Western University at Quindaro, Kansas (1865-1943) and its legacy of pioneering musical women.

Western University at Quindaro, Kansas, was probably the earliest black school west of the Mississippi (1) and the best black musical training center in the Midwest for almost thirty years during the 1900s through the 1920s. This was at a time when such education was not easy to find in a safe environment for young black ladies. To be sure, families farther east could send their talented musical daughters to several excellent music schools in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, the first major white school to admit black students, opened its doors in 1865. (2) Its first black woman graduate was Harriet Gibbs Marshall, who founded the Washington (D.C.) Conservatory of Music in 1903. In 1867, four other white music schools also were established: Boston Conservatory, New England Conservatory, Cincinnati Conservatory, and the Chicago Musical College. Fisk University, founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, made its name in music thanks to concerts and tours during the 1870s by the Fisk Jubilee Singers under director George L. White. Howard University, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1867, offered music classes in its normal school and developed a strong music department at the turn of the century. Women graduates of those institutions went on to establish careers, serve on faculties of many schools, and found black music conservatories of their own.

Western University, despite its history as a state-run normal school, then a theological seminary under the wing of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, and a state-run industrial training institution inspired by Booker T. Washington's doctrine of Negro self-help, remained little known until a certain Robert G. Jackson arrived to spearhead its music department in 1903. (3) In no time at all, a rigorous training program was developed and a music building added to its campus. Most important from a recruiting standpoint, the Jackson Jubilee Singers, in the spirit of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton Jubilee Singers, and a host of other spin-offs, began touring the United States attracting students far and wide. Talented musicians, both male and female, came to study and teach there. It was among the female students that the most illustrious of its alumni emerged. (4) Among the many women whose careers and talents had their first encouragement at Western University, Nora Douglas Holt, Eva Jessye, and Etta Moten Barnett are the most easily recognized. They were truly pioneers who changed America and made an impact on the history of blacks in the music and entertainment industry that is felt in many ways to this day.

With this perspective, I look here more deeply into the origins, maturity, and demise of this midwestern black middle-class phenomenon and explore how the school enabled Jessye, Holt, and Barnett to establish their groundbreaking careers.

Origins

During the 1850s and 1860s, Quindaro Bend, six miles upstream on the Missouri River from what would become Kansas City, provided a natural concealed harbor for slaves escaping from Missouri. A farmer named Abelard Guthrie owned much of the land in the vicinity and helped the slaves to safety along the Underground Railroad. His wife, named Quindaro, (5) was a Wyandotte Indian and had persuaded her tribe to sell the land to her husband. A short-lived but thriving boomtown of free-state settlers had grown up there in the mid-1850s, but by the beginning of the Civil War, the town had dwindled, leaving an all-Negro community. The admission of Kansas to the Union as a free state in 1861 came at the cost of conflicts between pro- and antislavery settlers and of many skirmishes, battles, and massacres (causing it to be labeled "bleeding Kansas") and is considered one of the inflaming issues that led to the Civil War. Although Kansas was a free state and gave Negroes the vote, most of its citizens were not free of racial prejudice and opposed Negro inclusion in public education. (6)

A local landowner, a Presbyterian minister named Eben Blachley, organized classes in his home to teach the ex-slaves' children the "three Rs." A school was in operation by September 1862 in an old brewery building converted into the first classroom (Smith 1966, 14). A committee of local white men summoned by the Reverend Blachley met in February 1865 to draw up a document establishing an official school. They took it to the courthouse in Wyandotte County, where the Quindaro Freedman's School was incorporated and registered. Its broad vision was spelled out by Blachley: "To secure the advantages of the higher culture in all departments and professions to the colored races, pure and mixed, in our country and to such persons of that race from other countries as may desire to avail themselves of these advantages in order to carry out the aforesaid purpose" (Register of Deeds Office, Wyandotte County, Book 1, 523).

In 1867, the Kansas state legislature appropriated hinds for the school's support. When the legislature renewed financial support in 1872, it provided for a four-year, state-run normal department at the school, with one Charles Langston as president, assisted by Eben and Jane Blachley (Smith 1966, 19). (7) Enrollment at the school increased from six to fifty in December 1872, then eight-three the following term. State support was withdrawn in 1873 because of financial difficulties caused by a plague of grasshoppers and extensive crop damage in Kansas. The Reverend Blachley died from cancer in 1877, and the school entered a period of inactivity. Blachley had worked tirelessly to support Negro education, and before his death, he had deeded his property of more than one hundred acres to ensure the continuation of the Quindaro Freedman's School. The school was revived in 1881 with sponsorship and contributions from the AMP Church, which was also the source of its next teachers, the reverends Frances Jessie Peck, B. F. Braxton, and C. C. Booth. The land on which it stood was deeded over to the church, and it was renamed Western University, although like most other early black colleges, it was essentially an elementary and secondary school.

With the end of Reconstruction in the South and renewed racial oppression there, another wave of settlers arrived in the West, blacks who called themselves "exodusters" because they believed the West to be their promised land. More all-black farming towns sprang up in Kansas, and other professionals moved in--tradesmen, businessmen, teachers, and ministers. A theological course was added to Western University, and Ward Hall was completed in 1891. (8) It was named after the AME conference's presiding bishop, T.M.D. Ward, and was built on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River. By 1890, white involvement in operating the school ended, and it came under exclusively Negro control.

Maturity

The next chapter in the evolution of the school began in 1896 when a young AME minister named William Tecumseh Vernon was invited to be its president. (9) Vernon was born in 1871 to former slaves in Lebanon, Missouri, and educated at Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Wilberforce College in Ohio. A man of energy and determination, he obtained state funding once again in 1899 in exchange for the promise of black political support of William E. Stanley's candidacy as governor of Kansas. With the example of the State of Ohio's funding of Wilberforce University for the establishment of industrial education, he persuaded the state legislature to add an industrial department to Western University. A new industrial building was named in honor of Governor Stanley, and instructors were hired to teach commercial business courses, drafting, printing, carpentry, and tailoring; later, blacksmithing and wheelwrighting were added. In 1901, an annex was built to Stanley Hall, and two stock barns, a power plant, and a reservoir were added in 1904. In 1905, a girls' trades building was begun, followed two years later by a boys' trades building.

President Vernon articulated his ideas on educating Negro youth: "The Negro went into the higher branches too early. Their first schools turned out lawyers, preachers, or teachers nearly exclusively until the country was flooded with men of my race who wanted to make their way in the professions. The industrial side was overlooked. Teach the Negro a trade and the commercial opportunity will follow. Every student, unless ill health prevents, must put in half the time learning a trade. Maybe there is a chance for a Tuskegee here" (quoted in Smith 1966, 42). With this statement, Vernon placed himself squarely in the camp of Booker T. Washington in the debate between Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois over Negro education. (10) But despite these sentiments, vocational training was not all President Vernon achieved at Western University. (11) His educational philosophy was encapsulated in the motto "head, heart, and hands for the home" (and emblazoned on the school emblem--a four-leaf clover with an H in each leaf and a W in the center). (12) He expanded the curriculum and the faculty to develop its collegiate department, which even then was designed to give its students a higher education. (13) In 1903, he added a department of music, with Robert G. Jackson as its head.

