had them enslaved in the first place. The values got them through the slavery period and in the end got the support needed to make the Civil Rights movement successful and create the much more but not perfectly equal world that we live in today.