Shew Fly!

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  “Shew Fly!”

Composer:  George Thorne & Rollin Howard

Engraver:  J. Frank Giles

Publisher:  White, Smith & Perry

Year & Place:  1869, Boston, Massachusetts

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Music B-409

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  b0409

Basic Description

This engraving features a solitary male figure, physically gesturing in such a way as to suggest his effort to escape a large, wasp-like insect to the left.  A word balloon with the expression “SHOO FLY” issues from the man’s mouth.  His big-collared shirt, long-tailed jacket, and striped/patched trousers recall the clothing typically worn by nineteenth-century minstrels.

Personal Description

Although the artist for this cover is not as technically polished as several others in this blog, his attempt at a persuasive African American depiction is laudable.  However, like so many of the black figures typically represented on covers, this one also emphasizes the body-in-motion, with angled limbs and twisted torsos carrying their own subliminal messages and allusions.

Reality Check

Robert Morris (1823-1882)

Robert Morris became one of the first black lawyers in United States after being admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1847.  Morris was born in Salem, Massachusetts on June 8, 1823.   At an early age, Morris had some formal education at Master Dodge’s School in Salem.  With the agreement of his family, he became the student of Ellis Gray Loring, a well known abolitionist and lawyer.  By the early 1850s, Robert Morris was appointed a justice of the peace and was admitted to practice before U.S. district courts.  He occasionally served as a magistrate in courts in Boston and nearby Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Vehemently opposed to slavery, he worked with William Lloyd Garrison, Ellis Loring and Wendell Philips and others to oppose the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  In 1851 Morris, with the help of Lewis Hayden, managed to remove from the courthouse a newly arrested fugitive slave Shadrack and helped him to get to Canada and freedom.  Arrests were made but Morris and the others were acquitted of the charges.

With the onset of the Civil War, Morris welcomed President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers but objected to the enlistment of African Americans unless they received fair and equal treatment and were offered positions as officers.  He helped in the recruitment of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first officially sanctioned African American unit in the U.S. Army but he continued to speak out against discrimination against them and other black soldiers.  Robert Morris died in Boston on December 12, 1882.

YOUNG EPH’S LAMENT

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  “Young Eph’s Lament”

Composer:  J.B. Murphy

Engraver:  W.E. Foote

Publisher:  Jacob Endres

Year & Place:  1862, St. Louis, Missouri

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Music A-1032

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  a1032

Basic Description

Arguably, this gesturing, black-faced/white-lipped man shares the engraving’s focal point with assorted titles, lyrical excerpts, and artistic bylines. Dressed in patched, striped, and too-short-and-tight-for-decorum trousers, the man’s impoverished fashion sense is further underscored by his rag-tag coat, collapsed stove-top hat, and bundled belongings on a stick.

Personal Description

Despite the downtrodden demeanor and the adjacent “lament” transcribed in an illiterate “darky” dialect, the man’s obvious burnt-cork-and-kaolin makeup, as well as his classic contraposto pose and indicatory gesture, suggest a masquerade or, perhaps, a tongue-in-cheek dramatis personae of pro-slavery mimicry, knowingly performed and proselytized here by Murphy and Purdy.

Reality Check

James Milton Turner (1840-1915)

James Milton Turner was a prominent politician, education advocate, and diplomat in the years after the Civil War.  Turner was born a slave in St. Louis, Missouri in 1840.  His father, John Turner (also known as John Colburn), was a well-known “horse doctor” in St. Louis who had earlier purchased his freedom.  In 1843 John Turner was able to buy freedom for his wife, Hannah, and his son James.  When he was fourteen James attended Oberlin College in Ohio for one term until his father’s death in 1855 forced him to return to St. Louis to help support his mother and family.

During the Civil War Turner enlisted in the Union Army and served as the body servant for Col. Madison Miller.  After the war, Governor Thomas Fletcher (Miller’s brother-in-law), appointed Turner Assistant Superintendent of Schools responsible for establishing freedmen schools in Missouri.  Turner was also behind the effort to establish Lincoln Institute in Jefferson City, Missouri, the first school to offer higher education for blacks in Missouri.  Turner was also active in organizing African Americans as a political force in Missouri.

