Nina Simone, a classically trained pianist who became one of the most respected musicians of the twentieth century, blended musical genres to become one of the most respected musicians. Her transition to music that explicitly demanded equality for African-Americans made her a hero to some and an enemy to others due to her music. Simone remained firm in her convictions despite this, leaving behind a musical and social legacy that will endure for generations.
Simone was subjected to the sting of racism at a young age as a child.
Nina Simone was born in February 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, to Eunice Kathleen Waymon and her seven siblings. She was the sixth of eight children. While her mother supported the family as a Methodist minister and part-time domestic worker, her father, who was himself an entertainer, worked various jobs to provide for his family. Simone was exposed to the music of her mother’s church from the time she was a toddler, and by the age of three, she was accompanying her mother’s sermons. At the age of five, she began taking piano lessons with a local teacher who introduced her to classical music. One of her mother’s white employers paid her piano lessons, who was also her mother’s boss.
Her autobiography would later reveal that her family had never discussed race at home and that she had grown up in a relatively integrated town. But she was not immune to the degradation and cruelty of the Jim Crow South, which she experienced firsthand. When she was 11, she was involved in an incident that occurred during a recital. When her parents were forced to give up their front row seats to a white couple, Eunice refused to back down and refused to play until her parents were restored to their original seats. That moment brought about a sort of epiphany for her, and she later described her feelings as “as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw.” It was a little tougher this time, a little less innocent, and a little more Black,” says the author.
She stayed away from politics for the first few years of her professional life.
After graduating from high school, Simone spent the summer at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York, preparing for her ultimate goal of admission to the Curtis Institute of Music, one of the world’s most prestigious music schools. She was so confident in her acceptance that her parents relocated to Philadelphia to be closer to her desired conservatory. Nevertheless, she was devastated when she was rejected from the program, and she believed for the rest of her life that race had played a role in the decision, stating, “I knew I was good enough, but they turned me down.” And it took me about six months to realize that it was because I was black that things were going wrong. “I’ve never really recovered from the shock of racism that I experienced at the time.”
She took a job as a pianist in Atlantic City because she was desperate for work and wanted to keep her disapproving parents from finding out she was working in nightclubs. She changed her name to Nina Simone to keep her parents from finding out she worked in nightclubs. Early on, an employer would only hire her if she agreed to sing in addition to playing the piano, and she embarked on a period of musical reinvention that saw her fusing her deep love of classical music with jazz, swing, and popular music from the time in which she lived. However, as she began to establish herself in the music industry, she made a conscious decision not to address racism, sexism, or other politically charged issues in her music. And she appeared to be dismissive of the folk and protest music that had become the soundtrack to the early civil rights movement’s emergence.
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However, while Simone stayed away from politics onstage, she became increasingly political in her personal life. Her friendships with Black cultural leaders and writers such as James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Lorraine Hansberry began while she was a resident of New York City. Simone and Hansberry quickly developed a close friendship. The playwright, whose play “A Raisin in the Sun” had explored the difficulties of Black life in twentieth-century America, became something of a mentor to Simone. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone later wrote in her memoir. “It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution — real girls’ talk,” says the book’s author.
Simone was propelled into activism as a result of a tragic event.
In a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, four young Black girls attending Sunday school were killed. White extremists carried out the bombing. Simone, who was preparing for a series of club dates shortly, was devastated — and enraged. She later admitted that her first instinct was to resort to violence when confronted. “At first, I attempted to make a gun for myself. Then, I went out and got some supplies. In the end, it didn’t matter which one of them I picked because I was going to take one of them out,” she later admitted. Although she was discouraged by her then-husband, she channeled her rage and grief into music. ‘Mississippi Goddamn’ was written in less than an hour, and the title was inspired in part by the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who had been killed in the state earlier that summer.
Despite the song’s upbeat tempo, the lyrics, which attacked the slow pace of racial justice in America and the continued, centuries-long oppression of and violence against Black Americans, were delivered with great intensity. In the following years, she would return to the song’s lyrics and revise them to include more recent incidents of racial injustice that had occurred in cities across the country.
