Meet the Resistance Revival Chorus, Where You Can Sing Out Your Political Frustrations

Finding hope, grief, and the power to fight, from the back row of a women’s protest choir
Image may contain Face Human Person Sunglasses Accessories Accessory Head Advertisement Collage Poster and Animal
Graphic by Drew Litowitz, photos of Resistance Revival Chorus members via Getty and provided

Emma Goldman famously said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” The quote, however, is apocryphal. The anarchist and free-love advocate actually wrote, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” It’s a more pragmatic resistance desire. After all, songs don’t get children out of detainment camps. An orchestra won’t permanently fortify Roe v. Wade. When, in 1964, Nina Simone released “Mississippi Goddam,” the most terrifying and beautiful protest song ever written, white-supremacist murderers didn’t go to prison. Even so, in times of trouble, people desire “beautiful, radiant things”—for inspiration, for hope. We want transcendence. We want music. Which is why, on a cold weeknight last winter, I found myself at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, waiting for the Resistance Revival Chorus.

The Resistance Revival Chorus is a collective of women protest singers, founded in the wake of the 2017 Women’s March. Since then, they’ve backed Kesha during her chill-inducing Grammy performance, sung Spanish lullabies to detained migrant children outside a New York holding facility, and been shouted-out by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“Mood: @ResistanceRevChorus,” she tweeted last year, along with a video clip). This spring, they’ll play Bonnaroo and release their debut album.

I first heard about the Resistance Revival Chorus through Ginny Suss, one of its co-founders. Suss used to be the Roots’ tour manager, then helped run and found, respectively, the culture publications Okayplayer and OkayAfrica. From there, she served as one of the producers behind the 2017 Women’s March. On that day, over four million people gathered to protest the president’s misogyny. Backstage, Suss chatted with the singer Harry Belafonte, a veteran civil rights activist and a co-chair of the March. He said to her, “When the movement is strong, the music is strong.” Suss listened.

As many wondered how to maintain the anger, joy, and sisterhood of that day, Suss and six other women—Sarah Sophie Flicker, Shruti Ganguly, Alyssa Klein, Jenna Lauter, Paola Mendoza, and Nelini Stamp—turned to song. Today, Suss and Mendoza, a filmmaker and activist, are the Chorus’ official managers. Initially, the idea was to “franchise” the Resistance Revival Chorus. The founders even created an online Tool Kit for those looking to start their own chapters; thus far, there are at least 10 related choirs listed on Facebook. But the New York chapter—mostly comprised of professional musicians—has become an active presence at protests, rallies, and vigils (chorus members recently participated in a choreographed chant outside Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial). They also hold regular shows where political organizers and special guests—ranging from ’90s-alternative favorite Natalie Merchant to soul up-and-comer Madison McFerrin—fortify the group’s size and power.

Which brings us back to that cold December night at the Knitting Factory: When 38 women filed onstage, singing the gospel-standard-turned-civil-rights-anthem “Woke Up This Morning (With My Mind Stayed on Freedom),” dressed in all white, clapping as they sang, I felt, for the first time in a long time, that thing so many of us have been unsuccessfully chasing. I felt hope.

Many of the women wore shirts bearing a quote from the poet and activist Toi Derricotte: “Joy is an act of resistance.” Between songs, activists urged the audience to take specific actions: first, to sing along, but then to follow progressive groups on Twitter, to give money and time, work, work, work. Chorus members backed the sentiment with their own actions: At that moment, Mendoza was at the Mexico/U.S. border filming a caravan of Central Americans seeking safe passage and asylum. Meanwhile, the singers raised money for National Bail Out, an organization fighting the systems of pretrial detention and mass incarceration that disproportionately affect black Americans. That’s the beautiful rabbithole of protest music: A song leads to an organization which leads to an action which leads back to a song.

