As soon as she started to espouse her communist and anti-racist politics in her songs, the record companies made an example of her and dropped her, and she spent a lot of years destitute.
In the case of Nina Simone, the CIA had to use trickery. As Wilford uncovered, Simone was sent on a tour to Nigeria in 1961 by the American Society of African Culture, a CIA front organization. As Keefe notes, “It’s one thing for the government to pressure Louis Armstrong to go to Africa on a propaganda mission and have him grudgingly but knowingly go along. It’s a very different thing to covertly send an artist on false pretenses. And Nina Simone was no patriot. She ended up renouncing the United States and living abroad. She called it, ‘the United Snakes of America.’”