A Conversation with Elijah Anderson

Interviewed by: Susan L. Worley

Dr. Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson, one of the leading urban ethnographers and cultural theorists in the United States, is the Sterling Professor of Sociology and of African American Studies at Yale University. Among his many scholarly contributions to the field of sociology are five books that provide a detailed cultural history of US urban landscapes. Qualitative fieldwork he conducted as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago led to his widely acclaimed first book, A Place on the Corner: A Study of Black Street Corner Men(University of Chicago Press, 1978), examining street-corner life at “Jelly’s,” a South Side Chicago bar. Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community(University of Chicago Press, 1990) is a study of gentrification that explores race and class in two very different Philadelphia neighborhoods. His third book, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (Norton, 1999), examines codes regulating violence and codes of decency in Philadelphia inner-city neighborhoods. His fourth book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (Norton, 2011), introduces the concept of the cosmopolitan canopy as an “island of racial civility in a sea of segregation,” describing encounters and forms of negotiation between Whites and Blacks of different social classes in various public spaces in Philadelphia and other US cities. His most recent book, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022), draws on more than 40 years of qualitative fieldwork to document the challenges Black people face as they navigate “White space” and attempt to overcome negative stereotypes. In 2025, Anderson received the American Society of Criminology’s Edwin H. Sutherland Award for his ethnographic investigations of city life and the origins of urban crime in the United States. In 2021, Anderson was awarded the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology. His long list of other awards and honors include the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award, the W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, and the Lynd Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Sociological Association.

Here, Professor Anderson reflects on his personal history and recent work with Susan Worley.

About the interviewer: Susan Worley is a science writer who resides in Pennsylvania. She is a member of the American Folklore Society and the National Association of Science Writers

SW: I’m wondering if we could start by talking a little bit about what initially drew you to the craft of ethnography. What was your early upbringing like?

EA: I was born in the Mississippi Delta in a small village, Hermandale, near the Mississippi River. We were very, very poor. My grandmother was the village midwife when I was born—in fact, she delivered me. She was kind of a village doctor, and she had what they would call “mother wit”—no education, but natural intelligence and knowledge of all kinds of herbal cures. When my mother had me, she was 20 years old and already had three other children. After my father’s experiences in World War II, he decided that we could not live in the South any longer.

SW: How old were you when your family decided to leave the South?

EA: I was two years old when my parents took me north. Like so many Black people during that period, my family was part of the Great Migration. They left the Mississippi Delta and moved to South Bend, Indiana, an industrial town 90 miles east of Chicago, and five miles south of Michigan. Many poor, working-class Black men from the South were attracted to South Bend, and I already had two uncles living there.

My family made the trek, first to Chicago, and then they settled in South Bend, where my uncles worked in the Studebaker factory. They got my dad a job there, and we lived with one of my uncles for a while before getting our own apartment. Then, my mother opened a grocery store in the Black community.

SW: Were the local communities very segregated?

EA: Yes, they were quite segregated. The White people were generally tolerant, and Black people knew they had a “place” inferior to that of the White people. That was an important understanding throughout my childhood.  I initially attended a predominantly White elementary school. By the second grade, my family had more resources and bought a house on the west side of South Bend. The neighborhood was racially mixed, but my elementary school, Linden, was segregated, with a few Black teachers; most of the teachers and the principal were White.

SW: In Black in White Space, you mentioned several jobs you had when you were a child.

EA: When I was eight and nine, I hung out in downtown South Bend and followed the older kids, mimicking their behavior. I sold The South Bend Tribune on downtown street corners, and by the time I was eleven, I had a job setting pins at local bowling alleys. Eventually, at the age of twelve, I started working at a local typewriter shop. I simply entered the shop one evening and approached Mr. Forbes, the owner, and asked him for a job. We seemed to hit it off, and he hired me. Initially, I ran errands and did handyman chores around the building, including cleaning and doing odd jobs. Eventually, I learned to service typewriters, with Mr. Forbes as my mentor. I worked for him through high school and beyond.

