University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-2009 A woman of action: Elma Lewis, the arts, and the politics of culture in Boston, 1950-1986/ Daniel N. McClure University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation McClure, Daniel N., "A woman of action: Elma Lewis, the arts, and the politics of culture in Boston, 1950-1986/" (2009). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 932. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/932 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Massachusetts Amherst Library Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/womanofactionelmOOnriccl A WOMAN OF ACTION: ELMA LEWIS, THE ARTS, AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN BOSTON, 1950-1986 A Dissertation Presented by DANIEL N. McCLURE Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2009 Department of Afro-American Studies UMI Number: 3359905 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI Microform 3359905 Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 © Copyright by Daniel N. McClure 2009 All Rights Reserved A WOMAN OF ACTION: ELMA LEWIS, THE ARTS, AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN BOSTON, 1950-1986 A Dissertation Presented by DANIEL N. McCLURE Approved as to style and content by: John Bracey, Chair William Strickland, Member Steven Tracy, Member Kevin Quashie, Member Amilcar Shabazz, Department Chair Department of Afro-American Studies A WOMAN OF ACTION: ELMA LEWIS, THE ARTS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE, 1950-1986 A Dissertation Presented by DANIEL N. McCLURE Aproved as to style and content by: JohMBracey, Chair / UM/Ui g/kw $Hu. f\k£ William^ Strickland, Member^ Steven Tracy, Member C AjriTlcar Shabazz, Departolentthair Department of Afro-American Studies DEDICATION To my family. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and my dissertation advisor, John Bracey, for the hours of conversation that led to this project. I also thank my other committee members. Bill Strickland, Steve Tracy and Kevin Quashie, all of whom offered constructive criticism, encouragement and keen insights. I extend a special thanks to Tricia Loveland, David Goldberg, Ousmane Power-Greene, Lawrence Jackson and Joshua Guild for the support, camaraderie and sense of humor they each lent to the process. I am grateful for the support of Paula Giddings, Robert Hall, Ronald Bailey and Kwamina Panford, all of whom offered encouragement and mentoring along the way. I am also grateful to the staff of the Northeastern University Special Collections for their knowledge and assistance. I wish to express my appreciation to all the individuals who offered to speak with me about this project including, but not limited to, Larry Blumsack, Sarah Ann Shaw, Mel King, E. Barry Gaither and Adrienne and Warren McClure. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my family and to my friends without whom none of this would have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank Elma Ina Lewis for providing the inspiration for this project and a model of engaged citizenship instructive to us all. v ABSTRACT A WOMAN OF ACTION: ELMA LEWIS, THE ARTS, AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN BOSTON, 1950-1986 FEBRUARY 2009 DANIEL N. McCLURE, B.A., WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY M.A., NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Prof. John H. Bracey This project examines the politics of education, culture and black community formation in Roxbury, MA during the postwar era. Elma Lewis was active in Boston's black community for more than half a century and through her work as educator, cultural worker and institution builder helped shape the spatial and ideological contours of Boston's black community throughout the postwar period. Her early commitment to institution building supported the development of cultural networks that facilitated the large-scale organization and mobilization of Boston's black residents during the 1960s and 1970s in the struggle for educational equality. She founded a school, a national arts organization and a museum, each of which fostered the emergent sense of black community culminating in calls for community control, black power and cultural pride during the later period. She was a bridge activist who established and developed cultural institutions that helped transcend social, ideological and generational divisions within Boston's black community. vi 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v ABSTRACT vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF BLACK BOSTON 1 3. CONTENDING WITH TRADITION: BLACK BOSTONIANS IN THE CITY UPON A HILL t 43 4. ELMA LEWIS: THE LIONESS OF BOSTON, 1921-1950 82 5. INSTITUTIONAL VISION: THE ELSFA, THE NCAAA AND THE MNCAAA, 1950-1986 117 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 163 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Our understanding of postwar black freedom movements has been greatly enhanced by an increased interest in the topic and the subsequent expansion and diversification of the body of literature that examines the scope of local, national and international struggles. Recent scholarship has offered new approaches to the periodization of postwar black freedom movements, studies of leadership, comparison between local and national struggles, interpretations of competing ideologies and examinations of gender and class dynamics within the struggle. Scholars have greatly expanded the scope of their inquiries to include local, grassroots civil rights and black power movements in the urban north and west and have documented the stories of previously neglected individuals and organizations. These contributions have explored continuities across generations, geographic regions and disparate ideological positions while remaining attentive to the specificities of local communities, organizations and conditions. Each of these developments has yielded a better understanding of the complexities and nuances of the topic. Yet, despite these welcome and needed additions, scholars have yet to engage comprehensively the importance and significance of cultural organizations and institutions to the development of postwar black freedom movements. Subsequently, black freedom movement studies have continued to undervalue, or ignore, the salience of cultural work and cultural workers to the social 1 and political organization of black communities. This is particularly evident in both local and national studies covering freedom movements prior to "golden age" of the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1965. In most northern urban communities, racial discrimination in housing, employment, education and politics reinforced structural inequalities and severely circumscribed black social mobility throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These causes of these structural inequalities were often obscured in popular and scholarly discourses by paternalistic assumptions of black inferiority rooted in antebellum notions of black pathology and cultural depravity. These ideas were propagated by early social scientists many of whom portrayed black people as childlike, I use the phrase "cultural work" broadly to refer to efforts aimed at the cultural organization and empowerment of communities. This includes activities ranging from arts instruction to cultural programming to advocacy for the arts. Unlike political organization, economic development, or other conventional measures of community empowerment, or development, cultural work is not easily quantifiable. It is, however, as important and worthy of examination. 2 The list of recent scholarship is too voluminous to cite in full. For representative works, see, Mark Schneider, "The Boston NAACP and the Decline of the Abolitionist Impulse," The Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 1 (1999): 95-113; Jeanne Theoharis, "'We Saved the City': Black Struggles for Educational Equality, 1960- 1976," Radical History Review, 81 (Fall 2001): 61-94; Jeanne Theoharis, "I'd Rather Go to School in the South": How Boston's School Desegregation Complicates the Civil Rights Paradigm," in Theoharis and Woodard (ed.), Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980; Jeanne Theoharis, "They Told Us Our Kids Were Stupid': Ruth Batson and the Educational Movement in Boston," in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, (ed.), Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 17-44; Robert Self, American Babylon: