We've Been Protesting

07/21/2026

Eight years ago today, July 20, 2018, Bobby Sessions released his Def Jam debut EP, (Chapter 1): The Divided States of AmeriKKKa. Across the record, Sessions works like a reporter, mapping the systems that shape Black life in America: police violence, mass incarceration and the for-profit prison industry, the long legacy of slavery, the backlash against athletes who kneel during the national anthem, the deliberate disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, and the pressures of assimilation and identity. The project was shaped in part by the 2012 police killing of his cousin, James Harper. He framed Chapter 1 as the act of naming the problem, with later chapters to carry the response. It belongs in the archive as protest told not as a single moment but as a continuing tradition.

Links to archive below:

Politics — https://tinyurl.com/4kj8bn47
Like Me — https://tinyurl.com/3a4u76kx
Black Neighborhood — https://tinyurl.com/3yv83a2x
Pick A Side — https://tinyurl.com/bdzz4zm5

07/18/2026

Billie Holiday died sixty-seven years ago today, on July 17, 1959, at Metropolitan Hospital in New York.

She was 44.

She died in the bed where federal narcotics agents had placed her under arrest a little more than a month earlier, while she was being treated for liver and heart disease. The police guard stationed at her hospital room was removed by court order only hours before she died.

The song that brought her to this archive is "Strange Fruit," recorded in 1939. The song began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, written in 1937 under the pen name Lewis Allan. Meeropol said the poem came out of a photograph of a lynching that haunted him for days. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Encyclopaedia Britannica identify that image as Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the August 7, 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana.

Holiday performed the song for two decades against pressure from clubs, from her label, and from a federal narcotics bureau that pursued her for years in connection with it. Nina Simone recorded it in 1965. Lupe Fiasco reworked it in 2012. The lineage runs straight through her.

Read the full entry: https://tinyurl.com/mr25apt9

07/18/2026

John Coltrane died fifty-nine years ago today, on July 17, 1967, of liver cancer at Huntington Hospital on Long Island. He was 40 years old.

This archive holds one Coltrane recording: "Alabama," cut on November 18, 1963. Two months earlier, Ku Klux Klan members planted at least fifteen sticks of dynamite beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The bomb went off on a Sunday morning as parishioners gathered. It killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair, who was 11.

"Alabama" is an instrumental. There are no words in it.

Coltrane said almost nothing about it either. Impulse! producer Bob Thiele asked him whether the title had "any significance to today's problems." Coltrane answered: "It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me." That is nearly the whole public record. LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, wrote the exchange down in his liner notes for Coltrane Live at Birdland, the album that carried the track when Impulse! released it in January 1964. Baraka got nothing further out of him, and hedged in the notes about whether the real Alabama was the catalyst at all.

Listeners have heard Dr. King's eulogy for the four girls in the shape of the melody ever since. That reading belongs to the people who made it. Coltrane left the title, the date and the recording.

Read the full entry: https://tinyurl.com/4uvrd4zn

02/20/2021

The We’ve Been Protesting Project, was started in July 2020, after national protests ignited across the United States, shortly after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. While there are many ways to protest, the project visualizes and illustrates how African American's have peacefully protested for many years, on issues that have affected us, through our art and most notably, through our music. An official playlist is now being curated on YouTube Music that coincides with the visual timeline at wevebeenprotesting.com.

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6Us0t0R-opJfC1D156eJLUwqIw7sHCtf

This is the official Youtube Music playlist that accompanies the website www.wevebeenprotesting.com. The We’ve Been Protesting Project, was started in July 2020, after national protests ignited across the United States, shortly after the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. Wh...