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High Culture in Black Pittsburgh Operates in Something of a Historiographical Vacuum

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High Culture in Black Pittsburgh Operates in Something of a Historiographical Vacuum 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Pennsylvania, 1900-1920" Laurence A. Glasco History Department University of Pittsburgh May 28, 1997 Preliminary Draft Do not cite or quote without permission. 9/20/2006 On a beautiful day in the Fall of 1994, officers of the State Historical Commission traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania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.
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