Information is power. Our mission at Portside is to seek out and to provide information that empowers you -- that empowers the left. Every day we search hundreds of sources to connect you with the most interesting, striking and useful material. Just once a year we appeal to you to contribute to make it possible to continue this work. Please help.

 

books

Nina Simone's Backlash Blues

John Lahr London Review of Books
A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

film

Nina Simone's Face

Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic
There is something deeply shameful in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. ​The new film "Nina" proves that the world still isn’t ready to tell her story.

Friday Nite Videos -- July 10, 2015

Portside
Jon Batiste & Stay Human -- St. James Infirmary. Megan Rapinoe: 'Being Yourself Is Most Important.' Retrumplican Party. Rep. Jenny Horne on the Confederate Flag. Movie: What Happened, Miss Simone?

Movie: What Happened, Miss Simone?

Using never-before-heard recordings, rare archival footage and her best-known songs, this is the story of legendary singer and activist Nina Simone.

film

Review: ‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’ Documents Nina Simone’s Rise as Singer and Activist

Manohla Dargis New York Times
From 100 hours of recently unearthed audiotapes recorded over decades, the Liz Garbus film weaves together Nina’s narrative, told largely in her own words. Rare concert footage, archival interviews, along with diaries, letters, interviews with Nina’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, friends and collaborators, make this the most authentic, personal and unflinching telling of the extraordinary life of one of the 20th century’s greatest recording artists.

A Raised Voice

Claudia Roth Pierpont The New Yorker
How Nina Simone turned the movement into music.

Strange Thanks

Robert Meeropol robertmeeropol.com
Although the great red scare of the 1950s almost erased the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit from the public arena, the strange fruit allusion - lynched bodies hanging from trees – was one of genius. It had gotten under our culture’s skin, and as time went on, it seeped out of its pores.
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