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r. Martin Luther King Jr. preaches from the poster outside adjunct professor John Gainer’s office in the University of Oregon School of Music: "Transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

Gainer seems to have taken that directive to heart over the 16 years he’s brought diverse races and people together through gospel music. To accomplish that goal at the university, Gainer took gospel into the secular world. It was a move reminiscent of the days of Dr. King, when gospel music emerged from the churches and found its way into the freedom rides and sit-ins of the 1960s civil rights movement.

The gospel music tradition evolved out of spirituals sung by African slaves brought to America during the 18th and 19th centuries. The slaves sang the songs at work or in the fields as a means of self-encouragement or as an expression of injustice. African American churches adopted the tradition, and it evolved and flourished in the 20th century.

By the 1950s, the black community’s desire to revive its cultural heritage led to the formation of more church and community choirs. Black activists embraced the growth because they saw folk spirituals as unique to black culture—something that white culture couldn’t take away. Because black reformers held their meetings in churches, where congregation-style music played such an important role, their adoption of the spirituals seemed natural. During the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in the 1950s, those gathered for meetings sang "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" and "Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart." Even the civil rights movement's unofficial theme song, "We Shall Overcome," was adapted from the black church song "I’ll Overcome Someday." By singing the folksongs, black activists could tap into the legacy of their ancestors’ suffering and add another chapter to that struggle, Kerran Sanger wrote in her 1995 book When the Spirit Says Sing! The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement.

Activists dealing with beatings, slurs and repression turned to the church for "physical protection and spiritual nurturing" at first, says Bernice Johnson Reagon, the pre-eminent historian on civil rights music. But later, the music itself became a form of protection. During the days of marches and protests, the music evoked such emotion and joy in those who sang it that some said the music felt "like an angel watching over you" in times of violence, said Cordell Reagon of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The music not only provided emotional support, but it also brought activists of different backgrounds together. Although many people across the country were sympathetic to the struggle for black equality, many of those who went to the South to participate in marches and protests found they had little in common with the people they marched with. The music helped bridge the gaps between northern white activists and southern blacks, middle-class black college students and older black adults from the rural South, Sanger wrote. But, she says, "Singing did not simply allow people of different classes and backgrounds to communicate — it made them equal." After everyone joined in singing, the differences between people diminished, Bernice Johnson Reagon has said. "Somehow making a song required an expression that was common to us all," she said.

In order to shape the songs to fit the current situation, the lyrics evolved from religious spirituals to those focused on segregation and freedom, rights, and equality. However, they were still sung in the traditional form of African American folk music, and the spirit behind the songs remained unchanged even if the religious aspects were removed, Sanger wrote.

"There is almost a religious quality about some of these songs, having little to do with the usual concept of a god," one activist was quoted as saying during the drive to register blacks to vote in Mississippi in the 1960s. "It has to do with the miracle that youth has organized to fight hatred and ignorance. It has to do with the holiness of the dignity of man. The god that makes such miracles is the god I do believe in when we sing 'God is on our side.'"

As the nonviolent struggle for civil rights faded with the advent of the black power movement in the late 1960s, many activists traded in the songs for more militant forms of protest. But music was still used for the movement, although new songs such as "Burn, Baby, Burn" and "Move On Over or We'll Move On Over You" expressed a newer, more belligerent tone. However, churches continued to keep the tradition of African American gospel music alive.

But the tradition of blending song with activism forged during the civil rights movement would not be forgotten by the activists of later generations. It would be embraced by those struggling for equality and the environment, for labor rights, and even by Chinese revolutionary youth struggling for democracy in 1989. And it would be used for more moderate change, like John Gainer's symphony of brotherhood.

"I would think that a movement without music would crumble," the Rev. C. T. Vivian, a civil rights activist, once said. "Anytime you can get something that lifts your spirits and also speaks to the reality of your life, even the reality of oppression, and at the same time is talking about how you can really overcome: that’s terribly important."

Guy and Candie Carawan, eds, "Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs" (Bethlehem, Penn.:Sing Out Corporation, 1990)

Joyce Marie Jackson, "The changing nature of gospel music: a Southern case study" African American Review, Summer 1995 v29 n2 p185(16).

Kerran Sanger, "’When The Spirit Says Sing!’ The Role of Freedom Songs in the Civil Rights Movement" (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1995)

Bernice Johnson Reagon, "We’ll Understand it Better By and By" (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992)