When Black folks moved from the rural south to northern cities, they did not find an end to racist policing. Stevie’s song—in its extended almost operatic album version (from Innervisions)—captures this experience. In the song, a young man “born in hard time Mississippi” travels to New York, looking for opportunity. Just off the bus, he gets caught up in an arrest, is thrown into jail, and receives 10 years, while his jailer snarls, “Get in the cell, N——.”

When your skin is viewed as a crime, there is no justice, north or south. 

This is more than just a great Blues song, but it is a great Blues song for sure! J.B. Lenoir takes us back even further than Stevie’s song, to the injustices he saw first-hand in Alabama. Lenoir’s version of the Blues was more political than many others. He recorded it in 1966, as seen in the first video. We also include a YouTube medley of his political songs, demonstrating his intense power and commitment to speaking out on racial injustices.

The more things change, the more they remain the same:

My brother was takin’ up for my mother, and the police officer shot him down. 

My brother was takin’ up for my mother, and the police officer shot him down. 

I can’t help but to set down and cry sometime, think about how my poor brother lost his life.

NWA changed everything. Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, DJ Yella—NWA was a Who’s Who of Rap. And this song changed everything, giving a new expression to how these young Black men viewed policing. It’s a first exclamation that things were messed up, and that the police were militarizing Black neighborhoods without regard to the people who lived in them. 

And the victims of that policing were not going to take it anymore. 

The song pissed off all sorts of people. But when you think about it, if you are powerless, the first step may be to cry out against the power that holds you down. In the song, Dre, MC Ren, and Eazy-E “testify” about their case against racist policing by putting the police on trial. The song gave voice to communities of color in a way that may have been hard to understand to some then, but easier to understand now. 

Fuck the police comin’ straight from the underground
A young nigga got it bad ’cause I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority

Fuck that shit, ’cause I ain’t the one
For a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun
To be beatin’ on, and thrown in jail
We can go toe to toe in the middle of a cell

Fuckin’ with me ’cause I’m a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager=

Maybe you have to be pulled over a few times for no reason other than your age or the color of  your skin to feel it, but in this incendiary track NWA captured the pain and outrage of young Black men all over America.

Lil Baby is a young rap artist who has released a lot of chart-topping songs. However, this one is unlike anything else he has done, unique in its focus on justice issues and policing. Lil Baby released it days after George Floyd’s murder, with a video that captured him and friends at related protests. It is a humble and moving and inspirational song—Lil Baby showing the way: 

I can’t lie like I don’t rap about killing and dope, but I’m telling my youngins to vote
I did what I did ’cause I didn’t have no choice or no hope, I was forced to just jump in and go
This bullshit is all that we know, but it’s time for a change
Got time to be serious, no time for no games
We ain’t takin’ no more, let us go from them chains
God bless they souls, every one of them names 

While you may not be into Rap or Hip Hop—or think you are not— give Lil Baby and some of these other artists your ears, and you will start to hear things differently. 

We end the first half of Music that Matters with a song that is not directly about policing, but instead a steadfast reaction to policing. Joshuah Campbell wrote this song in 2015 when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. Campbell has said that Black Lives Matter protestors inspired the lyrics in Sing Out, March On, but the song is timeless as well.

We offer two YouTube versions to uplift you. The first is from the 2018 Harvard graduation, with Campbell performing in honor of Rep. John Lewis, the Commencement speaker. The second is a live studio version and equally moving. Campbell has donated all proceeds from the song to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This song attempts to explain to a non-understanding audience what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about, and why it is necessary. It’s like a blunt instrument trying to open the eyes of an audience that may not understand or is in denial about what is going on in the U.S.

At first it may seem jarring that southern country artists are speaking to these issues, but the song is directly relevant to the increasing consciousness in white communities about the issues we are focusing on this month.

If you say it wasn’t racial
When they shot him in his tracks
Well I guess that means that you ain’t black
It means that you ain’t black

I mean Barack Obama won
And you can choose where to eat
But you don’t see too many white kids
Lying bleeding on the street

Soul/R&B singer Erykah Badu’s Soldier is featured on her fifth album, recorded as a tribute to producer, J Dilla. Badu’s brilliance in songwriting is on display in the introduction, where she describes a young man full of promise being gunned down while walking to school.

She then he jumps right into a call for action that inspires folks to keep going and continue fighting injustice in all of its forms.

“To my folks on the picket line
Don’t stop ’til you change they mind”

“We gone keep marchin’ on
Until you hear that freedom song”

“Living with my head down, hands up—no, no, don’t shoot.”

In this 2016 release Daye Jack and Killer Mike capture the chant of so many marchers, putting their hands up to signify how many unarmed men have been killed in these encounters.

Daye Jack is an Atlanta-based artist, but he was born and spent his early years in Port Harcourt, Nigeria—which is in the River States of Nigeria and which has been subject to extreme unrest, poverty, and violence in its own right. Hands Up is Jack’s best known song.

Prince did not write or perform many political songs. But after the murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, he wrote and produced this song. It is an excellent song, and the video released with it captures some of the protests in Baltimore concerning the murder of Gray. Not long after those protests began, Prince performed the song at his Rally 4 Peace concert in Baltimore.

Nobody got in nobody’s way
So I guess you could say it was a good day
At least a little better than the day in Baltimore
Does anybody hear us pray
For Michael Brown or Freddie Gray?
Peace is more than the absence of war

Tupac Amaru Shakur was one of the most influential artists in the world of hip-hop and beyond. His songs touched on social topics, ranging from police brutality to the crack epidemic and its devastating effects on the African-American community.

Cops give a damn about a negro

Pull the trigger kill a nigga he’s a hero

The son of a Black Panther, Tupac grew up surrounded by future political prisoners who, more often than not, were at war with the police and the criminal justice system. Though Changes was released posthumously, it is a timeless piece of music and as relevant today as it was when Shakur released it in 1998. Tupac’s hopes for a better future are still present today, despite his oftentimes bleak portrait and the day-to- day struggles of life as a Black Man in America. The song is truly raw in its lyricism and profound in its meaning.

We gotta start makin’ changes

Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers