Conference Agenda

The Interracial Music Council, Inc. (IMC) was formed in 1953 as the umbrella organization for the Interracial Fellowship Chorus (IFC), a New York-based amateur choir with membership that transcended contemporary boundaries of race, class, and religion. Originating in the early 1940s out of the Protestant “Social Gospel” movement, the IFC was designed to provide positive interracial contacts through music—with the creation of the IMC, these pursuits were multiplied. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the IMC presented budding African American performers in concert, created several additional interracial ensembles, sponsored benefits in tandem with social justice organizations, and annually commissioned new works to be sung by their flagship choir, the IFC. In 1955, the IFC performed the New York premiere of Ulysses Kay’s cantata, Song of Jeremiah (rev. 1947), and in 1959, the IMC commissioned Kay’s cantata, Phoebus, Arise.

In this paper, I provide readings of Kay’s cantatas that situate the works in the performative context of the IFC/IMC. While no scholarship on the IFC/IMC currently exists, I rely on data compiled from the contemporary press to recover the institutional history of the organizations. Combined with correspondence, program materials, and scores from the Ulysses Kay Papers (Columbia University), I interpret the cantatas as expressions of the interracial goals of the IFC/IMC. Furthermore, the data indicate Kay was affiliated with the IMC and that his wife, Barbara, sang in the IFC.

Current Kay scholarship centers his late career in addition to his involvement in US musical diplomacy efforts (Emily Abrams Ansari, 2009, 2013, & 2018). Extending consideration of Kay's life and works into his early-to-mid career, my paper contributes new biographical information about one of the United States’ most successful composers of the mid-twentieth century while addressing the performance of his cantatas by an ensemble that has similarly eluded critical inquiry. Considered together, I suggest the performances of the Kay cantatas by the IFC can be read as musical expressions of racial liberalism, the dominant ideology of the early civil rights movement in the United States (Kristopher Burrell, 2011).

Marian Anderson’s 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial stands as a watershed moment in the history of music and the movement for African American civil rights; however, this was not the first time a performance by Anderson took on a larger cultural and political significance. Though she had already sung at the White House and on several prominent symphonic radio programs, in 1938 a group of leading African American Newspapers, including the New York Amsterdam News and Baltimore Afro-American, initiated a nationwide write-in campaign to get readers to send letters to the Ford Motor Company and request that Anderson appear on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour, a weekly nationally syndicated program of symphonic music. Though this campaign was not without its detractors, such as the jazz vibraphonist and band leader Lionel Hampton, this campaign was successful and Anderson appeared not once, but three times on the broadcast. Imbedded within the cultural and civil rights aims of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary labor politics, I argue that this write-in campaign illuminates the value placed upon and ambivalence towards both western classical music and the Ford Motor Company within the African American community during the 1930s. Drawing on newspaper accounts and archival material from the Marian Anderson Collection and the Benson Ford Research Center, I show how Anderson’s appearance on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour was seen as a significant cultural milestone by many in the African American community in part due to the special position that the Ford Motor Company held as the rare employer that offered Black workers equal pay and positions in jobs that typically excluded Black workers. Even though Anderson had appeared previously on national radio broadcasts by ensembles that are typically seen as more prestigious, such as the NBC Symphony under Toscanini, and Ford’s labor practices had become less favorable to Black workers, Anderson’s performances on the Ford Sunday Evening Hour connected both the prospect economic achievement ascribed to Ford and the cultural attainment represented in Anderson’s position as the leading contralto of the era.

In the fall of 1933, a young African American soprano named Dorothy Maynor arrived in Princeton, New Jersey, to attend Westminster Choir College (WCC), having been hand-picked a few months prior by WCC co-founder and president John Finley Williamson. Maynor completed her WCC degree in just two years, becoming the first African American student to graduate from the predominantly white college. She went on to have an impressive career as a concert singer. In 1953, on the eve of the civil rights movement, she sang the national anthem at the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and in 1963, she founded the Harlem School of the Arts, an institution that she saw as part of the movement.

Documenting Maynor’s time in Princeton and at WCC is difficult. Maynor often found herself set apart, in her own unarchived world. Maynor did not even live in the women’s dormitory on WCC’s campus. She boarded instead at a house on 19 Green Street, located in the Witherspoon-Jackson community, Princeton’s historically Black neighborhood. Coincidentally, that house was just down the street from the birthplace of Paul Robeson. Historians Sheila Tully Boyle and Andrew Bunie wrote in 2001 that “the ghosts of Princeton” remained with Robeson “throughout his life.” In 1904, Robeson’s mother died in an accident at home. Paul Robeson’s son asserted that the tragedy “engulfed” his father, “leaving an emotional wound that may have never healed fully.” But it was not only his mother’s ghost that haunted him. Robeson was also disturbed by his father’s fall from grace in Princeton, a fall that was intimately connected to the racial politics of Princeton—and of Princeton’s Presbyterian community. This story illuminates Princeton’s strict racial codes, which had not yet dissipated by the time Maynor arrived in 1933. I use Robeson’s family history to help theorize Maynor’s experience in Princeton. I also draw on archival scraps from WCC and Hampton University. I argue that Maynor’s experience at WCC impacted her profoundly, shaping her approach to the Harlem School of the Arts and her belief in arts education as a tool to promote social justice.

On a pleasant, summer day in August 1949, in Peekskill, New York, the Black political artist, Paul Robeson, was almost lynched. Robeson was due to perform at a benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress, an anti-racist, legal-support organization in which he had formerly served as vice-president. This concert, however, never happened, as local World War Two veterans groups, anti-communist protestors, and Peekskill residents organized and rioted, attacking concert-goers and supporters of Robeson who had arrived in advance of the concert. The rioters hurled stones, racial-slurs, and bottles at the concert-goers as they swarmed the grounds and assailed the victims’ automobiles and those attempting to escape. Amid the “baying of the lynch-mob,” Robeson—who had hardly reached the concert-site before the violence erupted—was spirited away to safety (Robeson, 1958).

In this paper, I argue that this near-lynching of Robeson in Peekskill dramatically highlights the stakes of Black radical politics in the early Cold War. Robeson’s politics was one that melded resistance to anti-Black racism with a global and leftist commitment to anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. By framing this targeted violence as a lynching, I not only reassert Robeson’s own framing of the event as such, but also situate it within the American repertoire of spectacular anti-Black violence deployed to redress challenges to the dominant racial—and in this case, political—order. By synthesizing first-person accounts and assessments of the riot in local and national newspapers, with archival research and primary sources containing Robeson’s own reaction to the riot, I demonstrate that the violence at Peekskill exceeds any singular analysis as being either primarily racially motivated, or an explosive local flashpoint of anti-communism and other Cold War anxieties. Indeed, what is at stake in this project is the very possibility of Black radical politics during the early Cold War.