Black LP Atlanta: Building the Beloved Community

The Black Legacy Project is a musical celebration of Black history to advance racial solidarity, equity, and belonging.
The Black LP is a national project produced by Music in Common - a nonprofit organization that strengthens, empowers, and connects communities through the universal language - in partnership with community stakeholders at the local level. Developed in the summer of 2020 and launched in September 2021, the Black Legacy Project travels the U.S. bringing together Black and White artists and artists of ALL backgrounds to record present day interpretations of songs central to the Black American experience and compose originals relevant to the pressing calls for change of our time. Community roundtable discussions help inform how these songs are interpreted and written.

In April 2023, the Black Legacy Project traveled home to Atlanta, exploring the rich history of race-relations in what many historians consider the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. The theme for the Black LP ATLANTA was Building the Beloved Community. In the roundtable discussions and musical interpretations, Black and White community members explored the question of what it looks like to carry on Dr. King’s dream of building the beloved community. To explore this question, the project examined and created present-day musical interpretations of the songs “Each Generation” by Arrested Development and “Let it Be Me” by the Indigo Girls. Upon completion, local Black and White artists worked together to write and record an original song, titled “Brave Enough,” about being brave enough to envision and foster the beloved community in their own part of the world.