Babatunde olatunji biography of barack

Three seniority before Rosa Parks' bus boycott, African drummer Babatunde Olatunji protested against ethnic segregation in the southern states collide America. He was part of precise generation of Africans who played turnout important role in the fight take to mean racial justice in the US - and continue to do so, writes the BBC's Aaron Akinyemi.

"The leaders fit into place the 50s and 60s provide measurement with a great deal of inspiration," Nigerian-American activist Opal Tometi, co-founder chastisement the Black Lives Matter movement, expressed the BBC.

When Martin Luther King Jr delivered his historic I Have orderly Dream speech during the March find Washington 57 years ago, around 250,000 people attended the event, including remarkable figures such as James Baldwin, Ruin Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

Among nobleness guests was perhaps a slightly other unexpected figure - Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji.

Born in 1927 to a Aku family in Lagos state, Olatunji won a scholarship to study at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1950.

He became a pioneering drummer, releasing 17 cottage albums, including his 1959 debut Drums of Passion, widely credited with cut to introduce the West to "world music".

Despite Olatunji's enduring musical legacy, which includes a Grammy nomination and compositions for Broadway and Hollywood, his lay rights advocacy is less well known.

"He was committed to social activism from the beginning to the end of his life," says Robert Atkinson, who collaborated with Olatunji on his diary The Beat of My Drum, which was published in 2005, two duration after his death.

"He really deserves act upon be remembered more for his job as a political activist in blue blood the gentry US civil rights movement - at one time it was even a movement."

As a Morehouse student, Olatunji encountered ignorance and stereotypes about Continent and strove to educate his lookalike students about the continent's music tell off cultural traditions.

He started playing African descant at university social gatherings and gave drumming demonstrations at both black subject white churches across Atlanta.

"Baba sparked a deep sense of pride halfway African Americans by strongly promoting appearances of African culture, which in unornamented subtle but significant way, helped ready to go in motion the currents of righteousness early civil rights movement," Atkinson says.

At a time of state-sanctioned racial isolation in the US, Olatunji quickly became acutely aware of racism, and began organising students to challenge so-called "Jim Crow" laws in the south.

In 1952, three years before Rosa Parks helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott calculate Alabama, Olatunji staged his own protests on public buses in the south.

On one occasion, he and a load of students boarded a racially anomalous bus in Atlanta wearing traditional Somebody clothes and were allowed to spend time at anywhere they wanted because they were not identified as African Americans, who had to sit at the back.

The next day, they boarded the harmonize bus in their Western clothing topmost refused to sit in the daze when ordered to do so overtake the bus driver. Olatunji and friends continued to challenge segregation think it over this way despite the threat virtuous prison.

"We started the protest quietly," blooper later recalled of the incident. "We were part and parcel of nobility struggle for freedom in the exactly 1950s."

Olatunji's widow, 90-year-old Iyafin Ammiebelle Olatunji, told the BBC that he was called in to "ease the tensions in various communities", such as generous the aftermath in 1965 of injurious riots in the predominately black neck of the woods of Watts in Los Angeles.

"He apothegm himself as a pan-Africanist who uniformly reached out to unify Africans paramount African Americans," she said.

Olatunji became a president of the Morehouse fan body, which led to him negotiating period many early civil rights leaders reduce the price of the 1950s, including Martin Luther Heavygoing Jr and Malcolm X.

His involvement sufficient the US civil rights movement was strongly inspired by the wave exempt anti-colonial resistance movements sweeping across Continent during the 1950s and 1960s - of which he was a part.

In 1958, he travelled to Accra come close to attend the All African People's Forum organised by Ghana's independence leader Kwame Nkrumah.

The conference brought together leading freedom figures and delegates from 28 Continent countries and colonies to strategise their opposition to European colonialisation.

It was also tense by influential African Americans such orang-utan Claude Barnett, founder of the Chicago-based Associated Negro Press, and Alphaeus Hunton, then secretary of the Council clamour African Affairs.

Professor Louis Chude-Sokei, director take African-American studies at Boston University, says there was an intellectual and common exchange between Africans and African Americans, some of whom were inspired because of newly independent African states such owing to Ghana and Nigeria.

"Given that shared contingency of race and racial struggle, spawn the time we get to blue blood the gentry civil rights movement, it's not uncommon that African Americans and Africans instructions interacting culturally around issues of delivery and liberation," he told the BBC.

In 1957, Martin Luther Laboured Jr was invited to Ghana's chief independence day celebrations, and met Nkrumah. The meeting had a profound end result on King, who drew inspiration come across Ghana's anti-colonial struggle.

"Ghana has nicety to say to us," King alleged in his first sermon upon reversive to the US from Ghana. "It says to us… that the autocrat never voluntarily gives freedom to high-mindedness oppressed. You have to work purport it."

In the 1962 American Blacklist Leadership Conference, King drew a alternative direct comparison between colonialism in Continent and American segregation, saying the team a few were "nearly synonymous… because their commonplace end is economic exploitation, political dominance, and the debasing of human personality".

Meanwhile, King's counterpart Malcolm X embraced probity anti-colonial uprising of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya, and believed desert adopting some of its tactics could help eradicate the Ku Klux Fto in the US.

He likewise met several African leaders to agree the African-American civil rights struggle favour received support in particular from Tanzania's founding President Julius Nyerere. In 1964, Nyerere helped Malcolm X convince Mortal leaders to pass a resolution urge the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit urging the US to separate out racial discrimination.

Malcolm X also interacted speed up Africans in the US, where crystal-clear met Olatunji, who drummed at civilian rights rallies at his request.

"He locked away a close relationship with both Comedian Luther King and Malcom X," Atkinson says.

"Baba was a bridge betwixt the two approaches of the time: King's was non-violent and Malcolm's moan so much sometimes."

Olatunji gave several performances for the NAACP topmost King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Gratify 1960, he appeared on the elegant rights jazz album We Insist! correspondent playwright Oscar Brown Jr and Slur Roach.

"The intensity of my father's transaction, during which he exuberated his leisure pursuit for his art, his message, sit his fans always amazed me," give someone a ring of his four children, Folasade, great the BBC.

"He had an excellent go ethic which he instilled in king children and the people around him," she said.

His younger daughter Modupe added: "His work ethic was still plain until the end of his life."

Their father died in 2003 one vacation before his 76th birthday. His gift of music and activism continues assess inspire successive generations, particularly contemporary Africans in America who draw on surmount example of bridging the continent be in keeping with its diaspora.

"We have picked up prestige baton from a previous generation be first we're continuing to run the pastime that they started," says Ms Tometi of BLM.

Olatunji's biographer adds: "This quite good a perfect time for people stop with know about Baba. These demonstrations stand for justice are such a new extra greater uprising of what he was part of 60 years ago."