The great poet Khalil Gibran once said,“Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life, bringing peace, abolishing strife.”

If you have been watching the events unfold in Minneapolis and across the nation over the past month, you can see that truth unfolding in real time.

What we are witnessing is not entirely spontaneous. It is remembered and learned from similar movements and moments in our shared history. It is carried in bodies that have learned, across generations, how to stay present with one another when fear is loud and the future uncertain.

Singing Resistance is one organization that has risen up and has been an important part of the communal care and resistance movement rising in response to this moment and time in Minnesota. It has offered people a way to remain connected physically and emotionally, through shared breath as they learn the new and old songs, which helps them resist the isolating effects of fear. As local composer and participant David Hovick Lohman reported on social media, the movement had 500 participants the first week, 1,000 the second week, and over 2,000 people participated in training and a march that began at Westminster Presbyterian Church before moving outside a local hotel on February 1st.

Music As Resistance Is Not New

This focus on music as a form of resistance is not new. It was learned from the songs of those enslaved, when songs were shared that carried grief but also instructions and hope for escape. Those songs became the music of a long history of marching for justice and equality in this nation. Those songs taught people how to endure, how to communicate under threat, and how to remember themselves when systems were designed to erase them.

Music has never functioned only as inspiration. It has functioned as a way of keeping people present when exhaustion might otherwise send them home. When our speeches feel too thin or our statements feel too small, the body can still hear and remember song. Song reaches places language alone cannot, especially when words are no longer enough. Music gives emotional strength when the world feels heavy and the path forward unclear. It helps people stay together in moments that ask more than they feel they have to give.

Clinical studies now demonstrate what movements have long known. Listening to music for twenty to thirty minutes can lower heart rate and reduce cortisol, the stress hormone that floods the body under threat. Slow, repetitive musical patterns can deepen meditative states, support focus during complex tasks, and foster internal awareness. Researchers have found that familiar music can even help people living with Alzheimer’s or dementia reconnect to memory and the presence of their families and friends when other pathways falter.

Our movements understood this truth long before science caught up. And the people singing in Minneapolis and across the nation understand it now. Holding space musically is not about nostalgia. It centers communities away from fear and toward action. Just as music helps individuals re-regulate, it helps entire communities do the same. Singing together creates room for courage to return and for persistence to take root.

From the Black Gospel Tradition to LGBTQ Justice

In the Black Gospel traditions, songs have long lived as theology made audible. Gospel music has always held grief and joy in the same breath, lament and hope in the same body. LGBTQ people have deeply shaped and sustained it, even when they were denied safety or full recognition within it.

Queer and gender expansive musicians have always been present in the Black church and in the justice movements that rose within it. They carried songs into marches, jail cells, sanctuaries, and organizing spaces, too often singing for movements that did not yet know how to protect them. Even so, they held communities together through sound, helping people remain grounded, human, and connected when the work was long and the cost on human bodies and lives was real.

Singers like Willmer Broadnax, known as Little Ax, carried the emotional depth and spiritual authority of Black Gospel both into and beyond movements with narrow definitions of holiness. His voice held devotion and complexity together, refusing the idea that faith required erasure of himself as a Black transgender man. Others, like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, reshaped American music entirely, carrying Black Gospel beyond church walls and into the formation of Rock and Roll. Her bisexuality and relationships with both her Church of God in Christ (COGIC) first husband and partner, Marie Knight, challenged the church that raised her.

Queerness has always been part of the work of seeking justice. Artists like Sylvester, whose roots were formed in the Black Pentacostal church, carried gospel sensibilities into LGBTQ liberation movements with them when they came out, at a time when institutions, especially churches, sought to silence queer voices. And when Shirley Miller, known as Mother Shirley, sang “Oh Happy Day” in 1969 with the Edwin Hawkins Singers at the Harlem Cultural Festival, she was standing inside this long lineage, modeling how to hold space musically so other people’s fear or condemnation did not have the final word on her authenticity or her being a lesbian.