At the show, I ran into an old friend and her daughter, a soft-eyed nine-year-old. Together the three of us sang along with “Ella’s Song,” by Sweet Honey in the Rock: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest, cannot rest...” we shouted, soul clapping in double time. When we reached the most chilling part—“Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons”—my friend teared up, and her daughter hugged her. Everyone was crying. I refused to believe the tears were useless tears: We can grieve and want to fight, too. Hope, joy, grief—music is the only medium that allows for all of these feelings, in literal harmony.

I left the show feeling uplifted, and convinced for the first time since high school that I needed to sing. Which is how, two months later, I found myself in the green room at City Winery in downtown Manhattan. The Chorus agreed to let me join in on a song—but only one, since my lack of rehearsal is concerning to all.

I watch as the women put on makeup, curl each other’s hair, eat sandwiches, and drink ginger tea. I also chat with the choir’s guiding voice, musical director Abena Koomson-Davis, who’s sporting indigo-blue lipstick on this evening. I am not surprised Koomson-Davis appeared in the Broadway show Fela! as Fela’s mother, nor am I surprised she is the Ethics Chair at a progressive private school in New York City; it’s the combination of these two roles that is mind-blowing.

Koomson-Davis gives me a quick lesson in organizing a grassroots liberation organization: “There’s a tension in group formation and in stages of intimacy,” she says. “We’re beginning to crack the surface of how we celebrate each other… and how that intersects with our social identities.” She pauses, to make sure I do not leave out the meat of this. “Blackness, whiteness, social-economic status, sexuality—things that are complex and hard to talk about because of the world we live in… [The Chorus is a] place where we have to talk about privilege at different levels. We are in group identity formation.”

Onstage, after the opening song, Koomson-Davis says, “We honor the tradition we’re steeped in, the civil rights tradition, the social justice tradition, that we as black women have led.” It’s the first time I have been at a show where such a large and racially diverse group not only has a black spokesperson and leader, but the white women in the group integrate themselves into the larger whole rather than the other way around.

Koomson-Davis organizes the audience into a call and response for “Where There Is Light in the Soul,” a setting of a Chinese proverb by the composer Sharon Durant. The chorus sings, “When there is harmony in the home, there is honor in the nation/When there is honor in the nation, there is peace in the world.” At rehearsal, Koomson-Davis said she always hears a sigh from the crowd on that line. On cue, the crowd sighs.

Madison McFerrin, one of the evening’s featured guests, performs an introspective anthem about police brutality, an original called “Can You See?” “They say ‘stop, step back, hands up, look down’/But that won’t keep you off the ground,” she sings, before segueing into an eerie “Star Spangled Banner.” I realize it’s almost time and head over to the side of the stage. The song I’m joining in on is “This Joy,” which shares a tune and structure with “This Little Light of Mine.” I stay in the back row, singing full voice, feeling... good. Being part of that communal breath, sound, and vibration is fantastic; there’s a reason humans have always sung, in times of hardship and celebration, for work and play and prayer. If Ginny Suss told me I could join the chorus for real, I’d jump.

“The more we are a choir, the more the tune is forced to change.” This is the final line from actress and activist Amber Tamblyn’s 2017 New York Times essay about #MeToo and sexual harassment. “We are learning that the more we open our mouths, the more we become a choir,” is the penultimate line. Tamblyn was writing metaphorically, but the Resistance Revival Chorus is not taking it metaphorically. They work to change the tune.

Months later, during a writers’ conference in Portland, Oregon, I stop at a coffee shop for breakfast and strike up a conversation with another writer. As we sit and talk, a woman I recognize comes up to my new friend to say hello; it’s Toi Derricotte, author of the line “Joy is an act of resistance.” I am shy but introduce myself anyway, saying, “I have something special to tell you.” When I explain about the Chorus, pulling up a photo of the group on my phone, she sits and puts her hands over her face. When she removes them, her eyes are wet. “I have lived so much in despair,” she says, “and then… this.”