How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a "show tune." Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers.



In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of gender amid their demands for black liberatio...