With its livestock and agricultural program producing part of its food and carpentry students manufacturing its furniture, Western University was largely self-sustaining. Its business and printing department published sheet music composed by its students, and from 1915 to about 1919, it published the University Pen Point, devoted to current events on campus and news about its graduates. A dramatic club, The Braithwaite Players, put on school plays, and debating and literary clubs kept abreast of public affairs and the latest books. Nationally prominent visiting lecturers such as Booker T. Washington and guest artists such as composer Will Marion Cook were frequently presented. In March 1915, for instance, the University Pen Point reported that the noted Negro pianist Helen Eugenia Hagan's concert recital was "the most brilliant we have ever heard" ("Miss Hagen's Concert" 1915). (14) So although it was self-sufficient like many black communities in the United States at the time, it did not isolate itself from the world at large.

In its educational, cultural, and social values, Western University reflected the reverence for education and the concern for "uplifting the race" felt by middle-class African Americans elsewhere in the country. The published sheet music carried many sentiments along this line on its covers and back pages, for example, Clyde O. Andrew's prize-winning "Nocturne": "Dedicated to the uplift and inspiration of my fellow young men and women" (Andrews 1908). In response to a school survey on why music by Western students should be purchased, some students' answers were printed on the inside back cover of Viola Kinney's "Mother's Sacrifice" (1909): "Because it shows the wonderful progress of the Negro race since slavery and our possibilities when given a chance to prove our race equal to any other" (Mr. William Lane); "Because it will lend encouragement and zeal to other Negro youth, and create within them a desire to seek out, cultivate and develop the very best that is within them" (Miss Ida Henderson); "Because it shows the world our appreciation of classical music in preference to trashy rag-time music" (Miss Fannie Toles); "Because it shows the Negro in his great Musical Metamorphosis from the rag-time to the nobler, higher tones" (Viola Kinney); and "Because it is a nice parlor ornament to beautify your piano, even if you can't play it" (Miss Alberta Kerr).

Western University cultivated the ideals of racial uplift in its female students--respectability, refinement, competency, and responsibility. This behavior was monitored and their movements closely supervised. When the girls' dormitory, Grant Hall, was dedicated in honor of AME Bishop Abraham Grant in 1906, its first matron was Gracie Douglas, the mother of Nora Douglas Holt. A later matron, Mrs. Sadie ("Maw") Curry, was known for her strictness and her pet expression, "You'll either fit in or you'll fit out" (Murray 1960, 13). The dress code was strict--dark-colored middy blouses (loose-fitting with a sailor collar) and skirts made by the school's tailoring department. Smoking, drinking, and dancing were not allowed, and church attendance was mandatory. For black women everywhere, the effort to disprove the stereotype commonly accepted among whites of slovenly, immoral ignorance resulted in behavioral standards far above those required of white women. It is no accident that while dozens of ragtime pieces were written and published by white women, none written by black women have been found.

The music department and its founder and head, Robert G. Jackson, turned out to be among Western University's strongest assets. According to Western University historian Orrin M. Murray (1960, 13, 10), "He was perhaps responsible, more than any other one person, in causing Western to be introduced to the whole United States.... The music department was the outstanding department of the school that contributed more to the development of the school than did any other department."

Who was Robert G. Jackson? A native of Lexington, Kentucky (d. 1929), and a graduate of the School of Fine Arts at Kansas University, he was already known as an important musical contributor to the greater Kansas City community. He was active as a church musician, private teacher in his home studio, and organizer and director of choirs, glee clubs, and other musical organizations. After his death, he was praised in the Kansas City Call: "In addition to his teaching of individuals and groups, he was the inspiration of men and women who are making a name for themselves in music" (quoted in Buckner 1974, 72).

Jackson served at Western University from 1903 until his death during the Christmas holidays in 1929. During that time, the enrollment in the music department at Western University grew from 42 in 1903 to 91 in 1907 (out of a total enrollment of 251) to its peak of 153 in 1911 (out of a total of 355); it remained high until the late 1920s. Only a year after his arrival, there were three pianos, one reed organ, an orchestra, and a twenty-two-member brass band.

A music studio building was erected in 1907. It had five rooms furnished with pianos on the main floor and three rooms with pianos in the basement. An auditorium served for glee club and chorus rehearsals and recitals. Initially, Jackson taught all the subjects offered: piano, organ, composition, harmony, and music history. In 1906, W. H. Hammond was added as a bandmaster, and Nettie B. Penix was appointed an assistant in music. By 1910, Effie E. Grant taught voice culture, and Beulah Douglas taught piano.

The music curriculum also developed in other directions. The band's activities grew in importance, especially in 1914 when the renowned Major Nathaniel Clark Smith was hired as bandmaster and orchestra director. (15) New silver-plated band instruments and blue uniforms were acquired, making Western University's Cadet Corp the envy of the Kansas City area. In 1919, a major change in structure at Western University eliminated the elementary classes and added the Junior College Department. Jackson was now dean of the music department, and Clyde L. Glass was hired as professor of piano. Carrie M. Carney taught piano and voice, and Leon H. Herriford conducted band and orchestra. The faculty changed frequently over the years, with the longest-running position held by Guiou H. Taylor, a self-taught genius on the violin from Omaha, Nebraska, who enrolled in both the music and carpentry departments at Western University in 1918 and taught violin, band, and orchestra from 1922 to 1943.

From its earliest years, the music course at Western University required three years of study, after which students received a diploma. The 1903 catalog stipulated:

   Public recitals are also given by the more advanced students. By
   this means, it is made possible for the students to become familiar
   with both the standard works and modern composition and cultivate
   a taste and appreciation for the real values of classical music.
   Candidates for graduation must have completed the course in
   piano-forte, as laid down in the catalogue, and in addition, the
   work in Harmony, Theory, and History of Music. All students in the
   full course of study will be required to practice two and one-half
   hours per day, and take two lessons weekly. (Annual Catalogue
   1903, 40)

There was an obvious concern that Western University's music graduates acquire a well-rounded education in addition to thorough music training. The 1903 catalog listed the requirements for a diploma in piano-forte:

1st year: German, Algebra, Rhetoric, Harmony, and Piano: Leoschorn, Op. 66, Bk. 1 and 2; Heller, Op. 47; Heller, Op. 45; Clementi sonatinas; selections from classic and modern compositions; major and minor scales.

2nd year: German, Algebra, Physics, English Literature, Harmony, and Piano: Hanon, Virtuoso Pianist; Jenson, Op. 32; selected etudes by Bulow; Bach 2 and 3-part Inventions; sonatas by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, selections from classic and modern compositions.

3rd year: Geometry, World History, History of Music, Musical Composition, and

Piano: Phillipp, Practical Exercises; selected etudes from Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum; Czerny, Op. 740; concert pieces by classical and modern composers; selections from Chopin, Mendelssohn's Songs without Words; Sonatas. (39-40)

The diploma in harmony required:

1st year: The study of tone relations, scales, intervals, the formation and progression of chords, concords, and modulations. The practical work consists of harmonizations of musical sentences and original melodies, the recognition by ear of all chord progressions at the piano.

2nd year: Inharmonic [sic] tones (suspension, anticipation, passing notes). Recognition of all inharmonic intervals at the piano, by ear.

