And my paper went very well, and I'm very appreciative of all those who dragged themselves in to hear it early on a Sunday morning. In one of my rambling answers to a question I touched on the subject of what sort of music was important to the Civil Rights Movement in its early days, before Brown v. Board of Education. A few years ago I actually once spent some time looking at this issue, in some tangential research in the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress, and since I don't think I'll be publishing or presenting it any time soon, I thought I would sketch out what I found in a blog post.
As a matter of organizational support, the national office of the NAACP really only supported two kinds of music: traditional arrangements of spirituals, and African American classical musicians. The executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931-1955 was the rather patrician Walter White. White was personally a big fan of the conductor Dean Dixon, who as I mentioned earlier would later suffer some blacklisting. In the early 1940s, White was quite vigorous in using the NAACP name to promote Dixon's career, writing letters to people like Leopold Stokowski and Virgil Thomson to help arrange concerts and reviews. (Thomson gave him a favorable review, and wrote back to White "I do hope you will continue to bring to my notice interesting musical events in which colored people are involved.” White's support for Dixon lasted at least until 1952; I would be curious to know if the blacklisting brought it to an end.
The other official musical promotion was of spirituals. There may at one point have been an NAACP choir, and in 1949 the organization sponsored a benefit album organized around the tune "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (which, incidentally, was originally written by an NAACP activist.) There seems to have been a disagreement over how best to record the song; Roy Wilkins wrote a letter agreeing that "the rendition should be one of dignity and thankfulness. It is not a protest hymn and cannot be made such no matter what a recording group does to it."
What about popular music? Well, it's pretty clear that for the most part the leadership of the NAACP could care less. Oscar Hammerstein and John Hammond were both on the board of the NAACP, and there might have been a brief attempt in 1948 to deal with the issue of record companies having "race" departments, but I didn't much evidence that they did anything about it. One interesting little incident came in 1949. The manager of the Ink Spots wrote to the NAACP basically asking for some sort of recognition from the group for having desegregated several night clubs in the south. The main office balked at this, and clearly didn't really know who the Ink Spots were or if it was appropriate for them to recognize them. Finally, in place of a more official proclamation that would need to be ratified by the board, White wrote a letter to the Ink Spots commending them for their work:
Please accept my heartiest congratulations upon your successful appearance in Miami Beach. By breaking the long-standing ban on Negro entertainers in this resort you have opened up new opportunities for the race and have contributed significantly to the whole struggle against racial barriers in any field. This is a valiant struggle which you share in common with freedom-loving Americans of all races, creeds and regions. Your demonstration in Miami Beach should facilitate the presentation of Negro entertainers in theaters and nightclubs in other southern cities heretofore closed to them. May you continue in this pioneer work of surmounting barriers while contributing to the gaiety of the nation through the high quality of the entertainment you offer.
The basic theme of the NAACP's work in the late 1940s and early 1950s was one of slow, painstaking activism. In addition to the epochal work being performed by Thurgood Marhsall's legal unit, the bulk of the organization's files from this period is dealing with the ramifications of McCarthyism. This meant expelling Commmunists from the organization and dealing with recalcitrant local chapters while putting out small fires around the country--White was kept busy writing letters to draft boards, universities, the military, and other institutions assuring them that the NAACP was not a Communist front, and that membership was not a sign of fellow-travelerdom. For this he was later castigated, but unlike many other progressive organizations of the period, the NAACP made it through McCarthyism alive, and with its basic mission intact.
The story of Walter White's complicated relationship with Paul Robeson is a whole other story, but I'll leave that for another time!
No comments:
Post a Comment