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COPYRIGHT 2006 Center For Black Music Research
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...
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