3rd year: Musical analysis, harmonic and polyphonic forms, phrase periods, 2-part song, 3-part song, and song with trio. Analysis of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. (39)

In 1910, the piano diploma requirements were expanded to include three hours of practice a day and a mandatory graduation recital. A fourth year of piano study was now added. That year, voice-training requirements were also described:

Voice training students are required to show that they possess a good or promising voice and an accurate ear. Apart from this they are received in all degrees of proficiency. Special attention is given to proper method of breathing. The development of the natural voice of the individual, rather than conforming to a conventional pattern is desired. The work consists of:

1st year: Breathing exercises; sustained tone, scales and arpeggios; A.B.F. Frantz, Book 3; Vaccai, Vol. 241; Concone, 1st 25 lessons.

2nd year: Breathing exercises, continued; Lughten [?] for middle register; Concone, 50 Lessons; classic and modern songs and arias will be used as they are needed.

3rd year: Haydn, 10 canzonets; Italian grammar; Italian anthology; light areas from the French and Italian operas. (Annual Catalogue 1910, 27-28)

A variety of vocal ensembles was available, as indicated in the catalog: "Those taking the advanced high school course are eligible as candidates for the voice-culture department, and to the following musical organizations: male and female quartettes, sextettes, octettes, male and female glee clubs, etc." (Annual Catalogue 1919, 38-39).

With the arrival of Major Nathaniel Clark Smith (at Western from 1914 to 1916), rigorous band and orchestra course outlines were also added. Along with requirements such as the study of harmony, arranging, the study of Lange and Carl Weber, vocal solfeggio and ear training, one finds such items as "the study of the origin of music and the history of all instruments and their relationship to the voice" (Annual Catalogue 1915-1916, 25-26).

There is little evidence that Western University overcame its distaste for ragtime to embrace blues, jazz, or other manifestations of the roaring twenties or the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement. (16) However, after Western's student orchestra performed some classical music and hymns at the AME General Conference in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1920, university president Peck urged them to "give them a bit of those Wangs [Wang Wang Blues] and kinda swing out a little" (Peck quoted in Murray 1960, 11). "When that twenty piece orchestra opened up with those crying violins, laughing clarinets, moaning saxophones, slurring trombones, and the wa-ing of the cornets, those old Prelates began to snatch off those black skull caps they were wearing, and by the time the orchestra had finished the selection, those old preachers were stomping and foot patting more than the drummer's pedal foot" (Murray 1960, 11).

The public face of music and the training ground for future concert artists at Western University was, above all, the ensemble known as the Jackson Jubilee Singers. Not surprisingly, the group maintained high standards and could be divided into three smaller ensembles that traveled throughout the country during the summer months. Orrin Murray (1960, 5) wrote, "So great was their success in rendering spirituals and the advertising of the music department of Western University, that all young people who had any type of musical ambition, decided to go to Western University at Quindaro." Students came from not only Kansas and Missouri but also Colorado, Oklahoma, and states across the country. Etta Moten Barnett (1991, 151-152) recalled:

   My first professional experience was in that Jackson Jubilee Singers
   .... He booked us on the Chautauqua circuit.... [I]t would be small
   cities, small towns, rural towns mainly because that was in the late
   twenties then. The roads weren't good; the radio hadn't come in yet
   .... [Y]ou traveled by automobile. We had a bus, a Cadillac bus that
   they had fixed up for us.... There was a quartet of men and two
   ladies. Mr. Jackson was the pianist, and trained us. We sang
   classics as well as the jubilees, solos and popular ballads. We had
   a whole--an afternoon program that we gave with a lecturer. In the
   evening, we gave a concert of our own. The lecturer was generally
   from some university.... [O]ne [of them] had traveled with Cecil
   Rhodes in Africa....

      [T]hey had large tents ... and the tents stayed in one town a
   week.... They had something every day, maybe a play company, maybe a
   lecturer, like William Jennings Bryan's daughter, or Woodrow Wilson
   himself was a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit, ... a ten-week or
   twelve-week circuit.... We'd start in Ohio, Pennsylvania, or West
   Virginia, that whole circuit, like four or five or six states at
   one time, ... always in summer because you go back to school. You
   made this money to go to school on.

While the band, orchestra, and Jackson Jubilee Singers were the most prominent public faces of Western University, they were not its only representatives. Students in the music department often competed and won prizes in the yearly Original Music Contest of the Inter-State Literary Association of Kansas and the West, founded in 1891 by, among others, poet Langston Hughes's grandfather, Charles Langston. (17) The winning compositions were then printed and published as sheet music by the school's business department. An early example is Mable E. Harding's "Farewell, Alma Mater" (1907), which won first prize in December 1906 at St. Joseph, Missouri. Harding came from McAlester, in Indian Territory (Oklahoma), and was a composition student of Professor Jackson. That year, another Western University student named Clyde O. Andrews, from Denver, Colorado, won second prize. In December 1907, Andrews won first prize at Lawrence, Kansas, with his sonorous piano solo, "Nocturne" (1908), "A beautiful musical gem for the piano or organ." In 1908, the first prize went to Claude Minor of Lawrence, Kansas, a former pupil of Jackson's, and second prize was won by L. Viola Kinney for her "Mother's Sacrifice" (1909). (18) In 1915, according to the University Pen Point, Melvina Lewis won second prize and "is now in school at Howard University in Washington, D.C." ("Notes" 1915a). (19) While other published compositions have as yet to be discovered, the back cover of Kinney's (1909) composition notes that Western University students "have been prize-winners of every Inter-State Literary Session in which they have entered."

Kinney's work offers a fascinating glimpse into a typical student's background. On the cover of the sheet music for "Mother's Sacrifice," we learn that the composer is from Sedalia, Missouri (see Fig. 1). In the photos, the imposing buildings of Western University stand in austere and treeless majesty. Kinney's second prize was won at the Inter-State Literary Association's annual meeting held in Omaha, Nebraska, in December 1908. The piece, described as "This latest musical triumph," is "Dedicated to my dear Mother." A charmingly naive composition, it nevertheless demonstrates that she mastered her harmony lessons with Professor Jackson, using a chord built on the flatted sixth in the third measure of the introduction, as well as other chromaticisms, and modulating neatly to G minor, then E-flat major in the two contrasting sections. The graceful melody is embellished on its return and softly repeated in a lower register by the left hand to bring the piece to a close.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

No other music by Kinney has been discovered. She returned to Sedalia and in 1911 began a thirty-five-year career as a teacher of music and English at the "colored" Lincoln High School. The University Pen Point noted that in 1916 she returned to "spend Monday on the campus with her sister Cleo, a Senior. She gave some time visiting the classes ... [and] has made good in school work as well as in music. Her school chorus consists of 90 voices" ("Notes" 1916).

The importance and accomplishments of women from Western University's music department emerge through these clues as well as the numerous women members of its music faculty. Nettie B. Penix was the first person hired by Jackson, as "assistant in music" from 1906 until 1909. In 1910, Effie E. Grant, a graduate of Western University, began teaching "voice culture," and Beulah Douglas was engaged to teach piano. Later faculty members included Carrie M. Carney (piano and voice, 1919), Constance B. Fisher (voice and piano, 1921), and Bertha T. Bailey (voice and piano, 1924). Edna Hammett Porter studied with Professor Jackson at Western and was his assistant in piano in 1921. She later attended the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago and became the official organist for the National Baptist Convention of America from 1946 to 1961. Following Jackson's death in December 1929, Western graduate Helen O. Brooks became department head, teaching piano and voice and directing the choir. When she resigned in 1934, Marie Lillard, a graduate of the University of Kansas, became department head and taught all of the music courses. But long before then, the department, along with the university, had been in decline for many reasons to be discussed. Although the histories of these women still await discovery, we do know quite a bit more about three of Western University's more prominent graduates.

Eva Alberta Jessye (1895-1992)

In 1909, the year Viola Kinney graduated from Western University, Eva Alberta Jessye (Fig. 2), a thirteen-year-old girl from Coffeyville, Kansas, on the Oklahoma border, was accepted as a student despite the entrance requirement age of fourteen years. There was no secondary school for Negroes in Coffeyville, and her mother obtained permission for her to attend. She started in the elementary school and completed the secondary, then the collegiate division by 1914, when she was nineteen years old (Jessye n.d., 1).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Eva Jessye was born on January 20, 1895, to Albert Jessye, a chicken picker, and Julia Buckner Jessye, of Cherokee and Negro parentage. Her parents separated when she was three years old, and her favorite memory of her father was that he "could sound in his chest a duet, like a do and mi in his chest, sounded without opening his mouth, and I used to sit on his lap and liked to listen to that" (Jessye n.d., 1). Except for two years with her mother in Seattle, Washington, when she was seven, she was raised by her mother's mother and sisters. Her mother had gone to Seattle to find a job and worked tirelessly to provide Eva a good education. She even bought her a piano and arranged piano lessons for her with a German teacher in Coffeyville named Laird (Black 1986, 20-21). He assigned her difficult pieces but never knew she was playing mostly by ear, a "problem" that continued in her piano studies at Western University.

At Western, Jessye majored in poetry and oratory, winning several awards for her writing and speaking abilities. She also completed the course requirements in harmony, composition, and music history. She excelled in vocal studies, including solfege, and appeared as a soloist with the Jackson Jubilee Singers. She substituted as conductor for Jackson when needed and coached the male quartet and female sextet. The thorough training she received at Western was instrumental in shaping her future and, in turn, the future of many black musicians in America. In the early 1930s, for example, her choir was chosen by Virgil Thomson for his opera Four Saints in Three Acts because, unlike other black groups he considered, hers could read music and had high standards (Mundt 1981, 11). (20) Through such exposure, she became the first black woman to receive international distinction as a professional choral conductor and composer. Years later, her protegee Etta Moten Barnett (1991, 164) declared, "[She] was a natural composer.... [A]ll the composition she got was from this man, ... R. G. Jackson.... She never went to any higher school of learning, other than there at Western."

Two other incidents during her time at Western University had a profound influence on Jessye's life. When famed composer Will Marion Cook came as visiting guest artist to conduct the university's orchestra in one of his works, she attracted his attention and was asked to assist copying parts. He called her his "little protegee" and years later became her mentor in New York City (Wilson 1989, 16).

Another deep impression on Jessye was a speech she heard Booker T. Washington give at a Western University commencement exercise, in which he urged Negroes never to feel ashamed of singing spirituals. She credited this speech with motivating her lifelong commitment to arranging and performing spirituals (Black 1986, 24). (21)

Upon her graduation from Western University in 1914, Jessye returned to her hometown. The University Pen Point noted that "Miss Eva Jessie (Normal 1914) has a music class at her home in Coffeyville, Kansas, for the winter" ("Notes" 1915, 3). Subsequently, she moved to Oklahoma, where she taught elementary school in the all-black town of Taft, then in Haskell and Tullahassee. She also played in movie houses for vaudeville shows. During three summers, she attended Langston University, from which she received a lifelong teaching certificate in 1918.

In 1920, Jessye was appointed director of the music department at Morgan State College in Baltimore. Meanwhile, she was making a name for herself as a writer. Her poems were included in the collection Negro Poets and Their Poems (Kerlin 1923), and in 1925, she worked as a reporter for the weekly Baltimore Afro-American. Around 1926, she moved to New York City and joined a group of sixteen to twenty members called the Original Dixie Jubilee Singers. They appeared at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway, on Major Bowes Family Radio Hour and other radio programs, in motion pictures (Uncle Tom's Cabin 1927), and the first all-black movie musical, King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929). In 1929, she renamed the Dixie Singers the Eva Jessye Choir. She also compiled and published her collection My Spirituals, which received critical praise. Her folk oratorio Paradise Lost and Regained was broadcast on NBC radio in 1931. Other large-scale works composed in the 1930s were The Life of Christ in Negro Spirituals (1931) and The Chronicle of Job (1936). In 1933, she came to the attention of Virgil Thomson and was chosen to direct her choir in his Four Saints in Three Acts (1934). The following year, she became choir director for the original production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. She also advised and contributed authentic details to enhance the opera's African-American atmosphere. She was associated with the work through its many productions through the years and around the world, becoming known as the unofficial guardian of its score. Many black singers who went on to become well-known concert artists received their first break through these productions. Eva Jessye discovered, taught, or encouraged such singers as Etta Moten Barnett, Andrew Frierson, Muriel Rahn, and Lawrence Winters, among others. Barnett (1991, 164-165), in later years, remarked: "[She] was one of the people that had a lot of influence on my life.... She's a remarkable woman, ... all the lives she's touched. She's touched a lot of lives, just the same as she's touched me, in saying the right things.... You are grateful for people like this."

Jessye's choir traveled the world, performed at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and gave "Victory Concerts" to support the war effort in the 1940s. She also taught for a while at Claflin College in South Carolina and during the 1960s appeared as an actress on stage (Lost in the Stars) and in seven motion pictures, including Black Like Me and Slaves. She became involved in the civil rights movement, and her choir was chosen as the official chorus of the 1963 March on Washington by Martin Luther King Jr. Recordings of their singing were later used by African leader Tom Mboya during Kenya's struggle for independence.

In the 1970s, Jessye contributed her scores and memorabilia to establish the Eva Jessye Collection of Afro-American Music at the University of Michigan (1972) and the Eva Jessye Collection at Pittsburg State University, Kansas (1977, formerly College of Kansas State at Pittsburg). When Governor Robert Bennett declared October 1, 1978, "Eva Jessye Day," she directed her Paradise Lost and Regained in Pittsburg's auditorium, a performance that was broadcast by the Voice of America to forty-three countries. She served as artist-in-residence at Pittsburg from 1978 to 1981 and later at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, for a semester. She returned to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she died on February 21, 1992.

Jessye was the recipient of numerous awards, citations, and honorary degrees, from the University of Michigan, Eastern Michigan University, Allen University in South Carolina, and Wilberforce University in Ohio. In her later years, she was frequently an honored guest at the National Association of Negro Musicians yearly conventions at the invitations of its president, bass-baritone William Warfield, an old friend. She was one of the seventy-six women featured in Brian Lanker's (1989) photographic exhibition and publication I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.

Eva Jessye liked to talk about her family of origin, poetically and affectionately describing her ancestors and the aunts who raised her. Jessye rarely commented on her later personal life but did refer to her two marriages as "unfortunate" (Jessye n.d., 2). (22) She modestly summed up her life: "I have, perhaps, achieved more than I think. People tell me that. ... Most of all, if I'm just called a humanitarian. That's all I think. My life has given me much more than I ever thought that I could attain, much more. I think, because I've stuck with it" (6).

Nora Douglas Holt (ca. 1885-1974)

Following on Eva Jessye's heels, Nora Douglas attended Western University between about 1914 and 1916, but her connection to the school preceded her enrollment. Her father, the Reverend Calvin N. Douglas, was on the board of trustees and wrote the words for the school song, "O Western U." for the dedication of Grant Hall in 1907.

