Nina Simone was a pianist, singer, composer, and revolutionary cultural worker who made her music a weapon in the struggle for Black liberation, and who paid a heavy price for it. Born Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, she was a child prodigy who trained as a classical pianist and dreamed of becoming the first Black concert pianist in America. She was turned away from the Curtis Institute of Music, a rejection she always believed was rooted in racism. Playing in nightclubs to earn a living, she began to sing and became one of the most original and powerful artists of her time, fusing classical, jazz, blues, gospel, and folk into a sound entirely her own.

Her friendship with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry transformed her politics. In long conversations about Marx, Lenin, and revolution, Hansberry introduced her to revolutionary thought and to the anticolonial struggles sweeping Africa. Simone came to see the Black freedom movement in the United States as part of a worldwide fight against white supremacy and colonialism. After the murder of Medgar Evers and the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, she wrote "Mississippi Goddam." She followed it with "Four Women," "To Be Young, Gifted and Black," and songs that rejected the gentle protest of the era in favor of fury and defiance. She embraced Black Power and Pan-Africanism, sang at rallies and in support of the movement, and counted Kwame Ture, Miriam Makeba, and James Baldwin among her close comrades.

The industry and the state made her pay. Radio stations across the South banned "Mississippi Goddam," and distributors sent back cartons of her records broken in half. Concert bookings dried up, and she was branded difficult and dangerous at the height of her talent. In 1970 she left the United States and lived in exile in Barbados, in Liberia at Makeba's urging, and in Europe, until her death in France in 2003. Her legacy endures as the model of an artist who refused to separate her art from the struggle, declaring that it was an artist's duty to reflect the times.