In 1931, a decade-long labor struggle began in Kentucky, and a young woman named Florence Reece wrote a song. The struggle between coal miners and the mine companies became known as the Harlan County War. The song asked the coal miners, both union and scab, a simple question: Which side are you on?
The Harlan County War ended in 1939, but Florence's song was just beginning its trajectory through history. In 1940, the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger picked it up and played it for audiences around the world for decades. The song's repetitive questioning, and its almost militant insistence on an answer, makes it somewhat unusual in the genre of American protest music, where the focus is often on ending conflict. The refrain "Which side are you on" is a challenge: If you have to think about the answer, you've already chosen.
Protest music has been part of hip hop since hip hop began--groups like Brand Nubian, The Coup and Dead Prez are explicitly political, aligning their message with Black Nationalism, class consciousness and civil rights. Hip hop's natural style of declamation often aligns the tone of rhetoric more towards Florence Reece's sentiment, heard verbatim in this song by the group Rebel Diaz.
In 2014, protestors with theBlack Lives Matter movement in St. Louis interrupted a performance by the St. Louis Symphony, singing out the chorus written nearly eighty-five years in the past. They sang for five minutes, and left peacefully. They called their song "A Requiem for Michael Brown".