SW: You wrote very eloquently of Mr. Forbes and his role in your life in Black in White Space. It seemed that your relationship with him and the time you spent in that store provided you with something of an early ethnographic experience.

EA: Yes, I was intrigued by the social environment; Mr. Forbes and his family, the older boys around the shop, and the comings and goings of the customers, or the “public,” were of great interest to me. There, I learned social skills that proved important for my development. That job was my first real introduction to a White setting that I was able to observe with a work-related purpose. It was also a “White space” in a small town (population 125,000, about 8 percent Black) dominated by White people. The town also included several other ethnic minorities, primarily Polish and Hungarian people.

SW: Did you know that you wanted to go to college after high school?

EA: Yes. Earlier in my young life, I had become somewhat indifferent to school, mainly because schooling seemed not to matter much in determining one’s quality of life. Gradually, I began to appreciate the role of education in affording one the possibility of the “good life.” By tenth grade, I had become more serious about school, especially after I was cut from the basketball team for what I and my teammates thought were arbitrary reasons. At the time, I felt it was the worst day of my life, in large part because certain opportunities for social mobility had been closed to me.  Ironically, this incident caused me to focus on my studies, essentially flipping my sense of priorities. As I became more focused on school, I began to shy away from my “cool” friends, spending more time with the kids who were nerdier, or “square.” This change was so abrupt, it alarmed my mother.

In South Bend, a small industrial city, most people, Black and White alike, seemed to aspire to working-class occupations where schooling was not so important. And for most Black people, school seldom seemed to really pay off. Many, if not most, of the people I knew were primarily interested in obtaining a factory job for its relatively stable income and security. But during the civil rights movement, the Black middle class became acutely interested in and promoted “getting an education” and the promise it inspired. People like Martin Luther King Jr. visited South Bend and strongly encouraged Black social mobility and racial integration.

As this movement became increasingly a part of our consciousness as young people, I became increasingly focused on education, and for many working-class youths like me, college became an important aspiration. Because my family had limited funds, I started my college career at the South Bend extension of Indiana University and later obtained a scholarship to attend Bloomington, where a whole new world opened to me.

SW: Did you already know then that you would pursue ethnography?

EA: No, but as an undergraduate, I found myself drawn to sociology, almost like a calling. As a graduate student, I made my way to the University of Chicago, where there was an emphasis on qualitative fieldwork as part of the important Chicago school of sociology tradition. I was recruited to Chicago by Professors Gerald D. Suttles and Morris Janowitz, both major figures in the field of urban sociology, and I received a personal offer letter from Janowitz, the chair of the department. Ultimately, after Suttles departed the university for SUNY Stony Brook, I worked with Howard S. Becker and finished my doctorate at Northwestern.

During this period of racial turmoil, the civil rights movement was culminating in minor rebellions, riots, and civil disturbances all over the country. Great numbers of Black people, especially young people like me, became critical of the older generation’s acceptance of the racial status quo. As young Black students, we felt a sense of equality with our fellow White students and expected fair treatment, quickly noticing the discrepancy when things were unfair. As students, we demanded equality.

SW: And you benefited from the incorporation process that followed? 

EA: Yes.  It was a time of student activism, and opportunities seemed readily available in the American workplace, including at major corporations and universities. An ethos of racial inclusion was emerging, an amazing national moment, and ultimately, the public policies emanating from these circumstances created the largest Black middle class in American history.  

SW: Did you begin with a focus on urban ethnography at the University of Chicago?

EA: At the University of Chicago, there was a great deal of interest in urban affairs, especially on the qualitative side. For my dissertation, I studied Black “street-corner men” and was motivated in part by Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner, a major study of Black street-corner men published in 1967. Liebow was concerned with why the Black people he studied failed to become middle class, and he attributed this inability to what he called “manly flaws” and “serial monogamy.” While the book was wildly popular, his formulation left many young Black scholars, including myself, unsatisfied.  But the book’s flaws motivated me to study the condition of such Black men. And this ethnographic fieldwork led to my dissertation and my first book, A Place on the Corner, which the University of Chicago Press published in 1978, a publication that became the germ of my body of work.

