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Go Tell Somebody: Gospel Music, Black Liberation, and the Politics of Freedom in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras Wednesday, October 23 at 5 p.m. Theron Room, Wright Library and streaming online.
In his pioneering study, Somebody’s Calling My Name, Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker famously writes “What black people are singing religiously will provide a clue as to what is happening to them sociologically.” With Dr. Walker’s provocative assertion in mind, this lecture traces the theopolitical evolution of gospel music over the past fifty years. With Rance Allen’s 1974 recording, Soulful Experience and a 2024 film adaption of Walter Hawkins’ eulogy of disco star Sylvester as chronological bookends, this talk considers how several of gospel music’s leading voices responded to some of the most pressing social issues of our time, including poverty, racial inequality, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and political corruption, incompetence, and authoritarianism.
Claudrena N. Harold is the Edward Stettinius Professor of History and Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Virginia. She is the author of three books, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918-1942, New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South, and When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras. She has coedited two volumes, The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration and Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity.
As a part of her ongoing work on the history of African American life at UVA, she has co-directed with Kevin Everson eleven short films that have screened at film festivals and museums domestically and internationally. In 2024, Video Data Bank released Can You Move Like This: Black Fire films by Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold.
