9/20/2006
"High Culture and Black America:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1900-1920"
Laurence A. Glasco History Department University of Pittsburgh May 28, 1997
Preliminary Draft
Do not cite or quote without permission. 9/20/2006 On a beautiful day in the Fall of 1994, officers of the State Historical Commission traveled to
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and unveiled a marker at the former home of the National Negro Opera
Company.1 The Opera Company, headquartered in the African-American neighborhood of Homewood, had been founded in 1941 by a woman of extraordinary talent and dedication, Mary Cardwell Dawson.
This opera impresario came from a Southern, blue-collar background. She was born in Madison, North
Carolina and, around 1900, moved with her family to Homestead, Pennsylvania, a steel town located next to Pittsburgh. Mary's father, James Cardwell, labored at the Harbison and Walker Brickyard in West
Homestead, and was active in the Park Place A.M.E. Church choir. James and his wife, Elizabeth, encouraged Mary's interest in music and supported her continuing musical education. After Mary graduated from high school in 1925, she left town in order to continue her musical training--at Boston's
New England Conservatory of Music, at Chicago's Musical College, and at a school operated by the
Metropolitan Opera Company. In Boston Mary met and married a young electrical engineer, Walter
Dawson, and, toward the end of the 1920s, returned to Homestead. "The Madame," as she was affectionately called, became a leading force in Pittsburgh's musical life. She organized the Cardwell
School of Music and Cardwell Dawson Choir, started the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Association of
Negro Musicians, brought black opera stars and other musicians to Pittsburgh, and became president of the
1 The dedication ceremony occurred on September 25, 1994. The home, located at 7101 Apple Street, is a distinguished 13-room Queen Anne-style house, purchased in the early 1930s by William A. "Woogie" Harris, a barber and numbers czar of black Pittsburgh. For more on Harris and his partner, Gus Greenlee, owner of the Pittburgh Crawfords baseball team, see Rob Ruck, Sandlot Seasons: Sport in Black Pittsburgh (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), especially pp. 142-151. Mary Cardwell Dawson and her husband leased the house from Harris, perhaps at a reduced rent since that was typical of one of the many ways in which Harris helped subsidize worthy causes and individuals. The Opera Company rehearsed on the third floor. The Dawsons lived on the first floor of the Apple Street house, but also maintained Mary's family residence at 146 East Twentieth Avenue in Homestead. In the 1950s Harris rented the second floor of the Apple Street home to a number of black notables such as Roberto Clemente of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Lena Horne. Information from interview with Vickie Battles, granddaughter of Harris. For a picture of the house, see Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (Eliza Smith Brown, Daniel Holland, Laurence Glasco), African American Historic Sites Survey of Allegheny County (Harrisburg, Pa., 1994), pp. 159-160. The following information on Mary Cardwell Dawson and the National Negro Opera Company draws primarily on Eric Ledell Smith, "Pittsburgh's Black Opera Impressario, Mary Cardwell Dawson," Pennsylvania Heritage, 21:1 (Winter 1995), pp. 4-11, plus interviews with interviews with Peggy Pierce Freeman, member of the Choir and former member of the Opera Company, and Barbara Edwards Lee, niece of Mary Cardwell Dawson.
1 National Association of Negro Musicians. The climax of her musical activities came in 1941, when she established the National Negro Opera Company, the first such organization in the nation.2
Maintaining an opera company was (and is) very expensive, and Madame Dawson relied heavily on the black community. For singers and musicians she was able to recruit from a wealth of local talent; for financial support she turned to local musical organizations and churches. She received community backing that cut across social lines, something indicated by a list of some of the churches who supported her, both financially and with donated labor. Some, notably Bidwell Presbyterian, had elite congregations, while others, such as Ebenezer Baptist, Carron Street Baptist, Mount Ararat, St. James AME, Braddock
AME, John Wesley A.M.E. Zion, had congregations that were mixed in their social and economic composition.
The Madame set high musical standards. Her Choir was considered the best in Pennsylvania.
And her Opera Company drew rave reviews, from both the white and black press, for a highly ambitious production of Aida. This performance, which took place shorty after the Company had been established, featured an all-black cast of two hundred actors and singers (not all of whom were local), a 65-piece symphony orchestra (drawn mainly from the Pittsburgh Symphony), and 50 ballet dancers from New York.
And it was directed by the former musical director of the Metropolitan Opera, Frederick Vajda. By involving white musicians--and by insisting that they include Lawrence Peeler, a fine local African
American violinist--Mary made a strong racial statement, for the Pittsburgh Symphony, like virtually all symphonies of the time, refused to employ black musicians. Shortly after her triumphant production of
Aida, Mary and the Opera Company moved to Washington, D.C., where her husband had taken a new job.
But the Company maintained a branch in Pittsburgh (as well as in several other cities), and staged several more operas there. Black Pittsburghers, even after "their" Opera Company had moved to Washington,
2As early as 1873 the Colored American Opera Company gave performances in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. Thus, there had been opera written and performed earlier by blacks, but not a national, on- going opera company. H. Lawrence Freeman wrote some fourteen operas, the most notable being his Voodoo, performed in 1928 in New York. Shirley Graham (the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois) staged an opera Tom-Tom in 1932 in Cleveland. In the 1940s Philadelphia had a Dra Mu Opera Company, operated by a postal employee, Raymond Lowden Smith. Two black opera companies today are Opera Ebony and Opera North (Philadelphia). Personal communication, Eric Ledell Smith, July 5, 1996. See the bibliography of black opera by Eric Ledell Smith, Blacks in Opera (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Pubs., 1995). Also see Raoul Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977), pp. 123ff. 2 continued to follow its development, and were pleased when in 1956 it became the first black opera company to perform at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. Unfortunately, by helping to pave the way for blacks to enter mainstream opera, the Company contributed to its own demise, and a few years later it disbanded.3 Today, the legacy of Madame Dawson survives in the form of the Mary Cardwell Dawson
Choir, which specializes in annual performances of the "Messiah," and which sang at the 1994 marker dedication by the State Historical Commission.4
The story of the National Negro Opera Company has a significance that extends beyond its own travails and triumphs. That an opera company originated in a blue-collar steel town, that it appealed to an
African American community, that its support came not just from a narrow section of the middle class forces us to reconsider the presumed connections between race, class and culture. It also helps make several larger points about what we will call "high culture" in black Pittsburgh--and in black America in general.5
Even more remarkable than the community support of the Choir and the Opera Company is the fact that these institutions were not anomalies. As we will see, support for classical music--and also serious literature--within Pittsburgh's black community had been even more widespread at the turn of the century than in 1941, when Madame Dawson founded the Opera Company. Both the Company and the
Choir, that is, came out of a long tradition of community support for high culture. Such support peaked in the years 1900 to 1920, but has largely been ignored by scholars and forgotten by the public. During those decades, however, Pittsburgh's black community boasted the following: six concert orchestras, three chamber music ensembles, a number of violinists, harpists and pianists, and several choirs specializing in
3 The 1941 performance of Aïda was held at Syria Mosque, owned by the (white) Shriners and which, between 1926 and 1971, was the home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
4 Barbara Edwards Lee, niece of Mary Cardwell Dawson, suggests that this choir, which continues the tradition of the original Choir, should probably be described as an Auxiliary Choir of the Mary Cardwell Dawson Branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians, since only a few of the original choir members still survive. Interview, June 13, 1997.
5 There is no good term to represent the concept of "high" (or "highbrow") culture, which may reflect our own ambivalence about this particular form of expressive culture. In regards to music, I am referring simply to that which is commonly called classical, symphonic, art, or concert music; in regards to literature, I mean simply "serious" as opposed to popular writing.
3 classical music. In addition, the community contained a large number of literary societies, some of which were independent, others of which were affiliated with specific churches and neighborhoods, and all of which focused on serious literature.
Anyone who is tempted to view this cultural activity as simply the product of a black middle class needs to be reminded of several things. For one, Mary Cardwell's father was a blue-collar worker who had migrated out of the rural South. More importantly, Pittsburgh's black community in those years had so much cultural activity spread among so many clubs, churches and neighborhood groups that it could not have been supported exclusively by the middle class. Pittsburgh, after all, was not Boston, New York or
Philadelphia--long-established, commercial cities with large black elites. Pittsburgh was an industrial town of some 20,000 black residents, less than five percent of whom could be considered middle class on the basis of income or occupation. And even that small middle-class was not concentrated in one or two areas--which would have facilitated support for cultural institutions--but was scattered across five or six separate neighborhoods.6
One should not dismiss this interest in high culture as simply a "white wannabe" phenomenon, the sign of a community lacking in pride and racial consciousness seeking to use culture to impress whites.
Perhaps some members of the black middle class did have that in mind. But concerts held regularly at black churches, lodges and clubs would soon have become boring and sparsely attended had their sole, or primary, purpose been to impress others. Furthermore, as we will see, the community was proud of its cultural institutions, as well as of its charitable institutions, militia companies, and celebrations of such holidays as Emancipation Day and the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.7
6 Calculations based on a 4% sample of black households drawn by graduate students in the 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar--Joan Mohr, Eric Zissu, Elizabeth Jannetta, Gerald Fichter, and Roel Pacson--show that only 3 percent of black household heads in Pittsburgh were employed in skilled, white- collar and entrepreneurial occupations. If barbers are excluded, the percentage drops to only 1.5 percent. Henceforth this study will be referred to as "Pittsburgh Blacks in 1900," 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar.
7 In this regard, perhaps a comparison to the cultural experience of Jews might be helpful. Jews were persecuted in Europe and subject to discrimination by the dominant society, but they nonetheless participated in the dominant culture, especially classical music, and few would claim that those who did so were in any significant sense less proud of their Jewishness than those who focused instead on Jewish folk music and folk culture.
4
* * * *
Persons well versed in the cultural history of African-Americans might not be totally surprised at the support shown by black Pittsburghers in high culture. Biographies of blacks of that era reveal that they came out of communities whose members were often interested in, and exposed to, a wide range of music.
One example near at hand was Harry Burleigh. [??? give bio on Burleigh; Jean Snyder]8
Another example would be Amos Webber, a church organist and employee in a wallpaper factory in Philadelphia who left a fascinating "memory book" than spans much of the second half of the nineteenth century. One scholar has carefully analyzed Webber's book and concluded that he "did not perceive a sharp divide between popular and elite cultural expressions." At mid-century, for example, Webber attended German street music festivals in Philadelphia, listened to work songs sung by black longshoremen, and enjoyed concerts of Negro spirituals and European art songs given by Elizabeth
Greenfield, the so-called "Black Swan" who achieved acclaim in both the United States and Europe.
Moreover, as Webber's biographer notes, the strongest influence on black musical development at that time was the church, which at that time was expanding its repertory from a base in sacred music to include
"classical secular music," and in so doing exposed a significant portion of black Philadelphia to a broad range of music, both black and white.9
The life of Roland Hayes provides another example of this early interest in classical music, and shows how such interest transcended lines of class, color and region. Hayes was born in 1887, the son of impoverished ex-slaves who worked as tenants on a Georgia plantation. Upon the death of his father, he
8??? get Burleigh material and insert here.
9Nick Salvatore, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 68-73. Not all in the black community supported blacks singing classical music. Salvatore quotes one black Philadelphian who lamented at the time: "I am sorry to hear that the colored people persecute Miss Greenfield." At the same time, however, black Philadelphia clearly had an interest in classical music. Francis Johnson was black Philadelphia's most prominent composer of classical music and leader of an orchestra as well. He gave frequent concerts for blacks in the 1840s, and his compositions celebrating Haitian independence and foreshadowing the end of slavery achieved broad popularity among the city's blacks. In 1904 blacks in Philadelphia established the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra. Personal communication from Eric L. Smith, whom I wish to thank for his many helpful suggestions.
5 was sent by his mother to Chattanooga so that he would not grow up illiterate like her. Young Hayes easily became familiar with spirituals, Baptist church music, and what he called "barbershop harmony." In
Chattanooga, a church member introduced Hayes to what he termed "white folks' music"--popular tunes like "I Love You Truly" as well as Italian opera. Hayes went on to become famous for singing both Negro spirituals and German lieder, as well as the works of Handel, Bach, Purcell, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.
In 1917 he broke the color barrier by becoming the first black to give a recital at Boston's Symphony Hall, and his 1923 recital at New York's Town Hall is considered "a dividing line in the history of Blacks in classical music," because it paved the way for Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson and other blacks who followed.10
Paul Robeson provides additional evidence that blacks in that era were familiar with much the same music as whites. Robeson, who was born in ??? , grew up as the son of an impoverished itinerant preacher in Princeton and Somerville, New Jersey. Young Paul early acquired a musical reportory that included such songs as "Down by the Old Mill Stream," "Turkey in the Straw," and "Silent Night."
Robeson later became known for his renditions of black spirituals and work songs, yet he also was outstanding in his renditions of folk music from around the world as well as of operatic arias and art songs, especially those of Moussorgsky and Schubert.11
Marian Anderson provides our final example. Anderson is best known for her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the DAR refused her permission to sing at Constitution Hall. But at the peak of her career she was regarded as the world's finest contralto, noted for beautiful renditions of
Negro spirituals and European art music. Born in 1902, Marian grew up in a Philadelphia neighborhood that, by her own account, was racially integrated and relatively poor. She began singing in her Baptist church choir, and soon was giving recitals and concerts in Philadelphia and other cities. In 1920 her first concert tour took her to black churches and schools throughout the South.
10MacKinley Helm, Angel Mo' and Her Son, Roland Hayes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942), pp. 77 ff. Also, Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music, pp. 73-82.
11??? year born. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 14 and passim. Abdul, Blacks in Classical Music, pp. 89-95.
6 The examples of Hayes, Robeson and Anderson illustrate that black concert singers did not pertain exclusively--or even primarily--to the middle class, and that they showed no sense of false consciousness or rejection of black culture. They lived in a multicultural society and, like many other blacks, appreciated a broad range of music. In terms of having musical interests that transcended clear categories of race and class, blacks of the time were reflecting broader patterns in American life. Whites, too, were aware of, and interested in, African-American music, an interest that gave rise to the most popular musical form of the era, minstrelsy.
White musical taste also transcended lines of class. A recent study of American culture,
Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow, shows that, elites and ordinary folk were not nearly as far apart in their cultural tastes in the nineteenth century as they became in the twentieth. High culture and popular culture were not so rigidly separated; audiences were regularly exposed to, and appreciative of, both.
Shakespearean plays, for example, were so familiar to ordinary Americans that often they were parodied in minstrel shows. Operas and symphonic pieces typically were performed on the same program as marches and waltzes, thereby catering to audiences of varied social backgrounds.12 Only toward the end of the century did these forms of cultural expression collectively become "High Culture," meant to define an upper class and distance it from the masses.
However, even readers familiar with Levine's study might still be surprised at the high level of black support for classical music.13 Even in the best of times, one cannot comfortably extrapolate from
12 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 104ff. The interaction between high culture and emerging popular culture has been the subject of much scholarly attention in what is called the "sociology of music," but often more in the form of polemics bemoaning the rise of the latter and the decline of the former. Theodore Adorno has set the terms for much of this debate. Among his many publications, see Introduction to the Sociology of Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). For a recent discussion of these issues, see Peter Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995). For a good, detailed history of the rise of popular music, mainly in the United States, See Donald Clarke, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995). Doris Evans McGinty, "The Black Presence in the Music of Washington, D.C.: 1843-1904," in Irene V. Jackson, Ed., More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 81-105. Eileen Southern, Music of Black Americans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971) includes material on black performers of classical music. Also see Eric L. Smith, Blacks in Opera: An Encyclopedia of People and Companies, 1873-1993 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995).