The song elicited a mixed response from listeners. Many of the primarily white audiences in front of whom Simone first performed seemed uncomfortable or didn’t understand the gravity of the situation she described, which was understandable. Others, particularly those in the South, had a much more visceral reaction to the news than others. As a result, there were protests, the song was banned in several states, and there were numerous instances of people destroying physical copies of the album itself, among other things.
The fact that Simone gave voice to the pain and anguish of African Americans was praised by many. Dick Gregory, a comedian and civil rights activist, later stated, “If you look at all of the sufferings that Black people have endured, not one Black man will dare say, “Mississippi Goddam.” It was something we all wanted to say. “She came out and said it.” The song struck a chord, especially with organizers of all races, who flocked to Mississippi the following year to participate in a Black voter registration drive known as the Mississippi Freedom Summer, which garnered widespread attention.
Simone’s activism grew in intensity over the next few years.
While many civil rights leaders supported Martin Luther King Jr.’s more cautious, integrationist, and non-violent approach, Simone’s political leanings aligned with those who advocated for a more extreme reaction, after performing for marchers making their way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, she met Dr. King for the first time. Several marchers had been brutally assaulted just a few days earlier during the infamous “Bloody Sunday.” His more moderate approach caused Simone to express her skepticism, which an understanding King later assuaged.
Though she never met Malcolm X, she became friends with his wife, Betty Shabazz, while living in Mt. Vernon, New York, where they later became neighbors and neighbors became friends with her husband, who died in 1992. Her work was praised by other radical Black leaders, including Stokely Carmichael, who had broken with more moderate civil rights organizations in favor of Black nationalism, resulting in the birth of the “Black Power” movement in the United States. Simone also embraced a new personal style, styling her previously straightened hair in a more natural Afro style and donning an Afrocentric wardrobe that she had previously avoided wearing. With an acute awareness that darker-skinned Black Americans, such as herself, faced additional obstacles, she created music to challenge those assumptions, such as 1966’s “Four Women,” which depicted the impact of stereotyped “colorism” on Black women. A small number of Black radio stations refused to play the song, reflecting the divisions among Black Americans themselves on the issue of civil rights and inflicting severe emotional distress on Simone.
She had experienced personal and professional setbacks as a result of this.
Despite the fact that she had never achieved chart success, Simone had built a very successful career, which began to falter in the late 1960s as some audiences and music executives became uncomfortable with what they perceived to be her strident and angry music and persona. It took its toll on the couple, as did their violently turbulent marriage and worsening mental health issues (including undiagnosed bipolar disorder at the time). The deaths of Hansberry, who died in 1965 at the age of 34, and Dr. King, who died in 1968, had the same effect.
Despite the fact that she and he had disagreed on tactics, she was deeply affected by his death. During her performance at the Harlem Cultural Festival the following summer, she paid tribute to both Hansberry and King and herself. She performed a song in memory of King written by her bass player, and she reworked scenes from an unfinished Lorraine Hansberry play into a new song that would go on to become a civil rights anthem, “Young, Gifted, and Black,” which was covered by Aretha Franklin and others. An additional section of the performance featured a section in which Simone, unwavering in her determination to improve the lives of Black Americans, exhorted the audience to use any means necessary, including violence, to achieve their objectives.
“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times,” Simone stated during an appearance on the PBS newsmagazine Black Journal the following year. That, in my opinion, is my responsibility. So you can’t help but get involved at this critical time in our lives when everything seems to be on the verge of collapse and every day is a battle for survival.”
She spent the last two decades of her life in another country.
Simone left the United States in 1974, after years of legal battles with the Internal Revenue Service over back taxes (which she had refused to pay in part as a protest against the Vietnam War) and with her recording career on the wane. Before settling in France, she lived in Liberia for a while, where her difficult financial and emotional circumstances only grew worse. During her time in the United States, she grew increasingly disenchanted with the state of race relations in the country, lamenting the deaths of prominent civil rights leaders and what she perceived to be the movement’s decline.
Despite a brief resurgence in interest in her music in the decade leading up to her death in 2003, Simone’s legacy, as both a musical artist and a civil rights pioneer, has been largely overlooked in the history of the United States. However, the importance of her contribution has been recognized in recent years, with a flood of books and documentaries highlighting both her incomparable talent and her contribution to the struggle for racial and gender equality. In her memoir, she wants to know that she has left something for her people to build on when she passes away. “It is my reward,” says the author.