   Missouri shores and muddy waves,
   In fairest landscape view,
   On bleeding Kansas' famous soil
   stands dear old Western U.

Nora composed the music for it, but because Professor Jackson helped her with the harmonies, he wanted it printed with his name on it. In the dispute over authorship of the music, Nora destroyed the score. (23) The story gives some indication of both their personalities.

Douglas's long life contained enough tumult, contradictions, and accomplishments for several lifetimes. She was born either in 1885 or 1890 to Gracie Brown Douglas and Calvin N. Douglas and named either Nora Douglas or Lena Douglas (Johns 1996, 509). (24) Her father was a presiding elder with the AME Church and was active in the affairs of Western University. Douglas Hospital, organized and affiliated with Western University in 1898, was named after him. Her mother was the first matron of women students in 1906 when the women's dormitory, Grant Hall, was opened.

Douglas was encouraged to study piano at age four by her mother. She showed early ability and played the organ for several years in St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Kansas City. She was also married early and briefly, according to some sources, to a politician named Phillip Scoggins (Johns 1996, 509). At Western University, bandleader Nathaniel Clark Smith was a mentor, taking her to hear symphony concerts. Upon her graduation as valedictorian in 1916, she would have been thirty-one years old, if the usually accepted birth year of 1885 is correct. She then went to Chicago and enrolled at the Chicago Musical College, an institution that attracted a large number of Negro musicians from around the country. There, she studied harmony, composition, and music history, as well as music criticism with its president, Felix Borowsky (later a music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times). There was a second (or perhaps third) marriage to a Chicago barber, Bruce Jones, which lasted about a year. To support herself, she sang light songs and spirituals at elegant dinner parties in the luxurious "Gold Coast" homes of Chicago's wealthy whites. She received a bachelor's degree from Chicago Musical College in 1917, and later that summer, she married George W. Holt, a wealthy hotel owner some forty years her senior.

In November 1917, she began her longest-running career, as a music critic writing under the byline Lena James Douglas for the Chicago Defender. As a woman writing in a male-dominated field, she was breaking new ground, and her column appeared first on the "Woman's Page." Aware of her role, she felt her responsibility to provide competent appraisals of the artists who performed in Chicago and to raise public consciousness about classical music. Her first article was titled "Cultivating Symphony Concerts" (Holt 1917). Holt was to inveigh against jazz for a time when it first appeared, earning her a reputation for snobbishness.

In 1918, Holt became the first African American to complete the master's degree in music ("Lena James Holt" 1918). In addition to her courses at the college, she studied composition with the Danish composer Thorwald Olterstrom. For her master's thesis at Chicago Musical College, she composed a symphonic rhapsody for string orchestra based on the Negro spiritual "You May Bury Me in the East." Her compositions were rumored to number about two hundred and included orchestral, chamber, and solo instrumental music, as well as songs. Unfortunately, almost all her manuscripts were stolen from storage while she was traveling in Europe and the Far East in the early 1930s. Among her other compositions were four "Negro Dances," op. 25, and four settings of Paul Lawrence Dunbar poems, "My Love Is Like a Cry in the Night," "A Florida Night," "Who Knows," and "The Sandman." "Who Knows" was performed at William Hackney's "All Colored-Composers Concerts" at Orchestra Hall in 1915, under the name Lena James, and "Florida Night" was a favorite of tenor Roland Hayes.

Although her career as a composer was brief, the one instrumental piece that survives, "Negro Dance," op. 25, no. 1, for solo piano, indicates that she had talent, confidence, and facility. (25) Its style is reminiscent of ragtime, with a generally steady left-hand accompaniment and syncopated right-hand melody. The style is noteworthy because of the disapproval of ragtime expressed at her alma mater, Western University, and her own early objections to jazz. The piece's title indicates aspirations to folk authenticity, and it is definitely a cut above the average rag. The rhythm is more varied, imitating the juba dance in the introduction and breaking stride frequently. The figuration is imaginative and the harmonic treatment sophisticated. The third section, marked "cantabile" and later "maestoso," contains the most adventurous harmonic progressions, moving from C major through A minor, F minor, E-flat major, C minor, and A-flat major before cadencing expansively back into C major.

In 1919, by now using the name Nora Holt, Holt played an important role in founding the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), an organization that is active to this day (Fig. 3). That July, several notable black musicians, including Clarence Cameron White from Boston, R. Nathaniel Dett from Hampton Institute in Virginia, Henry L. Grant from Washington, D.C., Carl Diton of Philadelphia, Deacon Johnson from New York, T. Theodore Taylor of Chicago, and Alice Carter Simmons of Tuskegee, Alabama, met at Holt's home in Chicago to organize this association. Holt was elected vice president and served for three years. The group's purpose was to exchange views and ideas at annual meetings, set standards for performance and teaching, and encourage talented young African Americans to pursue careers in classical music through scholarships. (26)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

In addition to her work for NANM and the Chicago Defender, during 1921-1922, Holt produced and edited a monthly periodical called Music and Poetry. (27) It gave news of African-American musicians all over the United States and contained articles by well-known artists such as Roland Hayes, Helen Eugenia Hagan, and composer Louis Victor Saar, then on the Chicago Musical College faculty. It included printed music in the manner of the popular Etude magazine, preserving two of Holt's works, the "Negro Dance," op. 25, no. 1, and a song, "The Sandman." (28) Its July 1921 issue also chronicled the recent birth of NANM in an article that was reprinted in The Black Perspective in Music in 1974 ("The National Association of Negro Musicians" 1974).

In 1921, George Holt died, leaving Nora his considerable wealth. Two years later, she married Joseph Luther Ray, an assistant to Bethlehem Steel magnate Charles Schwab and owner of a food concession at the Bethlehem Steel Works. After a lavish honeymoon abroad, the marriage soured, ending in an acrimonious divorce. Holt now entered a new phase in her already-tumultuous life, as an entertainer and prominent figure in the heady environment of the Harlem Renaissance (Fig. 4). Among her new friends were Langston Hughes, who called her "the scintillating Negro blonde entertainer deluxe" (Hughes 1940, 254), and Carl van Vechten, who modeled the character Lasca Sartoris after her in his novel Nigger Heaven: "She had beauty and wit and money. She was rich and successful and happy. She had won. Problems didn't bother her. She had found what she wanted by wanting what she could get, ... this lovely animal swathed in sables, ... soft to the touch, fragrant with ... the latest perfume from Paris" (van Vechten 1926, 179, 231, 232).

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

In New York, London, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Shanghai, Holt sang for private parties and in exclusive nightclubs. (29) A columnist in London wrote of her: "Nora Holt, a blond Creole, ... has a presence and manner similar to Sophie Tucker. Same mop of golden, curly hair, the same perky good-humored lift of the head and the same appealing smile, ... but her voice is even more astonishing. She can produce sounds not comparable to orthodox singing, ranging from deepest low voice to a shrilling high, often unaccompanied by words" (quoted in Dannett 1964, 147). This was obviously not a vocal technique she learned at Western University!