President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Turner Ambassador to Liberia in 1871, making him the first African American to serve in the U.S. diplomatic corps.  He held the post until 1878.  Following his return to the U.S. he worked for relief and aid for Exoduster immigrants to Kansas.  In 1881 he and Hannibal Carter organized the Freedmen’s Oklahoma Immigration Association to promote black homesteading in Oklahoma.  In the last two decades of his life Turner lobbied strenuously for the rights of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw freedmen in the Indian Territory.  Turner died in 1915 in Ardmore, Oklahoma.

Remus takes the cake; A Southern melody; Characteristic two step-march

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  Remus takes the cake; A Southern melody; Characteristic two step-march

Composer: Ellis, Jacob Henry

Engraver: Moss Photo Eng.

Publisher: Willis Woodward

Year & Date:  1896, New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Music # A-2017

Historic American Sheet Music Item #: a2017

Basic Description
An African American man holds out a gigantic white cake ringed with red puffs and topped with a red bow.  His attire is ostentatious- a bright red bow tie, a flower on his lapel, a three-piece suit and tails, white gloves, and a gleaming diamond button on his shirt. The etched lines of the engraving and his blank stare give the man’s face a wooden quality. His position, with his empty white-gloved hand poised at chest level, makes him look mechanical. The man’s lips are large and disproportionate with the rest of his facial features.

Personal Description
The joy implied by the man’s smile is undermined by the wooden appearance of his face and blank look in his eyes. There is something mechanical about his actions. Finery swirls around him, from his clothes to the ribbon-bedecked cake to the delicate vine-like embellishments that seem to be inspired by French toille. Though the title and bravado of the man’s pose suggest his empowerment (maybe the cake as a prize for winning a dance contest), the man appears impotent and almost child-like, dwarfed by the pomp that encircles him.

Reality Check

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932)

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born the son of free black parents on June 20, 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents had recently moved to Cleveland from Fayetteville, North Carolina in response to the growing restrictions placed on free blacks in that slave state.
By 1866, Chesnutt worked part time in the family store while regularly attending Cleveland’s Howard School for Blacks.

In 1872 Chesnutt was forced to end his formal education at the age of fourteen because he had to help support his parents.  However, the school’s principal invited him to stay at the school as a distinguished pupil-teacher and turn his modest salary over to his father.

By sixteen, Chesnutt was employed in Charlotte, North Carolina as a full-time teacher and in 1877, returned to Fayetteville, North Carolina as the assistant principal of Howard School.  In 1880 Chesnutt became the school’s principal.

In search of more lucrative employment, Chesnutt resigned his school-administrator post in 1883 and moved to New York City where he worked as a stenographer and journalist on Wall Street.  By 1887, Chesnutt returned to Cleveland and was admitted to the Ohio Bar.   As a teacher, lawyer, businessman and writer, Chesnutt was a prominent member of Cleveland’s African American elite.  By 1900, however, Chesnutt gave up his business and professional life to write and lecture full-time.

Chesnutt was one of the first black American fiction writers to receive serious critical attention and acclaim for portraying blacks realistically and sensitively. In 1899 he wrote his first major novel, The Conjure Woman. Other books followed including The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line published also in 1899, as well as a biography of Frederick Douglass first released in that same year.  Another popular publication of Chesnutt was a novel entitled The House Behind the Cedars that he published in 1900.  Many of Chesnutt’s publications reflect a similar and distinct shunning of condescending characterizations of African Americans and challenging of the usual sympathetic portrayals of slavery.  Charles Waddell Chesnutt died in Cleveland in November, 1932.

Ethiopian serenade; Burlesque

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  Ethiopian Serenede; Burlesque

Composer: Puerner, Charles

Publisher: Wm. A. Pond

Year & Date:  1883, New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Music# B-477

Historic American Sheet Music Item #: b0477

Basic Description
A man plays what appears to be a fretless banjo and sings with a far-off look in his eyes. He has dark skin but it is not clear if he is a representation of an African American man or a minstrel playing a role. The man is dressed in a top hat and a dignified, if modest suit. His eyes are disproportionately large, especially in comparison with his tiny nose,  and his lips are parted to reveal two rows of small, perfectly formed white teeth.

