Protest Songs 2 - Mississippi Goddam
Nina Simone with help from Faith Ringgold
Notes — Mississippi Goddam (1964)
This one had to burn.
Where Strange Fruit was grief frozen mid-air, Mississippi Goddam is movement, the sound of chains snapping.
The spark came years before Birmingham or Medgar Evers. It began with the face of Emmett Till, mutilated and unhidden. Simone saw that photograph and said later: “I was no longer non-political.”
The artwork takes its structure from Faith Ringgold’s narrative quilts, stories stitched out of pain and pride. Each panel is a voice; each seam holds together what the world tried to tear apart. The grid contains the chaos, but only just. Within it, colors bleed and overlap: deep reds for urgency, black for endurance, gold for the unextinguished light.
Like Ringgold, it insists that craft is not domesticity, it’s defiance.
If Strange Fruit was a funeral, Mississippi Goddam is the march that followed, the moment the mourning voice stands up and refuses to stop singing.
She’s so good 😍