It’s hard to explain the extent to which humidity can wear on a body. In Columbus, where I live, spring doesn’t turn gently into summer. The season ends abruptly, with the heat of summer overwhelming the calm air of spring.
With so many new people taking to the streets, embarking on miles-long marches, the organizers in my community have sent out intermittent reminders: Start drinking water early, and drink more than you need. Even if it is 85 degrees out, dress like it’s going up to 95. Take a snack, if you can swing it. Walking through the thick, weighty fog of humidity can make lifting the feet more difficult. Sweat appears, not in small doses, but in waves. As the miles accumulate, it can be easy to lose focus. Snacks and water help, but as an act of energy and propulsion, the protest chant is the great motivator.
The act of the march, or the protest, is also an act of community. An act that, often, is driven by sound. Sometimes, yes, there is someone at the front or the back of a march with a radio. And occasionally, the people in the streets might be blessed with a car driving by slowly with its windows down. During the first weekend of protests here, one car drove by blaring N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” while protesters stood downtown. And then another car, and then another. A long chain of cars, all playing the same ode to dissent.
Song and communal voices uplifting protest is, of course, not new. Most notably, in the States, the civil rights movement was anchored by song. Black gospel and folk were songs of resistance, sometimes transformed for the sake of the movement. The 1900 hymn “I’ll Overcome Someday” was the seed that would grow into the 1960s anthem “We Shall Overcome.” Music plays a similar role today, like when Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” brings a crowd of weary protesters roaring back to life.
During the first weekend of protests here, one car drove by blaring N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” while protesters stood downtown. And then another car, and then another.
But the music of the protest is most often made by the protesters themselves. The protest chant takes on many forms and many modes. The genre requires something not entirely unlike the three-minute pop song. The chant must be rhythmic and catchy — easy for people to understand and to latch onto. People who have never marched or chanted before have to be able to pick up the language and beat mid-stride, and join in the efforts to push the sound. The people who lead the chants are, most likely, also strategizing along a march route and keeping an eye out for the movements of police. Someone up front shouting “no justice” and a crowd echoing back “no peace.” Or, simply, “Black Lives Matter,” repeated until it accumulates in pace, volume, and energy.
Because so much protest action has been happening rapidly, with new and eager people even in the years of protest before this one, there are places to learn chants online. Lists that break down the language, and the rhythm. It is not unlike practicing an instrument. Regionally, activists will apply their own language and rhythms to a preexisting chant. It works the same situationally — at a protest march to get cops out of schools, “Whose streets? OUR streets” can quickly be transformed into “Whose schools? OUR schools.”
There is a wall I’ve hit, and seen other people hit, over the last 10 days. The wall is physical, but also mental, and maybe emotional. There is something about passing lines of police officers who look at you and your comrades with annoyance or dismissal. There is something about marching through a neighborhood while mostly white residents peer at you through their windows, or film you from their front porch. It is as if you’re on exhibit, a prop at a museum. Chants help with this too. The action of the chant is also the action of keeping people aligned with a mission, and protected against the hostility of onlookers.
Yes, chants are about stating goals and demands in a way that can gain traction or volume, but they’re at their best, for me, when they take on the almost playful character of the student section at an event. Taunting the cops lined up in riot gear, or making light of the helicopters circling the sky, or the snipers on a roof. The music of the communal chant undresses the threat, even as it hovers above, or stands mere yards away. For anyone who has seen or known what the long reach of state violence can do, particularly to the most vulnerable, the chant can feel empowering. Almost like armor, even if it isn’t. To announce presence among the manicured lawns of the suburbs, where your presence might otherwise be either ignored, or a point of suspicion.
And the music, of course, gives purpose to the movement. It especially gives purpose when the names being chanted are the names of those lost. The freedom fighters who carried you into the streets in the first place. The chants give purpose when rebuilding and restructuring the unseen community of ancestors and letting them live within the breathing, moving community.
I have been reminding myself and others around me that we are in the first mile of a marathon. When your legs still feel light, and it seems like you can sprint the entire course. Before the exhaustion sets in. When the curfew was in our city, there was a toll to watching my phone each time the curfew came down, or in the hours after. There remains a toll to driving down a street and seeing a tank, or seeing a row of National Guard soldiers walking, guns out, down a strip of familiar road. All of this accumulates in ways that are felt (physically, emotionally, mentally) in the immediate moment of protest, but also linger far after.
There is also the physical. It takes a lot to be in the streets multiple days in a row. To have the police spraying tear gas at you, or chasing you with horses or vehicles. Even leaving the house knowing that police violence could be a possibility is a type of exhaustion — preparing supplies and defense mechanisms. It makes the understanding plain that you are going out into the world to protect yourself from the forces of the state. Even (or especially) when it becomes routine, that is when, for me, it has become most exhausting. Now, as we are seeing protests slow down around the country, it is the unity that was built through the exhaustion that will hopefully carry communities to whatever their next steps might be.
I love the feeling of the chants, in unison, rattling the air. While gathering my things from my parked car this weekend, blocks away from the protest, I could hear the chants bending through the air, guiding me in the direction of the people who would be my people for the next several hours. This, too, is how the protest chant is generous music: It can pull someone to exactly where they need to be, even when they don’t always know if they have the energy to make it there. One weekend before this one, when the police rolled their SWAT tanks into the streets and tried to shout down the masses over their loudspeakers, it was the people united who drowned them out. A better, sweeter sound swallowing a wave of horrible noise.