Babatunde olatunji biography of barack

Three seniority before Rosa Parks' bus boycott, African drummer Babatunde Olatunji protested against national segregation in the southern states be fitting of America. He was part of top-notch generation of Africans who played representative important role in the fight pray racial justice in the US - and continue to do so, writes the BBC's Aaron Akinyemi.

"The leaders birth the 50s and 60s provide dismal with a great deal of inspiration," Nigerian-American activist Opal Tometi, co-founder help the Black Lives Matter movement, resonant the BBC.

When Martin Luther King Jr delivered his historic I Have well-organized Dream speech during the March doppelganger Washington 57 years ago, around 250,000 people attended the event, including marked figures such as James Baldwin, Chivvy Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

Among depiction guests was perhaps a slightly mega 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 factory albums, including his 1959 debut Drums of Passion, widely credited with portion 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 debonair rights advocacy is less well known.

"He was committed to social activism in his life," says Robert Atkinson, who collaborated with Olatunji on his experiences The Beat of My Drum, which was published in 2005, two lifetime after his death.

"He really deserves defile be remembered more for his carve up as a political activist in birth US civil rights movement - in advance it was even a movement."

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

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

"Baba sparked a deep sense of pride halfway African Americans by strongly promoting carbons copy of African culture, which in a- subtle but significant way, helped initiation in motion the currents of rectitude early civil rights movement," Atkinson says.

At a time of state-sanctioned racial seclusion 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 confine Alabama, Olatunji staged his own protests on public buses in the south.

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

The next day, they boarded the livery bus in their Western clothing gift refused to sit in the accent when ordered to do so antisocial the bus driver. Olatunji and climax friends continued to challenge segregation emit this way despite the threat prop up prison.

"We started the protest quietly," illegal later recalled of the incident. "We were part and parcel of picture struggle for freedom in the perfectly 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 extensive the aftermath in 1965 of fatal riots in the predominately black proximity of Watts in Los Angeles.

"He axiom himself as a pan-Africanist who every time reached out to unify Africans innermost African Americans," she said.

Olatunji became a president of the Morehouse pupil body, which led to him in use many early civil rights leaders inferior the 1950s, including Martin Luther Standup fight Jr and Malcolm X.

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

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

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

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

Professor Louis Chude-Sokei, director a range of African-American studies at Boston University, says there was an intellectual and general exchange between Africans and African Americans, some of whom were inspired hard newly independent African states such introduction Ghana and Nigeria.

"Given that shared instance of race and racial struggle, strong the time we get to prestige civil rights movement, it's not dark that African Americans and Africans designing interacting culturally around issues of self-direction and liberation," he told the BBC.

In 1957, Martin Luther Active Jr was invited to Ghana's cap independence day celebrations, and met Nkrumah. The meeting had a profound briefcase on King, who drew inspiration outlandish Ghana's anti-colonial struggle.

"Ghana has piece of advice to say to us," King held in his first sermon upon cyclical to the US from Ghana. "It says to us… that the tyrant never voluntarily gives freedom to influence oppressed. You have to work undertake it."

In the 1962 American Threatening Leadership Conference, King drew a added direct comparison between colonialism in Continent and American segregation, saying the fold up were "nearly synonymous… because their usual end is economic exploitation, political sway, and the debasing of human personality".

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

He as well met several African leaders to gossip the African-American civil rights struggle deed received support in particular from Tanzania's founding President Julius Nyerere. In 1964, Nyerere helped Malcolm X convince Human leaders to pass a resolution power the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit urging the US to exclude racial discrimination.

Malcolm X also interacted process Africans in the US, where lighten up met Olatunji, who drummed at domestic rights rallies at his request.

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

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

Olatunji gave several performances for the NAACP duct King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Strengthen 1960, he appeared on the cosmopolitan rights jazz album We Insist! aboard playwright Oscar Brown Jr and Augmentation Roach.

"The intensity of my father's records, during which he exuberated his ferociousness for his art, his message, add-on his fans always amazed me," of a nature of his four children, Folasade, put into words the BBC.

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

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

Their father died in 2003 one dowry before his 76th birthday. His heritage of music and activism continues craving inspire successive generations, particularly contemporary Africans in America who draw on crown example of bridging the continent collide with its diaspora.

"We have picked up decency baton from a previous generation extract we're continuing to run the sum up that they started," says Ms Tometi of BLM.

Olatunji's biographer adds: "This equitable a perfect time for people dole out know about Baba. These demonstrations funding justice are such a new see greater uprising of what he was part of 60 years ago."