Simone, Nina (Eunice Kathleen Waymon)

Impact on the world

Wrote 'Mississippi Goddam' in less than an hour in 1963 after the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the Ku Klux Klan bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four young Black girls, a song she described as erupting out of her faster than she could write it down and that she called the equivalent of throwing ten bullets back at the bombers; the song marked a permanent turn in her career toward direct civil rights advocacy, including further compositions such as 'Four Women' and 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black,' performances at the Selma-to-Montgomery march and immediately following Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and a documented career cost she herself attributed directly to her activism, including a music industry boycott of her records.

Life & background

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina in 1933 to a Methodist preacher mother and an entertainer father, Simone began playing piano in church by age three and trained classically from childhood with lessons funded by local benefactors who recognized her talent, graduating valedictorian from North Carolina's integrated Allen High School before a Juilliard scholarship prepared her for an application to Philadelphia's prestigious Curtis Institute of Music. Despite her preparation and her own certainty of her ability, Curtis rejected her, a decision she believed for the rest of her life was based on her race; she later said it took her roughly six months to fully process that the rejection had been racially motivated, and that she never fully recovered from that early encounter with discrimination. Taking work as a nightclub pianist in Atlantic City under a new stage name to hide the work from her disapproving parents, she was told by an employer she would need to sing as well as play, beginning a reinvention that fused her classical training with jazz, blues, and popular music; she built a following in New York's Greenwich Village among figures including James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and performed benefit concerts for the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee before the 1963 Birmingham bombing redirected her career decisively toward protest music. She later recalled that her first instinct upon hearing of the bombing was to attempt building a weapon herself, an impulse her then-husband talked her out of before she channeled the same fury into composing 'Mississippi Goddam' instead; she went on to perform the song for 40,000 marchers at the conclusion of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965 and again three days after King's 1968 assassination, while increasingly aligning herself with Black Power and Black nationalist politics rather than King's nonviolent approach, expressing open skepticism in later interviews about how much his strategy had actually achieved. She left the United States in 1970 amid career disappointment, a collapsing marriage to her manager husband, and a tax evasion warrant she said had been issued in retaliation for her opposition to the Vietnam War, living for periods in Barbados, Liberia, and France; she continued performing internationally for decades afterward, struggled publicly with mental health difficulties later diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and died in France in 2003 at age 70, having become, in cultural critic Stokely Carmichael's own description, the civil rights movement's great singer.

Sources

1. PBS American Masters (The story behind Mississippi Goddam; How Nina Simone reinvented herself); National Women's History Museum; Biography.com (How Nina Simone Used Her Performances For Activism); Picturing Black History