13Another reason for our surprise at this situation is the yawning cultural chasm separating the races today. This chasm clearly has expanded since 1950, when J. Saunders Redding, an acute observer of black 7 white attitudes to black. And in the late nineteenth century, as America became increasingly segregated and racist, even middle-class blacks were welcome at few "white" concerts and theaters. In addition, we simply know too little about the cultural orientation of urban blacks in that era. Levine's
Highbrow/Lowbrow focuses on whites--to the virtual exclusion of blacks--and his earlier study, Black
Culture and Black Consciousness, focuses on Southern rural blacks. Furthermore, culture--at least expressive culture--has been off the radar screens of most social historians, such that studies of urban black communities do not investigate the cultural orientation of the residents. The spate of community studies that began to appear in the 1960s and which, with few exceptions, focus on the rise of the ghetto after
World War I and pay little attention to pre-existing social and cultural activities.14
Cultural historians have devoted somewhat more attention to this matter than have social historians, but they tend to focus on individual artists rather than on the listening or reading public. One of the few studies of the musical orientation of urban blacks in the nineteenth-century has been examined to any significant degree is Washington, D.C. And Washington had what one scholar has termed "a rich and varied music life, and was noted for its choral ensembles, concert artists, musical theter, bands, and
thought, wrote: "Season it as you will, the thought that the Negro American is different from other Americans is still unpalatable to most Negroes." ["The Negro Writer: Shadow and Substance," Phylon (fourth quarter, 1950), pp. 71-73, as quoted in Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958, 1965), p. 1.] Today, blacks who express a preference for classical music and European literature risk calling into question their racial identity. Few are attracted to symphonic music, few perform such music, and those who do typically perform outside the black community. To be more concrete: Leontyne Price and André Watts may be admired as examples of black accomplishment, but few who attend their concerts are black, few of their concerts take place in black venues, and few of their recitals could be accompanied by black opera companies or symphony orchestras.
14 Even Du Bois' landmark 1899 study, The Philadelphia Negro, fails to discuss the cultural orientation of the city's blacks. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996 [1899]). Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). The two most important studies that devote considerable attention to pre- migration communities are David Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973) and Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). Other studies which pay attention to pre-migration communities include Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890- 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem, The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Also see Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). These studies pay only passing attention to the arts in the communities they study. Kusmer attributes all interest in high culture to the black eliteand middle class. See Kusmer, pp. 105ff.
8 teacher."15 The Colored American Opera Company was established in 1872, one of the first black musical organizations in America. The Amphion Glee Club, the Treble Clef Club, the Burleigh Choral
Society, the Georgetown Music Association, and the Dvorak Musical Association performed concerts, oratorios and other forms of classical music, and the Mu-So-Lit Club was a center of literary and musical life in the nineteenth century. evinced considerable interest in classical music. Another study suggests that the same was true in three other Southern cities--St. Louis, New Orleans and Charleston.16 Unfortunately for our purposes, most investigations of urban black culture focus on one city at one point in time--New
York's Harlem during the 1920s--and pay little attention to what came before. David Levering Lewis' outstanding, detailed study, When Harlem was in Vogue, for example, devotes only six pages to the years before the Harlem Renaissance, and that is more than one finds in most.17 Moreover, these cities had a large middle-class black population, and so it is difficult to assess how widespread was the interest in such cultural forms within the larger black community.
15Mark Tucker, Ellington, The Early Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 8. There have been studies of New York as well, but New York, with its active theater and vaudeville, was unique. Blacks there were active in music and musical theater, but in venues that were designed for the entertainment of white audiences. No one has yet undertaken a study of the position of music in the black community per se.
16??? On Washington, D.C., see Doris Evans McGinty, "The Black Presence in the Music of Washington, D.C.: 1843-1904," in Irene V. Jackson, Ed., More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 81-105. Also see Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 27-28, 129; Bettye Gardner and Bettye Thomas, "The Cultural Impact of the Howard Theater on the Black Community," Journal of Negro History 55 (October 1970), pp. ??? for other locations, see Geneva Handy Southall, "Art Music of the Blacks in the Nineteenth Century," in Dominique-René de Lerma, Reflections on Afro-American Music (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973), pp. 161-179. Eileen Southern, Music of Black Americans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971) includes material on black performers of classical music. Also see Eric L. Smith, Blacks in Opera: An Encyclopedia of People and Companies, 1873-1993 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995). For information about blacks in Appalachian folk music, see Cecilia Conway, Black Banjo Echoes in Appalachia; Barry Lee Pearson, Virginia Piedmont Blues; Bill Malone, Singing Cowboys and Music Mountaineers; Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues. For an overview, see Charles Hamm, Music in the New World.
17 David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), pp. 28-33. Actually, earlier writers spent more time on the antecedents of the Renaissasnce. These include James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Atheneum, 1972 [1930]); Margaret Just Butcher, The Negro in American Culture , based on materials left by Alain Locke (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); Benjain Brawley, The Negro Genius (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1937).
9 For this reason, the present study of high culture in black Pittsburgh operates in something of a historiographical vacuum. But it yields at least three unexpected, and significant, results. First, blacks manifested an extraordinary interest in high culture, one that has gone unappreciated and almost unnoticed in the scholarly literature. Second, such interest was far from being an exclusively middle class phenomenon, although the middle class and elite obviously were important and involved. Finally, this interest was not a "white wannabe" phenomenon, but one that went hand-in-hand with race pride and race consciousness. It shows that the cultural history of urban blacks can be a fertile field for investigation, and that their interest in high culture can be interpreted as a healthy development, not a sign of pathology.
I. The Social Background
In the late nineteenth century Pittsburgh was a city that economically was the stuff dreams are made of. Between 1840 and 1870 it had shifted decisively from being a frontier commercial city into one of the world's leading industrial centers. By 1900 it was being called "Forge of the Universe" and its leading industrial figures--Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Heinz, Westinghouse--were household names.
Environmentally, of course, Pittsburgh was the stuff nightmares are made of--"Hell with the Lid Taken
Off" as Lincoln Steffens labeled it in his 1904 classic, Shame of the Cities. Its polluted skies, dirty water, muddy streets, and dilapidated worker housing were world-famous (or infamous) and the subject of a six- volume study between 1909 and 1914 by the Russell Sage Foundation.18
Culturally, Pittsburgh was not necessarily a nightmare, but with a dour Presbyterian elite suspicious of leisure, it had long been a cultural backwater whose large German community provided most of what was available in the way of classical music. By the late nineteenth century, however, the city's
18 Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (New York: Hill & Wang, 1969 [1904]). Russell Sage Foundation, The Pittsburgh Survey (6 vols., New York: Survey Associates, 1909-1914).
10 cultural pulse began to quicken as its industrial elite, reflecting national trends, began to take an increased interest in the arts,19
The national trend of local elites supporting high culture was particularly apparent in efforts to subsidize the size and scope of symphony orchestras. For much of the nineteenth century American symphony orchestras had been informal affairs, labors of love by musicians, and recipients of sporadic and inadequate funding. Toward the end of the century, local elites began transforming those orchestras into chartered, well-funded institutions. Boston led the way when, in 1880, Henry Lee Higginson, a stock broker, committed funds to provide that city with the nation's first permanent symphony orchestra. In 1896 the New York Times challenged "rich music lovers" to adequately fund that metropolis' two symphony orchestras, and by the outbreak of World War I, Boston's example had been followed in New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Pittsburgh.20
In Pittsburgh, Andrew Carnegie led the way in things cultural as well as economic. An active member of the Art Society of Pittsburgh, Carnegie in the 1890s singlehandedly made "The Smoky City" into a national cultural presence when he funded the Pittsburgh Orchestra and built a beautiful hall for it to perform in. The Carnegie Music Hall was part of a massive architectural complex the industrialist/philanthropist built, known as the Carnegie Institute, which contained a library, museum, and art institute, as well as a music hall.21 Willa Cather who, before moving to New York, wrote for several
Pittsburgh newspapers, reveled in the exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and praised the
19 For a profile of the Pittsburgh Iron and Steel elite, especially their social origins, neighborhoods and institutions, but not their cultural activities, see John Ingham, The Iron Barons (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), esp. pp. 13-39, 107-155. See Edward G. Baynham, "A History of Pittsburgh Music, 1758-1958," (typescript in Carnegie Public Library, 1970, 2 vols.), passim but especially pp. 245ff and 294ff. For a discussion of broad patterns in American music, see Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York: Norton, 1983), Putting Popular Music in Its Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: Norton, 1979). Also see H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1988). For an excellent discussion of the building of the cultural and civic landscape of Pittsburgh, see Franklin Toker, Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986, 1994), esp. pp. 79- 130.
20 Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, pp. 119ff.
21 The opera had been established earlier, in 1871. Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877-1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 35, 96ff.
11 performances of the newly formed Symphony Orchestra. Cather's review of a recital by Emma Calvé in
1897, gives an idea of what one student has termed a "virtual explosion" of interest among Pittsburghers in high culture. "Pittsburgh turned out en masse," she wrote.
The carriages were packed for four blocks about Carnegie Hall and all the street cars were blockaded.... It was half past eight before the ushers could catch their breath and the orchestra begin."22
Interest in high culture on the part of the white elite partly helps explain a similar impulse among blacks who, after all, also had a middle class. Part of the black middle class descended from an earlier, mid-century group that, having been barred from most occupations, saw its most ambitious members respond by setting up their own businesses. The best positions open to them—barbering and hair- dressing—involved personal service and therefore were avoided by most whites as demeaning. Barbers at mid-century, such as Lewis Woodson, John Vashon, John Peck and Lemuel Googins, had made a remarkable success of this occupational niche, becoming respected business men, often with fine establishments in downtown locations that catered to the city's white elite.23
By the turn of the century, vestiges of this service-oriented, self-employed elite were still present.
Virginia Proctor, for example, was one of its most prominent members. As the daughter of the mid- century community leader and barber, Lewis Woodson, and the wife of Jacob Proctor--a barber whose customers included members of the Westinghouse and Carnegie families--Virginia's wig shop was fabulously successful among the wives of the city's white elite. Virginia also was a community leader, active in Bethel A.M.E. Church as well as in various charitable and community organizations, and was one
22Quoted in Kathleen D. Byrne and Richard C. Snyder, Chrysalis: Willa Cather in Pittsburgh, 1896-1906 (Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1980), pp. 76-77. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh, pp. 97-98. One should not exaggerate the city's commitment to classical music, however, for in 1910 the Orchestra closed on account of internal squabbling and lack of outside financial support. Not until 1926 did the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra perform again. See Frederick Dorian and Judith Meibach, A History of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (np, nd, [1986] in Carnegie Public Library.
23 Laurence Glasco, "Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh," in S.P. Hays, ed., City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), pp. 70ff. Also, Patricia Mitchell, Beyond Adversity (Pittsburgh: Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1994).
12 of the founders of the Aurora Reading Club, the most prestigious women's cultural organization in black
Pittsburgh.
Between 1870 and 1900, newcomers began to supersede descendants of this older middle class.
Like the city's white immigrants, they had been attracted by Pittsburgh's booming economy, which, despite discrimination, was so vibrant that in fact many (non-industrial) jobs were available to blacks. Between
1870 and 1900 the city's overall population grew five-fold from 86,000 to 451,000, and the number of blacks mushroomed almost ten-fold from 2,115 to 20,355, making the Pittsburgh black community the sixth largest in the nation.24
As a result of this rapid population growth, Pittsburgh's black community at that time was overwhelmingly composed of migrants. Only 12 percent of black household heads had been born in
Pennsylvania, while the clear majority (57 percent) had come from Virginia, especially from the
Shenandoah Valley and Richmond areas, which were two of the most economically developed areas of the state. Richmond had a large industrial base with its iron and tobacco factories, while the Valley was characterized by mixed agriculture and growing urban centers. By the late nineteenth century Valley cities like Winchester and Staunton were becoming economically developed. For that reason, it is not totally surprising that a number of Virginia migrants came with entrepreneurial ambitions. Advocates of the self- made man, they had great confidence in their abilities and in their own entrepreneurial future.25
Unlike their mid-century predecessors, the migrants who arrived between 1880 and 1900 engaged in a wide range of businesses not connected with personal service. In 1909 Helen Tucker, a black social worker and investigator for the magazine Charities and the Commons, counted eighty-five black-run businesses in Pittsburgh, including pool rooms, print shops, plasterers, cement finishers, pharmacists, paper hangers, and haulers--even a savings and loan. A caterer (Spriggs and Writt) and a wigmaker (Proctor)
24 Laurence Glasco, "Taking Care of Business: The Black Entrepreneurial Elite in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh," Pittsburgh History 78 (Winter 1995/96), pp. 177ff. By the year 1900, rapid growth in the overall population of Pittsburgh made it the seventh largest city in the nation. Not until 1920 did blacks make up more than 5 percent of the city's population.
25 On the commercial development of the Shenandoah Valley, see Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977). Glasco, "Taking Care of Business: The Black Entrepreneurial Elite in Turn-of-the-Century Pittsburgh."
13 served a predominantly white clientele, as did several grocers, restaurant owners, and barbers. Some, she reported, were quite large, notably two contractors who employed over one hundred men each, and enterprises such as the Diamond Coke and Coal Company of Homestead, owned by Cumberland Posey.26
The epitome of these new entrepreneurs, and by far the most successful, was Cumberland Posey.
A self-made business man, Posey was born in 1858 in Charles County, Maryland, south of Washington,
D.C.. In 1892 "Captain" Posey--as he was affectionately known--moved to Homestead, Pennsylvania from
Ohio, where he had worked as a boat pilot and engineer. In Homestead Posey bought several coal boats, and soon organized the "Delta Coal Company" and the "Posey Coal Dealers and Steam Boat Builders," utilizing boats built under his supervision. The latter company ultimately was sold and replaced by the
"Marine Coal Company," which in 1900 was capitalized at $500,000. In addition to these boat companies,
Posey owned considerable real estate, and was director of one of Homestead's leading banks. And his wife
Anna became a leader in the social and cultural life of the community.27
Pittsburgh's black community also contained a number of newly arrived professionals. Prominent among these were lawyers, such as William Maurice Randolph. Born in Richmond, Virginia, Randolph was admitted to the New York Bar in 1888 after graduating from City University of New York. In 1891 he came to Pittsburgh, where he was admitted to the Allegheny County Bar, became interested in politics, and had a moderately successful political career. Black Pittsburgh had a range of other self-employed professionals. In the health field. J.B. Shepard shared honors with George Turfley as the community's leading physician, while the community's pharmacist, I.A. Jennings, had been born in Virginia's "back- woods."28
26 These businesses were not confined to the Hill district, but were dispersed in several sections of the city--the Strip, Hill district, North Side, and Lawrenceville. Helen A. Tucker, "The Negroes of Pittsburgh," Charities and the Commons, Jan. 2, 1909, reprinted in Kellogg, Wage-Earning Pittsburgh, pp. 424-36.
27 Colored American Magazine, Dec. 1901, p. 138. According to Bolden, Posey built some forty-two boats, and hauled iron ore from Duluth to Pittsburgh, as one of Andrew Carnegie's friends and business associates. Also, Glasco, "Taking Care of Business," p. 179.
28 In 1891 Randolph and J. Welford Holmes became the first blacks admitted to the Allegheny County bar. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, "Blacks in Pittsburgh: A Chronology," pamphlet. In 1895 Randolph was one of the delegates who appeared before the National Republican Committee and presented the claims of Pittsburgh as the place for holding the National Republican Convention of 1896. Glasco, "Taking Care of Business," pp. 179-181. 14 Some of Pittsburgh's older black elite, confronted by the newcomers, retreated into something of a gentle cocoon. According to a contemporary observer, social lines had hardened after the Civil War as longer-term residents and property owners held themselves aloof from Southern migrants, cultivated genteel manners, and "accepted into their 'social set' only those who could point to parents and grandparents and say they were 'old families' with 'character'."29 One can assume that a self-consciously refined stratum within the community spearheaded the promotion of high culture, even if its members were too few to have sustained the many institutions that provided cultural activities in the community.
Together, the old and new middle class created a measure of elegance, refinement and culture. Its leading men's club, the Loendi, described in 1901 as "one of the most prosperous organizations of its kind in the country," boasted a clubhouse furnished with "rich carpets, fine tapestries, beautiful pictures," and a rosewood piano. One of the most important possessions of the Club was a painting--"Nicodemus Coming to Christ," by the Paris-based, and Pittsburgh-born, artist, Henry O. Tanner.30 The Club provides evidence that the black community at the turn of the century contained an upper class interested in elegance and refinement.
29 J. Ernest Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," (typescript prepared for the WPA, 1940, now housed in the Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg), chap. 12, pp. 2-7, 14-20, 28-49. It is interesting to note similarities with the reponse of this "new" elite who, by the time of the migration of World War I, had become the "old" elite. See Glasco, "Double Burden," pp. 80ff.
