Music Sunday, December 9 will honor the Black Lives Matter movement.

Composers include Grammy Award winners, Roebuck “Pops” Staples and Ben Harper, as well as renowned choral composers, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Rosephanye Powell, and Rollo Dilworth. All of the composers we will feature have worked for social justice:

• Reagon founded the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers and continues to document African American music as Professor of History at American University and Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution.
• Powell, a professor of voice at Auburn University and expert on African American classical composers, arranges spirituals to remind us that, “regardless of how difficult life is at any time, I will overcome just as my ancestors did against all obstacles.”
• Harper supports Moveon.org and Little Kids Rock, working to restore music education in disadvantaged U.S. public schools.
• Pops Roebuck wrote “Freedom Highway” as a protest song in 1965; Rhiannon Giddens has recently covered it in support of Black Lives Matter, the NAACP and the Moral Monday movement.

We hope you will join us to hear our band and choir perform current music by primarily African American composers, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.