Active in SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party, Angela Davis received international notoriety in 1970 when she was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list because she had purchased weapons used in a courthouse shootout in which four people were killed. Davis went underground, was arrested in New York, and was held for extradition in the Women's House of Detention, where this selection was recorded. She was eventually acquitted of all charges. The interview was conducted by journalist Gil Noble and was published in the January 1, 1971, issue of Muhammad Speaks.

The Black Panther Party was co-founded in 1965 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Harassed by law enforcement agencies and presented in a distorted light by the mass media, the Black Panthers had a ten-point foundational platform which illustrated that their goals and beliefs were focused on community empowerment and self-defense. This selection features Seale reciting the ten-point platform at a rally protesting the incarceration of Newton.

After World War II, the blues that had been carried from the Delta north to urban centers went through a metamorphosis. The South Side of Chicago was center of blues activity, and guitarist and singer McKinley Morganfield a.k.a. Muddy Waters was the king bee. Fronting what was probably the first electric band, Waters created the prototype for the rock 'n' roll band that would dominate popular music during the second half of the century. In the introduction he states, "I am the blues man. I'm Muddy Waters." He's testifying to himself as a man and an artist. He has literally and figuratively "made a name for himself." Even though he was born into a Mississippi sharecropper's life, he refused to accept limitations. Recorded at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife in 1968, this performance features Pee Wee Madison and Luther Johnson on guitars, Paul Oscher on harmonica, S.P. Leary on Drums, and Otis Spann on piano.

This selection clearly illustrates the freedom songs' "re-membering" of call and response, improvisation, and rhythmic sophistication aimed at encapsulating a message and unifying a movement. Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around was a traditional song first adapted by the workers of the Albany Movement in Georgia. The SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Freedom Singers, including Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Rutha Harris, and Charles Neblett, recognized that freedom songs provided an outlet for protest for those who might normally have been intimidated by racist authority or mobs, and allowed those outside the struggle to become directly engaged. The performance was recorded in 1962 in Albany by Guy Carawan and Alan Lomax.

Langston Hughes, more than any other Black writer, is associated with the linking of blues and jazz with literature. He wrote this poem at the age of eighteen as he was crossing the Mississippi River on a train. As he explained in the original liner notes, "Many of my poems have been about the history of the Negro people. In this poem, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers,' I try to link, in terms of the rivers we have known, Africa – the land of our ancestors – and America, our land today."

A Jamaican who immigrated to Harlem during the Renaissance era, Claude McKay wrote this sonnet in 1919 in response to the riots and violent suppression of African Americans that took place after World War I. In the recorded introduction to McKay's reading of the poem he explains, "Even though many of my themes were racial, I write my poems to make a universal appeal."