30 Oliver G. Waters, "The Smoky City, Part II: Glimpses of Social Life," Colored American Magazine, vol. IV, No 1, Nov. 1901, pp. 11-12. The Colored American ran a four-part series on blacks in Pittsburgh. The articles appeared in October (Part I, pp. 402-424); November (Part II: "Glimpses of Social Life,"pp. 11-22); and December (Part III: "Social and Business Life," pp. 133-148), 1901, and January (Part IV: "Public Schools, Business and Professional Life," pp. 171-183), 1902. The articles contain a wealth of information on the turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh black elite. Each issue also contains useful photographs. The steward in charge of the dining room was Stirling Austin. The Tanner painting had been acquired by Thomas H. Johnson, the Club's treasurer and described as "One of our most substantial business men," during a trip to Europe. The painting was on exhibition in the Salon at Paris, at the Chicago Art Institute, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. See the November, 1901 issue of Colored American Magazine, "Smoky City," p. 17. This painting is probably a later rendition of Tanner's noted painting "Nicodemus Visiting Jesus." According to a Tanner scholar, the positive reception accorded "Nicodemus Visiting Jesus" inspired Tanner to paint three more renditions of the subject, two of which are now lost. Probably the rendition to which the "Smoky City" article is referring was a vertical painting of Nicodemus alone. Frank Bolden, former city editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, recalls seeing the Tanner painting hanging in the Loendi Club as late as 1936. For a description of the painting, see Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry Ossawa Tanner (Catalog of the exhibition, with introductory essay and catalog chapters by Dewey F. Mosby, 1991), pp. 168-171. On ten occasions between 1899 and 1925 the Carnegie exhibited a painting by Tanner.
15 The elite women also had their organizations. The most notable was the Aurora Reading club, founded in 1894, and dedicated to pursuing what has been described as "a systematic course of study each year." With their motto "Lifting as We Climb," the club also was active in local charities, especially supportive of the Aged Women's Home. The club's membership included the wives of most of the city's black elite--notably Anna Posey, wife of ship-builder Cumberland Posey; Mrs. John T. Writt, wife of the city's leading black caterer; Mrs. Virginia Proctor and her daughter Carrie, both leading hairdressers.
Younger women had their own literary society, the "Narcissus Literary and Musical Club," established in
1901, with Pauline Writt, daughter of the John T. Writt, as first president.31 In addition, as we will see, there were any number of other literary and musical clubs, both independent and church- and neighborhood-affiliated.
Although it is natural that the elite might be interested in culture and refinement, it is less obvious and, for our purposes, more significant that at least some of the black working class might have similar interests. In 1914 the black social scientist, R.R. Wright, in a study commissioned by the Pittsburgh
Survey, published the results of his investigation into the lives and working conditions of one hundred black steelworkers employed at the Clark Mills of Carnegie Steel. The workers had come in 1878 from
Richmond, Virginia when the Black Diamond Mill imported black puddlers to help break a strike. After the strike was broken, the owners departed from custom and retained the workers.32 Black steelworkers
31 ??? The motto was drawn from the motto of the National Association of Colored Women, an association of black women's clubs established in 1896. See Elizabeth L. Davis, Lifting as They Climb (Washington, D.C.: NACW, 1933). For information on the Aurora Club, which is still in existence after more than a century, see "Smoky City" series, Part III, December, 1901, pp. 140-143; for the Narcissus Club see "Smoky City," Part II, November, 1901, p. 17. The series says erroneously that the Aurora Club was founded June 27, 1897 rather than the correct date of 1894. See Mary Page, ??? [title] For descriptions of the importance of dance and music in the upbringing of children of Boston's black elite, see Adelaide M. Cromwell, The Other Brahmins: Boston's Black Upper Class, 1750-1950 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), esp. pp. 157-60. On the prevalence of women's service and literary clubs among the nation's black female elite at the turn of the century--as well as their stress on great books, art, literature, history, music and philosophy--see Willard B.Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indians University Press, 1990), especially the chapters "The Genteel Performance" and "Upper Class Club Life." Gatewood says little about music, but does note that the Treble Cleff Club, and later one of its offspring, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, focused on classical music for black audiences in Washington. Also see Stephan Birmingham, Certain People: America's Black Elite (New York: Little Brown, 1977); Geraldyn Major, Black Society (Chicago: Johnson Pub. Inc., 1976)
32More typical of such practices of using black strikebreakers was the experience of Pittsburgh Bolt Company which, in the 1870s determined to break the iron-workers union at their plant and brought in 16 constituted a negligible two percent of the city's overall industrial labor force, but at the Clark Mills, located in the city's Lawrenceville neighborhood, they constituted fifteen to twenty percent, a very unusual situation. For our purposes, the significance of these one hundred industrial workers is that their values were what today would be described as middle-class. Wright found these black steelworkers to be sober men with good work habits. They took pride in their appearance, being "well, even stylishly dressed, and bore nothing about them to indicate their calling." According to Wright, they had good personal habits, drank little "[e]xcept on Saturday night," and belonged to lodges and fraternal orders, including the
Knights of Pythias, Odd Fellows, and Masons, organizations whose members also included the black middle class. Those who were churchgoers attended services which Wright characterized as being notable for "an entire absence of the emotional expressions." In other words, like the father of Mary
Cardwell--himself a blue-collar worker in Homestead--these men appear to have been the sort who might have supported high culture, and show that within black Pittsburgh's working class were men who, although often confined to jobs that whites shunned, nonetheless had what one might label middle-class aspirations.33
The existence of a small, ambitious, business-oriented middle class, and of a working class with steady prospects of employment and (at least among some) an orientation toward middle class attributes help explain the interest of black Pittsburghers toward high culture.
Nonetheless, there were enough "discouraging" aspects to their existence that their orientation toward high culture remains surprising. First, the social, economic and cultural relations between African
Americans and the rest of Pittsburgh were characterized by the same racial discrimination as prevailed elsewhere. In 1872, for example, the city's Democratic newspaper (itself extremely hostile to blacks) forty-eight black puddlers. The employment of strike breakers was always a provocation to the workers, but using blacks "was a provoacation that transcended accepted behavior." The white strikers sent "a howling mob of two to three hundred men" and frightened off the black puddlers. See John Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1920-1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 105-106. Ingham reports that Black Diamond Steel was the largest of the city's crucible steel makers, but because it historically refused to release information, little is know of it. Idem, p. 89. 33 R. R. Wright, "One Hundred Negro Steel Workers," in Paul U. Kellogg, ed., Wage-Earning Pittsburgh, (The Pittsburgh Survey), vol. 6 (New York: Survey Associates, 1914), pp. 97-110. Also, Laurence Glasco, "Optimism, Dilemmas, and Progress: The Pittsburgh Survey and Black Americans," in Maureen W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
17 lampooned Republican hypocrisy in posing as friends of Negroes. In "Republican" Allegheny County, the paper noted sarcastically, blacks "could not be admitted to the orchestra, dress or family circle of the opera house, could not purchase a sleeping berth on any of the railroads that leave the city, could not take dinner at the Monongahela House, Hare's Hotel, or any A No. 1 restaurant," and could not even join the Lincoln
Club "except as a waiter."34
This type of discrimination, of course, not only hit hard at the pride of the already small middle class, it functioned to keep that middle class from expanding as it might have otherwise. Less than two percent of Pittsburgh's black household heads held white collar jobs such as salesman, lawyer, clerk, minister, or private music teacher; most were confined to traditional service occupations--barbers, butlers, caterers, domestics, chauffeurs, and the like. To a great extent, of course, this was true everywhere; even in Cleveland, one of the nation's most liberal and racially progressive cities, only 5 to 7 percent of blacks held white-collar occupations around the turn of the century.35 As a result, Pittsburgh's black middle class numerically was simply too small to have been the sole, or even primary, support of so many cultural institutions as existed at the turn of the century.
Laboring blacks also suffered from occupational discrimination. Until the labor shortages of
World War I pried open unskilled industrial jobs to blacks in more than token numbers, they were generally excluded from industrial labor. As a consequence, most labored as teamsters, refuse collectors, janitors, and laundresses, while the more fortunate worked as waiters, barbers, railroad porters, butlers,
34 Glasco, "Double Burden," pp. 69-110. Also Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," chap. 5, pp. 1-67. Quote is from pp. 65-66. We do not know whether blacks were discriminated against in the city's leading cultural establishments, like the Symphony. David Katzman, Before the Ghetto, shows that for turn of the century Detroit, although there was racial discrimination in cultural affairs, these tended to be on the part of the smaller theaters and movie houses, and that the symphony did not discriminate. That educated, cultured people in were Pittsburgh were capable of discrimination goes without saying. Alberta Hall Nelson, who grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1920s and 1930s, tells of her experience attending a concert by Marian Anderson in the mid-1930s at the YMHA, the Jewish "Y" of Pittsburgh. She purchased a ticket for the concert, and was surprised to notice the strange coincidence that all the blacks who attended had been sold tickets that seated them in the last few rows.
35"Pittsburgh Blacks in 1900," 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar. Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 74, 87.
18 maids, coachmen, and gardeners. The census of 1900 shows that over two-thirds of Italian and Polish immigrants, but less than 10 percent of blacks, held unskilled and semi-skilled industrial jobs.36
Geography, notably the widespread dispersal of Pittsburgh's black population across five or six neighborhoods, also should have worked to hinder cultural development by reducing the potential audience for any given cultural event. The Hill District, located next to the downtown district, contained the largest and oldest concentration of blacks, as well as the one with the largest concentrations of black businesses, churches and clubs. Yet the Hill housed less than half (41 percent) of the city's black residents. The North
Side--known as Allegheny City until its annexation in 1907--also contained an old black community with a distinctive identity. Located across the Allegheny River from downtown, the North Side was an old, predominantly German neighborhood that contained only 16 percent of Pittsburgh's black residents.
Lawrenceville, located approximately two miles (and several steep hills and bluffs) east of the Hill District, contained the city's only industrial black neighborhood (the iron workers investigated by Wright), who made up six percent of the city's black residents. Homewood, located some five miles east of the Hill
District, was formerly one of the city's eastern suburbs. At the turn of the century, it was home to many of the city's white elite, as well as of a select group of middle-class blacks, many of whom were domestic servants and chauffeurs. However, in 1900 Homewood housed less than one percent of Pittsburgh's black residents. Finally, Beltzhoover, located across the Monongahela River to the south of the business district, was a newer development, and also contained a small nucleus of middle-class blacks.37 Like Homewood,
36An interesting regional difference existed. Compared to their Southern-born counterparts, Northern- born blacks were twice as likely to be either laborers or metal workers, and half as likely to be service workers. Thus, 26 percent of Southern-born blacks were in labor or metal trades and 36% in service; the corresponding figures were 51 percent and 18 percent among Northern-born blacks. The figures are even more striking among the relatively few metal workers. Although the puddlers from Virginia receive the bulk of attention of black iron and steel workers, in fact only 2 percent of Southern-born blacks were so listed by the census, compared to 11 percent of Northern-born blacks. This is an anomaly that needs to be explored. The figures are recalculations from Table 3 (p. 61) in John Bodnar, Roger Simon and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
37Tucker reports on the recent move of middle class blacks into Beltzhoover. Tucker, "Negroes of Pittsburgh," p. 427. Homewood, located in the city's fashionable East End, had had a few middle-class blacks in the Civil War era. In the early twentieth century it became one of the main black middle-class neighborhoods. Steven Sapolsky and Bartholomew Roselli, Homewood-Brushton: A Century of Community-Making (Pittsburgh: Western Pennsylvania Historical Society, 1987).
19 it too housed less than one percent of Pittsburgh's black residents in 1900. The dispersal of the city's black population meant that the figure of some 20,000 black residents in 1900 overstates their "effective" presence. The 8,300 black residents in the Hill District were isolated from the 3,000 on the North Side, the
1,500 in Lawrenceville, the 3,400 in East Liberty, and the 100 or so in Homewood and Beltzhoover. In addition, the remaining 3,500 Pittsburgh blacks lived even more dispersed in other neighborhoods that had a negligible black presence. At a time when transportation costs were still relatively expensive, this geographic dispersal reduced even further the effective size of the black community in terms of numbers available for attendance at, and support of, cultural and social institutions.38
Neighborhood dispersal had another effect as well. It ensured a good deal of contact--socially and perhaps culturally--between blacks and whites.39 Pittsburgh blacks lived in extensive contact with whites, sharing residential and shopping space. Almost half (46 percent) of Pittsburgh black households had a white neighbor living next door, and the figure was much higher if one looked within five dwellings of the black family. Even in the Hill District--the principal neighborhood for blacks--long had been the principal arrival point for European immigrants, with Jews and Italians by 1900 beginning to supplant Irish and
German residents. As a result it was also the city's most highly mixed neighborhood, such that over a third of its black residents (36 percent) lived next door to a white family. To a large degree, of course,
Pittsburgh simply reflected national patterns; American cities were more integrated racially in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth. But Pittsburgh probably had a higher degree of residential integration than most cities. Blacks in Pittsburgh, for example, were 23 to 35 percent less segregated than blacks in Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Boston.40
38??? Figures from the 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar. On transportation costs and availability, see Joel Tarr. ???
39 The actual figures for these neighborhoods are: Hill District 8,317; North Side 3,207; Lawrenceville 1,527; East Liberty 3,408; Homewood 119; Beltzhoover 83. Figures derived from the 1900 printed census. As an example of cultural influence, Wright reports that a black minister attributed lessened religiosity among black workers to "contact with the foreign element in the mills." This suggests considerable personal interaction between the two racial groups. Migration and settlement patterns in the late nineteenth century have been largely neglected by scholars. For an examination of this topic for border cities of that era, see Paul Groves and Edward Muller, "The Evolution of Black Residential Areas in Late Nineteenth- Century Cities," Journal of Historical Geography 1, 2 (1975): 169-171.
40 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar. In this context, "next door" is defined persons in the following dwelling as listed on the page of the manuscript census. In fact, in a number of cases the black families 20 Geographic dispersal did more than integrate neighborhoods; it also helped desegregate the city's schools. In 1875, a combination of protests by black parents and the practical problems of maintaining separate black schools in so many neighborhoods, finally caused the Board of Education to scrap its segregated system and allow black children to attend neighborhood schools. As we will see later from the testimony of a black school girl who attended these schools early in the century, it exposed her to classical music at an early age.41
In sum, the black middle class was too small, and too dispersed, to have been the sole, or even primary support of the city's very active cultural life. At the same time, the geographic dispersal, plus the working exposure to white upper class family life as butlers and maids, helped expose blacks to "white" culture in ways that do not exist later in the century with the rise of the large urban ghettoes.
Let us now turn to an examination of that cultural life.
were living in alleys behind or at the side of the white occupied dwelling. And, of course, is some cases the route of the census taker occasionally abruptly changed, thereby undermining our methodology. However, as a way of getting a good, general sense of who lived near whom, the method is adequate. The comparison with Cincinnati, Cleveland and Boston is based on Gini Coefficient calculations from the published census of 1900. For techniques and related material, see Gerald Fichter, Jr., and Joan M. Mohr, "Profiles of Pittsburgh's Black Neighborhoods in 1900," 1992 Quantitative Methods Seminar. For the Gini coefficient, see Joseph Darden, Afro-Americans in Pittsburgh (New York: D.C. Heath & Co., 1973), pp. 2- 25; Richard Jensen, Historians Guide to Statistics (Huntington, N.Y.: R.E. Krieger Pub. Co., 1971), pp. 121-126; Nathan Kantrowitz, "Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in Boston, 1830-1970," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 441 (January, 1979), pp. 41ff.
41 ??? Talk again to Alberta. But early school integration also delayed the development of one of the largest single sources of educated, white collar blacks--school teachers. Because it was unacceptable for white teachers to be taught by blacks, the city did not hire any black teachers from the time schools were desegregated in 1875 until the 1930s.
21 II. Black Pittsburgh and Classical Music: 1900-1920
"Of the arts, music has been most widely practiced and most fully developed by the Pittsburgh
Negro." So intones a major study of black Pittsburgh written in 1940. And indeed at the turn of the century black Pittsburghers did have an impressively active musical life. Much of the music centered in church choirs, and according to the same analyst the era enjoyed "a kind of golden age of church music."