Personal Description
The instructions to play the “Ethiopian Serenade” on piano prompt the question of why this man is strumming a banjo. The implication seems to be that this is an authentic “Ethiopian” song that has been musically adapted for safe consumption in white middle class parlors. Words like “burlesque” and “serenade” would be clues that the rough, vernacular music of the African (played on the banjo, an instrument with African roots) had been tempered with the civility of European musical influences. The dignified yet childlike man with his banjo functions simply as a hollowed-out symbol of African American culture converted into a safe consumer amusement.

Reality Check

Ebenezer D. Bassett (1803-1908)
Ebenezer D. Bassett was appointed U.S. Minister Resident to Haiti in 1869, making him the first African American diplomat.  For eight years, the educator, abolitionist, and black rights activist oversaw bilateral relations through bloody civil warfare and coups d’état on the island of Hispaniola.

Born in Connecticut on October 16, 1833, Ebenezer D. Bassett was the second child of Eben Tobias and Susan Gregory.  Bassett was the first black student to integrate the Connecticut Normal School in 1853.  He taught in New Haven and befriended Frederick Douglass.  Later, he became the principal of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth (ICY).

During the Civil War, Bassett helped recruit African American soldiers for the Union.  In nominating Bassett to become Minister Resident to Haiti, President Ulysses S. Grant made him one of the highest ranking black members of the United States government.

During his tenure, Bassett dealt with cases of citizen commercial claims, diplomatic immunity for his consular and commercial agents, hurricanes, fires, and numerous tropical diseases.

Upon the end of the Grant Administration in 1877, Bassett submitted his resignation as was customary with a change of hands in government.  When he returned to the United States, he spent an additional ten years as the Consul General for Haiti in New York City. Prior to this death on November 13, 1908, he returned to live in Philadelphia, where his daughter Charlotte also taught at the ICY.

(Source: http://www.blackpast.org)

My Home in Alabam’

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  My Home in Alabam’

Composer: Putnam, James S.

Publisher: John F. Perry

Year & Date:  1881, Boston, Massachusetts

Collection/Call Number/Copies: Music#  B-666
Historic American Sheet Music Item #: b0666

Basic Description
A man sits on a wooden chair in a sparse garret bedroom with a banjo on his lap and his head in his hand. He stares at the viewer with a distant, troubled look, in a pose like Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” The town-like setting in the window contrasts with the plantation scene above— a dream space corralled by a dense frame of cloud-like circles.  The cracks and exposed bricks in the wall, along with the jagged hemlines of the man’s pant legs set depressing tone.  Rather than being integrated with the picture, the title text is set in the white space around the image. Two title options, “My Dear Savannah Home,” and “My Home in Alabam” are listed in sober typeface.

Personal Description
Each title option can lead to a different and contradictory interpretation of the image. Interestingly, this pamphlet includes two song sheet covers for other “plantation melodies” printed by the same publisher. This imagery makes light of the plantation experience, showing caricatured African Americans dancing or filling pails with berries. Like the song illustrated on the main cover, these songs also have two titles each that contrast oddly with each other. “De Huckleberry Picnic”  implies a recreational activity at one’s own free will but “Since I Saw de Cotton Grow” suggests the forced labor of slavery or the exploitation of sharecropping.  “My Dear Savannah Home” implies that the seated man is nostalgic for plantation life. But “My Home in Alabam” is vague, allowing the plantation memory invading the scene to be interpreted not as a cherished dream but rather an oppressive nightmare.

Reality Check

Edward Alexander Bouchet
(1852-1918)
Edward Alexander Bouchet was an educator and scientist who was born in New Haven Connecticut. His family was a member of the Temple Street Congregational Church, a stopping point for fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad.

In 1868, Bouchet was accepted into Hopkins Grammar School, a private institution that prepared young men for the classical and scientific departments at Yale College. He graduated first in his class at Hopkins and graduated from Yale in 1874, ranking sixth in his class. In 1876, he completed a dissertation on geometrical optics,  becoming the first African American to earn a PhD from an American University and the sixth American of any race to earn a PhD in Physics.

