Nina Simone’s music provided a soundtrack for the civil rights movement and she used her “unapologetic rage and accusatory voice to name names and take no prisoners in the African-American struggle for equality in the early 60s.” Simone struck up close friendships with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, LeRoi Jones, Miriam Makeba, and Lorraine Hansberry, who became her political mentor and was a neighbor of Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz. She wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four young African-American girls. Simone also penned “Four Women,” chronicling the complex histories of a quartet of African-American female figures, and “Young, Gifted and Black,” borrowing the title of a play by Hansberry, which became a popular anthem. After the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Simone’s bassist Greg Taylor penned “Why (The King of Love Is Dead),” which was first performed by the singer and her band at the Westbury Music Festival.