Music in the community was not only plentiful but also of high quality, something acknowledged by a local white paper of the period when it wrote: "Pittsburgh's colored population has made a marked advance in music as well as along almost all the other professions or business lines." The paper was pleased that now many black musicians had formal music training "with a solid grounding in principles and theory."42
Unfortunately the cultural outpourings of black Pittsburgh were not regularly reviewed at the time. One Pittsburgh paper, The Bulletin, covered the art and music scene at the time, but paid no attention to activities in the black community. In addition, the city lacked a black publication; the Pittsburgh
Courier newspaper was founded only in 1910, and only a year or two of issues survive before the 1920s.
What we must rely upon for an idea of the community's cultural life is a weekly column called "Afro-
American Notes," which, between 1896 and 1932, appeared each Sunday in the city's major Republican newspaper, the Press.43 The "Notes" were begun by Dr. John W. Browning, a pharmacist who had come to Pittsburgh from Montgomery, Alabama. However, after only about eight months as editor, Browning died and the column was taken over by Abram Hall, who continued as editor until the column's demise in
1932.44
42Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 13, pp. 27, 41, 58-59.
43 In addition to "Afro-American Notes," the Press included a column "German Societies" for a time as well as a column "Society" and "Fraternal Societies" which focused on the native-born white elite of the city. For an example of "German Societies," see Sunday issues for 1912. The "Notes" were relatively long, averaging about 2000 words. They are now being edited for publication by Dr. Carolyn Schumacher of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Special credit is due to students in my course, "History of Black Pittsburgh," Fall Semester 1992, who transcribed a sample of the Notes at five-year intervals between 1900 and 1925. Transcriptions by the following students appear in this essay: Kimberly Blair; Myrven Caines; Joseph Dunn; Peter DiNardo; Alyssa Ford; Walter Greenley; Maria Henderson; Mark Ingraham; Jennifer Kasecky; Art Malley; Donald Mielke; Patrick Morris; Vickie Praytor; Erin Rodgers; Tonya Wilson.
44 E. Ernest Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 7. 22 The "Notes" served as a type of community bulletin board, with notices of social, cultural, and political events in the black community. It is primarily through a reading of the notes that we can document the large number of classical music performances within the black community. In 1910 the
"Notes" asserted that Pittsburgh blacks "take to music like a duck to water." The paper could well have qualified the word music by adding "classical" in front of it since the majority of such reported events-- perhaps three-fourths--were recitals and concerts.45 Occasionally musicians of national, even international, repute came to perform. In the spring of 1915 Roland Hayes--as prominent a tenor as Marian
Anderson was a contralto--gave a recital at Grace Memorial Presbyterian Church before what the paper described as "an almost record breaking assemblage of music lovers."46 In the fall of that same year,
Joseph Douglass--grandson of the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass--gave a violin recital at
Washington Park Field House Auditorium. Accompanied by his wife at the piano, Douglass was returning from a tour of the United States and Europe.47 About the same time as the Douglass recital, Rachel
Lenoir Walker, a soprano soloist who had studied in Europe and sung before royalty, appeared at Bethel
A.M.E. Church in the Hill District.48
The locations of these events shows broad-based community support. Roland Hayes and Rachel
Walker, for example, performed in two prestigious churches (Grace Memorial Presbyterian and Bethel
AME) but Douglass appeared in the presumably more accessible Washington Park Field House
Auditorium, located in the Hill District. Lodges also sponsored important musical events. In 1920 the
Knights of Pythias sponsored a recital by Marian Anderson before an audience that, according to the paper,
45 "Afro-American Notes," January 4, 1910.
46 "Afro-American Notes," June 5, 1915. Hayes sang, among others, "Ayleward's Beloved It is Morn" and Verdi's "Celeste Aïda," (the latter sung in Haitian creole). The paper also reported that Stephen Forster's "My Old Kentucky Home," sung by request, "carried his audience into a storm."
47 "Afro-American Notes," September 26, 1915. Washington Park was located at Logan and Bedford Avenues, in the Hill District.
48 "Afro-American Notes," September 26, 1915.
23 "showed unbounded appreciation of every selection."49 The Knights were fairly mainstream within the community, a notch below the black Masons in terms of prestige and social standing.
Occasionally, musical performances occurred in "white" institutional settings, and one can only wonder whether whites may have been in attendance. In 1906 the Afro-British composer Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor came to Pittsburgh while on his American tour, and appeared at Carnegie Music Hall on the North Side with Harry T. Burleigh, Melville Charlton, and Clarence Cameron White.50 On a Friday night in 1920, Will Marion Cook's Orchestra of thirty-five musicians performed at the auditorium of the elite, predominantly white Schenley High School, located in the city's Oakland neighborhood.51 Usually, however, performances took place in predominantly black community settings, as in April of 1925 when
Prof. Walter Felix Bradford and his pupils' Concert Orchestra gave their fourth annual concert in the auditorium of the Hill District's Watt Street Public School.52
49 "Afro-American Notes," May 30, 1920. The concert may have attracted a racially mixed audience since it was held at Schenley High School, a predominantly white school in the elite Schenley Farms neighborhood of Oakland/Upper Hill. Lois Deppe also sang. The concert included pieces by Tchaikowsky, Chopin and other European composers, as well as Negro spirituals arranged for the concert stage by the distinguished Afro-American arranger (himself born in Erie, Pennsylvania), Harry Burleigh. Anderson gave a second concert at a black church, Grace Memorial Presbyterian.
50Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 13, pp. 51-52. The date was Nov. 28, 1906. Samuel Coleridge- Taylor's father came from Sierra Leone and his mother was British. After attending the Royal College of Music in London, he achieved fame with Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. In 1901 a society in his name was formed in Washington, D.C. He was well received in the United States, counting Booker T. Washington among his friends and dining at the White House as guest of President Theodore Roosevelt. On Harry Burleigh, see Jean Snyder, "Harry T. Burleigh and the Creative Expresion of Bi-Musicality," (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1992), and Snyder, "A Great and Noble School of Music: Dvorak, Harry T. Burleigh, and the African American Spiritual," in John Tibbetts, Dvorak in America, 1892-1895 (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus Press, 1993), pp. 123-148.
51 "Afro-American Notes," April 4, 1920. Located near the prestigious Schenley Heights neighborhood of Oakland, Schenley was one of the city's elite high schools, erected around 1916. An examination of the "Dedication Issue" of The Schenley Journal for 1916 confirms the presence of black students. Photos show a few black students in the school's swimming pool, and sewing class and cafeteria. By 1920 blacks were beginning to settle in the Heights, for we read in "Afro-American Notes" of a meeting of the Flucus Club, "a friendly neighborhood club" at the home of Miss Amy M. Hall, 829 Bryn Mawr Road, located in Schenley Heights. See "Notes," June 27, 1920.
52 "Afro-American Notes," February 1, 1925. Prof. Bradford's Concert Orchestra may have been integrated, but I doubt it because at that time the school was 91 percent African American. See Ira Reid, Social Conditions of the Negro in the Hill District of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: Urban League, 1930), p. 83.
24 Black Pittsburgh did not have to rely on outside performers, for it had no shortage of local talent.
David Grant, a harpist from the nearby steel town of Rankin, enjoyed sufficient popularity that in 1900 he declined to participate in a contest in New York City because, according to the paper, "it would seriously interfere with his other engagements."53 In 1920, Mary Cardwell, a recent graduate of the New England
Conservatory of Music--and later the founder of the National Negro Opera Company--appeared before what the paper described as "a large and appreciative audience" to give a piano recital at Carnegie Hall in her home town of Homestead.54
The community had several instrumental groups, at least two of which specialized in medieval and renaissance music. The Xanorphica Mandolin Quintet, formed in 1909, performed music of the
Renaissance. According to the "Notes," the group "eschew[ed] everything that is not classical" and was enjoying a "high, rapid and substantial" growth in popularity.55 In addition, the community enjoyed performances by the Greater Pittsburgh Consolidated Mandolin Orchestra, composed of forty players, including the Xanorphica Mandolin Quintet.56
The black community during this period had perhaps six orchestras--not all of which existed at the same time. In 1905 the Grand Elysian Symphony Orchestra performed at John Wesley A.M.E. Zion
Church, along with the Orpheus Mandolin Club, and in 1910 J.W. Myers, formerly a member of
Robinson's Orchestra, organized the Myers Family Orchestra. Two of the most important orchestras were those organized by Kelly and Taylor. William A. Kelly, a former coal miner and graduate from Oberlin
College, opened the first musical studio for blacks in Pittsburgh and organized the city's first black orchestra, the Kelly Orchestra, with eleven pieces. Kelly's studio contained a piano and organ, violins, cellos, and other musical instruments kept on hand because many of his pupils could not buy them. A
53 "Afro-American Notes," November 4, 1900.
54The recital was June 29, 1920; reported in "Afro-American Notes" for June 27, 1920.
55 "Afro-American Notes," May 22, 1910. See April 3, 1910 for an example of the group's performance in 1910 at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church. The paper reported that a "large crowd is expected" at the concert, which also featured the Acme Male Quartet and the Acme Concert Company.
56 "Afro-American Notes," October 16, 1910 or October 23, 1910. The Mandolin Orchestra and Xanorphica Mandolin Quintet played at Old Calvary Episcopal Church, located at the corner of Station St. and Penn Avenue in Homewood.
25 second orchestra was organized by Dr. C. A. Taylor, who had studied music at the Toronto College of
Music and the Toronto Orchestral School, and had played first violin with the Toronto Civic Orchestra.
Taylor's orchestra was the city's largest black concert orchestra, numbering twenty-five members, but disbanded after several years. Shortly afterwards it was revived by Frederick Hawkins, a chemical engineer at Crucible Steel Company who came to the city from Baltimore. A trained musician as well as engineer, Hawkins also had organized a professional dance orchestra. In addition, he was president of the
Pittsburgh Local 471 of the musicians union and the best known black musician in Pittsburgh. Hawkins renamed his orchestra (somewhat immodestly) the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The sixth orchestra in existence during this period was organized between 1915 and 1927 by David Peeler, a local contractor and builder.57
Choral performances were especially popular. In 1899, the Beethoven Musical Club gave its annual reception on New Year's Eve at Arcade Hall in East Liberty.58 In 1905 the Mendelssohn Musical
Club gave a concert at Good Hope Baptist Church.59 The Conservatory of Music at Avery College, the all-black trade school on the North Side, held monthly recitals at Carnegie Music Hall on the North Side; their program in November, 1900 was typical: "O Italia", followed by a clarinet solo, a concerto, a baritone
57On the Grand Elysian Symphony Orchestra, see "Afro-American Notes," January 22, 1905 or January 29, 1905. On the Myers Family Orchestra, see "Afro-American Notes," May 29, 1910. Hawkins also continued his dance music interests and employed his orchestra to play ragtime and jazz. On Hawkins and Peeler, see Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," chap. 12, pp. 28-49; ch. 13 esp. pp. 5-7, 60-62. David Peeler's son, Lawrence Peeler, was a noted violinist who, in 1937, was hired to teach music, making him the first full-time black teacher hired to teach in the Pittsburgh public schools (in 1933 he had been hired on a part-time basis). For more on Lawrence Peeler, see Ralph Proctor, Jr., "Racial Discrimination Against Black Teachers and Black Professionals in the Pittsburgh Public School System, 1834-1973" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1979), pp. 75-76. In 1937 Dr. A.R. Taylor pulled together members of various musical groups to form a forty-five member symphony orchestra that performed at the YMCA and other venues. 58The hall was located at Centre and South Highland Avenues.
59 "Afro-American Notes," December 31, 1899; October 15, 1905 or October 22, 1905. It is possible but--given the racial divide of the time, as well as the venue and timing of this concert--not likely that the Mendelssohn Musical Club was a white group. The city had a (white) Mendelssohn Male Choir, but it was established in 1908, changing its name in 1913 to the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh and admitting women. See Baynham, "A History of Pittsburgh Music," pp. 308ff. Choral groups were extremely popular at the time, and in addition to the many German groups, choral societies existed among many immigrants, including Lithuanians, Poles, Swiss, Hungarians, Swedes, Serbians, Russians, Ukrainians, Welsh, Italians "and others." Baynham, "A History of Pittsburgh Music," p. 297. A perusal of The Bulletin, the city's leading art and musical periodical, as well as the Pittsburgh Press, failed to turn up white choral or musical societies of the same name.
26 solo, and a soprano solo.60 In 1910, at a concert at Washington Park's Field house, the North Side Choral
Club performed works by Anton Dvorák, Luwdig Liebe, Carl Busch, and Edward Elgar. Concerning the
Choral Club, the paper commented: "During the past eight years the concerts given by this organization...have grown in the esteem and popularity of the music loving public and a fine audience is always reasonably assured."61 In 1915 the newly formed Alpine Choral and Dramatic Society, composed of about thirty young people--most of whom were either graduates or students of the various high schools, colleges and conservatories of Pittsburgh--gave their first performance at Bethel A.M.E. Church.62 And, from 1916 to 1919, the Burleigh Choral group performed concert versions of black spirituals; in 1922 it merged with the North Side Choral group and formed the Clef Choir which for years was the leading black choral group in Western Pennsylvania.63
Musical performances often were part of a longer program that included a poetry reading and formal lecture. In 1910 the Loendi Club presented an Easter musical program with choral performances, vocal and violin selections, a paper on "The Engineers' Part in the World's Work," and an address by
Robert Terrell, a black municipal judge in Washington D.C. According to the paper, the program
"attracted a record-breaking crowd."64 Also in 1915, an organizing meeting for a black YMCA held a banquet at which a string quartet gave a number of musical selections, following which S.R. Rosemond read several poems which he had written about the YMCA movement and the men connected with it."65
Music composed by Afro-Americans was also performed, usually in conjunction with European classical music. In 1900 the Ideal Quartette of nearby Wilkinsburg presented what the paper called "an
60 "Afro-American Notes," November 4, 1900. The main Carnegie Music Hall, where the Pittsburgh Symphony played, was located in the Oakland neighborhood.
61 "Afro-American Notes," January 24, 1915 or January 31, 1915.
62 "Afro-American Notes," May 30, 1915. It is possible that the name Alpine derived from Alpine Street, located on the North Side. Alberta Hall Nelson, who grew up on the North Side in the early 1920s, notes that Alpine Street was located near her home on Carrington Street near Arch Stree.
63Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 13, p. 52.
64"Afro-American Notes," April 3, 1910.
65 "Afro-American Notes," March 13, 1910.
27 evening of rare enjoyment" in which mandolin solos and works by Victor Herbert were followed by "a selection of rag-time melodies."66 When distinctive Afro-American music was performed, it typically involved spirituals arranged for the concert stage. Marian Anderson, for example, included spirituals along with classical European compositions in her 1920 recital with the Knights of Pythias. And in 1920,
Charles Edward Frye, described as "one of the best tenors of the race," sang a variety of European folk songs and Afro-American spirituals.67
The venues of these musical performances demonstrate that such activity was not just a middle class phenomenon. Grace Memorial and Bethel A.M.E. churches were among the elite black churches of the era, but this was not the case for John Wesley A.M.E. Zion or Good Hope Baptist churches, whose congregations were socioeconomically mixed. And, given the small middle class in the black community, even elite churches (then as now) in fact contained congregations that in fact were socially and economically mixed. Similarly the Loendi and Aurora Reading clubs were exclusive, but not the Knights of Pythias and certainly not Avery College, a trade school with a relatively low reputation. And performances at Washington Park Field House in the Hill District would have been open to a socially mixed audience.
66 The performance was held at the studio of Prof. J.A. McDonald's at 109 Soho Street. The paper reported that Professor McDonald himself performed a number of mandolin solos, and that "an elaborate collation followed the recital." "Afro-American Notes," April 1, 1900.
67 "Afro-American Notes," February 15, 1920.