By 1937, Holt tired of the hectic peripatetic life and settled for several years in Los Angeles, where she qualified to teach music in the public high schools and ran a beauty shop. In 1943, she returned to New York and to her career as a music critic, for the New York Amsterdam News (until 1956), and then the New York Courier. In 1945, sponsored by composer Virgil Thomson, she was invited to join the Music Critics Circle of New York, its first black member. She was also involved in radio, producing an annual program, American Negro Artists, for station WNYC, and Nora Holt's Concert Showcase, for station WLIB. This was a half-hour weekly program devoted to classical music (1953-1964). She inspired and promoted many young black musicians and played an important role in educating her listeners to appreciate classical music. She retired to California in 1964 and died in Los Angeles on January 25, 1974, having come a long way from Western University. As her lifelong friend Carl van Vechten (1979, 184) described her, "A fabulously amusing and talented person who deserves a biography of her own, she played piano divinely and was a fine artist as an interpretive singer. Extremely chic, she had a long and notable career, beginning in the West."

Etta Moten Barnett (1901-2004)

Entering Western University the year after Nora Douglas Holt graduated, Etta Moten shared with her a background as an only child of an AME minister. Etta was born in Weimar, Texas, to Ida Norman Moten, a teacher, and Freeman Moten, both from Texas ranching families. She was sent for her schooling to her father's alma mater, Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, where her fine contralto voice earned her a scholarship, as well as a place in the choir. In his work as an AME minister, Reverend Moten was transferred frequently, so Etta attended school in Los Angeles from 1915 to 1917. He then transferred to Kansas City, and Etta began her studies at Western University. She graduated from its secondary school, while singing in the Jackson Jubilee Singers and touring in the summers. Although she began Western University's junior college program, her education was interrupted when "a teacher there and I had carried on an affair slightly, we had fallen in love.... Papa married us. 'But,' he said, you haven't finished school.' I said, 'Well, I'll do that later.' I went with him [Curtis Brooks] to Oklahoma. He went into business.... We stayed together six years, and made three children during this time" (Barnett 1991, 153).

At age twenty-three, her marriage over, Moten returned with her three little girls to her parents in Kansas City, to find that the roaring twenties had changed the world. Professor and Mrs. Jackson took her under their wings, and according to Moten, "Mrs. Jackson said, 'Why, girl, you look like an old lady.' Here everybody was wearing bobbed hair, and mine was long. Dresses were short and mine were long" (Barnett 1991, 153). Mrs. Jackson was now enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and suggested that Moten leave her children with her parents and do the same. In summers, Moten continued to tour with the Jackson Jubilee Singers to earn money for her fees. She majored in voice and minored in public school music. She took part in musicals in the drama department, produced a weekly program on the university radio station, and gave a well-attended and widely noted senior concert recital. The dean of the school of fine arts observed her progress and encouraged her to combine singing and acting as a career.

With a letter from Eva Jessye inviting her to join her choir, Moten left for New York after her graduation in 1931. After only two weeks in New York, she landed a role in the Broadway show Fast and Furious, one of whose writers was Zora Neale Hurston and whose orchestra included violinist William Grant Still. The show closed after two nights, but Moten was immediately invited to join the cast of another Broadway musical, Zombie, which played for two months in New York and toured Chicago and California. She went on to appear in Sugar Hill and Lysistrata. Her motion picture career began with several films in which only her singing voice was heard, until The Gold Diggers of 1933, when she finally appeared briefly and anonymously, but memorably. She told a Chicago Tribune reporter, "When you stop to look for me, you have to look real fast, but it meant so much to the Negro people to break the stereotype of Blacks playing menial roles" (quoted in Hill 1996, 53). The film led to numerous personal appearances, one of them in Washington, D.C. There, one of the White House maids, named Lizzie McDuffie, told her that President Franklin Roosevelt admired her singing, especially "My Forgotten Man." Alerted by McDuffie, Eleanor Roosevelt sent a letter the next day inviting Moten to give a short concert for a gathering in the White House on January 31, 1933.

After that, films, such as Flying Down to Rio (1933) in which she appeared with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, listed Moten's name in the screen credits. The RKO producer of the film, Lou Brock, arranged a radio job, her own program called Etta Moten Sings, and NBC signed her on as a soloist for Meredith Wilson's show Carefree Karnival. Moten also served as mistress of ceremonies for the West Coast salute to the new Radio City Music Hall in New York. Appearances on the East Coast followed, culminating in the Palace Theater in New York.

Since 1931, Etta Moten had crossed paths regularly with Claude Barnett, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute and president of the Associated Negro Press. In 1934, they were married at the home of Tuskegee Institute president Robert Russa Moton. Her daughters, Sue, Gladys, and Etta Vee, went to live with the couple in Chicago and were adopted by Barnett.

Moten Barnett put her established reputation and fame at the service of musicians who were beginning their careers. In Chicago, she developed a friendship with Margaret Bonds, a graduate of Northwestern University who was making a name for herself as a pianist and composer. She introduced Bonds's solo setting of Langston Hughes's The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1936), and in 1939, the two toured schools and colleges all over the United States together (Fig. 5).

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

In the early 1940s, the director of Porgy and Bess sought a replacement for the role of Bess. The first choice was Moten Barnett, whom Gershwin had declared was the kind of Bess he originally had in mind. At that time she demurred, feeling the range was not right. After some of the songs were lowered for her, she felt ready to take the part, playing opposite Todd Duncan as Porgy. Unfortunately, five years of singing Bess on Broadway and in tours throughout the country took their toll, and in 1947, she had a cyst removed from her throat.

A trip with her husband to Africa gave Moten Barnett a good opportunity to rest her voice. They toured several countries and met President William Tubman of Liberia, as well as future leaders Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Louis Ojukwu of Biafra, and Sylvanus Olympio of Togo. It turned out to be the first of many trips to Africa, frequently as official representatives in delegations from the U.S. government. Through her husband's press releases as well as Moten Barnett's lectures and club activities, these visits awakened new interest in Africa and its developing nations among African Americans.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, Moten Barnett's activities focused more on Chicago, her home base. She was already closely tied as performer to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and to the Ravinia Park and Grant Park summer concerts, and she was host for an NBC radio program, Etta Moten--with Music and Conversation. She gave her time to the Chicago Lyric Opera, DuSable Museum, Field Museum, South Side Community Arts Center, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. After her husband's death in 1967, she resumed activities in her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and became an honorary member of Links, a service organization for black women. Particularly active in women's issues, she was a member of the National Council of Negro Women and headed the Links delegation to the United Nations' Decade for Women World Conference in Nairobi in 1985. She was artist-in-residence at Florida A&M University and Dillard University and received honorary degrees from Atlanta University, Spelman College, University of Illinois, Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), and North Carolina Central University. Almost to the end of her long life, she continued to travel and lecture (to Brazil in 1988 and China in 1990), give master classes, and remain active in the areas of her expertise: African history and politics, women in the third world, and concert and stage music. She died in Chicago on January 2, 2004, at the age of 102. At one of her many one hundredth birthday celebrations, actress Halle Berry presented her with an award at the Chicago International Film Festival's tribute, "Black Women in Film ... from Etta to Halle." A play about Moten Barnett's life, Papa's Child, by Useni Eugene Perkins, was presented at Chicago's ETA Creative Arts Foundation. Like other notable graduates of Western University, she saw tremendous changes in African-American history and culture, in many of which she played an instrumental role.

