Search Results

This chapter explores the expansion and refinement of the educational partnership between black Mobilians and the American Missionary Association through Emerson Normal. This redefined partnership led to the establishment of a corps of public schoolteachers necessary for new state school system. Outside the classroom, Emerson Normal graduates became an essential asset for black Mobilians and their slow and arduous struggle for African American public education and racial equality. They used these resources to secure Broad Street Academy, African American public schoolteachers, and school administrative positions. Without Emerson Normal and its graduates, the chapter argues that the public schools and turn of the century racial uplift activism would have been greatly impaired.

This chapter explores black Mobilians’ hard struggle for the African American education after Confederate defeat. Intense white opposition led by Josiah Nott, arson, and antagonisms with Creoles of Color threatened their goal of becoming a literate people. Black Mobilians overcame these challenges and proved that they were no longer slaves. By remaining steadfast in purpose, this chapter argues that black Mobilians and their partnerships with the Freedmen’s Bureau and American Missionary Association remade the postwar landscape to include the African American schoolhouse in Mobile and firmly embedded African American education as a state constitutional right of citizenship.

This chapter recounts the turmoil endured by black and white Natchez women and men during the Civil War and Union occupation, and how these experiences shaped historical memories of the war. Mississippi’s economy lay in ruins with nearly a quarter of the white males who served in the Confederate Army killed in action or perishing from wounds or disease at war’s end, while white civilians faced poverty, military loss, and a racial hierarchy turned upside down. Natchez’s large African-American population majority faced their own challenges but found sustenance in black churches and schools organized by the American Missionary Association during Reconstruction. Natchez had all the makings for a complex set of historical memories: great wealth, followed by profound loss, a paternalistic planter class, a sizable free black community that did not always sympathize with former slaves, and a massive formerly enslaved labor force discovering freedom for the first time.

This chapter recounts the history of the founding of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1866 by the American Missionary Association and a trio of its agents: Erastus Milo (E. M.) Cravath, Edward Parmelee Smith, and John Ogden. The school’s educational philosophy emphasized teacher training, theology, training for craft work, and liberal arts. George L. White, hired as treasurer, initiated an informal music program that grew into an avenue for generating profit and promoting Fisk’s educational agenda, thanks to a choir he put together with the assistance of Ella Sheppard, who as music teacher was the first and only black staff member at Fisk from 1870 to 1875. In public, the Fisk choristers sang music from the white popular tradition, known as “people’s song” in the words of composer George Frederick Root. In private they introduced their spirituals to the white teachers, doing so under some duress, as they associated the songs with an enslaved past to be forgotten. Around early 1871 George White began urging the American Missionary Association to let him take his choristers on the road to raise money for the school; the group would be modeled on “singing families” such as the Hutchinson Family Singers. After much debate his plan was approved, and after a few weeks on the road White named his choir the Jubilee Singers. Although initially a dismal failure, the troupe’s rebranding, decision to sing more spirituals and less people’s song, and the patronage of Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn led to a reversal of fortune. By early 1872 the Jubilee Singers were on their way to fame and fortune. They presented their concerts as a “service of song,” to remind the public that their singing was not entertainment but rather had a religious and moral mission.

This chapter examines the peculiar history of Tougaloo College from its founding during the Reconstruction Era to the turn of the century. Tougaloo, is best known for being a haven for black militancy during the modern civil rights movement and one of the few safe spaces for Freedom Riders, marchers, and sit-in activists in the most notoriously violent state in the south – Mississippi. Yet its early years illustrate an institution in constant flux, trying to survive economic hardships, and under the thumb of conservative administrators and teachers who exposed Tougaloo students to the expectations of respectability politics. Nevertheless, black students carved out vital spaces for expression and utilized the pages of their student newspaper to display their expanding social and political consciousness and their desire to resist the oppressive and often violent hardships of America’s lowest point in race relations.

