Nina Simone’s ‘Mississippi Goddam’ Is a Protest Song of the Civil Rights Era, and Our Own

By Wesley Morris

Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.

June 8, 2026

Here we are, near the end of “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone’s first original protest song of the civil rights era. It touched down in 1964. The previous year, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been assassinated outside his home in Jackson, Miss., and four girls had been murdered in a church bombing orchestrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Ala. Throughout the country, especially in the Jim Crow South, degrading Black life, snuffing it out, was an established pastime.

“Mississippi Goddam” is Simone’s bulletin of exasperated fury. It’s a microcosm of a screaming social and political crisis — and this passage is its polemical peak.

Simone’s set included songs she has now taken ownership of, like “I Loves You Porgy” and “Don’t Smoke in Bed.” She was faithful to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Pirate Jenny” while also turning it upside down. And she may have provoked the room into discomfort by doing “Old Jim Crow,” her roast of the South’s apartheid system. No one could have confused her with a more ideologically neutral entertainer like Liberace. But no one could have expected “Mississippi Goddam,” either.

Simone disobeys a conventional verse-chorus-verse structure and lays it all out in the opening lines: “Alabama’s gotten me so upset / Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam.”

But screw decorum. Simone is agitated. You heard her: She can’t sleep. “Everybody” is fully aware of what’s happening to Black people in the South. Yet segments of the country appear to be sleeping just fine. She means “goddam” as an alarm.

At the same time, Simone opts for a subtler tactic, setting a trap for her predominantly white audience. Before she starts singing, she addresses the room. “The name of this tune is ‘Mississippi Goddam.’”

It’s likely that Simone has anticipated this, since she lets everyone carry on for seven seconds — seven whole seconds — before finishing her preamble: “And I mean every word of it.” The italics here are audible. Indeed, the uproar has subsided considerably. She has caught them misreading, mistaking, dismissing her, and she’s let them know.

But a minute later, the audience hasn’t yet gotten it. Between verses, Simone says: “This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.”

For a few more verses, she continues, building the pressure, and then she pauses to ask the audience a question:“I bet you thought I was kidding, didn’t you?”

She’s not kidding. This chanteuse is doing warrior work, pleading for reflection, for action, for answers. We don’t talk about this enough, but, what, a third of the Declaration of Independence is a litany of complaints against an oppressive power structure. This song is a list of disappointments. It’s Simone demanding the country fulfill the “sacred honor” of its founding document.

She kept playing the song through the turbulent years that characterized the fight for civil rights, changing the song’s lyrics to keep up with the outrages. Days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, in 1968, she turned it into an elegy for him at a concert on Long Island. The strategic fury she had summoned at Carnegie Hall turned mournful for the Rev. Dr. King.

Eventually, however, Simone came to believe the song damaged her career. In a 1986 TV interview, she said that the music industry “decided to punish me” and “put a boycott on my records.” She stopped performing protest songs, in part, because she believed they’d become irrelevant. It’s possible she was protecting herself from the pain of what it cost to compose and embody a cry from the soul like “Mississippi Goddam.” Perhaps, her stance shielded her from the awful truth of her protest’s unceasing applicability. Because we’re still too slow, still doing it slow, still actively undoing. The song’s siren is still blaring.

Everybody knows about Minneapolis

Everybody knows about Alligator Alcatraz

Everybody knows about Callais

Goddam