SW: After you completed your PhD, you taught at Swarthmore before heading to Penn, correct?

EA: Actually, after completing my fieldwork in Chicago, Swarthmore recruited me, and I taught there for two years before departing for the University of Pennsylvania, where I completed my dissertation and then published it.  I was recruited by some of the major figures in the field, including the chair of the sociology department, Renée Fox, as well as E. Digby Baltzell, William Labov, Dell Hymes, and Erving Goffman, among others. These scholars mentored me there, and we became colleagues and friends.

SW: Dell Hymes taught in the folk department at Penn, too. Did you interact with others in the folk department?

EA: Yes. Henry Glassie and Dan Ben-Amos welcomed me, among others.

SW: Did you already have a new ethnographic pursuit in mind when you arrived at Penn?

EA: As I finished A Place on the Corner and prepared it for publication, I was becoming very interested in the community in which my wife and I then resided, Powelton Village, an area just north of the Penn campus. While living there, I began to wonder why so many of my White neighbors (people who had gentrified the area) would remain in Powelton Village, which was adjacent to one of the most distressed and impoverished Black neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia. This study became my second book, Streetwise, and it dealt with the issue of the color line, the dividing line between Black and White people, from an ethnographic perspective.

SW: Could you talk a little about your approach to ethnography, which seems to overlap significantly with folk ethnography, and explain what you mean by qualitative fieldwork?

EA: Ethnography is defined as the systematic study of culture, a set of shared understandings that people live by. Virtually all human communities develop an informal “local knowledge,” as Clifford Geertz has suggested, by meeting the exigencies and the demands of their everyday lives. They share this knowledge and their understandings of it with members of their community, people they care about, and especially their children. Ultimately, this knowledge gets expressed in the various myths, rituals, and the patterns of everyday life. Through qualitative fieldwork, the researcher tries to apprehend this knowledge and represent it in lectures, articles, and books. The challenge is to render accurately the way of life of a community.  This is the kind of ethnographic work I have been engaged in throughout my career, which is reflected in my five books on the Black experience in American cities.

At the University of Chicago, and through the teachings of Howard Becker and others at Northwestern, I learned about ethnographic methods while engaging in qualitative fieldwork for my dissertation. Ethnography is the only method where we place our own body in the field and, through a reflexive analysis and observation, come to an understanding of the culture of the people we are studying. Essentially, by observing what people do and recording what they say, we learn about their everyday lives. The challenge is always to be able to render their experiences and lives accurately.

SW: What was the focus of your third book?

EA: After completing Streetwise, I became curious about why so many young Black people as well as adults were caught up in violence, why so many Black people were killing each other in their urban communities. Beginning with Mantua, just to the north of Powelton Village, I explored these issues in ghetto areas around Philadelphia, including North and Southwest Philadelphia. What I discovered was that many residents lived by the “code of the street,” an understanding among many young men that transgressions would be met in kind, as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” form of street justice involving payback and revenge. Street credibility was a highly sought-after coin that could not just be earned once but had to be negotiated endlessly. Many residents of the inner city believed that the larger American society—including city government, the police, and especially the criminal justice system—had abdicated any responsibility for the welfare of the local Black community and its residents.

Many Black residents felt they were on their own, especially in matters of personal defense, public safety, and security at home. When they summoned the police, the response was almost always slow, or non-existent, and when the police did arrive, they were often disrespectful to the people who had called them in the first place. Thus, to keep safe, many residents took matters of personal security into their own hands. Street justice became the norm. Often this meant that individuals needed to be able to effectively convey that they would use retributive violence to keep dangerous people from bothering them or their loved ones. In the local community, even the most “decent” people can feel the need to appear tough and streetwise to prevent others from taking advantage of them. This is part of the description and analysis that appears in The Code of the Street.