28
III. Black Pittsburgh and Literature
In additional to their love of classical music, black Pittsburghers also were interested in serious literature. They organized and supported numerous literary clubs and societies, one of the most prestigious of which was the Frances E.W. Harper League, established in 1893 and named after the popular African-
American female poet of the late nineteenth century. The other prestigious literary society was the Aurora
Reading Club, founded one year later and which was still active in 1994, when it celebrated its centennial anniversary.68 A typical meeting of the F.E.W. Harper League in 1900 was held at the Wylie Avenue
A.M.E. Church with papers presented by members on Spanish history, perhaps occasioned by the recent
Spanish-American War.69 At a typical meeting of the Aurora Reading Club in 1925, members discussed the life and writings of poets Joaquin Miller and Walt Whitman, reading excerpts from the latter's "Leaves of Grass."70 Some societies with the word "literary" in their title were dedicated to more than the study of literature. For example, one of the largest literary societies, the Wylie Avenue Literary Society, formed in the 1890s, had three hundred members who met monthly to hear lectures on temperance and similar subjects.71
As with music, the emphasis in these literary societies was on European and on mainstream, or
"white," American literature. The Tuesday Night Reading Club, for example, was composed of eighteen
"young ladies" who met twice a month at the Wylie Avenue branch of Carnegie Public Library to study
"leading writers of romance." In 1900 the paper reported the group had completed studying Sir Walter
Scott's novel Ivanhoe. Sometimes the topics were banal, such as a 1900 debate sponsored by the Literary
Society of Warren Methodist Church on the topic: "That Joshua was a greater leader of the children of
68 For the Frances E.W. Harper date see "Afro-American Notes," November 4, 1900. The Aurora Reading Club is now the oldest black community organization in the city, and in 1994 recently celebrated its centennial anniversary. The Frances Harper League, formed by Mrs. Rebecca Aldridge and Mrs. Sadie Hamilton, was named for Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a black Baltimore-born poet who lived between 1825 and 1911.
69 "Afro-American Notes," March 14, 1900.
70 "Afro-American Notes," March 8, 1925 or March 15, 1925.
71Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 12, p. 5.
29 Israel than Moses." Another banal debate that year was sponsored by the Bellevue Literary Society on the question whether "the pen is mightier than the sword."72
Although most literary works discussed by these societies were authored by Europeans and white
Americans, black writers were not neglected. In 1899 Mrs. C.W. Posey--wife of the prominent Homestead businessman--presented an essay on "The Writings and Life of Paul Laurence Dunbar" at a meeting of the
Aurora Reading Club, after which the club decided to include selections from Dunbar's writings in all future meetings.73 In 1925 the Aurora Reading Club met to discuss the writings of Phillis Wheatly, the black American poet of the eighteenth century, as well as that of the white poet James Whitcomb Riley.74
Theatrical performances were not as frequent as musical performances and literary discussion, but they persisted throughout the period. In 1898 the Lend-a-Hand Club of Allegheny performed Macbeth, but that seems to have been the only such Shakespearean performance before the 1920s. Around the turn of the century, Thomas Ewell opened a School of Elocution and Dramatic Arts, and in addition, several women--Mrs. Susie Lee, Venzuella Newsome Jones, and Miss E. Marie Coleman--trained readers who performed theatrical skits for clubs, churches, and fraternal societies.75 Theater groups included the
Lilliputian Dramatic Club, the Oriental Dramatic Club, and the dramatic society of St. Benedict the Moor
Roman Catholic Church. Most often, however, performances were by ad hoc groups. In 1920 the AKA
(Alpha Kappa Alpha) Sorority awarded a college scholarship following a theatrical performance in
Montefiore Hall.76 In 1920 a group performed "Nature's Play" at Syria Mosque for the benefit of the
72 "Afro-American Notes," November 4, 1900, April 1, 1900.
73 "Afro-American Notes," December 31, 1899. By that time Dunbar had already achieved recognition by white America. In 1900 the "Notes" reported that "The Atlantic Monthly for October contains ... a short story by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the colored poet..." "Afro-American Notes," October 21, 1900.
74 "Afro-American Notes," February 1, 1925. In 1900, Paul Laurence Dunbar, "the celebrated negro poet," appeared in Carnegie Music Hall--probably before a predominantly white audience--to read his poems. "Afro-American Notes," November 4, 1900.
75Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," ch. 13, pp. 11-12, 16-17.
76"Afro-American Notes," December 31, 1899, February 15, 1925, May 22, 1910, May 16, 1920.
30 Urban League,77 and another performed "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream" at Warren Methodist Church for the benefit of its day nursery. In 1925 Bethel A.M.E. Church members witnessed a play "Ethiopia at the Bar of Justice," held at a Hill District elementary school auditorium. A vaudeville performance was held in 1925 at the Pershing Theater for the benefit of the Coleman Home for Boys.78
Other forms of cultural expression attracted even less public interest than theatrical performances.
Dance, for example, was seldom mentioned, although the paper did report in 1900 that the East End
Dancing Class decided to keep the school in operation during the summer, "owing to an almost unanimous request from the patrons." The visual arts were present but, like dance, apparently were not prominent.
References to painters seem confined to the early years of the century. In 1899 A.A. Williams, an Erie artist then located in Pittsburgh, was reported as the guest of headwaiter A.H. Anderson of the Union
Station restaurant. The only other active artist appears to have been Leon R. Lee, a portrait artist mentioned in 1900.79
IV. Pride in Community and Race
A number of questions can be raised about a community of pariah-like status and modest economic means that leads a cultural life patterned after that of its discriminators. Why did its members choose to focus on elite culture of Europe and the United States rather than on the cultures of Africa or of the rural South? Did this emphasis on high culture reflect simple snobbery, a desire to distance themselves from the "lower class," a lack of racial pride?80 Writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance certainly felt it did, insisting that they, as representatives of the "New Negro," by having embraced the folk culture
77It was attended by "150 colored girls including school and other local groups" and was directed by Professor Carl Heinrich of the University of Pittsburgh. "Afro-American Notes," May 16, 1920.
78 "Afro-American Notes," May 16, 1920, May 17, 1925.
79 "Afro-American Notes," July 22, 1900 or July 29, 1900, December 31, 1899, October 21, 1900.
80Patricia Prattis Jennings, who now performs for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, asks perceptively: "Do other cultures, such as Orientals, concern themselves with such things? Good music is good music. Why box ourselves in? That's a large part of our problem."
31 of the rural Southern black (and to a lesser extent, of Africa), displayed more race pride and racial consciousness than had earlier intellectuals.81
However, there is no inherent contradiction between race pride and high culture. August Meier's landmark study of black social thought at the turn of the century, Negro Thought in America: Racial
Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington, shows that prominent black intellectuals such as W.E.B.
Du Bois, T. Thomas Fortune, and William Monroe Trotter--strong "race men" all--were thoroughly steeped in, and appreciative of, European and Euro-American high culture, both musical and literary.82 The cultural orientation of Pittsburgh blacks, in fact, was in step with that of contemporary intellectuals and writers. Charles W. Chesnutt, for example, the leading black novelist of the late nineteenth century, proudly belonged to the "genteel," Victorian tradition of American literature; the same could be said of
Jessie Fausett, the leading novelist of the early twentieth (although she also promoted the rebel writers of the Harlem Renaissance).83 Will Marion Cook, Harry Burleigh, and Scott Joplin, three of the leading black musicians of the period, utilized spirituals and other forms of folk music of rural Southern blacks, but transformed them into symphonic forms.84
To be sure, there were aspects of the city's black community that fit easily into the pejorative image of extravagance drawn by E.F. Frazier in his study, Black Bourgeoisie.85 Black Pittsburghers
81 Nathan Huggins discusses this attitude, and argues that in fact most writers of the Harlem Renaissance "aspired to high culture as opposed to that of the common man, which they hoped to mine for novels, poems, plays and symphonies." Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 5.
82With graduate training at Harvard and post-graduate training at Berlin, Du Bois epitomizes this interest in high culture and black pride. Du Bois was uncomfortable with much of the writings of the Harlem Renaissance because of their over-stress on folk culture.
83Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, pp. 27-28, 101.
84 On Harry Burleigh, see Jean Snyder, "Harry T. Burleigh and the Creative Expresion of Bi-Musicality," and Snyder, "A Great and Noble School of Music: Dvorak, Harry T. Burleigh, and the African American Spiritual." Even Scott Joplin, the leading composer of Rag Time music, was obsessed with creating a long, operatic composition; his opera Treemonisha, contained folk-fable elements, but was not accepted at the time by the public. Louis Armstrong loved opera music, especially Italian opera, and enjoyed playing arias and overtures from Cavalleria Rusticana among others. See Joshua Berrett, "Louis Armstrong and Opera," The Musical Quarterly 76 (Summer, 1992): 216-241. Thanks to Steven Sapolsky for the reference go Armstrong.
85E.F. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1957, 1965).
32 featured in "Afro-American Notes" often spent their vacations out of town--in Virginia and other Southern states, as well as in Atlantic City, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and Detroit. They belonged to clubs that took fishing trips to Canada and to churches whose their ministers attended ecumenical congresses in Europe. They gave six-course dinners for out-of-town guests, and led a social life that included dances, whist parties, a "Haley's Comet party," bowling tournaments, picnics, train and boat excursions, smokers, New Year's Eve and Mardi Gras balls, "moonlight receptions," costume balls, even something called an "automobile and porch party." And their baseball, basketball, and football teams played opponents both locally and from as far away as New York City.86
However, it would be too facile to use these examples of extravagant leisure activities as a way also of dismissing other aspects of the cultural orientation of Pittsburgh's black middle class. They were, in fact, embodying the call of W.E.B. Du Bois--certainly no superficial figure--that high culture was something of considerable value to blacks. Du Bois had expressed this thought in his Souls of Black Folk, considered one of the most important pieces of black literature ever published. In that work Du Bois spoke of a black soul divided between white culture and black identity. With a Ph.D. from Harvard, and post- graduate study at the University of Berlin, Du Bois clearly felt that inner division, but was not about to concede that the best of Western civilization was off limits to him or to other blacks. For this reason he was deeply offended by assertions of Booker T. Washington (and many whites) that it was folly for black youth to study Greek and Latin, to have a liberal education, to be exposed to the world classics of poetry and fiction. Du Bois certainly did not flee from his blackness. Indeed he reveled in racial pride and racial consciousness.87
Whereas Du Bois had praised Negro spirituals in Souls of Black Folk, Black Pittsburghers at this time--like their counterparts elsewhere in the nation--had mixed feelings about traditional black music like spirituals. J. Welford Holmes, one of the city's leading black attorneys, considered them to be dated
86 "Afro-American Notes," August 6, 1900, July 31, 1910. The trip was to Penetang, Ontario. The ecumenical conference was held in Scotland and was attended by Rev. Willis W. Brown, of Ebenezer Baptist Church, accompanied by his wife. For examples of elaborate entertaining see February 20, 1910, January 3, 1915, December 24, 1925, July 26, 1925.
87 Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, (New York: Schocken Books, 1976, 1990), p. 89.
33 remnants of the days of slavery and of little practical use for current social and economic needs of blacks.
Holmes' attitude emerged during an exchange that occurred in 1899 in the Pittsburgh Leader newspaper.
A writer (presumably white) suggested that music might be the way for blacks to surmount "the barrier of prejudice" since "there is and can be no prejudice in art." What rankled Holmes was the author's subsequent idea that the music most appropriate for "uplifting” blacks was not "grand opera" but the
"quaint melody" of traditional black music, especially Jubilee singing. Holmes said he had "little faith" in what he termed "the paying theory of music" and felt that "The idea of solving the Negro problem by making them musicians and singers is utterly absurd." According to Holmes, the uplifting of blacks could only come about "in the same way as for other races, through industry, labor and business," adding that the old time songs had served their purpose during slavery. Today, he argued, such songs "are of no more use or good to the colored people" and felt "it is just as well to forget them." Holmes called on whites simply to give blacks “a fair chance in the economic matters and trades,” concluding with the plea: “Give a Negro a full opportunity to become a skilled artisan and he will find his way into the arts of his own accord."88
Holmes, in other words, was not rejecting spirituals out of shame. Nor did he advocate blacks adopting high culture as a way of elevating the race in the eyes of whites. He simply saw music as irrelevant to that argument altogether.
Another reason to doubt that blacks of that era saw high culture as a way to impress whites is that, from what one can infer from the papers of the time, whites took scant notice of black cultural activities. I have located only two possible exceptions to this. In 1910, when Harvey B. Gaul, a well-trained composer and conductor, became musical director at the socially prominent Calvary Episcopal church, he followed the advice of in London and investigated the music of blacks in Pittsburgh. Accordingly he toured the streets of the Hill District listening to "street calls and songs of bean-sellers, coal-vendors, pie-men and other peddlers," and then used these themes and melodies and used them in his choral compositions.89
Another exception occurred in 1900 when the Founders Day exhibition at the Carnegie Art Institute
88 Wright, “The Negro in Pittsburgh,” ch. 13, pp. 46-51. The Wright typescript incorrectly identifies the author as W.H. Holmes, the city's "leading black attorney," but clearly the reference was to J. Welford Holmes. See above reference, fn 23.
89 Wright, “The Negro in Pittsburgh,” ch. 13, p. 59.
34 included two paintings by Pittsburgh-born artist Henry O. Tanner, who had achieved international recognition in his adopted country, France. Other than these two exceptions--and a few recitals at
Schenley High School--the vast majority of black cultural events were held in black institutions located in the black community and undoubtedly attended only, or primarily, by blacks. Indeed, the "Notes" never mentioned whether whites were present at any of these events, or discussed what whites might have thought had they been in attendance. However, given the segregation of the time it would have been newsworthy had whites been in attendance. For these reasons, it is highly probable that such events reflected the cultural outlook of a sizable part of black Pittsburgh during this era, and are an authentic expression of their own cultural preferences.
Nor does it appear that the orientation toward high culture was simply an effort by middle-class black to avoid identification as African Americans. The very title of the newspaper column--"Afro-
American Notes"--is significant in this regard, for its association with Africa. The contemporary term of self-reference for blacks nationally among whites was "Negro," which some blacks had rejected in favor of the older, polite term "colored." The name of the N.A.A.C.P.--National Association for the Advancement of Colored People--itself founded in this era, is an example of this terminology. In the "Notes" the term of self-reference only occasionally is "Afro-American," but "race man" and "race organization" were used much more frequently than the older, more elitist term "colored." 90
It is possible, of course, that the "Notes," which appeared in the city's leading Republican newspaper, tried to present a special face to its readership. But two things suggest that this was not so.
First, the "Notes" did report on some less "refined" cultural events. In 1900, for example, it mentioned an evangelist who was having "almost unparalleled" success at John Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church and was
"still holding forth to crowded houses." In 1905, it noted that Bethel A.M.E. Church--the oldest and one of
90 On the other hand, the black Detroit newspaper, the Plaindealer, seems to have urged adoption of the term "Afro-American" largely to escape what was regarded as the pejorative term "Negro." See Katzman, Before the Ghetto, p. 164. For an extended discussion of the terms "black," "Afro-American," and "colored," see Bettye Collier-Thomas, "Race, Class, and Color: The African American Discourse on Identity," Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (Fall 1994): 5--27. For an early evaluation of the term Negro, see W.E.B. Du Bois' reply to a young man who found the term hurtful: Du Bois, "The Name 'Negro'," Crisis 35 (March, 1928): 96-97.
35 the most prestigious congregation in the black community--held a revival meeting which, according to the column, has enjoyed "a number of conversions and many seekers."91
Ideally, one would wish that Pittsburgh had its own black newspaper at this time, so that one could be sure that the editor of "Afro-American Notes" was not being censured, either by himself or by the paper. Such a paper--the Pittsburgh Courier--began publishing in 1910, but only a few copies of the paper survive for the period before 1925. However, an examination of those few issues for the years 1911-1912 shows a similar cultural orientation for the community.92
Despite possible competition, members of the old and new black elite together sustained a remarkable degree of institutional development. By 1900 black Pittsburghers supported a number of prestigious clubs--the Loendi, Aurora, Goldenrod, and White Rose--which emphasized high culture.
Along with their less elite friends, upper class blacks helped establish chapters of national fraternal lodges, many of which--such as the Elks, Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, and True Reformers--at least occasionally had classical music concerts. The black elite--especially the women--often used cultural events to raise moneys to help support charitable institutions, most notably the Home for Aged and Infirm
Colored Women, a Working Girls' Home, and a Colored Orphans' Home. A number of churches which catered to the district's elite--Ebenezer Baptist, Grace Memorial Presbyterian, Bethel A.M.E. (African
Methodist Episcopal), Warren Methodist, and St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic--also were active in cultural activities, and the same was true of less elite churches.93
Another indication of racial pride is the frequent appearance of speakers who came to lecture on black history and racial uplift. In 1915, a former U.S. minister to Liberia preached at Warren Methodist
Church on the topic "Liberia, Where the Black Man Rules." The community fought to maintain racial
91 "Afro-American Notes," February 18, 1900, February 19, 1905.
92Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp 42ff. We have almost a complete run of the Courier beginning on January 13, 1923; before that period, the only surviving copies are for the period March 25, 1911 to December 27, 1912.
93Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier, p. 26. Of necessity they also had their own cemeteries. See Joe T. Darden, "The Cemeteries of Pittsburgh: A Study in Historical Geography" (MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of Pittsburgh, 1967).
36 pride directly, through lectures such as one sponsored by the Booker T. Washington Literary Society of the
Carron St. Baptist Church entitled "Why I am Proud of My Race," as part of its on-going lecture series.94
Clubs invited speakers to address racial discrimination. In 1899, anti-lynching crusader Ida B.
Wells-Barnett visited Pittsburgh and sparked interest in forming an anti-lynching league. William Mead, a
Canadian minister who favored emigration to Africa, came to tell a Pittsburgh audience "we want a country of our own" because "The negro will never be able to rise in this country. He need never hope to be admitted to the social level of the whites. Frances Harper League members listened to a paper on "The
Effects of Segregation," Homewood A.M.E. Zion Church heard a Mississippi attorney speak on "Peonage,
Disfranchisement and Southern Oppression," and the militant William Monroe Trotter--who had broken with W.E.B. Du Bois over the latter's willingness to work with whites--drew a crowd of "at least 1,000 people" at a mass meeting.95
Additional indicators of racial pride were community-wide celebrations and parades commemorating important events in black history and black contributions to America. In September 1900 the Madison Square Outing Club and St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church held a two-day celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation at Forbes Street Turner Hall.96 In 1905 Shiloh Baptist Church, together with the Colored Baptist Church of Duquesne and the Bethleham Baptist Church of McKeesport, presented the drama, "Lincoln's Proclamation." According to the "Notes" such plays were becoming popular among blacks "as they deserve to be" since "they were written by an Afro-American woman Catherine D.
Tillman."97 In 1910 Warren Methodist Church held a two-day observance of Emancipation Day,
94 "Afro-American Notes," November 7, 1915, April 3, 1910.
95 "Afro-American Notes," April 1, 1900, March 14, 1915; November 6, 1910.
96 "Afro-American Notes," August 6, 1905. It noted that "dancing and refreshments will be the features of each evening's entertainment." Similar celebrations were reported in Cannonsburg.
97 "Afro-American Notes," May 28, 1905; March 12, 1905. The plays were put on by the Williams family of Homestead.
37 including a speech about "Heroes Without Monuments" in which, according to the "Notes," the speaker
"paid a just tribute to the mothers and fathers of the race, who have been denied all opportunity."98
Black Pittsburghers regularly celebrated the birthdays of their heroes, especially Frederick
Douglass, whom they often paired with Abraham Lincoln for his labors in the emancipation of the race. In
1900 the paper reported that a military group, The Lincoln Blues, planned to commemorate Lincoln's birthday at Hannah's Hall in Lawrenceville. In 1905 the Frances Harper League celebrated "Douglass
Day" with a program of music and papers on his life. There also were celebrations which honored Lincoln and Douglass jointly. In 1910 the Booker T. Washington Literary Society sponsored a "Lincoln-Douglass" celebration with orations and papers bearing such titles as "Father Abraham," "Lincoln, the Builder of
Character," and "Douglass' Life an Inspiration." Keen interest in the meaning of Lincoln and Douglass continued throughout the period. In 1925 the paper noted that the memory of Frederick Douglass and
Abraham Lincoln "still holds a high place" among "local members of the race" as indicated by the many memorial meetings held in their honor.99
Militia companies honored black military achievements. Following the Civil War these groups led commemorations of that conflict. Pittsburgh blacks regularly turned out on May 30 for Decoration, or
Memorial, Day parades and speeches to honor the Civil War dead.100 By the turn of the century, this celebration in Pittsburgh seems to have achieved a prominence among blacks as great as Emancipation Day and the birthdays of Douglass and Lincoln. Indeed, celebrations of Decoration Day tended to subsume celebrations of the Civil War. These communal celebrations typically were organized and enacted by black militia units--notably Sons of Veterans, the Shafter Rifle Club, the Algers, the Pittsburgh Guards, the
Uganda Rifles, the Delany Rifles, and the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). The two most important in
98 "Afro-American Notes," September 25, 1910. The paper noted approvingly that the audience showed its patriotism by singing "My Country Tis of Thee."
99 "Afro-American Notes," February 4, 1900, February 5, 1905, March 12, 1905, February 6, 1910, February 15, 1925.
100Decoration Day, also called Memorial Day, a public legal holiday honoring U.S. citizens who died in war. Originally it was set up to commemorate soldiers killed in the Civil War, and was first observed on May 30, 1868. Until after the First World War the South refused to acknowledge the day, and honored their dead on separate days.
38 Pittsburgh were the Delany Rifles and the Robert Gould Shaw Post of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The Delany Rifles, named after Pittsburgh's noted black nationalist and emigrationist leader of the nineteenth century, Martin R. Delany, had been established in 1908, and included a Bugle and Drum Corps and an Athletic Association.101 The Robert Gould Shaw Post of the GAR was named after the white
Bostonian abolitionist and commander of the Massachusetts free black regiment in the Civil War.102
Following the First World War, the paper reported that the American Legion was enjoying "very encouraging growth," with two posts in Pittsburgh, one in Coraopolis and a new post, named for Robert
Smalls, a famous slave who helped sink a Confederate ship in Charleston harbor, to open in Braddock.103
These militia companies recalled the exploits of black soldiers in the Civil War, and commemorated important events in black history. On Decoration Day in 1900 the Robert Shaw Post paraded with other companies to (white) Allegheny Cemetery "to strew flowers on the graves of Veterans of the nation's prowess and glory." The unit also conducted memorial services at black-owned Lincoln
Cemetery in the Hill District, where "many hundreds of Colored citizens showed their appreciation of the day by their presence."104 At its 1910 meeting in Memorial Hall November 12, the "Notes" urged
101 Cyril E.Griffith, The African Dream: Martin R. Delany and the Emergence of Pan-African Thought (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Pres, 1975); Russell Duncan, ed., Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Col. Robert Gould Shaw (New York: Avon Books, 1994); Edward A. Miller, Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Okon Edet Uya, From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
102 "Afro-American Notes," May 29, 1910. It is not clear when the Delany Rifles were organized, but they are mentioned in the "Notes" as early as 1900. Another military group was the Pittsburgh Guards. These militia companies may have declined in popularity, since in 1915 the paper characterized the Guards as "the only strictly colored military company now in existence in the city." "Afro-American Notes," February 21, 1915. Another military group, the Uganda Drill Club, met in 1910 in Continental Hall on Centre Ave. The regiment Shaw commanded was the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Colored Infantry, whose heroic exploits were memorialized in the movie "Glory." The Post was located at 56 Arthur Street in the Hill District.
103 "Afro-American Notes," June 13, 1915. It listed those in operation but the newsprint is difficult to read. In addition to meetings and parades, the Legion occasionally sponsored recitals. In 1925, for example, the Crispus Attuck's Post #30 gave a recital in Schenley High School auditorium under the direction of Finlay Davis. "Afro-American Notes," September 27, 1925.
104 "Afro-American Notes," June 23, 1900. Lincoln Memorial Cemetery was one of the principal locations and destinations of such parades. Located at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Duff Street in the Hill District, the cemetery apparently had something of a business flavor to it, as we infer from a notice in 1900 that shareholders of the cemetery met in Wylie Avenue Church to conduct business, and distributed some $400 to shareholders. "Afro-American Notes," May 27, 1900. 39 attendance by young people, "who can rely on hearing something...concerning the valor of those who gave their all to perpetuate this country as a nation."105
The meaning of this day was well articulated by the "Notes" in 1910:
"Every recurring commemoration of Decoration Day brings its flowers and its memories. Its parades of aged veterans. Its services at the cemeteries, always ending with scattering volleys of musketry, the dipping of colors, and the sounding of "Taps." ... [W]ith the Afro-American ... the day and its patriotic exercises is always a mute reminder of a chapter in their lives which was closed forever by an almost infinite cost of human lives and countless treasure. Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, owned and conducted by Afro-Americans in this city, is always the Mecca on Decoration Day for thousands of the race, who assemble to strew flowers on the graves of their dead ones, to meet and greet old friends, and to listen to the fervid oratory of the leaders of their race as they rehearse the story of a people's rise from peonage to citizenship."106
With this profound significance, it is no surprise that in 1910--and despite threatening weather--some 1,500 black Pittsburghers went to Lincoln Memorial Cemetery where the GAR Post organized a commemoration.
According to the "Notes"::
"[the parade] was headed by the Independent Band of 30 pieces, in gorgeous new uniforms, followed by the Delany Rifles, 40 strong, commanded by Captain Frank R. Steward, displaying for the first time its stand of colors, a recent gift from the Delphians, an association of young women and accompanied by its drum and bugle corps, a recent acquisition. Then came the Pittsburgh Guards, 30 strong, Captain John Parham commanding, and the Pythian Cadets, under command of Major Johnson. ..." There were then several speeches given. Finally "the guards fired the salute" and the demonstration ended.107
If earlier Memorial Day festivities were the province of the GAR, soon a variety of militia companies shared responsibility. Sharing the honors at the 1915 services were the GAR, the Sons of Veterans,
Veterans of Foreign Service, the Pittsburgh Guards and the St. Luke Cadets. Connected with these solemn celebrations was interest in having the federal government erect in Washington, D.C. a memorial for black soldiers who fought "valorously in all of the wars of the country." Several big meetings were planned at
105 "Afro-American Notes," November 6, 1910.
106 Organizations involved included Robert Gould Shaw Post 206, GAR (Grand Army of the Republic); the Pittsburgh Guards; the Delany Rifles; the Pythian Cadets. "The principal speaker will be the Rev. Dr. William H.H. Butler, pastor at Brown A.M.E. Church, North Side, who is a veteran of the Civil War." "Afro-American Notes," May 30, 1915.
107 "Afro-American Notes," June 26, 1910.
40 Ebenezer Baptist Church and Bethel A.M.E. Church to promote the idea, but of course no such memorial was ever created.108
V. Conclusions
In sum, between 1900 and 1920 Pittsburgh's black community displayed both a strong sense of racial identity and a lively interest in high culture. Had we found such interest in high culture in New York or Philadelphia, it would have been less significant and less surprising because they contained much larger black populations and larger black middle classes. Substantial interest in high culture is more significant in a working-class city with a black middle class too small to be the exclusive support for such a wide range of cultural institutions and activities.109 Nor could it have been an effort toward mindless assimilation, given the obvious aspects of the community that reflected considerable racial pride and identity.
So far, our study of high culture in black Pittsburgh has focused on what that interest was not--it was not a sign of a lack of racial pride and it was not an exclusively middle-class phenomenon. We are left, however, with the questions of what that interest, in fact, was. To answer that entails describing where it came from and where it ultimately went.
In terms of the origins of blacks' interest in high culture, considerable work remains to be done.
However, several points can be made. First, it is doubtful that the interest originated in Pittsburgh, given the city's early deserved reputation as a cultural backwater. One exception might be blacks living in the
108 "Afro-American Notes," November 7, 1920. The dream of such a memorial never disappeared, and in 1994 ground breaking occurred for an African American Civil War Memorial in Washington D.C. as part of the National Park System, to be located on or near the Mall.
109There has long been an argument about the need for different criteria for determining the middle class within the black community and the white community. Among blacks, with a sharply truncated income and occupational structure until quite recently, conventional, "respectable" behavior and values played a crucial role in self-determination of whether one was middle class or lower class. See E.F. Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Free Press, 1962 [1957]) for the classic statement on the historic black middle class. For the late nineteenth century, see W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (New York: Schocken Books, 1967 [1899]). For new definitions emerging in the 1920s and 1930s see St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City [Chicago] , 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1945). For a recent statement, see Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
41 heavily German Allegheny City--later the North Side--because of the Germans' active interest in classical music, but this remains to be examined.
More likely is the possibility that blacks brought a taste for high culture from the South. In this regard, the story of Roland Hayes, as important a tenor as Marian Anderson was a contralto, is instructive.
The son of an impoverished farmer, Hayes grew up in rural northwest Georgia near Chattanooga,
Tennessee. He recalled that as Baptists they learned spirituals and in Chattanooga, through the brother of a member of his monumental baptist Church he was coached in classical music by a graduate of Oberlin.
Hayes recalled that before that, he "had heard very little white folks' music, apart from some Victorian anthems which we sang in church. Under the coaching of Professor Calhoun, he was exposed to pieces like "I Love Your Truly," and especially to the operas of Caruso and songs of Schubert. This continued at
Fisk University in Nashville, where he learned to read music and received a good training in classical music.110
There was, in other words, at least some interest in and awareness of classical music in Deep
Southern states like Georgia and Tennessee. It may well be that there was even more exposure to "white folks' music" in the Upper South. It is difficult to say, because the necessary research of the geography of black musical production and listening tastes has not been done. At any rate, almost 60 percent of black
Pittsburghers in 1900 had come to the city from Virginia. Virginians, both black and white, have long regarded themselves as a cultured, refined people.111 Moreover, Pittsburgh blacks seem to have come mainly out of Richmond and the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. In both Richmond and in Valley cities like Winchester, Staunton, Roanoke blacks, were probably better off economically and socially, and more exposed to white culture, than elsewhere in the South.
110??? Get bio material on Hayes. MacKinley Helm, Angel Mo' and her Son, Roland Hayes (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1942), pp. 25-30, 7174, 76-81, 86-88, 90-92.
111 The census does not give information directly on the region of a state in which people were born; I have inferred regional origins on the basis of columns in "Afro-American Notes" describing what town and counties individual Pittsburgh blacks were returning to for visits and the like. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley. On the cultural life of early Virginia, see Richard B. Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson's Virginia, 1790-1830 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1964), as well as Davis' Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 1585-1763 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977).
42 The presence of so many Virginians also may help explain why there are so few references in
"Afro-American Notes" to performances of blues, jazz, and spirituals. Perhaps these were also present, performed in informal settings rather than in churches and at club meetings. Perhaps too, however, these musical forms came more from the Deep South--Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana--and were not as prevalent among blacks in the Upper South. Certainly blues and jazz did not become prominent in most Northern cities until the migration of blacks from Deep South arrived in those cities.112
Several factors made the city of Pittsburgh itself conducive to the preservation of blacks' taste for high culture. One was the type of jobs which blacks held. Many worked as domestics, butlers, and chauffeurs in the homes of wealthy whites, or as waiters and other employees in restaurants and clubs--all of which brought them into regular contact with whites of affluence. As the white elite turned more toward high culture in the late nineteenth century, these types of service jobs meant that blacks of modest occupational status had more exposure to wealth and culture than their overall economic situation would indicate otherwise.
Another factor was the city's integrated neighborhoods. The early 1900s was a period before the emergence of the modern, heavily black ghettoes that we know today, and in 1900 even cities like Chicago had fairly mixed residential areas. But Pittsburgh, partly because of its hilly topography, was probably more residentially integrated than most. Blacks in Pittsburgh were not concentrated in one or two large neighborhoods, as they were in most "flat" cities, but were dispersed across five or six. In 1900, recall, almost half of Pittsburgh blacks lived next door to whites, including over one third of those even in the Hill
District, the neighborhood with the greatest black residential concentration.
Related to this residential integration is the fact that Pittsburgh schools had been desegregated as far back as 1875, one of the few large urban systems that were desegregated at the time. The fact that black pupils attended classes with whites exposed them to the same musical and cultural programs as their white classmates. A history of blacks in Pittsburgh done in 1940 by the WPA of the federal government
112 David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), pp. 28-33, describes a moderate amount of proto-jazz activity in New York City before the Great Migration of World War I. Alain Locke attempted an early geography of black musical forms. See Margaret Just Butcher, The Negro in American Culture , based on materials left by Alain Locke (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 60-61.
43 noted that at the turn of the century, "Teaching of music in the schools, and a growing number of Negro teachers of voice and of instrumental music produced a greater number of trained singers and skilled readers."113 This early exposure made an impact, as evidenced by the example of Alberta Hall Nelson.
Mrs. Nelson, a retired African-American teacher of Latin in the public schools, attributes an early interest in classical music partly to her mother, who belonged to a black choral group on the North Side in the
1910s and 1920s, and partly to her attendance at Cowley Elementary School. Mrs. Nelson recalls that in the 1920s she and other pupils travelled with their teacher by street car to attend special matinees given by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.114
In sum, several factors help explain the interest in high culture among blacks at this time. And, of course, once these groups had introduced that music into their own churches and clubs, other blacks would also have been exposed to it. At that point the principal dynamic for adoption of the music came from inside the community itself.
