4 Times the Newport Jazz Festival Became a Platform for Civil Rights

One of jazz’s fiercest civil rights activists was pioneering bebop drummer and composer, Max Roach. Beginning with his landmark 1960 LP, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, he regularly used his music to advocate for racial justice—not only for Black Americans, but for Black communities worldwide, particularly in support of African independence in countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Mali.

Structured as a five-part suite blending hard bop, avant-garde jazz, African rhythms and vocal performance, the We Insist! album—a collaboration with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. and Roach’s wife, singer and activist Abbey Lincoln—pushed the boundaries of jazz both musically and politically. Its themes tackled slavery, segregation and the struggles for civil rights and African liberation, most notably in the track “Tears for Johannesburg,” which responded to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa. One of the most arresting pieces, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace,” featured Lincoln’s raw, wordless screams, capturing the anguish and fury of racial oppression.

Some critics hailed We Insist! as bold and uncompromising; others panned it as too radical and confrontational. Officials in apartheid South Africa banned it. The Library of Congress added it to its National Registry in 2022.

Not surprisingly, civil rights organizations embraced it. The Congress for Racial Equality sponsored the first live performance of We Insist! in January 1961 at New York’s Village Gate club, four months before they launched the Freedom Rides campaigns to challenge segregated bus terminals. Later that summer, Roach performed the music at the NAACP’s annual convention in Philadelphia. Three years later, Wein invited Roach to bring the explosive suite to Newport. With Lincoln’s vocals again channeling the fury and defiance of the Civil Rights Movement, Roach steered a quartet featuring pianist Lonnie Liston Smith, bassist Eddie Khan and saxophonist Clifford Jordan. The fact that they performed it on July 4—two days after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act—made the set all the more resonant.

When Nina Simone, the uncompromising pianist, singer and composer, wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in 1963, she crafted it as a searing indictment of racial violence in the Deep South. That June, white supremacists gunned down civil rights leader Medgar Evers in front of his Jackson, Mississippi, home; three months later, members of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four Black schoolgirls.

“Mississippi Goddam” decried the violence, oppression and lies Black people continually endured, while expressing Simone’s deep weariness with the sluggish pace of Black Americans’ social, economic and political progress. Her despair comes through with lyrics like: “I don't belong here, I don't belong there / I've even stopped believing in prayer / Don't tell me, I'll tell you / Me and my people just about due.”

Three years later, the song still crackled with intensity at the Newport Jazz Fest on July 2, 1966, as Simone accompanied herself on piano alongside drummer Bobby Hamilton, guitarist Rudy Stevenson and bassist Lisle Atkinson. (Simone famously changed the opening lyrics in this performance to call out the 1965 Watts Rebellion: “Tennessee has made me lose my rest” became “Watts has made me lose my rest.”)

The concert came weeks after Simone, an active supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, had headlined a tribute concert to support the Meredith March Against Fear, an event during which Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael helped coin the term "Black Power." That moment, followed by the founding of the Black Panther Party later that year, marked a shift in the Civil Rights Movement toward a more militant stance—sharply contrasting with the nonviolent strategies championed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Toward the end of the 1960s, soul-funk pioneer James Brown introduced a bold new sound that captured the spirit of the “Black Is Beautiful” movement, energizing Black America as the turbulent civil rights struggle pressed on.

Even in the aftermath of the assassinations of civil rights leaders, Malcolm X (in 1965), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) as well that of presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy (1968), Brown offered a defiant anthem of Black self-affirmation, driven by an irrepressible groove. His musical influence was so powerful that his 1968 concert in Boston, televised after King’s death, helped calm tensions and prevent riots in the city.

That summer, Brown released his galvanizing anthem, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” With a call for Black economic empowerment and self-reliance, Brown spat out fist-pumping verses like: “Some people say we’ve got a lot of malice / Some say it’s a lot of nerve / But I say we won’t quit moving until we get what we deserve.”

Brown’s performance of “Say It Loud” on July 6 at the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival, complete with his full-throttle dance moves and rhythmic shouts and grunts, proved that the song still packed dynamite. Owing to his superstar status, Brown and his band, along with guest comedian Nipsey Russell, were the festival’s only performers that afternoon.

When bassist, bandleader and composer Charles Mingus brought "Fables of Faubus" to the Newport Jazz Festival, he didn’t just perform a composition—he unleashed a searing political statement. Originally recorded in 1959 as an instrumental (because Columbia Records refused to release the version with lyrics), the piece was a blistering satire of Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who had infamously resisted the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 by sending in the National Guard to block the entry of nine Black students.

Mingus wasn’t the only jazz giant to comment on Little Rock. As the crisis was unfolding, popular vocalist and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, belying his usual cheery public demeanor, made heated public comments after President Dwight Eisenhower dragged his feet before sending in federal troops to protect the Black students. Sixteen years later, Mingus and his quintet—featuring pianist Don Pullen, tenor saxophonist George Adams, drummer Doug Hammond and trumpeter Ron Hampton—kept the drumbeat of protest alive, performing “Faubus” at Harlem’s Apollo Theater on July 3, 1973, after the Newport Jazz Festival briefly relocated to New York City.

With caustic lyrics like “Name me someone who’s ridiculous…Governor Faubus” and “Two, four, six, eight: They brainwash and teach you to hate,” the piece pulled no punches, offering a full-throated condemnation of segregationist leaders. The performance underscored how deeply jazz could engage with injustice—and how artists like Mingus refused to separate their art from the urgent issues of the day.