While completing that book, I moved my family downtown to Rittenhouse Square, a tony area in Center City.

SW: And then you had the opportunity to study Rittenhouse Square.

EA: I became intrigued by Rittenhouse Square, which was literally outside my front door. I was impressed by the diversity of Philadelphians, and the ways in which they seemed to get along with one another. The old-growth trees that covered the square reminded me of a canopy, and so I decided to call the book The Cosmopolitan Canopy.

The square is a peaceful public space that welcomes all kinds of people, and these people are mostly civil to one another, where tensions are mostly kept at bay and violent incidents rarely occur. Under the canopy, there are people of essentially two orientations: cosmopolitan and ethnocentric. At times the two orientations may appear in the same person, who may code switch from one to the other, depending on the situation. The cosmopolitans typically dominate and define the canopy space, while the ethnocentric people, often hailing from the more parochial communities around the city, defer and keep their ethnocentrism or racism in check; when they reach their limit, their racism or ethnocentrism might be manifested in the drawing of the color line, separating “us” from “them.” These two orientations can be exhibited by people of all races. On rare occasions, any one of them might be capable of drawing the color line, thereby excluding others by their words or actions.  

Another important concept that I introduce in The Cosmopolitan Canopy is the idea of the iconic ghetto. The idea is that the Black community is not simply a physical space, but is understood as an icon, a symbol or image that hovers over any unfamiliar Black people in public, especially for the more ethnocentric types around the square, who may weaponize their racial prejudice. Occasionally, in these circumstances, Black people may experience moments of acute disrespect, or an abrupt drawing of the color line, that can make them feel excluded, like outsiders.

SW: That is what happened during the Starbucks incident in Rittenhouse Square.

EA: Yes. Here you’re referring to the infamous incident that occurred in 2018, seven years after The Cosmopolitan Canopy was published, in which two Black men sat at a table in Starbucks without ordering, as they waited for a friend to arrive, but then had the audacity to request the key to use the restroom. The barista refused and called the police, who arrived within minutes and arrested the two young men for basically being Black in Starbucks. This incident made nationwide news, and this Starbucks as well as others around the country closed for a day to engage in some public soul searching and bias training for its workers. The incident is a prime example of the way the color line gets drawn, which Black residents of the city know all too well.

SW: Historian Frank Hoeber and others consider The Cosmopolitan Canopy to be relatively optimistic regarding racial relations but find Black in White Space to be less optimistic, or even pessimistic, in tone. Would you agree with that?

EA: Of course, the two books were studies of different settings at different times, but the last chapter of The Cosmopolitan Canopy examines racialized disrespect or what Black people sometimes call the “n*gger moment”—circumstances when the color line is drawn. Black in White Space is a sequel to The Cosmopolitan Canopy and takes up the issue addressed in that final chapter, or how Black folk manage their Blackness in white-dominated settings. Given the changes the nation has undergone over the last two decades, it appears that the canopy space is increasingly under a peculiar form of distress. Under such canopies, especially as cosmopolitans recede in prominence, the ethnocentric folks seem not only to grow in number, but also to become emboldened, with fewer constraints in how they treat Black people and other marginalized minorities.

However, the cosmopolitan canopy can be taken as aspirational, or even a metaphor civil society. By nature, as Erving Goffman suggests, such relations in public involve not a little amount of what he referred to as a “social gloss.” The gloss various people display—including polite smiles and sympathetic looks—helps them to smoothly get past others in public and the possible social entanglements they pose. Because of such displays of social gloss, The Cosmopolitan Canopy analysis might be viewed as more optimistic. The canopy is a place that gives off positive vibes, but all it takes is one person to draw that line, which can then render others as outsiders and not welcome in that space, as though they don’t belong.

When I wrote that book, the times were perhaps more optimistic. Since then, there has been a conservative, ethnocentric reaction that contributes to the occasional rending of the canopy. It may be that Black in White Space picks up on the ways in which the canopy is now under threat and details the ways that ethnocentric people feel increasingly more emboldened to make life more difficult for marginalized people.

