by Cieslafdn | May 14, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
Beloved American opera singer Jessye Norman recently released her memoir, Stand Up Straight and Sing!, which tells of her amazing life story and the people who inspired her to greatness.
Born in 1945, in Augusta, Georgia, she became interested in singing after listening to recordings of Rosenwald fellow Marian Anderson. As a teenager she took part in a Philadelphia vocal competition named after Anderson (a Philadelphia native) where Norman received an offer for a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington D.C. Like Marian Anderson, she began her singing career in Europe but went on to achieve international fame.
I had the pleasure of hearing a lovely discussion with Ms. Norman and briefly meeting her at a book signing hosted by Darren Walker, head of the Ford Foundation during my recent trip to New York. Here’s a photo of us together:
Jessye Norman and Aviva Kempner
Photo credit: The Ciesla Foundation, May 2013
Last month, Ms. Norman performed as part of a Marian Anderson tribute concert at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall, the very venue that Anderson was barred from appearing in back in 1939.
by Cieslafdn | Jan 31, 2014 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
The Washington Post reports that Marian Anderson, one of the most notable of the long list of Rosenwald fellows, will soon be honored with a tribute concert at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. Anderson famously performed a concert on the National Mall in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her request to perform at the segregated Constitution Hall, which at the time accepted only white performers.
The upcoming event (“Of Thee We Sing”) will be held on April 12 of this year and will feature soprano Jessye Norman, WPAS’s Men and Women of the Gospel, soloist Solomon Howard and others.
Marian Anderson in 1947
Photo credit: Carl Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress
In March of last year, we wrote about Marian Anderson’s 1930 Rosenwald fellowship, which she used to make two trips to Europe. These early trips to Europe developed her international reputation as a top flight contralto at a time when African American singers struggled to find acceptance at major concert venues in the U.S.
You can read more about the tribute concert at The Washington Post.
by Cieslafdn | Nov 22, 2013 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
According to the New York Times, three of the famous “Scottsboro Boys” recently received official pardons from the state of Alabama, over 80 years after they were wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to death. Their trial was an infamous miscarriage of justice and was emblematic of institutionalized racism in the Jim Crow South. Since the defendants have all passed away, pardoning them required writing a new law that allowed for posthumous pardons in cases of “social injustice associated with racial discrimination.” Although it is merely a symbolic gesture, this is an important repudiation of Alabama’s racist history.
The great poet Langston Hughes took an interest in the case in 1931, when he visited the “Scottsboro Boys” on death row in Alabama. At the time, Hughes was on a trip across the South funded by his 1931 Rosenwald grant and inspired by Mary McLeod Bethune, who had encouraged him to spread his poetry to a Southern audience that was largely unfamiliar with his work. On the trip, Hughes visited all the Southern states, reciting and distributing his poetry at various venues, including many historically black colleges. A year later, Hughes would publish Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, a virulent denunciation of the unjust treatment of the defendants by the Alabama legal system.
This posthumous pardon calls to mind President Clinton’s official apology for the notorious “Tuskegee Syphilis Study”. In his May 1997 apology speech, Clinton said that an official apology was “the first step [in] a commitment to rebuild that broken trust” engendered by the inhumane study. Unlike the recent Scottsboro pardon, four survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, each over 90 years old, attended that apology at the White House.
In other Alabama history-related news…
Those of you who tuned into Jeopardy! last night saw all three contestants unable to come up with the name of the author of Up from Slavery and Tuskegee & Its People. Whatever your opinion of Booker T. Washington’s work (which remains controversial to this day) it’s astounding that three schoolteachers competing in the Jeopardy! Teachers Tournament would be unaware of the most famous book written by the “Wizard of Tuskegee.” Washington is undeniably one of the major figures in African American history and he will play a prominent role in The Rosenwald Schools – one of his most interesting and lesser known projects is the school-building program he devised near the end of his life with Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund.
