John Brown’s Body and the Battle Hymn of the Republic
For example, when Sherman began the March to the Sea, his troops started singing the Battle Hymn. He said it was the most rousing rendition he’d ever heard.
There’s always this:
An anthem that stood for the Viet Nam era anti0war sentiment and helped get the ball rolling.
The above is the original, but this below is the more commonly recognized sorta-canonical version:
Which was one of the first mainstream movies to explicitly make a hero of a totally American racial misfit defeating White Supremacist Bubba Wannabe Slavemasters.
It did not make an era. But it was emblematic of it.
The correct answer to this thread is the little known song “Fook Ye, King John, And Signe The Magna Carta” from 1214.
But if you’re not buying that, there are songs for different purposes. I’m sure the French Revolution had its songs and the Civil War clearly did. A number protested the Vietnam Conflict including those by Starr and Country Joe. Songs like Strange Fruit challenged several stereotypes and others energized civil rights reform.
Hey maybe “One jump and whistle and one fart” was actually a radical protest song against feudalism and absolutist monarchy that Henry II just thought was a funny song about farts 
The song is notable, but the Anti-Apartheid movement was already large and active, and Mandela already internationally famous, before the song was released in 1984. The movement gave rise to the song, rather than the other way around.
4 dead in ohio.
I am very much of that era and my recollection is of a wide awareness and hatred of apartheid. Sporting boycotts and controversies were a constant source of discussion as were the type of sanctions and pressures to apply (political, financial, sporting). It certainly wasn’t the case that the population in general were ignorant of what was happening or whether it was a terrible situation or not.
But I’m not sure we are saying anything vastly different. That bedrock of awareness and opposition may already be there (in the UK I suggest it certainly was) but focussing it into meaningful policy and pressure for action sometimes requires an emblematic or iconic person or event and that is what the song helped to provide. It certainly did amongst the young (as you suggest). That particular generation grew up in a world where apartheid opposition now had a human face and I’m sure it is no coincidence that the pressure to act only grew as that cohort reached voting age with that face and that song clear in their head.
Mmm, maybe. But I think Mandela was already well-established as the embodiment of the injustice of apartheid. The song was released in 1984; I recall a campaign when I was in university (before 1984) around the renaming of a building in his honour. I don’t recall anybody, regardless of their views on the renaming, not knowing immediately who he was and why he might be honoured in that way. The song may well have cemented his emblematic status, but it certainly didn’t create it.
Wikipedia tells me that a focus on Nelson Mandela was an intentional focus of the Anti-Apartheid movement from the early 1980s. He was made a Freeman of the City of Glasgow in 1981, and had streets named after him in other British cities from at least as early as that year.
“I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy in 1972 inspired the hearts of millions of women who successfully gained their rights in the 1970s. “I Am Woman” broke barriers and was huge in its day.
“Ghost Town” by The Specials was a big, big deal in Thatcher’s Britain, but I suspect it was more a reaction to, rather than an instigator of, social unrest.
Mostly what I think it achieved was annoying Margaret Thatcher and pulling back the false veneer of prosperity from her tenure, but it also crystallized the way a lot of people were already feeling and energized the protest movement of the time.
I’m not saying he was completely unknown, but he was far less widely known in the early 80’s UK until a purposeful push was made to make him so. The song was a key part of that.
Pockets of recognition and awareness would be present in all sorts of places, not least of which university students and certain flavours of local council with naming powers so I’m not surprised that a building or street was named after him (even Del Boy’s flat was in “Nelson Mandela House - Peckham”).
Let me put it like this. Prior to the song, he had a certain level of public recognition and was one of the main figures of the anti-apartheid movement. After the song, everyone knew who he was and he became the face and name of the anti-apartheid movement.
(Heck, even Jerry Dammers himself was apparently unaware of him until around 1983 and he was in a band well known for it’s social awareness and protest tendencies)
The thing with protests against the Vietnam War or Apartheid or whatever, is that there were a lot of songs associated with them. It’s hard to say that any specific one of those songs was the one that made the difference, and even if one could somehow pin down the most important song associated with any given cause, if that specific song didn’t exist, some other song would surely have taken its place.
The 1960s Christmas carol that is also an anti-war song deserves an honorable mention.
Yeah that is my impression too. As I said I was too young to remember (or at least to care about what Apartheid or South Africa was) when the song came out but later in the 80s and early 90s when I did it was completely universal to know how terrible apartheid was, and who Nelson Mandela was. Not just for kids like me (pretentious little prick I was ) who did pay attention to the news and what was going on the world, but also for kids I knew who didn’t and really only paid attention to Top of the Pops and Match of the Day, It was that the song helped make happen, and it made a difference I think. From the point of view of the ruling Tory government, the “activists” are always going to be complaining about something, they aren’t going to change their attitude to the Apartheid-based government of South Africa because of them, but when the whole of society (or a large majority) is of the opinion that Apartheid is obscene and they should be a pariah, they can’t get away with “business as usual”.
It couldn’t have hurt that, as far as protest songs go, it was (and still is) an absolute cracker. I believe it also counts towards another current thread elsewhere which asks about “songs which start with the chorus”
Yeah I’d posit that the only thing they can really do is raise the profile of the cause and, at most, take it from minority opinion among a “politicized” minority to widely held, almost universal, opinion. The examples of “Free Nelson Mandela” and “Biko” discussed above did that IMO.
Other examples, while completely synonymous with a particular cause (e.g. We Shall Overcome, Marseillaises, I Am Woman, Ohio, John Brown’s Body, etc.) weren’t IMO the reason most people were aware of that cause.
Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” helped make Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.
I don’t think that “raising awareness” is all a song can do, though. It’s one thing to be aware of an injustice; it’s another to be willing to take to the streets to fight it. A song can’t make that whole difference by itself, but it sure can contribute to it.
I was 12 and living in the UK when this song came out and while I knew what apartheid was, I had no idea who Nelson Mandela was - and the song actually does a great job of describing who he was and his plight. It’s actually hard to think that the only pictures that existed of Mandela were those that were taken when he was leading the ANC before his arrest.
I also remember both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations labelling the ANC as a terrorist group (and Mandela by association). I would say it made a world of difference as far as raising awareness of who Nelson Mandela was, and as others have said, it was a cracking tune. I wasn’t aware of “Biko,” which came out four year prior, and a year later Steve Van Zandt released “Sun City.” That was a pretty effective period of awareness of the effects of apartheid.
“Do They Know It’s Christmas?” came out in Christmas 1984, and while there has been a lot of revisionism about the intent of the song, Geldof has wisely sidestepped that issue and made the point that the song made lots of money for famine relief, which is the most important thing. As a 12 year old, I bought the single and felt I was doing something good for the Ethiopian famine victims, and it generated a whole period of charity songs - “We Are The World,” “Tears Are Not Enough,” etc.
I even bought a compilation of games for my Commodore 64 called “Soft Aid” that donated profits to famine relief…
That song has always bugged the hell out of me, What, did Muslim and Jewish Ethiopians not deserve sympathy?