SW: When The Cosmopolitan Canopy was published, President Obama was still in office.

EA: That is true. In fact, during a television interview I did with Calvin College around that time, I spoke about how Congressman Joe Wilson interrupted Obama’s State of the Union address and called him a liar. People were stopped cold, and Black people recognized the incident immediately as a racial insult.

SW: A lot of us believed that with Obama being president that some racial healing was going to occur. But then, things changed. When you wrote Black in White Space, we were experiencing the first Trump presidency.

EA: In this context, the ethnocentric people seem to have become more emboldened in their drawing of the line of demarcation against minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized populations, and not only in the US. In Europe, you see this happening as well; in Germany, Poland, France, and the UK, there has been a return and rise of ethnocentrism. I began to observe this phenomenon at the end of The Cosmopolitan Canopy and turned my attention more fully to the issue in Black in White Space.

SW: And now, as several sociologists have pointed out recently, we are witnessing so-called “white victimization”—is that a new phenomenon?

EA: No, I wouldn’t say so. The feelings of white grievance have been around since the enslaved people were emancipated and the rise of the Black Codes and Jim Crow. Today, as increasing numbers of Black and Brown people rise in class status, many ordinary White people feel they are losing out, that their own rights and privileges have somehow become abrogated by the rise or the inclusion of Black and Brown people as well as women entering spaces such as the labor force and corporate America.

SW: That was the beginning of the sense of White victimization.

EA: An interesting question is: What happens in response to all this inclusion? As part of a White backlash, microaggressions and racial attacks on Black and Brown people seem more common—though I am not fond of the term “microaggression,” as it implies that such acts are minor, when, in fact, they can be profoundly consequential in their impact on a person’s mental and physical health and sense of well-being. And of course, the larger moment can be life-changing and even lethal.

SW: Would you say that in some sense the resistance you’ve described stretches back to the early days after slavery?

EA: Yes, I think so. It goes back to Emancipation and even before that with Justice Roger B. Taney’s ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when he declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—in other words, that Black people could not be citizens of the nation.  

SW: In Black in White Space, you mentioned that because of considerable Black prosperity, which is traced in part to affirmative action, there was an emerging indifference to racial inequality and a strong narrative of blaming the victim. And now that there are so many White people who are unable to live as well as their parents did, they’re feeling anger and resentment about Black people who are enjoying jobs and benefits that they want for themselves. Do you think this explains the current anti-DEI and anti-woke atmosphere that has become quite frightening?

EA: Yes, in part. I wrote a piece for the Atlantic called “Black Success, White Backlash” (November 2023) that explained this process. Historically, whenever Black success and prosperity have occurred, there has always been a White backlash.

SW: And gradually there was Black prosperity.

EA: Largely because of the civil rights movement that culminated in the massive riots and civil disorders of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the nation, the powerful White majority was unable to ignore the racial inequality and the way it negatively impacted American civil society. In this context, Lyndon Johnson gave a critically important speech (“To Fulfill These Rights”) at Howard University, imploring the White establishment to do better. The racial exclusion of Black people had become urgent and needed to be addressed, not with more racial exclusion, but by racial inclusion, or what Lyndon Johnson defined as “affirmative action.”

We Shall Overcome

Voices of Democracy

At that time, Johnson had commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to be chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, whose report concluded that “White Racism” was at heart of the problem. The 1968 Kerner Report stated quite clearly that the nation was rapidly moving toward becoming “two societies . . . separate and unequal,” one Black, impoverished, and socially marginalized, and the other predominantly White, often prosperous, and relatively privileged.