Bouchet moved to Philadelphia in 1876 to teach at the Institute for Colored Youth, the city’s only high school for African American students.  Bouchet gave public lectures to his community in Philadelphia on scientific topics and was a member of the Franklin Institute, a foundation for the promotion of the mechanic arts, chartered in 1824.

In 1908, he became principal of Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio, where he remained until 1913, when an attack of arteriosclerosis compelled him to resign and return to New Haven. He died in his boyhood home in 1916.

(Source: African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Walking for dat Cake

Walking for dat Cake

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Walking for Dat Cake

Composer:         Braham, David

Publisher:          Wm. A. Pond

Year & Place:    1877; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:               Music B-156

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:  hasm.b0156

Basic Description

This image depicts a warm scene of revelry and dance inside of a wooden dwelling.  Young couples move about the floor in formal attire with the boys in suits and the women in dresses. The adults in this image line the walls and the outskirts of the floor. One couple, consisting of a male and a female watch the festivities from the back, far left portion of the space. while another couple stands in the far right of the background near the entrance of the house. Dancing in the far left foreground, a matronly woman balances a plate of food on her head. She wears glasses as well as an apron. Mirroring her movements and creating a symmetrical composition, directly across from her is an older gentleman with a pipe in his right hand. In the background, directly in front of the window, a small, thin boy participates in the festivities by dancing on top of a table. Illuminating this joyous evening is a large, lit, fireplace as well as a candle on top of the mantle. Portraits, chairs pushed against the walls and a clock lining the wall remind the viewer of the space’s domestic character.

Personal Description

The fifteen individuals packed into this small space make this image extraordinarily crowded.   The source of the music is also conspicuously absent. The occasion for this dance and the individual identities of these people are also missing pieces of contextual information that the viewer cannot visually access. One might infer that these constitute free blacks from their fancy dress and participation in an activity of leisure.  All that the viewer can know for sure, however, about this image is that there is a group of black people dancing. In this way, it contains elements of caricature, as it reduces black identity to dance. Still, there are other dichotomies exist in this image. First, the artist chose not to create a grotesque illustration scene of debauchery that would have been more in line with the hypersexualized, revival-esque dance with which African-Americans were associated. Instead, the illustrator drew a restrained scene of civilized dance. This is, however, punctured by anomalies. A woman dances with food on her head and a boy dances on top of a table. Other characters are not clearly adults or children, straddling a strange space between youth and maturation.  It is as if the artist wanted to suggest that they can’t quite get it right. Thus, this image combines subtle stereotyping with an indirect critique of middle-class African-American life.

Reality Check

Sketch from February 26, 1870 Harper’s Weekly

“There are now about one hundred buildings occupied by the schools of this [New York] city.  While all of these buildings are convenient and healthful, the newer buildings are a great improvement on those erected in former years.  They have been constructed on the best principles of arrangement, fitted with conveniences for teachers and pupils, supplied with the best kind of furniture, and are warmed and ventilated by the best apparatus.  They vary in size, some occupying only two lots, other six or seven.  It has been found that large buildings are much more economical and convenient than small ones; and not infrequently two thousand pupils, and even a larger number are well accommodated.

The sketches that illustrate this article will give the reader a very complete idea of the internal arrangements of our common schools.  The first gives an exterior view of one of the school buildings; No. 2 shows a lesson in object teaching in a class-room in a colored school; No. 3 a girls’ class in calisthenics; No. 4, a girls’ class in drawing; No. 5, a writing lesson.  These sketches were all taken from actual scenes and are accurate representations of them.”

Wait, my Children, Wait!

Location:                Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:         Wait, My Childrem, Wait

Composer:             Dekress, Charles R

Publisher:              John Church

Year & Place:      1880; Cincinnati, Ohio

Collection/Call Number/Copies:                  Music B-152

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:    hasm.b0152

Basic Description

A raucous scene of a group of boys who have disrobed and swim in a large body of water near a shore takes place in this image.  One boy, completely naked, dives into the water while the other float displaying an assortment of body parts.  While some are almost completely submerged with only their heads peeking above the water’s surface, others are upside down with legs and feet visible to the viewer.  In the bushes on the shoreline are two personified animals who seem to stare at this curious scene.  With their rapt gaze and comportment exhibiting a verticality with two legs and feet firmly on the ground, their behavior recalls that of a human.  Above this aquatic adventure is an angel blowing a trumpet, to which two of children seem to both acknowledge and respond, while resting on a set of clouds.