As the careers of Eva Jessye, Nora Holt, and Etta Moten Barnett were hitting their stride in the 1930s and 1940s, Western University's vitality was waning. Even before Professor Jackson's death in 1929, the music department's enrollment had dropped from a peak of 143 in 1921 to 90 in 1922 to 50 in 1925 and just 9 in the fall of 1927--this despite the largest graduating class (114) in Western University's history in the spring of 1927. The causes for this decline were multiple. Perhaps a string of mishaps and tragedies during 1920-21 cast a pall. (30) The destruction of the dormitory facilities by fire in 1924 and the AME Church's tardiness in rebuilding them had an adverse effect on enrollment. The year 1927 corresponds with the reinstatement of dress restrictions at Western University, and it may be that the church's reluctance to include the cultural changes of the 1920s and the New Negro movement caused young people to look elsewhere. After the stock market crash of 1929, state funding decreased and families and students could not afford tuition. The complicated organizational structure combining church and state funding and staffing also contributed to the deteriorating fortunes. Salary inequalities between "state" teachers and those employed by the church lowered morale and fostered high turnover. Western University's historian, Orrin Murray, places most of the blame for the entire school's decline on the AME bishops and their political gamesmanship. In 1927, AME bishops exchanged political support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Clyde Reed for the "release" of Western University president Dr. Frances Jesse Peck (after he had served the university as its head teacher in the 1880s and as its president from 1918 to 1927). His ill-advised replacement, Jefferson King, led to graft and financial chaos. Between 1927 and 1931, not only enrollment but also the physical facilities, teacher qualifications, and academic standards became worse than inadequate.

In 1933, Governor Alfred M. Landon appointed former Western University president William T. Vernon as superintendent of the industrial department. (31) The school reopened that fall with expanded and improved faculty and remodeled and refurnished buildings. It continued to grow until 1938 when Vernon left and the brief reversal of Western University's fortunes ended. By 1942, the graduating class had dropped to six. The state legislators decided that continued state funding of the school was wasteful and withdrew all state industrial equipment from the university. There was no longer a need for a separate industrial school for African Americans because Kansas now had mixed schools and all the students could be trained at the state-run Kansas Vocational Institute in Topeka. In a formal ceremony held on June 30, 1943, Western University officially closed and its property reverted back to the AME Church. The university's theological seminary, renamed Bishop Williams School of Religion in 1938, continued until 1948 when it, too, closed and was moved to Wilberforce, Ohio.

The once-imposing buildings of Western University were destroyed by fires, which had always been an adversary. In 1992, all that was left of the campus was the life-size statue of John Brown erected in 1911 by students and alumni to keep alive the memory of the abolitionist and martyr in the cause of freedom. (32) It bears the inscription "Erected to the memory of John Brown by a grateful people" (see Fig. 6). A plaque subsequently added to its base declares it a Kansas City Historical Site and briefly summarizes the history of Western University. While acknowledging the school's origins in the 1860s, the inscription dates it from 1881, the year the AME Church stepped in to keep the school alive and changed its name from Freedman's School to Western University. In the late 1950s, several alumni formed a Western University Memory Club, and in 1960, Orrin McKinley Murray St., a graduate of Western University's Junior College and later a bandleader and teacher in its Adult Education school, self-published a pamphlet titled The Rise and Fall of Western University. In 1966, Thaddeus Smith wrote his master's thesis on the history of Western University for a degree from Kansas State College of Pittsburg. At that time, he was still able to interview a few surviving people who had studied or worked at the school. As those who were part of its history pass on, the memory of its story and legacy fades away, and like its buildings, this chapter in African-American history disappears. This is unfortunate because Western University has more than one lesson to teach us. Not only did Nora Douglas Holt, Eva Jessye, and Etta Moten Barnett and its many other alumni learn at Western University that results depend on effort, knowledge, and skill, but as members of a minority, they mastered the culture of the majority so that they could improve and make changes in it.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

Thanks to Randy Roberts at the Leonard H. Axe Library of Pittsburg State University of Kansas, Michael Church at the Kansas State Historical Society, and Pat Willis at the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts of Yale University for their help in locating sources.

DISCOGRAPHY 

Holt, Nora. Negro dance, op. 25, no. 1. Helen Walker-Hill, piano. Kaleidoscope: Music by African-American women. Leonarda Records LE 339 (1995).

REFERENCES

Andrews, Clyde O. 1908. Nocturne. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University Business Department.

Annual catalogue. 1903. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University.

--. 1910. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University.

--. 1915-1916. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University.

--. 1919. Quindaro, Karts.: Western University.

Barnett, Etta Moten. 1991. Reminiscence. In The black women oral history project, vol. 2, edited by Ruth Edmonds Hill, 140-232. New York: Meckler.

Black, Donald Fisher. 1986. The life and work of Eva Jessye and her contributions to American music. Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan.

Buckner, Reginald Tyron. 1974. A history of music education in the black community of Kansas City, Kansas, 1905-1954. Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota.

Dannett, Sylvia. 1964. Profiles of Negro womanhood. Vol. 2, The twentieth century. Yonkers, N.J.: Educational Heritage.

Du Bois, W.E.B. [1903] 1994. The souls of black folk. New York: Gramercy Books.

Harding, Mable E. 1907. Farewell, alma mater. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University Business Department.

Hill, Ruth Edmonds. 1996. Etta Moten Barnett. In Notable black American women, book 1, edited by Jessie Carney Smith, 51-55. Detroit: Gale Research.

Holt, Nora Douglas [Lena James Douglas, pseud.]. 1917. Cultivating symphony concerts. Chicago Defender November 10.

--. 2001. Negro dance, op. 25, no. 1. Stevens Point, Wis.: Vivace Press.

Hughes, Langston. 1940. The big sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Jessye, Eva. N.d. Interview. Eva Jessye Collection, Pittsburg State University Special Collections.

Johns, Robert L. 1996. Nora Holt. In Notable black American women, book 2, edited by Jessie Carney Smith. Detroit: Gale Research.

Kerlin, Robert Thomas, ed. 1923. Negro poets and their poems. Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers.

Kinney, L. Viola. 1909. Mother's sacrifice. Quindaro, Kans.: Western University Business Department. Reprinted in Black women composers: A century of piano music (1893-1990), edited by Helen Walker-Hill. Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Hildegard Publishing, 1992.

Lanker, Brian. 1989. I dream a world: Portraits of black women who changed America. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang.

Lena James Holt takes high honors at Chicago Music College. 1918. Chicago Defender June 19.

Miss Hagen's concert recital highly appreciated. 1915. [Western] University Pen Point March: 1.

Mundt, Gladys M. 1981. "What's the matter with now?" Eva Jessye. Little Balkan Review 1, no. 4 (Summer): 1-17.

Murray, Orrin McKinley, Sr. 1960. The rise and fall of Western University. Kansas City, Kans.: Privately printed.

The National Association of Negro Musicians. 1974. Music and Poetry (Fall): 234-235.

Notes. 1915a. [Western] University Pen Point Sept.-Oct.: 3.

Notes. 1915b. [Western] University Pen Point November: 3.

Notes. 1916. [Western] University Pen Point March: 3.

Smith, Thaddeus. 1966. Western University: A ghost college in Kansas. Master's thesis, Kansas State College of Pittsburg.

Southern, Eileen. 1982. Biographical dictionary of Afro-Americans and African Musicians. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Van Vechten, Carl. 1926. Nigger heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

--. 1979. "Keep a-inchin' along": Selected writings of Carl van Vechten about black arts and letters, edited by Bruce Kellner. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.