The Commission made these points emphatically while encouraging the major stakeholders of the nation—including the Fortune 500 companies, major universities, and state and local governments—that for the good of the nation, they needed to commit themselves to the inclusion of Black people going forward. Relatedly, a whole host of civil rights legislation passed through Congress, making possible what amounted to a New Deal for Black people, akin to a Second Reconstruction. It effectively outlawed discrimination in various areas of American life, specifically public accommodations, housing, employment, voting rights, and more. Equally important, the variously impacted institutions began to actively reach out to Black people and, going forward, to include them. Otherwise, as a nation, we could expect increasing racial turmoil and greater levels of alienation among the large Black underclass of the nation’s urban ghettos.

Essentially, what this meant was that Black people would begin to move into spaces previously occupied only by White people. Strikingly, their reception has been mixed. Totally White spaces continue to exist, while Black and Brown people, as well as other marginalized minorities and White women, have made inroads toward greater inclusion. Now in America, we have the largest Black middle class in history. And to a large degree, this massive inclusion of Black people became an impressive and inescapable example of American democracy at work, but it also helped to “cool out” the anger and alienation felt by large numbers of Black people still living in the ghetto.

The Auction Block and the Hit Song: Blues Is My Business

Written By: Amy Abugo Ongiri

Slavery continues to be an uncomfortable topic for most Americans. This is doubly so for Americans of African descent because of its association with our collective trauma, pain, and sorrow. In many ways, though, the story of our enslavement is one of radical hope. It is awe inspiring to consider the fact that even though all the technologies of European modernity and industrialization were allied in the attempt to control, oppress, and even eliminate us, and we are still here and very much free. What kept us here and moving towards freedom was our indigenous knowledge. Our agrarian roots didn’t start with our enslavement. Many enslaved people were expert planters and cultivators in Africa, and that knowledge was at least part of the reason that we were stolen away by Europeans in the first place, because they valued our ability to cultivate rice and other plants that would become mainstays in the US.

The seeds we planted under that bitter experience flourished despite the pain that we also experienced under enslavement. Music and sound became our means of resistance, and the seeds that we planted culturally flourished as well, despite the horrible conditions under which they came to expression.  It is commonly known that the roots of all US popular music originate in African American expressive culture. But do we always know how deep and widely those roots go?

One of the most impactful popular protest songs of all time has its roots in the 19th-century expression of slaves who sought freedom and liberation under what Amiri Baraka called “the worst kind of slavery.” Baraka wrote the book Blues People, a landmark study of the impact of enslavement on the development of African American culture. For him, the blues were the deepest experience of cultural expression created as people turned from Africans during enslavement into African Americans. Baraka would write: “Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”  

Sometime in the late 1800s, possibly earlier, enslaved African Americans composed a song expressing their desire for liberation. The song was called “No More Auction Block for Me,” and it is a carefully detailed account of all of the things that enslaved people will joyfully leave behind when they achieve freedom. The song focuses on both the everyday aspects of slavery, such as the insufficient food rations, as the song exclaims, “no more pinch of salt for me, no more peck of corn for me.” While the rest of the song celebrates the end of the harsh realities of slavery, “no more hundred lash for me, no more mistress call for me.” An early publication of the song that appeared in 1867 said it was a song “to which the Rebellion had actually given rise.” Exactly which rebellion is somewhat in question, as very few people were concerned about recording the facts of Black resistance in the 1800s.

Image credit the Smithsonian

When it was written down in 1867, the author claims that “it was first sung” when enslaved people were sent to build fortifications for the confederate army on the Gullah Islands of Hilton Head and Bay Point. It is likely that enslaved people sang the song before this moment, but this was the first time that their enslavers heard it and recorded it. From a contemporary standpoint, it seems unlikely that enslaved people sang the song in support of the confederacy as its earliest recorders implied. Enslaved labor formed the cornerstone of the confederate rebellion, and the confederacy was fighting to maintain it. The alternate title for the song “Many Thousands Gone” suggests that the song was either a lament for the losses under slavery or a celebration of those who had managed to escape it by running away.

