4.6

• During the Black Freedom movement of the 20th century, Black artists contributed to the struggle for racial equality through various forms of expression. Their work brought African Americans’ resistance to inequality to global audiences and strengthened similar efforts by Afro-descendants beyond the US.
• Performers like Josephine Baker, and internationally known performer and civil rights activist, critiqued the double standards of an American democracy that maintained segregation while promoting ideals of equality domestically and abroad.
• In their writings, poets such as Nicolás Guillén, a prominent negrismo Cuban poet of African descent, examined the connections between anti-Black racism in the US and Latin America. They denounced segregation and brought Black Freedom struggles to the attention of audiences beyond the US.
• Musicians, such as jazz bassist Charles Mingus, composed protest songs reliant on African American musical traditions like call and response. Their music drew global attention to the white supremacist responses to racial integration in the U.S. (e.g., the Little Rock Crisis, 1957).