‘How It Feels to Be Free’ Salutes Black Female Entertainers - NYTimes.com: Ruth Feldstein’s important new book, “How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement,” is an original exploration of the little-known but central role that black entertainers, especially black women, played in helping communicate and forward the movement’s goals. Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson — the black women entertainers in this book — were popular at the height of an organized global struggle for black freedom, from around 1959 till the mid-1970s. They were influenced by this movement, even as they helped shape it.
Ms. Feldstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University in Newark, has not written tell-all celebrity biographies of these women. Nor is hers the story of a group of women working together, though Simone, Lincoln and Makeba became close friends. “How It Feels to Be Free” is a work of cultural history that insists upon the importance of popular art to the work of social change.