Wilson, Doris Jones. 1989. Eva Jessye: Afro-American choral director. D.Ed. diss., Washington University.

(1.) Wiley College in Texas claims that distinction (see www.WileyCollege.com), although it was founded in 1873 and preceded by Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri (1866), among others (e.g., Paul Quinn, Dallas, Texas, 1872).

(2.) Oberlin College preceded its Conservatory of Music by thirty-two years.

(3.) Many of the dates in this story vary from one source to another. Smith (1966) dates Jackson's tenure from 1902. Also, the name of the school varies from one source to another, from Freedman University (until 1881) in Smith (1966) to Quindaro State School for the Colored (until 1919) in Black (1986). I have adopted the most well-documented and frequently used names and dates.

(4.) Young sons may have been trusted to travel to unfamiliar cities, but most black families, with some notable exceptions such as that of Florence Smith Price, preferred to keep their daughters in the more-comforting surroundings of all-black schools.

(5.) The name means "bundle of sticks" or "in union there is strength," an apt choice, considering the town's dangerous proximity to proslavery strongholds Atchison, Leavenworth, and Wyandotte City (later Kansas City).

(6.) In 1872, whites burned down several schools that admitted Negroes. In 1892, Kansas still did not enforce its official policy of integrated public schools.

(7.) Langston was unable to serve beyond 1872 because of illness. He may have been Langston Hughes's grandfather on his mother's side, who founded the Inter-State Literary Association of Kansas and the West in 1891.

(8.) The school was organized into these divisions: subnormal (elementary grades 6, 7, and 8, telescoped into two years, for those who had been deprived of elementary education), normal or high school (four years), collegiate (replaced in 1919 by the Junior College), theology, and agriculture.

(9.) According to Murray (1960, 5), Vernon was invited to head the school by the Reverend Calvin Douglas, Nora Douglas's father.

(10.) Washington (1869-1915), the son of former slaves in Virginia, attended Hampton Institute in the 1870s and founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881. His conviction that all Negroes should concentrate on self-help and independence and learn trades to improve their economic situation was influential in black communities throughout the United States. His preference for separation of the races and conciliation with the white majority made him highly popular with the white power base. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), raised in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and Berlin (Harvard Ph.D., 1895), had a brilliant career as a teacher and writer and was a key player in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. He believed that the goal of education was "culture and character rather than bread-winning" (Du Bois [1903] 1994, 73), higher education for Negro leadership (the "talented tenth"), civil rights, and racial equality.

(11.) Vernon's achievements were noted in Washington, D.C., and upon his election in 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt called him to be Registrar of the National Treasury, a post Vernon also held under President William H. Taft. Vernon was elected bishop of the AME Church by its General Conference in 1920 and traveled widely in Europe and Africa.

(12.) The emblem was later adopted by the 4-H clubs.

(13.) By 1903, its entrance requirement was graduation from the secondary division or normal school plus two years of Greek, Latin, French, German, English literature, political economy, international law, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, geology, sociology, psychology, and moral philosophy. This department was replaced by the Junior College in 1919.

(14.) Helen Eugenia Hagan was a 1912 graduate of Yale School of Music who was awarded a two-year fellowship to study with Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. She then concertized in the United States until turning to teaching and choral conducting.

(15.) Nathaniel Clark Smith (1877-1933) was an alumnus of Western University (before Jackson's arrival), Guild Hall in London, England (1899), and Chicago Musical College. He toured with minstrel groups, directed military bands, and returned to Western University to teach during 1914-1916. This was followed by a distinguished teaching career at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago, and Sumner High School in St. Louis.

(16.) Etta Moten Barnett (1991, 153) did comment, however, that Mrs. Jackson urged her in 1923 to return to Kansas (from Oklahoma) and "go where there's some young people." In Kansas, women were wearing bobbed hair and short dresses. Perhaps this is why Western University reinstated dress restrictions in 1927 to allow only middy blouses and dark skirts (Smith 1966, 48).

(17.) The Inter-State Literary Association of Kansas and the West met yearly in various cities to present papers, essays, addresses, music performed by black ensembles and soloists, and contests in storytelling, essay writing, declamation, oration, and original music. It is not known how long the association was in existence.

(18.) These scores are held at the Library of Congress and can be viewed in the Helen Walker-Hill Collection located in duplicate at the American Music Research Center in Boulder, Colorado, and the Center for Black Music Research Library and Archives at Columbia College Chicago.

(19.) Unfortunately, Melvina Lewis's composition has not been located.

(20.) Etta Moten Barnett (1991, 164-165) relates that Jessye would spend the night before an audition with the poor readers in her group, teaching them by rote: "She has the happy faculty of making nonreaders look good."

(21.) At that time, there was a tendency to avoid spirituals in some churches because they were a reminder of slavery and degradation.

(22.) One of her marriages took place in 1936. The certificate is in the holdings of her collection at Pittsburg State University in Kansas.

(23.) Thereafter, it was sung by "ear and memory" until Orrin Murray wrote out the notes and arranged them for band instruments. These handwritten notes were lost when a fire destroyed the school buildings after it closed. In 1959, Murray wrote it out again but did not include the many "runs and variations that it should have had." Orrin Murray's handwritten notes are on file at the Kansas State Historical Society.

(24.) Records in Kansas City are given only from 1911 and are available only to relatives.

(25.) "Negro Dance," op. 25, no. 1, has been reprinted by Vivace Press (Holt 2001) and recorded by Leonarda Records (1995).

(26.) The first scholarship was awarded to contralto Marian Anderson in 1921.

(27.) Music and Poetry was the third black music periodical to be published, after Amelia Tilghman's Musical Messenger in 1886 and J. Hillary Taylor's Negro Music Journal in 1902.

(28.) "The Sandman" and "Negro Dance," op. 25, no. 1, can be viewed in the Helen Walker-Hill Collection at the Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago, and at the American Music Research Center in Boulder, Colorado.

(29.) She may have studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau in 1931 (Southern 1982, 187).

(30.) The tragedies began in January 1920 when Miss Carney, the voice teacher, caught a cold and died of pneumonia in her room on campus. In the following year, several students either died or took their lives (Murray 1960, 11).

(31.) This despite Vernon's having been defrocked as a bishop in an AME Church Conference trial viewed by many as unfair.

(32.) According to legend, John Brown dug a cave where the campus later stood, which became part of the Underground Railroad. Old-timers in the 1960s claimed to have been in it and to have seen names of slaves carved in the walls (Smith 1966, 59-60).

Pianist and musicologist HELEN WALKER-HILL has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Muhlenberg College, and the University of Wyoming. She is the author of Piano Music by Black Women Composers: A Catalog of Solo and Ensemble Works (Greenwood Press, 1992) and Music by Black Women Composers: A Bibliography of Available Scores (CBMR Monograph no. 5, 1995). Her collection of scores in manuscript and print by African-American women composers is housed at the Center for Black Music Research, and her editions of this music have been published by Hildegard Publishing Company and Vivace Press. Her articles have appeared in the International Dictionary of Black Composers (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999) as well as various journals. Leonarda Records produced her CD Kaleidoscope: Music by African-American Women (1995), performed with violinist Gregory Walker. Her most recent book, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music (Greenwood Press, 2002), will be released in paperback by the University of Illinois Press in 2007.