For my found object, I chose to
talk about a song by Stevie Wonder called “Living for the City.” The lyrics
describe a man that grew up in a poor family in Mississippi. He decides to
leave Mississippi for New York city because “find[ing] a job is like a haystack
needle” because all the employers where he lives don’t hire African-Americans. When
the man gets to New York City, he ends up being set up for a crime and gets put
away for 10 years. Then the lyrics describe the man as homeless, dirty, almost
dead, walking the streets of new York city. The song ends with a call to action
from Stevie Wonder to “make a better tomorrow.”
This song explicitly talks about systematic racism
and inequality. First, the man is discriminated against when trying to find a
job in the south. Then, when he moves to find a better future in New York, he
ends up being falsely imprisoned for 10 years because he is a black man that
happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After prison, he is abandoned
by the system completely.
The song came out in November of
1973 and was a single off the album Innervision,
which is considered by many to be one of Stevie Wonder’s best albums; “Living
for the City” made it to #8 on the Billboard 100. It is a great song and it
probably resonated with a lot of people of color in America. The civil rights
movement wasn’t at the forefront of the national discourse like it had been 10
years prior. There was a lack of leadership within the African American
community. The civil rights leaders were assassinated. The Black Panther Party
all but disbanded by 1973. Many people of color felt that the change that was
promised in the 1960’s wasn’t happening. At the beginning of the same year, the Civil
Rights Commission came to the same conclusion and stated that the government
and the Nixon administration was continuing to fail to enforce civil rights. Stevie
Wonder tapped into this collective feeling of disenfranchisement and created a
classic song.
- Percy Gallagher
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