We are left with the question of when and why this interest in high culture declined. As we have seen, the persistence of the National Negro Opera Company well into the 1950s, and of the Mary Cardwell
Dawson Choir to the present time, show that such interest never disappeared entirely. Yet it is clear that the degree of interest in high culture among blacks has declined significantly from what it had been in the period 1900-1920. Of course, the same is true for all Americans, white as well as black, but it would be fair to say that the decline has been significantly greater among blacks.
Of course, interest in high culture among "ordinary" whites probably was declining significantly by the turn of the century since, as Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow shows, by that time high culture was becoming increasingly identified with the upper class. To some extent, then, the black experience might simply be mirroring the white, but with a time lag. Black interest in high culture clearly had begun to decline by the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. In music, that creative period of African American
113 Wright, “Negro in Pittsburgh,” ch. 13, p. 40. The report must be referring to teachers in private schools and academies, since blacks were not hired as teachers in the Pittsburgh Public schools until the mid-1930s. This refusal to have their black teachers hired in the local schools was the painful cost paid by blacks in Pittsburgh for a desegregated system so far as the pupils were concerned.
114Mrs. Nelson also received private music lessons by students from the prestigious, and predominantly white, Pittsburgh Music Institute, where Billy Strayhorn also studied. Interview, July 28, 1896.
44 history witnessed the emergence of jazz as a popular form. In literature, writers such as Claude McKay and Zora Neale Hurston followed the manifesto of Langston Hughes, that they would write what they pleased. The result was a turning away from the "Genteel Tradition" that formerly had defined much of
African American literature, to a genre that looked to Africa and to the rural South and to the recent
Southern migrants as their inspiration for fiction and poetry. This radical new approach to culture may have quickly won over the bulk of creative writers and artists of the period, but it is less certain to what degree it reflected the changing tastes of the public. For one thing, many of the patrons of the Harlem
Renaissance were whites--one of the seldom discussed "secrets" of the Renaissance. For another, one of the most remarkable features of the Harlem Renaissance is the fact that even its leading intellectuals paid scant attention to the major cultural creation of that decade--jazz.
W.E.B. Du Bois provides clear evidence of great ambivalence, even hostility, on the part of some of the race's most astute and proud leaders toward both jazz and the new literature. As editor of the Crisis magazine--the organ of the NAACP--Du Bois did more than anyone to promote black literary and cultural efforts of the Renaissance, especially during the early 1920s before white publishers became increasingly open to literary works by blacks. His magazine (and especially its literary editor, Jessie Fauset) promoted the new writers, but at the same time Du Bois himself was highly critical of much of that output. Arnold
Rampersad notes that Du Bois' magazine, the Crisis, "hardly concealed its disdain for jazz, the blues, and the popular gospel song," adding that "Du Bois' idea of a notable musical event ... was a black performer interpreting serious Western music, or a white composer or musician introducing African or Afro-
American themes into his work." The Crisis, in other words, reflected in the 1920s much of what we have observed of black Pittsburgh at the turn of the century--a heavy infusion of serious European and white
American literary works. The magazine often included on its cover or at the end of sections epigraphs from writers like George Eliot, Tennyson, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, or of contemporary writers like
Shaw, Wells, Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Sinclair Lewis. Black artists included Paul Robeson and
Marian Anderson, as well as Charles Chesnutt, Jessie Fauset, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Du Bois' main criticism of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance was its interest in what he considered "low life" themes. Du Bois thought art should be socially and morally uplifting, and present edifying examples of the best of the race. He deplored what he considered the fact that "Negroes of 45 education and accomplishment" were not being portrayed in contemporary writing and that the old image of "the sordid, foolish and criminal" black was being reinforced in works such as Claude McKay's Home to
Harlem which Du Bois condemned for its use of "drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity."115
Du Bois argued that the focus on low life and the exotic was partly the result of white influence.
Regarding jazz, Du Bois wrote: "Most whites want Negroes to amuse them; they demand caricature; they demand jazz." Regarding works like McKay's he wrote:
"white Americans are willing to read about Negroes, but they prefer to read about Negroes who are fools, clowns, prostitutes, or at any rate, in despair and contemplating suicide. Other sorts of Negroes do not interest them because, as they say, 'they are just like white folks.' But their interest in white folks, we notice, continues."116
In sum, by the time of the Harlem Renaissance, a massive shift in black cultural preferences was underway. It may have been confined primarily to the artists and writers, but it ultimately would filter down to the man in the street, in ways that have not yet been carefully explored. Certainly critics like Du
Bois were increasingly out of touch with a new generation of blacks in regards to jazz, which was then becoming increasingly popular among young people of both races.
Yet even in terms of the acceptance of jazz the story is more complicated than one might imagine.
In this regard, the example of Billy Strayhorn, one of Pittsburgh's leading jazz musicians and composers is instructive. One of the premiere composers in the history of jazz, Strayhorn is best known among jazz aficionados for composing the Duke Ellington standard, "Take the 'A' Train." However, as Ellington's principal composer and collaborator, Strayhorn composed (but received little public recognition for) many other Ellington standards.
In fact, Duke Ellington's life itself shows this shift in black musical taste. The Duke grew up in a solid middle-class community of Washington, D.C. around the turn of the century. His father was a butler for a prominent Washington (doctor; dentist ??) and his mother was the daughter of a Washington police officer, a very prominent job in the black community of that era. Both parents stressed manners and
115 Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Schocken Books, 1976, 1990), pp. 194-5, 197.
116 Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, pp. 188, 197.
46 gentility, and both played the piano at home. They also arranged for their son to take piano lessons while quite young--although Duke later says the lessons made no major impression on him. He later studied composition in classical music with Henry Grant, a prominent figure in the city's classical music circles.
With this solid background in classical music, Duke in his late teens--which would have been between
1915 and 1920 (???) he also absorbed "black music" of the era. As he reports, "I could also hear people whistling, and I got all the Negro music that way." He furthered his musical education by hanging out at poolrooms, especially ones very popular poolroom, Frank Holliday's at 7th and T streets, where all levels of black male society intersected--gamblers, Pullman porters, law and medical students from Howard
University, and musicians both trained and untrained. There he acquired a musical education that shaped his future development, a fusion of Europea classical music, popular white tunes, blues and emerging jazz rhythms and techniques. He reports that at Hollidays, "There was a fusion, a borrowing of ideas, and they helped one another... Oh, I was a great listener!"117
Although Ellington never says so directly, he was being increasingly influenced by a new factor in black cultural development, the migration of rural Southern blacks to the North. In Washington, the impact of this migration is not as immediately obvious as in other, industrial Northern cities, for
Washington also had a substantial rural black population. But with the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent opening of industrial jobs to black in places like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, many black migrants passed through Washington on their way to places like Pittsburgh. And they passed through with their music and culture as well.
In Pittburgh, the impact of these migrants was immediately obvious. First, unlike the migrants in the years 1880-1900, these came from the Deep South, especially Georgia and Alabama, and brought their tradition of blues which now got transformed into jazz. The impact in Pittsburgh was to immediately enliven the local cultural scene. The migrants gave the community a new energy and creativity that quickly attracted attention. Wylie Avenue, Centre Avenue, and side streets in the Hill district "jumped" as blacks and whites flocked to its bars and night spots. The Collins Inn, the Humming Bird, the Leader
House, upstairs over the Crawford Grill, as well as Derby Dan's, Harlem Bar, Musician's Club, Sawdust
117??? Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress (???), pp. 6-34. years hanging out at Hollidays = ???
47 Trail, Ritz, the Fullerton Inn, Paradise Inn, and the Bailey Hotel attracted some of the nation's finest jazz musicians. Marie's and Lola's, small and stuffy clubs, provided spots for late night jam sessions, and helped make Pittsburgh a center for nurturing internationally known musicians. Jazz notables born reared, or nurtured in the Pittsburgh area between the wars include Lena Horne, Billy Strayhorn, Kenny Clarke, Art
Blakey, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Roy Eldridge, and Leroy Brown, in addition to such notable female musicians as Mary Lou Williams, Louise Mann, and Maxine Sullivan. As the district's fame spread nationwide,
Claude McKay, leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, labeled the intersection of Wylie and Fullerton
Avenues--in the heart of the Hill--"Crossroads of the World."118
One very good example of how this transition occurred can be seen in the life of one of
Pittsburgh's most distinguished products, Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn was born to parents who, like so many other Southern blacks, moved North during the World War I era for economic opportunities. In
1920, when Billy was five years old, the family (after intermediate stops in Ohio and New Jersey) moved to Braddock, then to Rankin, Pennsylvania--mill towns located just outside Pittsburgh--before finally settling in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh. Billy's mother Lillian had earned a two-year degree from
Shaw University, and was a woman of refinement and taste who came from what his biographer describes as a "comfortable working family" in a small town in North Carolina. Strayhorn's father also had been raised in "relative comfort and style" in Hillsborough, N.C.
The parents' dreams for a better life in the North were quickly frustrated, however. A succession of dead-end jobs in the mills and in construction turned Billy's father into a bitter, disillusioned man who increasingly drank and neglected the family. The family lived in a "shack" located in the rear of Tioga
Street in an integrated, working-class neighborhood, where the hopes of Billy's mother for a life of elegance and refinement faded under the burden of a bleak, dreary existence. Billy was helped by spending summer vacations with his grandmother in North Carolina, where he was introduced to a home of
118 Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," p. 75. The McKay quote is from Ishmael Reed, "In Search of August Wilson," Connoisseur, March, 1987, p. 95. Also see William Y. Bell Jr., "Commercial Recreation Facilities among Negroes in the Hill District of Pittsburgh" (MA thesis, Department of Social Work, University of University of Pittsburgh, 1938).
48 gentility and refinement--and especially to the fine piano that adorned his grandmother's elegantly appointed parlor.
With his grandmother's encouragement, Billy developed a passion for music, and in Pittsburgh took a newspaper route to earn money with which he eventually purchased a used, somewhat defective piano. He quickly showed his talent for both playing and composing music while a student at
Westinghouse High School, a predominantly white school with an excellent music program, The gifted student became principal pianist for the Senior Orchestra, which specialized in playing classical music at school events. He also became the pianist for the school's Orchestra Club, which played classical music at leading hotels and clubs. While still in high school Billy composed several pieces of classical music, including a waltz and a "Concerto for Piano and Percussion." Strayhorn also shone as a classical pianist, and once interpreted a Grieg concerto so beautifully that his music teacher raved about the recital years later.
However, Billy also enjoyed popular music, especially the symphonic jazz compositions pioneered by George Gershwin. Strayhorn's biographer describes his popular compositions as
"[r]hythmically vibrant and catchy":
"jaunty popular-music-style phrases over chromatic harmonies and syncopated rhythms in much the way that Gershwin had popularized, by way of black jazz, European concert music and Yiddish theater songs." [p. 17]
At one point Billy and a white neighborhood friend, Harry Herforth, formed a duo that played civic events around town--often polkas and the like, to sometimes hostile stares. Recognized for his outstanding musical talent, Billy was invited to parties held by both blacks and whites, where he invariably was asked to play the piano.
Not only was Billy sophisticated and eclectic in his musical tastes, he also maintained a form of sophistication not always common in high school students. According to his biographer, Billy "embraced all the era's standard symbols of refinement"--he spoke French, he dressed impeccably, he subscribed to the
New Yorker magazine. Probably Strayhorn also reflected the refinement of his mother and grandmother.
Although Billy enjoyed jazz, his first love continued to be classical music. After graduating from high school, he worked in a drug store, saved his money, and enrolled at the Pittsburgh Musical Institute, a
49 private school dedicated to classical music and affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh. Strayhorn did well there, but soon left after the death of a favorite teacher.
Strayhorn increasingly turned toward popular music, notably jazz, partly because he was coming to realize that, no matter how talented he might be, he would have great difficulty earning a living as a pianist or composer. His old friend, Harry Herforth, with whom he had formed a duo, won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory. Herforth later recalled that Billy had been discouraged about the idea of college because of his race, and gave up the idea of a career in classical music because "[t]he very idea of a black concert pianist was considered unthinkable."119 His final turn away from classical music toward jazz came when Mickey Scrima and Bill Esch, two white buddies in the neighborhood--and themselves aspiring jazz musicians--purchased him his first "true" jazz record--a solo by Art Tatum.120 Strayhorn was enraptured, and soon discovered Teddy Wilson, and saw before himself successful musicians of his own background making it in the commercial world.
For our purpose, Strayhorn's coming of age in Pittsburgh demonstrates that several factors--some internal and familial, others external and social--shaped his musical preferences. Strayhorn's interest in classical music came from his attendance at a racially mixed high school where good instruction in such music was available. But his initial attraction to the piano, and his taste for style, elegance and sophistication came from his mother and grandmother. These personality traits and musical training came together in his blending of the complex harmonies of classical music with the rhythms of jazz to produce the sophisticated and concertized jazz pieces he composed for Ellington's band. And the racial climate of the time, plus the fact that recordings were making jazz a commercially viable form of music shifted him in the direction of jazz. Strayhorn might or might not have been as productive as a composer and performer of classical music as he was of jazz.
And there is additional evidence of the persistence of earlier attitudes toward high culture in the
1920s and 1930s. Frank Bolden, former city-editor of the Pittsburgh Courier and an incredibly rich
119 David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), p. 19.
120Hajdu, Lush Life, pp. 31-32.
50 memory, recalls the existence of classical music groups at the time he came to Pittsburgh in 1930. Bolden easily calls off the names of some of the musicians in Pittsburgh at the time.
"'Ghost' Howe had a quartet, very good; Fritz Hawkins was an excellent violinist out of East Liberty and had a string ensemble that played at our symposiums at the YMCA. They were playing [classical music] before I came to Pittsburgh in the 1930s. Also, the women here, quite a few of them had very good voices; they had duets, quartets, and a sextet with two of the members out of the Aurora Reading club. One of them did German lieder..."121
However, as Bolden also notes, the popularity of classical music had definitely declined sharply by the 1930s. It was still available, but was confined to the "hoity" churches and clubs, and had a much reduced following. People, including most of the middle class, by then were attuned to jazz and swing, although a number of ministers still objected strenuously to the new, secular music. As a result, Bolden-- who reported on things musical for the Courier, recalls that he was able to devote little space to musical events involving classical music, but much space to jazz performances, because that is where the public's interest lay by that time.122
Billy Strayhorn, Mary Cardwell Dawson, and the many black musicians and listening public of the turn of the century and well into the 1920s, 1930s and later, provide a profound lesson for all of us, one that we need to ponder. Like their predecessors at the turn of the century, they displayed no internal conflict between being black and playing classical music. Their values and interests were summed up by
Patricia Prattis Jennings, daughter of a former editor of the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper and the first black musician play for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Noting the large amount of classical music in the black community early in this century, Jennings commented:
"I think some of us have a tendency to think we invented the wheel, that nobody did much of anything worthwhile before we came along. ... One can hardly blame the many younger people who have turned their backs on or refuse to acknowledge the value of 'high' (white) culture, in order to find their true identity. But I have to wonder if they'd recognize their true identity if they came upon it. What is our true identity? Great books are great books; great music is great music. To deny that is to deny truth."123
121Frank Bolden, telephone conversation, June 22, 1997.
122 Bolden, telephone conversation, June 20, 1997.
123Personal communication, August, 1996.
51
Appendix Notes
Check footnotes:
1 ??? Until ??? the Apple St home was occupied by Vickie Battles, granddaughter of Harris. Peggy Pierce Freeman is one of the few ??? surviving members of the Choir and the Opera Company. Was the other Dawson home the family home that Mary had grown up in in Homestead, and still occupied by Barbara Edwards Lee?
?? What was Woogie's occupation?
1 Which churches that supported Mary's NNOC were elite? Her Company received support--financial and in terms of donated labor--from a wide range of churches, including Ebenezer Baptist, Carron Street Baptist, Mount Ararat, St. James AME, Braddock AME, John Wesley AME, A.M.E. Zion, and Bidwell Presbyterian.
