All the Rage

The story of how one woman changed the course of the country when she desegregated that most maligned and misunderstood emotion-black rage-on our most hallowed stage. Through a retelling of the birth and afterlife of Nina Simone's protest music, All The Rage is a new biography of black rage, a counter-history that breaks the African-American singer free from the disparaging labels so frequently attributed to her. Salamishah Tillet, contributing Culture critic to the New York Times, argues that Nina embodies a new narrative of black rage. Through her voice and black female body, black rage was reborn. Her most famous protest songs decried not only racial crimes, but gender violence, enabling her to uniquely channel the despair of young people coming of age in civil rights, the women's liberation, and eventually black power movements.