Personal Description

This out-of-control, ambiguous, scene combines the fantastic, with revival-esque religious undertones.  Rather than render an apparition, the angel looks just like the other figures and interacts with them.  Additionally, it is unclear from the lyrics whether the angel is there to warn the children of an impending danger or to issue more malicious taunts about their ‘wooly’ hair as the lyrics suggest.  The two animals present look and behave like humans and stand up vertically, while children are upside down and several limbs appear without attached bodies.  The eerily static animals have a sinister manner as they silently watch the kids, who seem in a curious reversal, to act like animals.  All of these elements push this scene beyond the denigrating humor of caricature to a visual realm that is disordered, sub-human and out of this world.

Reality Check

Wallace Shelton Polk, 1874 – 1877

Wallace Shelton Polk was born around 1870 to Elias J. and Sarah Polk. At the time this photo was taken the family was living on West Canal St. Elias was a laborer and a foreman at the city stables. Wallace became a porter and tacker and later an advertising agent. He had an older brother, James.  Wallace Shelton Polk was about four years old when this photograph was taken.  The photographer was James Presley Ball, an African-American photographer based in Cincinnati, Ohio.   He is standing on an arm-less upholstered chair. The chair is velvet with heavy fringe around the seat and buttons in the back. There is a tassel hanging from the curved back. He is leaning on a round table covered with a solid cloth. There is a painted background with a column and a drape on the left. His dark hair is parted on the side. He is wearing a bolero style jacket with buttons on each side. The top button is buttoned. The card is on thicker stock and has been trimmed all around. The imprint is lengthwise on the back in purple with “P. B Thomas, Retoucher” printed in the corner. Wallace’s name is written in pencil on the back.  Wallace died Sept. 27, 1915 and is buried in the Union Baptist Cemetery.

(Source: http://library.cincymuseum.org/starweb/photos/servlet.starweb)

Patrol Comique

Patrol Comique

Location:            Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University  (Durham, North Carolina)

Title of Song:     Patrol Comique

Composer:         Hindley, Thomas

Illustrator:        Zimmerman

Publisher:          Standard Music

Year & Place:    1886; New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:              Music #719

Historic American Sheet Music Item #: hasm.n0719

Basic Description

This image depicts four African-American individuals. Three stand in a row in the foreground while one sits in the background playing a banjo and tapping his feet.  The raised legs of the characters closer to the viewer indicate that they are dancing.  Everyone in the group sports formal attire with the men in double breasted suits.  The male in the far left of the pictorial space wears a top hat while his counterpart at the very right stands out with his bayonet and darker boots. In combination with his hat and long pants, his garments mark him as a member of the military.  The woman moving gracefully in the center of these men wears a long, short-sleeved dress as well as a hat adorned with feathers.  With an open fan in her left hand, she daintily grasps and raises her dress in the other.  The woman looks to the man to her right in an adoring manner.  While their racial distinction is clear, little attention, has been given to their distinct facial features.  Similarly, the group stands in an indistinguishable setting.  The vertical floorboards, however, suggest that they are indoors.

Personal Description

The lack of attention to details suggests that the illustrator was not keenly concerned with their individual identities.   There is nothing particularly striking, extravagant, overdone or especially poignant about this image.  Rather, what seems important is conveying the general idea of music and dance and the jovial interactions.  These festivities, however, do not reference a real social situation located in a specific date and time.  It is one that seems both real and imagined.  The male characters recall the prototypical respectable gentleman while the female recalls the chaste, graceful, properly reared, Victorian notion of femininity.  And it seems from the title, “Patrol Comique” that there is an attempt to derisively mock these people.  Rendered beautifully above the characters it suggests that this is a humorous rendition of black characters in this social setting.  One might look to what is only subtly pronounced in the image – dark Skin and formal dress – as pointing to a contradictory social situation.  Nevertheless, there are other elements that make this an odd social situation.  These characters are dressed up as if they will attend a fancy ball and they awkwardly dance with only the aid of a musician and a banjo.  Additionally, the presence of two males dancing with one female is another source of tension.

