Unable to communicate openly in public spaces, slaves developed ways of sharing information that remained invisible to their white masters. Aware that the Christianity they were taught by proslavery ministers counseled endurance on earth in exchange for a heavenly reward, “docile” slaves sang ostensibly passive lyrics like “swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.” Taking the black song as evidence of the slaves’ “childlike” acceptance of their condition, few whites heard the political message. But the slaves knew that the “River Jordan” was also the Ohio River, that the chariot’s destinations included Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston, Canada. “Wade in the Water,” one of the most common slave songs and still a gospel standard, provided literal escape instructions for slaves pursued by bloodhounds. When they heard a voice call out “Steal away to Jesus, I ain’t got long to stay here,” slaves knew that Harriet Tubman used the song as a summons to the Underground Railroad.
Schooled in the cultural traditions of the segregation-era South, Mahalia was deeply aware of the power of masking. Studs Terkel, whose Chicago radio show first introduced her to a large white audience in 1947, recalls: “She explained to me that the spiritual wasn’t simply about Heaven over there, ‘A City Called Heaven.’ No, the city is here, on Earth. And so, as we know, slave songs were code songs. It was not a question of getting to Heaven, but rather to the free state of Canada or a safe city in the North—liberation here on Earth!”
While the songs Mahalia sang in Montgomery testify to the push for liberation, they highlight two very different aspects of that drive. “Move On Up a Little Higher,” Mahalia’s signature song, sold over two million copies, almost all of them to blacks, when it was released in 1947. Accompanied only by piano and organ, Mahalia carries her audience into a world impervious to the violence and poverty that have torn the black community apart, a world where “it’s always howdy howdy and never goodbye,” where the saints can lay down their burdens and put on their robes. The quiet confidence that allows Mahalia’s voice to move just ahead of the beat, to lead the community, anticipates the more obvious assertive energies underlying the masked messages in “Walk in Jerusalem,” “I’m On My Way,” and “Walk All Over God’s Heaven.” The black community’s overwhelming affirmation of Mahalia’s voice expressed a shared determination grounded in the unshakable knowledge that, in the eyes of God, their struggle was righteous. When Mahalia assured them that his eyes were on the sparrow, that he would calm the raging sea, it helped black folks gather their energy. When Mahalia called on her people to keep their hands on the plow, her voice helped them hold the plow, and each other, tight.
Mahalia’s powerful voice always carried undertones of something like despair, undertones that provide the emotional center of “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven.” Reaching deep into the agonies of black history, the song testifies to losses that, from any earthly perspective, seem too much to bear: the four young girls who died in the Sunday morning bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963; the millions of Africans who died in the cramped holds of the slave ships and whose bones littered the Atlantic. The litany of horrors has been recited so often that it has lost its ability to shock. Almost no one stops to think what it means that during the search for the three murdered civil rights workers whose deaths gave the Freedom Summer of 1964 its symbolic meaning, workers pulled up body after body of black men who had simply been forgotten, whose deaths had never attracted any attention outside the black communities who knew only that they were gone, who could never be sure whether they had been killed or simply run away.
It gets to the point where none of it can be said in words. Yet it is the foundation of black life in America. Even as she dedicated herself to a future in glory, Mahalia refused to forget the past. In “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” she voices that refusal as a moan. As theologian and social critic Cornel West observes in The Future of the Race, the moan lies at the core of black expression:
. . . it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan—a cry not so much for help as for home, a moan less out of complaint than for recognition. . . . The deep black meaning of this cry and moan goes back to the indescribable cries of Africans on the slave ships during the cruel transatlantic voyages to America and the indecipherable moans of enslaved Afro-Americans on Wednesday nights or Sunday mornings near god-forsaken creeks or on wooden benches at prayer meetings in makeshift black churches. This fragile existential arsenal—rooted in silent tears and weary lament—supports black endurance against madness and suicide.
When Mahalia sang “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” she was reaching out for a home, trying to find a way to hold on to the belief that, someday, things would change. That night in Montgomery, as the community gathered in the church prepared to take the movement to a new level, it was crucial that Mahalia acknowledged both the reality of the moan and the determination to “move on up a little higher.”
The people heard Mahalia at the same time they heard King. And they found the strength to march out and meet “the man.” Often in the name of their ancestors, always for the sake of their children. Eventually, a lot of white folks found the strength to join them. Some of them began to understand the hope inside the moan. The paths of some of the black folks, some of the white folks, led to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The setting for King’s speech already resonated with a history that made Mahalia’s contribution that shining August day particularly appropriate. In 1939, black concert singer Marian Anderson had presented one of the most politically important concerts of the century from almost exactly the same spot. When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her permission to sing at still-segregated Constitution Hall, Anderson moved to the Lincoln Memorial, where numerous political figures including Eleanor Roosevelt watched and endorsed her dignified protest. Challenging the nation to live up to its betrayed ideals, Anderson sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” When King introduced Anderson to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” twenty-four years later, he was acknowledging that he hadn’t made it there entirely on his own. When Mahalia moved to the microphone to sing, she was carrying on a tradition that placed black women and their voices at the center of the freedom struggle.
Between Montgomery and Washington, Mahalia had frequently warmed up crowds for King. The two had developed a kind of ritual where King would gauge the specific energy of a crowd and suggest a song to Mahalia. Before the march, King and Mahalia had tentatively agreed that she would sing Thomas Dorsey’s gospel classic “Take My Hand Precious Lord,” which Mahalia would later sing at her martyred friend’s funeral. But in Washington, just before she was to sing, King leaned over and asked for “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” As deeply rooted in the moan as anything Mahalia ever sang, it reminded the crowd just what the price of the ticket had been and would continue to be. As Mahalia began to sing, a low-flying airplane threatened to drown out her voice. But, drawing the energy from her massive frame and from the history that surrounded her at the memorial, Mahalia’s voice surmounted its mechanical competition and rose up singing.
No better symbolic moment could have been imagined. As Mahalia’s triumph, the triumph of King and the march and the movement, became clear, the crowd began to wave white handkerchiefs. Although the plan