??? Ask Frank about the social class of these churches and clubs. The venues of these musical performances demonstrate that such activity was not just a middle class phenomenon. Grace Memorial and Bethel A.M.E. churches were among the elite black churches of the era, but this was not the case for John Wesley A.M.E. Zion or Good Hope Baptist churches. Similarly the Loendi and Aurorar Reading clubs were exclusive, but not the Knights of Pythias or Avery College (a trade school of low reputation). And performances at Washington Park Field House in the Hill District would have been open to a socially mixed audience.124
?? change fn reference. Wright, “The Negro in Pittsburgh,” pp. 46-51. The Wright typescript incorrectly identifies the author as W.H. Holmes, the city's "leading black attorney," but clearly the reference was to J. Welford Holmes. See above reference, fn 26.
??? check with CPL for catalog of this 1900 exhibition for name of Tanner painging.
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(1) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Contact Marva Carter, Atlanta University, per Deane Root; Josephine Wright ex editor of American Music Journal, at College of Wooster in Ohio (tel 216-263-2218). Contact Paul Wells, Cirector, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132 tel:615-898-2449.
One may still ask whether blacks' adoption of European musical forms was not being in some way
"disloyal" to their own cultural tradition. In this regard, it is pertinent to note that African culture has traditionally been eclectic and willing to borrow from others, even while transforming such borrowings into something uniquely their own. The blues and jazz, for example, were not found in Africa, but
124??? Ask Frank about the social class of these churches and clubs.
52 emerged in America from a blending of African and European musical styles into something new. John
Chernoff, in his remarkable study of traditional African music, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, reports that at one point, while studying drumming in rural Ghana in the early 1970s, the musicians once asked him to play them something from his own country, the United States. Chernoff demurred, saying he didn't want to "corrupt" their distinctive musical style, to which the musicians laughed heartily, assuring him that they also learn from listening to the musical styles of other tribes, translating that into their own style and creating something new and exciting. When Chernoff then played them something from the U.S., sure enough, the delighted musicians immediately began to improvise upon it and incorporate it. [???]125
And certainlly the musical performances of a Marian Anderson, a Roland Hayes, and a Paul Robeson attest to the fact that black performers who learn and appreciate and perform European classical music can and do give it their own individual and cultural interpretation. And, of course, they did so without in any way forsaking an appreciation of African-American Southern folk music such as spirituals and work songs. qq qq Check school curriculum re music. qq Call Lawrence Peeler's son in Baltimore and sister in California. Son=David Peeler, 410-988- 9192(h) and 410-767-6963(w). Lives at 3505 Reynard Dr., Ellicott City, Md. 21042. Has brother in NJ with photos; Lawrence Peeler was a pack-rat. Many records. qq Ask Peggy Pierce Freeman about Sunday teas in which classical music was performed. Look at this in Snyder's report on the Steel City Heritage Project. qq Get Willard Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color (1990) on bmc and culture. shows they were not interested in spirituals. qq For info on black symphony orchestras, contact Center for Black Music Research, Suzanne Flandreau, Librarian, 312-663-1600 x5559. Ask about the New World Symphony. qq check if Mary Cardwell Dawson choir continues today--fn1. qq Check on curriculum of Pgh schools--did they have courses or focus on classical music and/or serious literature? fn119 qq See Lou Donnelley history of Duquesne Club (441-3027); Mary Brignano worked on clubs; Hax McCullough hist of country clubs; Frank Couvares; David Wilkins; Eliza Brown; Frank Toker history of Pgh.
125 ??? get Chernoff citation. John Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)
53 qq An examination of the cultural orientation of the black community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the decades before the outbreak of the Harlem Renaissance shows that the writers, artists and intellectuals of that era indeed were reflective of a much broader cultural orientation among black folks of that era, that to the extent one can find any general cultural orientation of the broad community, it would be toward high culture--classical music and European literature. If this is true, and if Pittsburgh can tell us something more broadly about the cultural orientation of black Americans at that period, then we must rethink our assumptions about the connection between race and culture. qq There are several reasons for this lacuna in the literature. First, the desire of many blacks to promote a distinctive and separate cultural identity makes them contemptuous of, or at least indifferent to, the notion of blacks being interested in high, so-called "European" culture. Consequently the stress of late has been on the emergence of this distinctive African American cultural forms, and little interest in illuminating interest by blacks in "white" culture. In addition, much recent scholarship has focused on popular and/or folk culture, of both whites and blacks. In the case of blacks, the scholarly focus on the blues, spirituals, and jazz has created an impression that black interest in other cultural forms seems an oddity.126 qq If Pittsburgh is indicative of broader patterns within black America, then clearly in the early twentieth century, black interest in classical music and high culture was much broader and deeper than we would suspect, and extended much further down into the social order than we would have imagined.127 qq Only recently have scholars begun to record the participation of blacks in the world of classical music. Eileen Southern, in her survey, Music of Black Americans, notes that in the late nineteenth century blacks could not perform in white orchestras but quite a few did attend musical conservatories, notably Oberlin, Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York.128 Jean Snyder has examined the career of one of those conservatory trained black musicians, Harry T. Burleigh, who was educated at the National Conservatory of Music in New York, studied with Anton Dvorák, and composed orchestral arrangements of black spirituals. Marva Carter has examined the career of Will Marion Cook, who studied at Oberlin, Berlin and New York before establishing a chamber orchestra in 1890 and composing orchestral music based on black folk elements.129 Eric Smith has recently published a
126Even in discussing the Harlem Renaissance, the stress has been on the incorporation of distinctively black motifs into the writing and music, rather than the fusion of European and black cultural traditions, as the Renaissance leaders themselves maintained they were doing. For discussions of blacks in white folk music, see: Cecilia Conway, Black Banjo Echoes in Appalachia; Barry Lee Pearson new book on Virginia Piedmont Blues; Bill Malone, Singing Cowboys and Music Mountaineers; Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues on Piedmont N.C.; John Jackson, black musician from Rappahanock Co Va liner notes on album. References provided by Paul Wells, Director, Center for Popular Music, Middle Tenn State Univ, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, tel: 615-898-2449; also Charles Wolfe. See Penn Bogert, an amateur historian studying black bands of Louisville in early 19th century: 1134 Cherokee Rd., L'ville Ky 40204. Also see Spencer Crew book; Horton on Boston On Pittsburgh high culture, see Tokler, Lorant
127Add this later, if needed: During this period, the black population of Pittsburgh was growing rapidly but still quite modest in size. It numbered only 20,000 in 1900 and its middle-class, at least as measured by white-collar occupations, was minuscule. During this period the interest in classical music and serious literature was so prevalent and spread so widely across community institutions that it could not have been the exclusive province of the community's middle and upper classes.
128Eileen Southern, Music of Black Americans, pp. 262-264.
129Marva Carter at Atlanta Univ, per Deane Root. Also, see Josephine Wright, ex editor of American Music Journal who teaches at College of Wooster in Ohio (tel 216-263-2218). 54 bibliography of blacks in opera.130 And other facets of black musical participation in art music continues to be explored in the journal [Blacks in music].131 qq However, although studies have begun to document the experience of individual blacks in classical music, they have paid almost no attention to the community dimension of interest in classical music and other forms of high culture. The existence of widespread interest and support can be inferred from two things. First, as pointed out by Eileen Southern, in the nineteenth century black classical musicians traveled extensively, performing in black churches, colleges and community settings.132 Second, several cities maintained black symphonic and musical societies--the Lyre Club Symphony Orchestra of New Orleans, the Clef Club Symphony Orchestra and the Drury Opera Company of New York, as well as choral groups in Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia.133 qq Of course, Levine set out to explore black folk culture, not black interests in black high culture. This is an area that has received very little investigation. Most of the few investigations that deal with this topic focus on literature, and even then deal more with an analysis of the careers of individual black writers and artists rather than on the cultural preferences and activities of black communities and the black public. Eileen Suthern has noted it in music, as has xx harry burleigh, and students of wash d.c. Similarly, Robert Bone has observed this for black literature. And August Meier has noted it for black social thought in general. qq That such a finding seems puzzling, perhaps even somewhat dubious, reflects how much our perception of the past is shaped by the present. If we associate black Pittsburgh with anything musically, it is jazz. After all, Pittsburgh is the home of outstanding jazz innovaters in the 1920s and 1930s--Earl "Fatha" Hines, Leroy Brown, Fletcher Henderson, Roy Eldridge, Kenny Clarke, Mary Lou Williams, Louise Mann, Maxine Sullivan, Lena Horne, Billy Eckstein, and Stanley Turrentine, among others.
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The Wright MS, Ch. 13: Arts and Culture
Same time: Four Hundred Social Club, the Hesperia Club, the Gilt Edge Social Club, the Rosebud Social Club, the Twin City Married Ladies Circle, the Laman (?) Social Club, the Columet Club, the Ladies Magnolia Circle, the Volunteer SOcial Club of Allegheny, the Four Whitecaps Progressive Club "and many others" (p5-6)
1903: organized the State Federation of Colored Women's Cub "and most Pittsburgh organizations affiliated."(p6*
1907: more than 25 Negro women's clubs were active. In 1914 the majority affiliated with out-of-town groups to rorm the City-County Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.(p6)
130Southern, pp. 266-280.
131Get title ot journal of blacks in music.
132New York: W.W. Norton, 1971, 1983, pp. 240-250, 281, 283-286.
133Southern, pp. 286-291. Also see, for NYC, James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930), pp. 123-124. 55 The Tuesday Study Club met at the Wylie Avenue Branch of Carnegie Library, by its own notice was "composed of a number of intelligent and earnest minded ladies of the race." Directed by Miss Howard, the Librarian. (p8) [But what date???]
Theater: not much until in 1931 five dramatic groups combined to form the Negro Drama League and its annual competitive performances. The Olympian Playes was the most notable of the black theatre groups. (p16-17)
MUSIC: The Wright MS, Ch. 13: Arts and Culture
In Sept 1919 the War Camp Community Service sponsored a Song Festival at Forbes Field "at which over a thousand Negro singers including church choirs, choral clubs, soldiers and sailors and individuals appeared," with the stated purpose of awakening interest "in Negro folk music, especially the spirituals." (p53)
Direct studies of the cultural orientation of the black public can tell us to what extent such literary and musical forms transcended the individual artist and the small but growing "Talented Tenth" of black professionals and entrepreneurs whom Du Bois counted on for the elevation of the race.134 A first step in such an investigation would start by recognizing the importance of place. The blues and spirituals may well have been the almost universal musical form found among blacks living in the rural Deep South, but not necessarily in the urban South, much less the larger cities of the North.
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Today, an opera company supported by the African-American community might be looked upon as both curious and anomalous, indicative of middle-class snobbery and perhaps of a lack of racial pride.
Whatever the merits of such an assessment today, it would scarcely apply to earlier periods. As we will see, at the turn of the century interest by Pittsburgh's black community in "high culture"--defined here to include classical music and serious literature--equaled if not exceeded interest in other forms of expressive culture. They took enormous pride in their own community-based and community-supported cultural institutions, which included concert orchestras, chamber music groups, choirs, and any number of harpists,
134W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: James Potts, 1903), pp. 33-75. The concept of the Talented Tenth, the best and brightest and most educated of a people, was developed in a number of Du Bois' early writings, although not necessarily with that formal title. See, for example, The Philadelphia Negro (New York: Schocken Books, 1899 (1967), esp. "Social Classes and Amusements," pp. 309-321.
56 pianists and violinists. Such interest in high culture in no way indicated a lack of racial pride, for the community also maintained a wide range of charitable and community institutions, regularly celebrated black history and black achievements. In short, it was a community characterized both by race pride and by an appreciation of high culture.
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This is partly because historical studies of urban black culture have focused on the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The Renaissance itself merits thorough study, for it was probably the most brilliant chapter in the development of the cultural life of urban black America. But attention has focused almost exclusively on the ways in which it drew inspiration from Southern folk culture, and relatively little on how it emerged in dialectical fashion from a long tradition of interest in high culture, and tried to meld the two. Relatively little attention has been paid to the forms and popularity of that earlier cultural orientation of black urbanites, the one that the Renaissance called upon in attempting to take the rural folk culture to new levels of sophistication. [get citations ????] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
However, studies of individual intellectuals, writers and musicians do not necessarily tell us much about the cultural tastes of the black public. For reasons of marketability, writers sometimes tailored their materials to appeal to whites, something that was most evident in the case of Paul Laurence Dunbar, who wrote dialect poetry that was popular among whites, but himself preferred to write in a formal style. ======
57 An examination of the cultural preferences of Pittsburgh blacks in the period 1900 to 1920 clearly shows a great interest in high culture. Although blacks were not welcome at downtown theaters and could not perform with the city's opera and symphony orchestra, they gave little indication that they regarded these cultural forms as inherently the province of whites. Instead, they opened the doors of their churches, lodges and clubs to performances by visiting musicians and they supported local musicians, singers, orchestras.135
The names of some of these community groups indicates how great was the interest in classical music. In the 1890s the community had several bands and orchestras, such as the Twin City Band, the
Lincoln Cornet Band, the Pittsburgh Military Band, Williams Orchestra, Lloyds Orchestra, Kelly's
Orchestra, and the Avery College Orchestra. In addition, a number of churches and fraternal orders developed their own bands and orchestras, such as St. Benedict’s Band, sponsored by St. Benedict the
Moor Roman Catholic Church. In the years 1900 to 1920 the community boasted an even larger number of such groups, including the Xanorphica Mandolin Quintet, the Orpheus Mandolin Club, the Grand Elysian
Symphony Orchestra, the J.W. Myers Family Orchestra, Robinson's Orchestra, the Conservatory of Music at Avery College, the Beethoven Musical Club, the Mendelssohn Musical Club, the North Side Choral
Club, and the Alpine Choral and Dramatic Society.136
Black Pittsburghers also were interested in serious literature. Churches and clubs sponsored readings and/or discussions of literary works, which often included a musical recital as well. They discussed works by such black writers as Paul Laurence Dunbar (the "poet laureate" of black America), as well as by such white writers as Sir Walter Scott and Walt Whitman. The names of some of these literary
135 check baker, following the color line, re jim crow theaters of the time. See Robert Bone, Negro Novel in America; Meier, Negro Thought in America: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963, 1988); David Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981); Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois--Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: H. Holt, 1993); Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Schocken Books, 1976, 1990).
136 Most references to these clubs and organizations were gleaned from a newspaper column, "Afro- American Notes," which appeared weekly in the Pittsburgh Press. For more on the "Notes," see later. References to the groups in the 1890s is contained in a history done by the W.P.A. in 1940, edited by Ernest J. Wright. See Ernest J. Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh," (typescript, W.P.A. Federal Writers' Project Ethnic Survey ca. 1940; original in the Pennsylvania State Archives), p. 58. Until recently many black churches in Pittsburgh sponsored Sunday afternoon teas at which musicians and vocalists performed some mixture of classical music and spirituals.
58 groups give an idea of their activity and the degree to which they were embedded in the community--the
Literary Society of Warren Methodist Church, the Golden Star Club of Central Baptist Church, The
Hawthorne Literary Society of Homewood A.M.E. Zion Church, the Booker T. Washington Literary
Society of the Carron Street Baptist Church, the Imperial Literary Society of Calvary Baptist Church, the
Preston Avenue Literary Society of Bellvue, the Literary Section of the Sewickley black YMCA, the
Aurora Reading Club, the Tuesday Night Reading Club, the Frances E.W. Harper League, the Young
Men's Literary Club, the Married Women's Culture Club, the Andrometer Literary Society, the Daughters of Henry Club, the Emma Moore Literary and Art Circle, the Homewood Social and Literary Club, the So-
Re-Lit (Social, Religious, and Literary) Club, and the Arnett Literary Society. Although the newspaper reported that at the latter club "apathy seems to have taken hold," the literary tradition continued among others, and in 1912 representatives of nearly every black lyceum and literary club united to form the
Pittsburgh Literary Union.137 ======
Writers of the Renaissance spoke proudly of themselves as representing a "New Negro" full of race pride who was replacing a vaguely defined, but implicitly less proud "Old Negro." These writers, however, never provided specific, detailed descriptions of those "Old Negroes."138
137 "Afro-American Notes," in the Pittsburgh Press, 5/9/1915, 9/25/1910, 5/19/1900, 5/14/1905, 2/19/1905, 2/20/1910, 8/1/1915. Also, Ernest J. Wright, "The Negro in Pittsburgh."
138 See Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 64-65 for a good critique of the supposed dichotomy between the "Old" and "New" Negro.
59