Randy Wood, the famous founder of the Dot record label, died last week. His place in the history of rock and roll is significant and also controversial, because he played a key role in helping white musicians cover (and massively distribute) black songs, an historical hinge moment in rock and roll becoming identified culturally in the States as a white-music phenomenon built from a largely African-American back-catalogue. You can read Douglas Martin’s helpful obituary here.

Now, Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” followed by Pat Boone’s Dot-sponsored cover:

As a white theologian trained in Catholic theology, I will never forget the charge laid before white Catholic theologians by Jon Nilson in his presidential address, “Confessions of a White Catholic Racist Theologian,” at the 2003 Annual Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America. (Nilson’s address was later elaborated in his 2007 book, Hearing Past the Pain: Why White Catholic Theologians Need Black Theology (Paulist).)

(more…)

This is the third part of a series on the contribution rock music and the Black Church made to the civil rights movement. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

While the Brown case made segregated schools illegal, the decision was largely ignored in the south. Mississippi Senator James Eastland stated that the region would simply refuse to obey it. Several state legislatures passed bills to fund “private” schools with public monies to avoid desegregation. By the end of 1956, 6 southern states had not desegregated one single school. Even worse, the Ku Klux Klan increased its activities committing hundreds of acts of violence against African-Americans between 1955-59.

So civil rights leaders went back to their churches to organize their parishioners. One of the first major mobilization efforts came in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to vacate her seat on a city bus for a white passenger. Recognizing the need for a coordinated response to her arrest and to the racial segregation policies on Montgomery’s city buses, several local ministers and other civil rights activists organized the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the local Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, became its leader. The MIA led a year-long boycott against the Montgomery bus system eventually ending when the Montgomery Federal Court declared the city and state bus segregation laws unconstitutional.

(more…)