From the Plantations to the Projects to the Prisons

by Helen Garay Toppins
Morningside Meeting

 

Music has sustained me throughout my prison ministry. Going into penitentiaries where everyone looks like you and meeting worship members as they come out of solitary confinement necessitates strength. Raised AME (African Methodist Episcopal) I knew how to manifest strength through song.

 

I would listen to music recorded by John and Alan Lomax in 1933 at the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. Before it was the Angola penitentiary it was the Angola Plantation — named after the enslaved Angolan people. White men on horseback with whips rode up and down the cotton fields. Before Emancipation they were overseers; after Emancipation they were prison guards. They come to mind when I read about overseers in our New York Yearly Meeting Faith & Practice.

 

There are many prison songs that inspire me and keep me keeping on. “Let Your Hammer Ring” is a prime example.

 

Marvin Gayle’s “What’s Going On” is as apropos today as the day it was released in 1971. It also gives me hope to keep going. 

Mother, mother

There’s too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There’s far too many of you dying

You know we’ve got to find a way

To bring some lovin’ here today, yeah

Father, father

We don’t need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer

For only love can conquer hate

You know we’ve got to find a way

To bring some lovin’ here today

 

Committed’s version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” — our “Black National Anthem” — fuels me with determination for my social justice work. It was written as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), composed the music for the lyrics (retrieved from naacp.org, 10/7/24). 

Lift every voice and sing,

‘Til earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the list’ning skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on ‘til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chastening rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

‘Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,

our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;

Shadowed beneath Thy hand,

May we forever stand,

True to our God,

True to our native land.