By refusing to diminish who they knew themselves to be, these musicians taught generations how to stay present with one another and come back into relationship. They remind us that the movement of the Spirit has always traveled beyond and between the boundaries that institutions and governments try to impose.

Singing Resistance today draws from this lineage, whether it names it explicitly or not. It carries a tradition shaped by Black, queer, and gender expansive people who understood that song is how movements stay human, how courage returns to the body, and how communities remain connected when the work is long and the outcome uncertain.

Lohman is not new to the continuing march toward the formation of the Beloved Community that Dr. King focused upon. In Minneapolis, his song For All the Children (YouTube) centered the fight for marriage equality in the state between 2012 and 2016.

Here are a few of the lyrics from Lohman’s song that still sing true today:

Though the day may not yet be here,
We trust it soon will be
When your children will be free…

Oh, may our hearts and minds be opened…
May there be room enough for everyone inside…
May that welcome be our song.

These words name what Singing Resistance has always held. Welcome is not abstract. It is something we practice with our breath, our bodies, and our willingness to make room for one another when fear tells us to close ranks. As another of Lohman’s songs reminds us, when we remain in relationship as a movement, “Together we’ll build a world where there’s room for all to be; a world where we’ll live our lives, liberated, strong, and free.”

When people sing together in Minneapolis and across the nation, they are not inventing something new. They are stepping into a lineage of courage shaped by Black Gospel, by queer faithfulness, and by communities who have always known that song is how we remember who we are. Song is how welcome survives. Song is how justice stays human. And song is how love at the center finds its way forward, again and again.
So, we ask you – what songs frame the inherited memory of justice work, and LGBTQ welcome in your congregations and fellowships? We invite you to sing those songs again, and to learn some new ones as a community in the coming weeks and months (including from the new UUA virtual hymnal). We would love to hear from you. Drop us a message at lgbtq@uua.org and title it Music of Resistance. We will share the playlist next month.

References and Resources

Singing Resistance

Visit Singing Resistance Training and Toolkit to learn more about the work of Singing Resistance or to participate in one of their training sessions.

Willmer Broadnax (1916-1992)

Willmer Broadnax, known professionally as Little Ax, was a Black transgender man and renowned gospel singer whose powerful voice carried the emotional depth of Black Gospel while challenging narrow definitions of holiness and gender within the church.

Listen to The Lord is My Sunshine (YouTube)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973)

Sister Rosetta Tharpe was a queer Black gospel musician whose innovative guitar style transformed American music and laid the foundation for Rock and Roll. She blurred sacred and secular boundaries, carrying Black Gospel into new cultural spaces while living openly outside conventional norms of gender and sexuality.

Listen: to Didn’t It Rain (YouTube)

Sylvester (1947–1988)

Sylvester was a Black gay singer shaped by the Black church and gospel tradition, who carried those musical roots into LGBTQ liberation movements as well as mainstream Disco in the 1970s. His work offered joy, affirmation, and sanctuary at a time when queer communities faced profound violence and erasure. Sylvester became one of the many victims of the AIDS pandemic during the 1980s.

Listen to How Great Thou Art (YouTube)

Mother Shirley Miller

Shirley Miller, widely known as Mother Shirley, is a Black lesbian gospel singer, preacher, and movement elder who has been a foundational figure in Black LGBTQ Christian life for decades. She is married toYvette Flunder, Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and her singing and spiritual leadership have been central to Black LGBTQ liberation, worship, and justice movements, including the legacy of Singing Resistance.

Listen to Oh Happy Day (YouTube)

David Hovick Lohman

David Hovick Lohman is a Minneapolis-based composer and organizer whose work centers on communal singing as a form of resistance and care. For more than a decade, Lohman has helped communities sing their way through moments of fear, change, and moral courage. You can contact him if you would like to incorporate one of his songs into your gatherings.

Listen to We’ll Build a World (YouTube)