The song is her response to the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi; and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. On the recording she cynically announces the song as "a show tune, but the show hasn't been written for it yet". The song begins jauntily, with a show tune feel, but demonstrates its political focus early on with its refrain "Alabama's got me so upset, Tennessee's made me lose my rest, and everybody knows about Mississippi goddam". In the song she rails on the common argument at the time that civil rights activists and African Americans should "go slow" and make changes in the United States incrementally: "Keep on sayin' 'go slow'...to do things gradually would bring more tragedy. Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it? I don't know, I don't know. You don't have to live next to me, just give me my equality!"

Feldstein demonstrates Simone’s increasing politicization through textual analysis of songs like “Mississippi Goddam”, her involvement with various organizations, and her on-stage embrace of African culture and clothing. Feldstein analysis describes Simone’s denunciation of the “going slow” and outspoken criticism of gradual change in race relations in the early 1960s, much before the traditionally-held rise of black power or second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Feldstein presents accounts of her fundraising benefits for SNCC, CORE, NAACP and other groups to show her desirability as a performer whose music, training, and background were accessible and well-received by whites and blacks of different classes. Feldstein describes Simone’s romanticized reception of Africa upon a 1961 trip to Lagos, Nigeria, which was a pivotal turn to physically linking African American struggle with African freedom through black cultural nationalism (via clothes, the “natural”). Simone had great success in