Max Roach was already almost a decade into his career as one of the most influential jazz drummers and composers when he teamed up with lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. to collaborate on a piece they planned to perform at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. The urgency of the civil rights movement and the momentum gained from the “sit-ins” which began at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, inspired the artists to commit the project to record in the fall of 1960.

Recorded just months after the February 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, the album stands as an early musical testament to the burgeoning rage, anger and passion that would take the Civil Rights Movement from its early victory in Montgomery in 1955 into a future that would dramatically alter race relations in the United States. Produced by label co-founder, famed music critic and social activist, Nat Hentoff, the album is a bold statement, focussed on civil injustices in black history ranging from slavery to contemporary racial prejudices, and featuring some of the finest jazz musicians ever, including Abbey Lincoln, Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little, and Michael Babatunde Olatunji.(Candid Records)