This chapter explores the process of musically and culturally translating oral folk spirituals into notated arranged spirituals performed on the concert stage. The American Missionary Association hired people’s song composer and church musician Theodore F. Seward to transcribe the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ spirituals as arranged for them by their director, George L. White. Using Seward’s transcriptions as well as those by Jubilee Singers Ella Sheppard and Thomas Rutling, plus reviews and primary sources, as well as early recordings, this chapter recreates as far as possible the performance practice of the concert spirituals sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers on their tours. The reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers is surveyed through numerous reviews and is interpreted to show how a codified discourse about spirituals was created in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which stressed, for example, primitivism, wildness, nature, and the inherent musicality of the African race.

This chapter examines the connections between the Miller Grove community of free Blacks and the Underground Railroad. Established in 1844, Miller Grove is a cluster of rural farmsteads named for Bedford Miller, whose family stood among the sixty-eight people who received their freedom from one of four White families in south-central Tennessee. Primary archaeological excavations at Miller Grove took place at the farmstead of William Riley Williams, a free-born African American from Tennessee. Among the original migrants, former slaveholder Henry Sides and his wife lived among the freemen and freewomen at Miller Grove. This chapter begins with a discussion of how the American Missionary Association, through its missionary work, linked known Underground Railroad participants across the country. It then considers abolitionist strategies, particularly the dissemination of antislavery literature among African Americans. By tracing the history of Miller Grove, the chapter reveals distinct details of community formation and interracial cooperation within regional Underground Railroad operations.

The ever-growing success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attracted widespread notice, and by 1873–1874 the troupe was facing a field of competitors, some of whom made innovations to the concert presentation of spirituals and others of whom were content to imitate the Fisk Jubilee Singers in style and repertory. Among the innovators were the Hampton Institute Singers, directed by Thomas P. Fenner. Their repertory was largely distinct from that of the Fisk singers, and they sang in a more folk-oriented performance style, as evidenced by the fact that they had a “shout leader” and sang in dialect. Another group of innovators was the Tennesseans (1874), directed by John Wesley Donavin, who sang in support of Central Tennessee College in Nashville. Their popularity rested on the supposed authenticity of what they billed as their “slave cabin concerts”—not a Fisk service of song but meant to be a naturalistic representation of slave life. The Tennesseans’ bass singer Leroy Pickett made many of their arrangements, becoming one of the earliest black arrangers of concert spirituals; later he became acting musical director. Imitators, on the other hand, reproduced the repertory and aesthetic of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They included the Hyers sisters, who reoriented their programming of art songs to include spirituals so that they could complete with other black singers at the time, as well as the Shaw Jubilee Singers, New Orleans Jubilee Singers, Jackson Jubilee Singers, Old Original North Carolinians (managed by T. H. Brand), and Sheppard’s Colored Jubilee Singers. With all of these groups, a jubilee entertainment industry began to take shape in 1872 to 1874, as performance norms were established and as organizations like lyceum bureaus began to add jubilee troupes to their roster.

While some black regiments remained throughout the South performing occupation duties, others were sent to Texas to perform a combination of duties. They were keeping the peace and helping freedmen transition to freedom, but they were also sent to Texas to counter French aggression in Mexico. In Texas the troops would have to endure being even farther away from their families, in more remote and difficult terrain and in disease-ridden conditions. Additionally, homesickness, the terrible conditions, and the increase in idle time and boredom all led to a breakdown in order and professionalism among the officers and the men, which in turn led to an increase in tension between the two groups. Black troops’ discontent arose from knowing that, while white troops continued to be mustered out of service and returned home, they were headed to Texas. They were also upset about being farther away from their families and the paymaster. One positive outcome of occupation duty for black troops was their greater access to literacy programs. By September 1865, Union policy shifted against the continued use of black regiments. Union officials, including General Ulysses S. Grant, determined it was best to release all northern-raised black troops from military service.

Born on January 16, 1901, in Orange, New Jersey, Margaret Callender McCulloch was a teacher, philanthropist, and social worker. Raised by her parents in the Episcopal Church, McCulloch got immersed in race relations when she worked at the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and Fisk University’s American Missionary Association. In November 1962, McCulloch addressed the South Carolina Council on Human Relations. This chapter presents McCulloch’s speech, in which she talked about segregation and desegregation. She offered causes and solutions to the ongoing racial problems in the South and implored her audience to understand the complexities that race relations entail.