[December 9th
marks the 145th anniversary of P.B.S.
Pinchback assuming the Louisiana governorship, making him the first
African American governor in U.S. history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
five figures from the Reconstruction era, leading up to a special post on
Pinchback himself!]
On two of the
many vital legacies of a cultural and historical artistic project.
While the kinds
of post-slavery and –war debates and questions I discussed in yesterday’s post
were of course central threads to Reconstruction, the period was also intensely
focused on the future, and more exactly on how
to help African Americans become a full part of this new American community
within that future (or, for far too many Reconstruction actors, how to stop them from doing so).
Chief among the progressive responses to that question was an emphasis on education, one
that took place in every community and at every level but that included the
founding of a number of new African American
colleges and universities. One of the earliest such post-war institutions
was Fisk University, founded in
Memphis as the Fisk Free Colored School just six months after the war’s end by
members of the American Missionary Association. By 1871, thanks to the
vicissitudes of Reconstruction among other factors, Fisk was struggling to stay
afloat financially, and its treasurer and music director, George White,
decided to found a choral group that could tour to raise funds and awareness
for the university’s community and efforts.
That group
embarked on its first national (and eventually international) tour on October 6th,
1871, the beginning of a more than 18-month period of performances. Early in
the tour—faced
with one of their many encounters with racism and hostility, this time in
Columbus, Ohio—White and the performers decided to name themselves the Jubilee
Singers, a tribute to the
spiritual and cultural vision of a “year of jubilee” after emancipation. By
the end of the tour, the Jubilee Singers had more than lived up to that name,
achieving a series of stunning triumphs that included performances at the Boston World’s Peace
Jubilee and International Music Festival, at the White
House for President Ulysses Grant, and (when the tour was extended to an
overseas leg in 1873) for England’s
Queen Victoria. In an era when nearly all of the representations of African
Americans onstage were performed by whites in blackface—whether in overtly racist
minstrel shows or in slightly more nuanced productions such as Tom Shows—it’s
difficult to overstate the importance of this group of talented African
American performers taking and commanding the stage, offering an alternative to
those constructed representations and giving voice to their own identities,
stories and histories, and communities in the process. That’s one legacy of the
Fisk Jubilee Singers, and it continues
to this day.
The Fisk Jubilee
Singers also connected, overtly, immediately, and importantly, to the
aforementioned questions of historical memory, however. They did so first and
foremost through their choice of repertoire, which in its initial iteration
focused almost entirely on African American slave spirituals (what W.E.B. Du Bois
would later call, in his beautiful, multi-part engagement with the genre in The
Souls of Black Folk, “sorrow songs”). I believe it’s not at all
inaccurate to say that by arranging and performing their versions of these
songs, the Jubilee Singers helped keep them alive, indeed helped turn them into
a foundational and ongoing genre
of American music that could endure into future generations and would influence
every subsequent such genre. In so doing, I would argue that they provided
one middle ground answer to the debate between Crummell and Douglass I
highlighted yesterday—a way to carry forward communal memories and voices of
slavery without dwelling in the most horrific and traumatic elements, to build
on that historical legacy but at the same time to take potent and inspiring
ownership of it for new purposes and goals. That’s a model of the best of
Reconstruction, and precisely the kind of story and history we need to remember
if we’re to move beyond the most limited and mythologized collective memories
of the period.
Next figure
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Reconstruction figures or stories you’d highlight?
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