African American Connecticut Explored

30 The Fisk Jubilee Singers Tour the North

207 We understand that every seat in Music Hall [in New Haven] was sold for the Jubilee concert last night and when the doors were opened only standing room could be had. . . . The [Fisk University Jubilee] singers sang well and were warmly encored. . . . During the evening Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was prevailed upon to make a statement. . . . He made a good begging speech [and] about $600 were pledged on the condition that $1000 should be raised for the Fisk University. . . . The singers were not met with ovations when they began their tour. Until they reached New York their expenses exceeded [their fundraising] but the success that now attends their efforts, makes up for past losses. They will probably return and sing here again. — new haven register, February 15, 1872 On October 6, 1871—six years after the Civil War’s end—a small group of African-American youth, some recently freed and others born into freedom, began a musical journey from Nashville. The Fisk Jubilee Singers went on tour to raise funds to help settle the school’s debts. Fisk University’s Jubilee Hall is evidence of the tour’s ultimate financial success. While on that tour, the Singers introduced Negro spirituals to a curious American public fascinated by the recently freed black Americans and their culture. The young singers personified a broader effort to safeguard and raise awareness of the culture free and enslaved blacks had created while in America. They found support and allies in Connecticut and New England. Their efforts, along with those of other black performers of the period , helped to focus a movement to resurrect the black image in late nineteenth-century America. Enslaved blacks created regionally specific cultures adapted to their lives. In places as disparate as Louisiana, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, black communities found ways to worship, communicate, cook, and celebrate that were familiar and comforting. While those cultural forms might have been understood and even shared by blacks and whites in a given region, the Civil War Wm. Frank Mitchell 30 The Fisk Jubilee Singers Tour the North 208 Post Civil War to WWI brought broader exposure of the cultures and of slavery and other circumstances in those regions. That exposure also opened opportunities to exploit political ideology, music, dance, worship style, and even the clothing blacks favored to both the benefit and the detriment of the enslaved and the free. As Democrats and Republicans , Northerners and Southerners, abolitionists and slaveholders, and citizens and immigrants had argued the issues that would lead to war, public images of black life and culture had become increasingly politicized—and ultimately reduced to sentimental or meanspirited stereotypes. The spirituals the Jubilee Singers sang were solid cultural forms of African America. The combined musical influences of different continents produced music that entertained crowds of working people at minstrel shows and eventually the elite in concert halls. Arrangements of those songs influenced the African American composers Charles Albert Tindley, Harry T. Burleigh, and William Grant Still. But before their work reached the concert hall, elements of the music appeared on the minstrel stage in humiliating performances that mocked black people’s speech, intellect, movement, and even style of dress. The Jubilee Singers and their handlers set off for their first tour figure 30-1 Original Jubilee Singers, 1872. The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Inc., Simpson Collection, 1987.1.3451 The Fisk Jubilee Singers Tour the North / W. F. Mitchell 209 in an uncertain environment. Early audiences in Ohio and a few other Northern states received the singers with indifference or even hostility. Some expected they would perform comic and degrading minstrel songs. The singers made very little money from donations, faced discrimination in their accommodations—when housing could be secured—and struggled to gain support for the tour from a reluctant American Missionary Association. Their fortunes changed once the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher agreed to support the tour. The Connecticut native was the nation’s preeminent celebrity preacher; by inviting the singers for a December performance at the prestigious Plymouth Church of Brooklyn, Beecher ensured the tour’s success. After the triumph at Plymouth, the singers received offers from other churches and larger halls, and the American Missionary Association finally agreed to back the tour. Connecticut dates followed, and the Jubilee Singers enjoyed a warm welcome, favorable press coverage, and solidly respectable donations from audiences. They sang in Westport, Farmington, Plainville , Bristol, New Britain...