“Music that Moves Me”: Preliminary Thoughts on Black Music and Urban Education in the Era of Black Power

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Scott Douglass, Kaisha Esty, Tracey Johnson, Tiffany Nyachae, Darrin Thornton, Michael West, and Nan Woodruff for serving as thought partners.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Alex H. Zimmerman, “Ford Foundation Grant to MENC: For Project on Contemporary Music in the Schools,” Music Educators Journal 49, no. 4 (1963): 37, https://doi.org/10.2307/3393629.

2 Mark Shedd, “The Beat of American Youth,” Music Educators Journal 55, no. 1 (1968): 33, https://doi.org/10.2307/3392284.

3 Paul Burgett, “Aesthetics of the Music of Afro-Americans: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Selected Black Scholars with Implications for Black Music Studies and for Music Education” (PhD diss., University of Rochester 1976), https://urresearch.rochester.edu/institutionalPublicationPublicView.action?institutionalItemId=5322.

4 Ibid., 272.

5 Ibid., 282–3.

6 Ibid., 308–9.

7 Daniel Matlin, “‘Lift up Yr Self!’ Reinterpreting Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Power, and the Uplift Tradition,” The Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 91–116, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486061, at p. 97; “Jazzmobile Starts Harlem Performances Next Week,” New York Amsterdam News, July 17, 1965; “Jazzmobile Launched,” New York Amsterdam News, July 9, 1966.

8 Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 65.

9 This article uses “cultural relevance” as it was defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings. See Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal 32, no. 3 (1995): 465–91, https://doi.org/10.2307/1163320. Ladson-Billings argues that culturally responsive pedagogy marshals cultural references and experiences of students as a critical teaching resource.

10 “Dr. Francis Andrews to Mr. Grant Beglarian,” July 22, 1970, University of Maryland – College Park, Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, Special Collections for Performing Arts.

11 Burgett, “Aesthetics of the Music," 252–3.

12 Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Russell Rickford, “Black Power as Educational Renaissance: The Harlem Landscape,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Ansley T. Erickson, “HARYOU: An Apprenticeship for Young Leaders,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018); A.A. Akom et al., Education as Freedom: African American Educational Thought and Activism, ed. Noel S. Anderson and Haroon Kharem (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

13 Jonathan Fenderson, Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s, 1st ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Carmen L. Phelps, Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013); Daniel Widener’s Black Arts West is one of few recently published texts that examines music as an artifact of the movement. Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); La Donna Forsgren, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of Black Arts Movement Theater and Performance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020). While Sistuhs in the Struggle is an oral history, it offers a window into Black women’s experiences as music artists within the movement. Kris Gutierrez, Betsy Rymes, and Joanne Larson “Script, Counterscript, and Underlife in the Classroom: James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education,” Harvard Educational Review 65, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 445; Hakeem Leonard, “The Arts are for Freedom: Centering Black Embodied Music to Make Freedom Free,” Journal of Performing Arts Leadership in Higher Education (Fall 2020): 4–25; Murry Norman DePillars, “African-American Artists and Art Students: A Morphological Study in the Urban Black Aesthetic” (PhD diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1976), https://www.proquest.com/docview/302829978/citation/853B6A4E23084A99PQ/1 [accessed January 21, 2023]; Maya Cunningham, “The Black Power Classroom: An Ethnomusicological Approach to Teaching African Heritage Awareness through Music Education in Botswana and African America” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2019), https://www.proquest.com/docview/2305529685/abstract/2113A8307724250PQ/1 [accessed April 22, 2022].

14 Jarvis R. Givens, “‘There Would Be No Lynching If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom’: Carter G. Woodson and the Occasion of Negro History Week, 1926–1950,” American Educational Research Journal 56, no. 4 (August 1, 2019): 1467, https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218818454.

15 Wiley L. Housewright et al., “Youth Music: A Special Report,” Music Educators Journal 56, no. 3 (1969): 43–74, https://doi.org/10.2307/3392636.

16 Loneka Wilkinson Battiste, William T. McDaniel, and Rosita M. Sands, “The Radical Origins and Mission of the National Black Music Caucus: The First Twenty-Five Years—1972–1997,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 43, no. 2 (April 1, 2022): 248–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/15366006221082256.

17 Reeder, “Afro Music,” Music Educators Journal 56, no. 5 (1970): 89, https://doi.org/10.2307/3392698.

18 Nadine Dresskell, “The Average Student and His Piano Lesson,” The American Music Teacher 5, no. 2 (November 1, 1955): 4–10.

19 “The Facts of Life, Distilled from Interviews,” Music Educators Journal 56, no. 5 (1970): 49, https://doi.org/10.2307/3392687.

20 “The Facts of Life, Distilled from Interviews,” 50.

21 Givens, “‘There Would Be No Lynching,’” 1478.

22 DePillars, “African-American Artists and Art Students,” 135; Givens, “‘There Would Be No Lynching,’” 1478.

23 Barbara Reeder, “Afro Music: As Tough as a Mozart Quartet,” Music Educators Journal 56, no. 5 (1970): 90, https://doi.org/10.2307/3392698.

24 Tess Bundy, “‘Revolutions Happen through Young People!’ The Black Student Movement in the Boston Public Schools, 1968–1971,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (March 1, 2017): 273–93, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144216688277.

25 Jametta Lily, interview with the author, in the author’s possession, November 3, 2015.

26 Earl J. Hess and Pratibha A. Dabholkar, Singin’ in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).

27 Ossie Davis and Davis-Rose-Udell, Purlie (New York: Samuel French, Inc., 1971).

28 Carl Bernstein, “Black Students Boycott Western, Wilson Highs,” The Washington Post, January 31, 1970.

29 John Matthews, “Freedom School Moving Forward,” The Sunday Star, July 27, 1969, Music in Urban Education, Box 2, Folder: Community, Special Collections, University of Maryland Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library.

30 Scott Douglass, “Commonwealth of Jazz: A Community History of Jazz Musician Educators as Agents of Social Change in Richmond, Virginia" (PhD diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2022); Tracey Johnson, "Carving Out a Space for Themselves: Black Artists in New York City, 1929–1989" (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2021).

31 Tom Arnold-Forster, “Dr. Billy Taylor, ‘America’s Classical Music,’ and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador,” Journal of American Studies 51, no. 1 (February 2017): 117–39, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815002662; DePillars, “African-American Artists and Art Students.”

32 Hubert Walters, “Black Music and the Black University,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 10 (1972): 14–21.

33 Jazz Studies. Inc, “Proposal for Jazz Workshop,” October 22, 1968, New Detroit, Inc. Collection, Box 42, Folder 12, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; “McKinney to Head Jazz Workshop,” Michigan Chronicle, July 12, 1958.

34 Dominique-René de Lerma, “Black Music in Our Culture; Curricular Ideas on the Subjects, Materials and Problems” (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1970); James A. Standifer and Barbara Reeder, Source Book of African and Afro-American Materials for Music Educators (Washington: Contemporary Music Project, 1972); and Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: Norton, 1997).

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Dara Walker

Dara Walker is an assistant professor of African American studies, history, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She is currently writing her first book, High School Rebels: Black Power, Education, and Youth Politics in the Motor City, 1966–1973, which examines the role of Black high school student organizing and political study in the development of Detroit’s Black Power movement.