The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #37699   Message #528491
Posted By: GUEST
15-Aug-01 - 11:26 AM
Thread Name: Folk Alliance vs. NAACP
Subject: RE: Folk Alliance vs. NAACP
North American Folk Alliance doesn't have a broad base of support, so there isn't any interest in bailing them out or rubbing their nose in their bad decision.

My guess is, most national folk acts will treat the NAACP boycott the same way they did the South Africa boycott. There were a few highly visible musicians,ie Paul Simon, who violated that boycott. But for the most part there was tremendous solidarity and resolve to keep the boycott intact.

I doubt there is that level of commitment to this boycott among many left leaning folkies, to be quite honest. NAACP is a pretty conservative, insular, and parochial organization, which organizes almost exclusively for its own constituency. Political folkies nowadays are much more diversified than they were in the past, when they were so strongly tied to the black American civil rights movement.

While some constituencies in the broader NA folk community still maintain strong ties to the Democratic National Party, and the Old Guard civil rights leadership who have assimilated themselves into the US mandarin classes, most progressive and radical left folkies, most of whom are post-revival at this point, just don't have the ties to the black American civil rights movement that the folk revival generation did.