Black History Month Day 19: Culture Was Taken, Credit Wasn’t

Black History Fact:
Jazz, blues, rock, and hip-hop were created by Black artists, often while white performers profited more widely and were deemed more “marketable.”

Black culture has always been influential—and exploited.

Black history shows us how creativity flourishes even under constraint, and how that creativity is often stripped of its origins once it becomes profitable.

This isn’t just about music. It’s about language, fashion, humor, and ideas.

Appreciation without acknowledgment is extraction.

And extraction without repair is theft.

History demands honesty about who creates—and who benefits.

Black History Month — The Sound We Tried Not to Hear

There is a particular American habit we don’t discuss nearly enough.

We love the music.
We resist the people who made it.

We sanitize the rhythm, but distrust the rhythm makers.
We play the song at weddings, then argue about teaching the history in schools.

Every February, the country politely nods toward Black history — as though it were a museum exhibit rather than the foundation under our feet. But you cannot understand America without understanding the sound of America. And the sound of America was created, again and again, by Black artists who were celebrated on stage and rejected off of it.

Let’s begin where rock and roll actually begins — not with a white man holding a guitar on television — but with a Black woman in a church, bending notes in a way no one had heard before.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe stood in a dress and heels, playing an electric guitar with distortion years before it was considered respectable. She fused gospel with rhythm, spiritual with swing. The audience shouted in church, and teenagers later screamed in arenas — but the root emotion was the same: release.

Chuck Berry studied her.
Little Richard studied her.
Elvis Presley studied those who studied her.

History often presents rock and roll as a sudden eruption in the 1950s, as if America woke up one morning and discovered hips could move. But it had been growing for decades in Black churches, juke joints, porches, and street corners — places where survival required expression.

We did not invent the music.
We discovered we liked it.

Then we repackaged it.

Chuck Berry wrote teenage rebellion into existence — cars, school, desire, impatience. Little Richard screamed joy into a microphone so fiercely that society tried to tame him into silence. The energy frightened adults because it sounded like freedom, and freedom is unsettling when you have built order around hierarchy.

So America performed its familiar maneuver:
embrace the art, control the artist.

But the story doesn’t stay in rock.

Jazz asked the country to listen.
Blues asked the country to feel.
Soul asked the country to acknowledge humanity.

Nina Simone did not perform songs — she testified. She played the piano like a courtroom argument and sang like a closing statement. When she sang Mississippi Goddam, she did something radical: she removed the comforting distance between injustice and the listener. Suddenly history was not “then.” It was now. It was here. It was you.

The response was predictable: applause from audiences, discomfort from power.

Aretha Franklin didn’t just ask for respect — she redefined it. Her voice carried church authority into secular space. The demand wasn’t polite. It wasn’t negotiable. It was human. And that, more than anything, unsettled people who preferred equality as an abstract concept rather than a lived practice.

Music has always been where America practices the future before agreeing to it.

We danced interracially before we integrated schools.
We shared radio waves before we shared neighborhoods.
We memorized lyrics before we accepted civil rights.

Black artists have long functioned as cultural translators — explaining humanity through melody when legislation refused to do so. The country learned empathy in headphones long before it learned it in policy.

And yet — even today — we see efforts to restrict curriculum, sanitize history, and present progress as inevitable instead of fought for. When we remove the stories behind the songs, we create the illusion that equality simply appeared, as naturally as a chorus after a verse.

But progress has never been automatic.
It has always been argued, resisted, sung, marched, and paid for.

The music tells the truth even when textbooks hesitate.

So this Black History Month, I am less interested in polite celebration and more interested in honest recognition. The soundtrack of America is not background noise. It is documentation. Each note records a negotiation between exclusion and belonging.

If you listen closely, you hear a consistent message across decades and genres:

I am here.
I am human.
I will be heard.

The artists were not asking permission to contribute to America.
They were insisting they already had.

And perhaps that is why the music lasts — because it carries something deeper than entertainment. It carries the sound of people refusing invisibility.

We tap our feet to it.
History asks us to respond to it.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

P.S. I share these daily reflections not as history lessons alone, but as invitations — to notice, to question, and to act where conscience meets opportunity. The patterns we study are not confined to the past, and silence has never protected the vulnerable. If something here moves you, let it move your voice, your vote, your conversations, and your community.

Please share with others. I do hope people subscribe to get my newsletters directly and avoid the algorithms, censors and dastardly overlords.