by Cieslafdn | Oct 22, 2013 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
Last week, President Obama nominated a new Secretary of Homeland Security to succeed Janet Napolitano, who resigned the position in August. Jeh Johnson, the president’s nominee, is a former Department of Defense lawyer and has been a trusted adviser to Obama on issues of national security. Most profiles of him in the news this week have mentioned that his grandfather, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, was a Harlem Renaissance figure and sociologist, but as his grandson moves into the national spotlight, now seems like a great time to bring out the fascinating life and work of this lesser-known historical figure.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s decades-long career as a sociologist is interwoven from the very beginning with Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund. It begins in 1919, during the Chicago Race Riot. After serving overseas in World War I, Johnson returned to Chicago and enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Chicago. Just days after marching in a military parade for black veterans, Johnson witnessed the outbreak of the riot on his way home from the Chicago Urban League office. As Rosenwald Fund official Edwin Embree describes in 13 Against the Odds, Johnson made his way through rioting crowds to his apartment and immediately sat down and began outlining what would become his first great work of sociology, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot.
The Negro in Chicago was a product of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a board made up of local businessmen. One of its most prominent members was Julius Rosenwald, who early on during the riot had pushed a reluctant Mayor Bill Thompson to restore peace. Rosenwald had also made some incisive comments about the root causes of racial antagonism in Chicago to reporter Carl Sandburg, some of which foreshadowed his later interest in improving housing for African Americans. Johnson, acting as Associate Executive Secretary of the CCRR, wrote the majority of its report, illuminating how Chicago’s systematic exploitation of new African American arrivals to the city (as part of the Great Migration) coupled with housing segregation and employment discrimination had led its citizens to violently riot in the streets.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson in 1948
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Carl Van Vechten collection
A decade later, when the Rosenwald Fund began its syphilis control demonstration (a very different project than the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, as James Jones explained in our interview with him last month) they tapped Johnson to study the outcomes, efficacy and future potential for the kind of treatment program they had demonstrated in six rural southern communities. Johnson received a Rosenwald fellowship in 1930 and began working for the Rosenwald Fund in this capacity in 1931. While the Fund’s involvement in syphilis treatment ended in 1933, Johnson’s field work in Macon County, Alabama became the basis of his Shadow of the Plantation, a classic sociological study of the lingering effects of slavery on southern communities.
Johnson is perhaps best known for being the president of Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville that was home to the Rosenwald Fund’s southern offices. Initially hired by Fisk because of his behind the scenes work promoting Harlem Renaissance authors and artists, he was a professor of sociology for twenty years before becoming president in 1948. At Fisk, he wrote many important sociological studies, including Shadow of the Plantation (1934) and Growing up in the Black Belt (1941). According to Sarah M. Howell of Middle Tennessee State University, in 1944 the Rosenwald Fund helped Johnson put on a series of Race Relations Institutes. These were conferences on the state of race relations held at Fisk University and attended by scholars from all over the nation. As chair of the Department of Sociology at Fisk, Johnson also worked with Edwin Embree, head of the Rosenwald Fund, to produce The Monthly Summary, a publication that documented race relations in communities nationwide. Johnson was a close adviser to Embree, and he was often consulted when the Fund was considering fellowship candidates.
It may seem surprising that such an influential researcher is not more well-known, but Johnson seems to have purposely avoided the spotlight during his career. Johnson’s dedication to studying and improving race relations must have been an influence on his grandson, who was born 11 months after his death. If Jeh Johnson is as perceptive and driven as his grandfather, he will make an excellent public servant.
by Cieslafdn | Oct 22, 2013 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
Last week, President Obama nominated a new Secretary of Homeland Security to succeed Janet Napolitano, who resigned the position in August. Jeh Johnson, the president’s nominee, is a former Department of Defense lawyer and has been a trusted adviser to Obama on issues of national security. Most profiles of him in the news this week have mentioned that his grandfather, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, was a Harlem Renaissance figure and sociologist, but as his grandson moves into the national spotlight, now seems like a great time to bring out the fascinating life and work of this lesser-known historical figure.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson’s decades-long career as a sociologist is interwoven from the very beginning with Julius Rosenwald and the Rosenwald Fund. It begins in 1919, during the Chicago Race Riot. After serving overseas in World War I, Johnson returned to Chicago and enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Chicago. Just days after marching in a military parade for black veterans, Johnson witnessed the outbreak of the riot on his way home from the Chicago Urban League office. As Rosenwald Fund official Edwin Embree describes in 13 Against the Odds, Johnson made his way through rioting crowds to his apartment and immediately sat down and began outlining what would become his first great work of sociology, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot.
