Pop music served as civil rights propaganda by asserting Black humanity

Evidence

Yet, arriving as it did amid the advent of the American teenager, Motown’s ascent was a crucial dimension of Black American PR. These kids ached and yearned and lost their cool just as intensely as the white high schoolers who were helping send them to the top of the pop charts. They had hormones in common and much more. The music was an earthquake, not only because of its enormous, rhythm-driven sound (big drums, horns, tambourines) but because it shook with the insistence that the people who made it ought to be embraced as irreducibly human. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1078

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘Black American PR’ concept — pop music as a racial-relations argument — is a rich essay frame: how commercial success functioned as a civil rights strategy.