Reality Check

A Fancy Dress Ball on Seventh Avenue, 1872; New York, NY.

Source: Dodson, Howard, Christopher Paul Moore, and Roberta Yancy. The Black New Yorkers : The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology. New York: John Wiley, 2000.

 

Poor Oppressed

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  Poor Oppressed

Composer:  Benson, E.A.

Engraver:  Slinglandt, J.

Dedicatee: Miss Dinah Dobson

Publisher:  C.D. Benson

Year & Place:  1862, Nashville, Tennessee

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Conf. Music #456

Historic American Sheet Music Item #:   conf0456

Basic Description
This lithograph depicts a fussily dressed African American woman in profile. She is wearing a blue gown with a Victorian-style bustle and a red shawl. The ribbons of her  feather-decorated bonnet are tied below her chin and fastened in a  bow. She holds a delicate parasol in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. A white petticoat shows beneath her dress but her feet are barely visible. The bustle of the dress casts a shadow behind it, making it seem more bulky. The colors of the composition, including the woman’s dress and the lettering of the song title, are predominantly red, white, and blue.

Personal Description
The woman gazes up at the parasol as if amused or slightly perplexed. The decision to position her in profile and render her clothing in extreme detail  makes the engraving look like a nineteenth-century fashion plate. The subject of fashion illustrations is usually the clothes, not the person inside them. However, the woman’s fascinated look at the parasol draws some of the attention to her and makes it appear as if the clothes don’t “fit” her. The title of this instrumental song, “Poor Oppressed,” seems to be ironic, especially since J. Slinglandt made this engraving in middle of the Civil War, the year Lincoln issued the first order of the Emancipation Proclamation. Made in Nashville where slavery was legal, this image may be an attempt to undermine abolitionist claims to the moral righteousness of emancipation by presenting a seemingly frivolous African American woman who doesn’t look “oppressed” at all. It may also be gesturing, in a mocking way, toward the emerging women’s suffrage movement.

Reality Check

Sarah Jane Woodson Early
(1825-1907)
The fifth daughter and last child of Thomas and Jemima Riddle Woodson, Sarah Jane Woodson Early was born on November 15, 1825, near Chillicothe, Ohio. When Thomas Woodson was a young man he purchased his own and his family’s freedom for nine hundred dollars. Her family moved to Jackson Country, Ohio in 1829, and she was educated in this community until she was 15. In 1850 she left home to attend Albany Manual Labor Academy in Athens, Ohio. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1856.

By 1859 she had taught at various schools endorsed by the AME Church. That year was asked to teach at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where her brother was a member of the board of trustees. She taught courses in literature at the school. In 1868, she left Wilberforce to teach in an all-black girl’s school funded by the Freedman’s Bureau in Hillsboro, North Carolina. In September of that year, at age 43, she married John Winston Early, a widowed AME minister.

For the first nineteen years of the marriage, Early taught wherever her husband’s preaching took them. From 1869 until 1888, when she and her husband retired to Nashville, she taught in various cities and towns all over Tennessee. She was a dedicated teacher whose belief in the principle of self-help was best expressed through her efforts to educate the children of her race.

As an extension of her religious commitment, Early became an activist in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in 1884, when she succeeded Frances Ellen Watkins Harper as superintendent of the colored division of the organization. When the prohibition movement began in Tennessee, she served the State Prohibition party as a spokeswoman and canvasser, going from door to door to warn people of the evils of liquor and tobacco. She also became a leader in the AME temperance efforts, delivering a number of lectures in churches, colleges, and prisons.

Through her work with the temperance union, she encouraged black women to work for the benefit of their communities. Temperance was only one part of the religiously inspired holistic movement for moral reform. In 1893, Early gained national acclaim when she was named “Representative Woman of the World” at the Chicago World’s Fair and was included by Lawson Scruggs in his celebratory work Women of Distinction. With the growing stereotype of black women as immoral, black women leaders were increasingly convinced that if the race was ever to equality, they must exhibit exemplary demeanor, moral standards, and domestic capabilities. However, consistent with her upbringing, Early believed that the entire race had to concentrate on developing self-reliance and high moral principles. These were common themes in speeches and writings throughout her life.