Canadians have long celebrated the song as part of the heritage of the “Black Loyalists” of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Black Loyalists were enslaved and free people of African descent who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. In 1775, a British proclamation promised land, freedom, and protection to any person of African descent who fought for the British. When it was clear that the British would not win, thousands of these soldiers and their families fled across the border to Canada, forming some of the first free settlements there in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These soldiers faced discrimination and denial of benefits that they were promised, though many persevered and were foundational to Canadian society. At least a thousand of these Black Loyalists elected to leave Canada and return to Africa in 1792. They settled in Sierra Leone and created the city of Freetown, which is now the capital and largest city in that country.

Whether the song is the product of the civil war or the revolutionary war, the song’s impact continues to be deeply felt, though, like the history of enslaved people, it’s not always acknowledged. The singer Odetta began performing the song in the 1950s and recorded it on her 1960 album Live at Carnegie Hall. Known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” Odetta explored the history of African American culture in song. When she began singing “No More Auction Block for Me” at folk music venues around New York City, she was heard by a young Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, himself, would begin performing the song, undoubtedly influenced by sharing the stage with Odetta in many of those same venues.

Dylan was already deeply influenced by Odetta’s music, and, in fact, he claimed it was Odetta who made him a folk singer in the first place. Dylan had become Dylan by practicing to an Odetta album when he was still a teenager in Minnesota. It was, according to him, the first folk album that he ever owned, and he learned every song on it. It was the music of Odetta that convinced Dylan to give up the electric guitar that he had been playing as a teenager and turn to folk music in the first place. He even bought the same model of acoustic guitar as Odetta, saying: “Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.” In 1965, Odetta would turn the tables on Dylan by recording Odetta Sings Dylan.

Odetta in 1961

Bob Dylan released the anti-war song “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963, and it would go on to become one of the best-selling and most iconic protest songs in US history. Since its release, the song has been recorded hundreds of times by a wide variety of artists. When the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary released their version of the song (also in 1963), it sold 300,000 copies in its first week and quickly exceeded a million sales. Since the song was copyrighted to Bob Dylan when he wrote the lyrics in the 1960s, he has continued to profit tremendously from its recording. In 2019, the song was even used in a Budweiser advertisement that aired during the Super Bowl.

It wasn’t until 1978 that Bob Dylan would acknowledge that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a direct adaptation from “No More Auction Block for Me.”

The song literally made him millions, but he didn’t owe anything to the song’s original creators. Dylan has a long history of litigation around his “borrowing” of elements of songs from other musicians, but when “No More Auction Block for Me” was first written down in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States, its creation was simply attributed to “Anonymous.” One could argue that it would have been impossible for Dylan to compensate African Americans for their creative work because of the conditions of the work’s creation that were beyond his control. But that wouldn’t explain why it took so long for him to acknowledge the song’s origins.

The creation of US popular music has always been a profoundly material as well as aesthetic process. In Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, Matthew D. Morrison marks the way that music as the space of Black creative possibility also became the space in which American commercial music was created as well. This space was not only one of creative productivity but also, as many scholars have noted, one that replicated the wider theft and exploitation occurring in mainstream US culture. Morrison notes: “Blacksound is the locus through which the original performances (sonic and corporeal aesthetics) of black musicians—who develop their practices both within their own segregated communities and in relation to European American and other ethnic styles over time—were then taken up as sources of property to be owned and copyrighted by mostly white musicians in the establishment of the popular music industry.”

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like for the originators of “No More Auction Block for Me” to sit and imagine freedom when it barely seemed like a possibility. It was a leap of radical hope and undoubtedly a very sacred moment. The journey of the song from a lament and call for liberation by enslaved African Americans to its hidden uses and commercial success for non-Black people is emblematic of the ways in which Black music exists within American culture in general. African Americans have always provided commercial music’s roots and also its branches but have rarely been fully acknowledged for that work. Our lyrical cries for freedom have nourished us when freedom didn’t even seem possible. We and all other Americans have always received the benefits of that imaginative leap even when it hasn’t been acknowledged or compensated. The musical continuity from slavery to the present moments assure that our sacred moments will never be lost to us.

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