Eva Jessye

Eva Jessye
 

It's been a long struggle, you know. Blacks in America spent over 50 years under the Iaws of Jim Crow, during which time they were systematically excluded from participating in American, or any other culture, except their own. They were denied access to normal channels of cultural expression – the printed word, music, movies – because the dominant faction of the population didn't want to be reminded of its treatment of Black people, and couldn't accept the idea that what they thought of as an inferior people could create as well as the "clearly superior" whites could.

Of course, the whole time indomitable Black Afro-Americans were not only creating and adding to the American cultural legacy, they were actually forging much of it. Much of what is thought of as mainstream American culture began as distinctly Black forms of expression – especially in the area of music. These great contributions to American (and world) culture have been generally overlooked because History – the chronicler of cultural progression – has not had (and worse, has not looked for) the facts and figures concerning these contributions. Black history, to borrow a phrase, has been lost, strayed, and stolen, and it has been a long struggle for Black people to clear things up for the rest of us.

Eva Jessye is one of those Afro-Americans who has struggled long and hard to bring the cultural contributions of Black people, especially in the field of music, out into the open. She is, first and foremost, an artist who herself made contributions to our culture. She is "the Dean of Black women musicians" in the United States. She is a composer, writer, and choral director. Her accomplishments include conducting the chorus for the famous 1935 premiere production of George Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," and training many (if not most) of the great Afro-American singers and actors on stage today. For fifty years she has been a part of America's musical stage, but the whole time she had an even greater task at hand.

While she herself was a great contributor to the culture, she was also attempting to preserve some of the facts and figures which history had so long neglected by collecting everything that she could find that concerned Afro-Americans' contributions to American musical culture. Her collection, the Eva Jessye Afro-American Music Collection, which has been a life-long project, was officially presented to the University of Michigan at the Stearns Building on North Campus on Saturday , January 19th, a day that fittingly had been declared Eva Jessye Day by the Mayor of Ann Arbor.

The President of the big U, Robben Fleming, was there to accept the donations, as was the President of the Black Music Students Association, the group to whom the collection was actually given. Dr. James Standifer, the young Black director of the collection, was there to make sure that things went smoothly, as were numerous specially invited guests and friends of Dr. Jessye's. It was a festive occasion culminating more than a year and a half of work on the part of Dr. Jessye and Dr. Standifer, who took the tremendous collection and categorized and organized it so that it could be presented for the use of the public. There are so many items in the collection that even now the job of organizing it has only begun. Since the collection is intended "to serve as the nucleus for future acquisitions and donations of Black music and its related arts," it is a job which will (hopefully) be continued until all those facts and figures are made available to the public, and the Black contribution to American culture is completely realized and restored.

The collection itself is amazing. It is housed in the Frederic Stearns Building, 2005 Baits Drive, on North Campus (just off Broadway St.). It includes books, periodicals, programs, pamphlets, clippings, manuscripts, sheet music, tapes, recordings, instruments, photographs, and paintings. Some of the items are more than one hundred years old, others as recent as the 1973 Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Some of these items have been arranged and set up in three rooms of the Stearns Building to serve as a "visual history" display of Afro-American cultural contributions, which the public is welcome (and for my part, urged) to visit Monday through Friday between 9:30 am and 1:30 pm. The rest of the items have been (or are being) categorized and filed, and are also available for public use inside the building. It is clear that Ms. Jessye and Dr. Standifer want the public to have the opportunity to know what only a few people have known for so long – that Afro-Americans have made great contributions to American culture, contributions which we have been aware of, but whose origins have sadly been forgotten.

At the presentation ceremony Saturday there were several telegrams which had been sent to Ms. Jessye on her day, and one of them really sums up not only the importance of Ms. Jessye's work, but also of the collection as a whole:

"I heartily commend you on the opening of the Afro-American Music collection which you have worked so assiduously to establish. The rich cultural legacy of America's largest ethnic minority has too long been buried under the debris of racism, thus denying national and international citizens an opportunity Ito enrich their lives through a knowledge of the unique contributions that Afro-Americans have made to world culture. Now, exposed to the light of time, I know that this long lost part of our heritage will prove itself to have been one missing ingredient to the completeness of humanity." The telegram was signed: Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr.

– Lauren Jones