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View on the Quest for Racial Justice in the United States and Across the African

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View on the Quest for Racial Justice in the United States and Across the African Pride and Protest in Letters and Song: Jazz Artists and Writers during the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965 A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Jack R. Marchbanks May 2018 © 2018 Jack R. Marchbanks. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Pride and Protest in Letters and Song: Jazz Artists and Writers during the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965 by JACK R. MARCHBANKS has been approved for the Department of History and the College of Arts and Sciences by Kevin Mattson, PhD Professor of Contemporary History Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT MARCHBANKS JACK R., Ph.D., May 2018, History Pride and Protest in Letters and Song: Jazz Artists and Writers during the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965 Director of Dissertation: Kevin Mattson Pride and Protest in Letters and Song is a traditional historical narrative which examines racial justice advocacy, as expressed in artistic works by several preeminent jazz musicians and the writers who allied with them during the pivotal 1955 to 1965 span of the American Civil Rights Movement. The work interrogates milestone confrontations during the civil rights movement, such as the Little Rock Nine Crisis, the African Anticolonial Movement, and the pivotal 1963 direct action campaigns waged by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC, the NAACP and SNCC. The aim of this method of historical inquiry is to determine why and how these events motivated the profiled musicians and writers to use their gifts to express opinions on the racial tumult of the era. It was found that the artistic works produced during the era had little real-world impact on the overwhelmingly Southern and church-based civil rights campaigns. However, what the profiled musicians and writers had to say about the civil rights movements is worth knowing because the historical record demonstrates they were thought leaders. Several of the observations they made and ideological stances they adopted were prescient, indicating future strategic shifts and points of view on the quest for racial justice in the United States and across the African Diaspora. 4 PREFACE This narrative history tells the story of how a select group of jazz musicians and jazz-admiring writers used their creative gifts to raise their audiences’ awareness of the social, economic and political forces impacting African Americans. It focuses on a ten- year period beginning in 1955 and ending in 1965. During the same ten-year span in which civil rights movement leaders mounted their most potent challenges to the nation’s longstanding segregationist policies and practices, this select group of musicians and writers enjoyed coincident career pinnacles, by both critical and commercial measures. These advocates in the jazz elite joined the fray, using their artistic expression and cultural prominence to push for racial justice. But, to borrow a phrase from jazz aficionado James Marshall Hendrix, the story “goes a little deeper than that.”1 The Twentieth Century was only a few months old when two African American intellectuals declared their people’s quest to claim their rightful status as full citizens of the United States. These two African American intellectuals heralded a coming struggle for political rights, civil rights and economic justice that would transform America in the century ahead and, in turn, spark a global campaign for human rights. These two African Americans made this powerful and prescient proclamation – in a song. Before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, before Alain Locke announced the arrival of the “New Negro” of 1 Jimi Hendrix, “Highway Chile,” from Are You Experienced? The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Reprise, 1967). 5 the Harlem Renaissance2 and before W.E.B. Du Bois prophesized that the “problem of the Twentieth Century” would be “the problem of the color-line,”3 James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson published a song that reminded African Americans of the travails they had overcome and that envisioned their ultimate victory over the monstrous racial injustices of Jim Crow. Educator and lawyer James Weldon Johnson had first written the song’s lyric as a poem. Five hundred school children performed it to celebrate the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12, 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida. His younger brother, pianist-composer John Rosamond Johnson, set the poem to music and together they published it in New York that same year. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” became so popular that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), co- founded in 1911 by W.E.B. Du Bois among other notables, adopted it as its official song.4 Over a century later, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” remains one of the most beloved songs of the American Civil Rights Movement, is often called “the Black National Anthem” and is annually sung by those gathered at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday celebrations. The reason “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has endured longer than any other “message song” that will be examined in this dissertation is because it was written by two middle class black leaders who saw other black leaders as the primary audience for the song and its message. It has been embraced by successive generations of black clergy, 2 Alain Locke, “The New Negro” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Charles Boni, Inc., 1925, republished by Simon & Schuster, 1997), 11-7 and 14-16. 3 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 1. Originally published in 1903. 4 “Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Poem and The Song,” Black Culture Connection; http://www.pbs.org/black-culture-authors-spoken-word-poetry/lift-every-voice-and-sing/html [accessed May 9, 2016]. 6 professionals, business owners and politicians who have had the platform and means to keep the song in the consciousness of African American communities across the nation. Far from being a “folk song” of the movement, it is a “talented tenth” song, to use Du Bois’s famous term. Its message flowed down from the black elite rather than up from the working class black communities. This observation is not made to disparage the song. It is made to understand how and why the song has become a revered cultural artifact of African Americans’ long struggle for justice and equality. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” rose to popularity among African Americans long before the advent of record players or radio. To listen to a new composition in the early 1900s, one had to hear it performed “live” or purchase its piano sheet music and play it as well as sing the lyric personally. Serendipity favored the Johnson brothers and their song. It happened that the piano was the status symbol among black families of means at the turn-of-the-Twentieth Century. The piano held a special allure for African Americans because it was an instrument many of their parents and grandparents had longed to own but were denied during slavery. Even destitute sharecropping blacks aspired to have a piano in their ramshackle cabins. This fascination with the symbol of American musical culture perturbed early Twentieth Century black leader Booker T. Washington. He urged Southern Negroes, most of whom were only a generation removed from the total impoverishment of captivity, to live thriftily and focus on acquiring practical agricultural and industrial skills that would allow them to sustain themselves in a racially segregated society. Washington condemned the pretentiousness of the high culture-worshipping “liberal education” being foisted upon his people. He saw it as foolish for blacks, most of whom could barely afford to buy coal to heat their homes, to spend their scarce dollars to 7 buy a second-hand piano.5 Yet, Washington underestimated the self-esteem many African Americans gained by owning a piano. By the early 1900s, a piano in the home announced a black family’s gentility. It is worth noting that Ferdinand La Menthe (Jelly Roll) Morton, born in New Orleans in 1890, and Edward Kennedy (Duke) Ellington, born in Washington, D.C. in 1899, were both raised by economically stable black families who owned a piano,6 the instrument both men mastered to their future fame. The ability to read music and play piano was most valued as a sign of cultivation among middle class black women. Tens of thousands of well-to-do black families purchased the sheet music of John Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson’s song. John Rosamond Johnson, who was a shrewd marketer, had arranged the music as a “spiritual,” a dignified form of hymnal music favored by educated blacks in the Victorian America era. The Fisk Jubilee Singers had popularized spirituals with their triumphant international tours in the 1870s. Despite spirituals being viewed as “old fashioned” by the early 1900s, the genre remained a source of cultural pride for middle class blacks. The song’s dignified spiritual arrangement made the black elite more receptive to the aspirational lyrics written by James Weldon Johnson. While the black elite, themselves at the mercy of Jim Crow despite education or status, shared James Weldon Johnson’s grand vision of victory over racial injustice, it is hard to imagine them taking the message as seriously if John Rosamond Johnson had composed the accompanying music in a 5 Booker T. Washington, “Industrial Education for the Negro,” in The Negro Problem, ed. Booker T. Washington (New York: J. Pott & Company, 1903; republished by CreateSpace Publishing, 2017), 4-7.
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