Although she married too late to have her own children, by the time she retired she had taught over six thousand children and had been principle of several large schools in four cities. She died at the age of 82 in Nashville in 1907.

Plantation Dance; Burlesque

Location:  Historic American Sheet Music Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Title of Song:  Plantation Dance; Burlesque

Composer:  Pattison, J.N. (John Nelson), 1845-1905

Performer: Pattison, J.N. (John Nelson), 1845-1905

Illustrator: Teller

Engraver and Lithographer: Clayton

Publisher:  C.M. Tremaine

Year & Place:  1867, New York, New York

Collection/Call Number/Copies:  Music B-930

Historic American Sheet Music Item #: b0930

Basic Description
Two African American men prance in a bucolic setting. One plays a banjo and nimbly lifts his foot in dance.  The other skips in a sprightly, child-like way, and has an almost cherubic look. Their frolicsome poses differ greatly from the elastic, disjointed maneuvers of T.D. Rice’s “Jumping Jim Crow.” A Big House and what appear to be slave quarters or barn in the backdrop are visible reminders of toil and suffering, but the structures appear flat, as if part of a stage set. Their diminished presence suggests that this enchanted moment of dance and music is an absorbing escape for its participants. But the viewer can see how compromised and regulated this moment is, allowable only because it is under surveillance. There is a sense of enclosure and lock-down; the barn-like structure visible between the men links them as figures but also circumscribes them. A mass of what could be brambles limits their movements to the right of the frame. The men’s clothing–the billowy shirt and tall boots of the childlike man in particular–could equally place them in seventeenth-century Western Europe as in the antebellum South. The use of the word “Burlesque” in the song title plays in to this pretension; as a form of theater, burlesque was linked to Victorian popular culture and renditions of Shakespeare’s plays in a burlesque style.

Personal Description
The social life of African American slaves is romanticized; it is made to appear so rewarding that the oppression and sorrow of slavery is just a side note next to all the gaiety. Although the illusion relies on the association of African American slaves with some positive traits (artistic talents and agility), it also suggests that they are childlike and see their surroundings through an Arcadian lens. The title of the song and the use of the word “burlesque,” associated with comedic theater, makes light of the brutal conditions of slave life in a vulgar and abusive way. It is damaging and unethical because it minimizes and downplays the effects of a grossly unjust system. This imagery converts this injustice into a comedic form of entertainment for popular consumption, therefore perpetuating the impulse to dismiss or ignore the conditions of slave life.

Reality Check

Charles L. Reason (1818-1893)
Charles Lewis Reason was born July 21, 1818 in New York City to West Indies immigrants Michiel and Elizabeth Reason. Charles attended the African Free School along with his brothers Elmer and Patrick. An excellent student in mathematics, Reason became an instructor in 1832 at the school at age fourteen, receiving a salary of $25 a year. He used some of his earnings to hire tutors to improve his knowledge. Later, he decided to enter the ministry but was rejected because of his race by the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal church in New York City. Reason rejected such “sham Christianity” and resigned in protest from St. Philip’s Church, the congregation sponsoring his application. Undaunted by Episcopal racism, he studied next at McGrawville College in McGraw, New York.

Reason aided in drafting a call to the first New York State Convention of Negroes in 1840 and advocated in New York City a manual-labor school to provide training in the industrial arts. He created a normal (teaching) school as a remedy to the charge that black teachers were inefficient and incompetent. He decided to pursue a career in teaching, believing strongly that education was the best means for black advancement.

In 1849 Reason became the first African American to hold a professorship at a predominantly white American college when he was hired as professor of belles lettres, Greek, Latin, and French and adjunct professor of mathematics at the integrated New York Central College in McGrawville (Cortland County), New York only to resign in 1852 in order to become the first principal of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth (1852-56) [now Cheyney University of PA].  In 1873 he headed the successful movement to outlaw segregation in New York schools.

When Reason resigned in 1892, he held the longest tenure in the school system.
Reason was also active politically throughout his life. He was committed to the antislavery cause and worked unceasingly for improvement of black civil rights.

Source: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/index.html, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, Mathematics Department, State University of New York at Buffalo