The Negro in Chicago was a product of the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, a board made up of local businessmen. One of its most prominent members was Julius Rosenwald, who early on during the riot had pushed a reluctant Mayor Bill Thompson to restore peace. Rosenwald had also made some incisive comments about the root causes of racial antagonism in Chicago to reporter Carl Sandburg, some of which foreshadowed his later interest in improving housing for African Americans. Johnson, acting as Associate Executive Secretary of the CCRR, wrote the majority of its report, illuminating how Chicago’s systematic exploitation of new African American arrivals to the city (as part of the Great Migration) coupled with housing segregation and employment discrimination had led its citizens to violently riot in the streets.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson in 1948
Photo credit: Library of Congress, Carl Van Vechten collection
A decade later, when the Rosenwald Fund began its syphilis control demonstration (a very different project than the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, as James Jones explained in our interview with him last month) they tapped Johnson to study the outcomes, efficacy and future potential for the kind of treatment program they had demonstrated in six rural southern communities. Johnson received a Rosenwald fellowship in 1930 and began working for the Rosenwald Fund in this capacity in 1931. While the Fund’s involvement in syphilis treatment ended in 1933, Johnson’s field work in Macon County, Alabama became the basis of his Shadow of the Plantation, a classic sociological study of the lingering effects of slavery on southern communities.
Johnson is perhaps best known for being the president of Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville that was home to the Rosenwald Fund’s southern offices. Initially hired by Fisk because of his behind the scenes work promoting Harlem Renaissance authors and artists, he was a professor of sociology for twenty years before becoming president in 1948. At Fisk, he wrote many important sociological studies, including Shadow of the Plantation (1934) and Growing up in the Black Belt (1941). According to Sarah M. Howell of Middle Tennessee State University, in 1944 the Rosenwald Fund helped Johnson put on a series of Race Relations Institutes. These were conferences on the state of race relations held at Fisk University and attended by scholars from all over the nation. As chair of the Department of Sociology at Fisk, Johnson also worked with Edwin Embree, head of the Rosenwald Fund, to produce The Monthly Summary, a publication that documented race relations in communities nationwide. Johnson was a close adviser to Embree, and he was often consulted when the Fund was considering fellowship candidates.
It may seem surprising that such an influential researcher is not more well-known, but Johnson seems to have purposely avoided the spotlight during his career. Johnson’s dedication to studying and improving race relations must have been an influence on his grandson, who was born 11 months after his death. If Jeh Johnson is as perceptive and driven as his grandfather, he will make an excellent public servant.
by Cieslafdn | Oct 2, 2013 | Rosenwald Grant Recipients
In a small, tranquil traffic island park next to tree-lined Riverside Drive in the western part of Harlem, New York, stands a memorial to the great writer of The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison. The bronze sculpture is a large slab with the outline of a figure cut out of it, symbolizing the “universal, genderless” invisible man. After moving to New York in 1936, Ellison lived in a building across the street for much of his life.
The sculpture is by Elizabeth Catlett, an extraordinary teacher, sculptor and print-maker who died last year. She is probably best known for her series of prints called “The Negro Woman.” Although her work is on display in many major museums and galleries, this sculpture was her only commissioned work in New York when it was unveiled in 2003. Both Catlett and Ellison were Rosenwald fellows.
We were recently able to visit the memorial in person and take some photographs, which are posted below. The building pictured is 730 Riverside Drive, Ellison’s home. Be sure to click through the images to see larger versions. To learn more about the memorial click here.
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
Photo credit: Christine M. Rose, September 2013
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