Increasingly, politicians from Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Cory Booker to 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, are making the case for fixing several aspects of the nation's broken criminal justice system. Among the legislative solutions they have offered is reform of mandatory sentencing for nonviolent drug offenses, limiting solitary confinement for juveniles, and addressing the issue of racial profiling and policing. At the intersection of the Black Lives Matter movement and this growing political bipartisan support for reform, stands singer and songwriter John Legend, who is launching a “nationwide listening and learning tour” as the first step in his FREE AMERICA campaign.
Singers embracing social justice is nothing new to the music industry. From Elvis Presley's “In the Ghetto,” to the groundbreaking “We Are the World” campaign, artists have long had something to say about how the world treats the least privileged and most marginalized among us. One particular subject of focus over the decades has been incarceration -- and within this group of songs, there's a subset that stands alone as its own theme: songs reflecting on the plight of being falsely imprisoned, and the social justice issues that often play a role in the fates of those entangled in the legal system.
In “Work Song,” written by Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nat Adderley, and recorded by Nina Simone for her album Forbidden Fruit, the protagonist is convicted of robbing a store and sentenced to time working on a chain gang. Although she ultimately confesses to committing the crime, she provides poverty and hunger as her defense.
The U.K. hip-hop artist Plan B made an entire album centering on the theme of incarceration. On the concept album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Plan B tells the fictional story of a man who struggles to survive the harsh prison climate after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. The protagonist’s woes begin in the song “She Said,” with the false accusations of an obsessed female fan. It’s like a modern day “Billie Jean,” without the paternity allegations but with a jury trial.
The plot then descends into a nightmare scenario of prison life that consumes most of the album’s B-side. Throughout the album the character Strickland Banks never stops proclaiming his innocence, with his pleas to be released from prison culminating in the track simply titled “Free.”
And then there are the songs based on actual events that highlight the real lives too often upended and derailed by the criminal justice system. Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” about the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, excruciatingly details the true story of a man convicted of a triple homicide, due to alleged racial profiling and an unfair trial. While the song “Go Back Home,” written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for the musical The Scottsboro Boys, recalls the injustices of the Jim Crow Era. Although written in the early 2000s, the musical recounts the harrowing true story of a group of young Black men in Alabama who are imprisoned after being falsely accused and then convicted of raping two White women in 1931.
“Go Back Home” is sung by the young men as they -- victims of an unjust legal system -- await execution. When Audra McDonald covered “Go Back Home” on her album of the same name, she channeled both the hope and the heartbreak the characters experienced as their lives hung in the balance, at the whims of a legal system that did not even grant them the right to a fair trial.
John Legend has now joined the long list of artist-activists shining a spotlight on the issue of incarceration. But he's not singing about it. When the 2015 Academy Award recipient and nine-time Grammy Award-winner held a press conference at a correctional facility in Austin, Texas to announce his multi-year initiative focused on criminal justice reform, Legend made ending mass incarceration and addressing the school-to-prison pipeline in America his top priorities. During the press conference Legend echoed themes he had struck during his Academy Award acceptance speech, where he took home the Oscar for “Glory,” his collaboration with the rapper Common. He talked about the negative effects that mass incarceration has on taxpayers and communities, and its disproportionate impact on the African-American community.
This is not Quincy Jones’ “We Are the World.” Legend’s efforts go beyond just songwriting and performance as a means of raising awareness and/or charitable donations. And he isn’t letting up. A few weeks later Legend led a panel discussion in D.C. hosted by Politico and attended by outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and other influential figures in Washington, and then followed that with an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
With the FREE AMERICA initiative, John Legend has defied a long history of singers merely singing about the subject of incarceration, and decided to actually do something about it.