The Lens of Lived Experience: Music and Black Community in Segregated North Carolina

We invite you to a conversation with Chris McAuley, Black Studies Collection Editor at Lived Places Publishing (LPP) and Gregory Freeland, author of Music and Black Community in Segregated North Carolina .

They will discuss the pivotal role that music played in keeping a community together during one of the most legally segregated times in United States history. Southern black people survived racially motivated attacks, imprisonments, appropriations, enslavement, and exploitation all the while continuing to struggle and survive those injustices. Through the lens of Dr. Freeland's experiences during segregation in North Carolina he found that music was vital to community togetherness and spiritual well-being and that music brought the community into positive spaces that fostered survival, both intentionally, through activism, and naturally, through the effect of music’s all-encompassing uniting presence.