No music is made in a vacuum. Social and political changes in Durham in the 1960s and 1970s deeply influenced the city’s music.

For decades, Durham was nationally renowned for its strong black middle class and black institutions, including the NC Mutual Life Insurance Company and the North Carolina College for Negroes (now NCCU). Nonetheless, racial discrimination was rampant in Durham, segregation was still law at the start of the 1960s, and many African Americans lived in poverty. As part of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Durham's black residents fought against these injustices through a variety of efforts. Notable examples of resistance against racial oppression included sit-in protests, anti-poverty organizations like Operation Breakthrough, and Malcolm X Liberation University.

In response to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, African American performers began to express their racial and cultural pride in a variety of ways. In earlier years, African Americans were referred to as Negroes, whereas using "black" as a racial description was often considered to be insulting. But by the late 1960s, the outlook of many African Americans shifted, and “blackness” became a source of pride. In Durham, one group illustrated this development by naming itself the Black Experience Band. This funk band would later wrestle with difficult questions of racial progess when it released the song “Has Time Really Changed?" with the Communicators in 1974.