From Dr. Monroe Majors, through Margaret Bonds and Rev. Hamilton Boswell, to Kamala Harris
THERE’S A FINGERPRINT. That fingerprint is Vice President Kamala Harris’s “detailed, serious and impactful” housing plan (see https://nhc.org/the-harris-walz-housing-plan-detailed-serious-and-impactful/ ) – a plan that has won the endorsements of the National Housing Council, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and that would provide easier access to affordable, dignified housing across the board, but particularly for low-income persons.
That “fingerprint” agenda is by no means new in Vice President Harris’s career, but what matters here is that it dates back to her work in San Francisco in the first decade of this century. That’s important because San Francisco was also home not only to Harris’s oft-discussed mentor Willie Brown, who served as mayor of San Francisco from 1996-2004 and California’s first Black Speaker of the Assembly, but also to an INSTITUTIONAL NEXUS: the historically African American Jones Memorial United Methodist Church (JMUMC). Organized in 1943 and named after the first Black bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Jones Memorial was the pastoral home of the Rev. Hamilton T. Boswell (1914-2006; remember that name!) from 1947 to 1976. Under Boswell’s leadership, Jones Memorial not only established a credit union in 1953 so that low-income parishioners who were often denied access to credit and loans because of their race in the white-dominated banking and real-estate industries could have access to those financial tools for improving quality of life, as well as a Food Pantry serving 140 people a week and Health Ministry program serving hot meals every Tuesday throughout the San Francisco area. More materially, Rev. Boswell’s JMUMC became one of the first U.S. churches to offer a program that would allow seniors housing with dignity: Rev. Boswell oversaw the construction of three multi-story units of senior housing behind and across the street from the church. These homes, begun in 1964, were titled Jones Memorial Homes. They’re a 501c3 senior living community that prioritizes providing choices and independence to its residents so that they can “lead active and healthy lives within a safe and well-managed environment.”
And who was this Reverend Hamilton T. Boswell whose JMUMC initiative for dignified but affordable senior housing anticipated Kamala D. Harris’s own bold housing initiative? You can learn much about him here, but there’s more to know, because:
He, too, was a friend and mentor to Vice President Harris; in fact, his daughter held the Vice President while she was still in diapers;
He was a protegé of the great activist poet and debate coach Melvin B. Tolson (portrayed memorably, albeit with substantial poetic license, by Denzel Washington in the highly regarded 2007 historical drama The Great Debaters (Rev. Boswell’s counterpart in the film was “Hamilton Burgess,” portrayed by Jermaine Williams);
He was the grandson of pioneering doctor, journalist, poet, and civil-rights activist Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors (1864-1960) via Dr. Majors’s daughter, Grace, born in 1890 of his first marriage; and
Dr. Monroe A. Majors with first wife Georgia A. Green and their daughter, Grace He was the nephew of the daughter born of Dr. Majors’s second marriage: Margaret Jeanette (Allison) Bonds (1913-72) – a brilliant composer and careerlong social-justice activist who, like her father and her nephew, and like Vice President Harris, devoted her life to indefatigable activism and championing of the poor and downtrodden of society, to lifting them up through her art and countless activities and endeavors specifically geared toward acknowledging the innate human dignity of those who – then as in certain (i.e. Republican) quarters now – were considered undeserving of the opportunities and beauties of a dignified life that capitalist culture unthinkingly celebrates in the lives of the wealthy and privileged. It is no coincidence, surely, that during her late California period (1967-72) Margaret Bonds spoke at Jones Memorial United Methodist Church, or that JMUMC was itself home to premieres and other performances of Bonds’s extraordinary musical creations – among them her magisterial 1964 setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic social-justice manifesto titled Credo (1904, rev. 1920) and her surviving orchestral magnum opus, The Montgomery Variations (also 1964).
To summarize: the unremittent social-justice activism of Vice President Kamala Harris, Rev. Hamilton T. Boswell, and Margaret Bonds centers on one single institution – Jones Memorial United Methodist Church. And, perhaps more importantly, the root of all this was Dr. Majors himself: known in his California family as “Big Dad,” he was a powerful and utterly intrepid activist whose indomitable spirit and commitment to social justice were enacted in regular family gatherings that included his daughter Grace (half-sister to Margaret Bonds), her husband Warren Boswell, and the Boswell children – including Hamilton T. Boswell, future mentor to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.
And that indominatable spirit of commitment to social justice cannot but have also contributed to the force of that same indomitable spirit and commitment to social justice in Dr. Majors's second daughter, Margaret, since Dr. Majors lived with Margaret and her mother, Estella Bonds, in the same home at 6652 S. Wabash Ave. in Chicago for the first six years of the composer’s life – vitally important formative years. Margaret Bonds, ever fiercely loyal to her extraordinary mother, was not close to Dr. Majors after the annulment (1919) of the Bonds-Majors marriage, aside from a brief period of familial rapprochement beginning in 1955 that would lead Dr. Majors and Estella Bonds to remarry in 1956. Nevertheless, her surviving letters and other documents show that Margaret Bonds – not least through her half-sister Grace, to whom she was quite close – honored and respected the causes to which Dr. Majors committed himself, often in peril of life and limb, from the 1890s to his death. That spirit left a latent fingerprint of activist vision on Margaret Bonds’s work.
It is the same fingerprint of activist vision that not only characterized the life’s work of Rev. Boswell, but continues to figure centrally in the housing-centered vision of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Vice President – who, I hope, will be the forty-seventh president of these United States – has carried the progressive vision of her mentors forward to new and unprecedented heights in the national discourse, and if we as a nation have the courage and decency to elect her, what she brings to our national progress will be directly derived from what the lessons shared with her by the grandson of Dr. Monroe A. Majors – lessons that rooted in Dr. Majors's own activism, and that were shared also by the extraordinary musical genius who was unrelated by blood but was nevertheless a kindred spirit in the deepest and most meaningful political and social sense.
It is a bond, if you will, of distinction between Kamala Harris and Margaret Bonds.
I made several closing banner collages that I thought might capture the message of this post, but couldn't decide which I liked best. Which is your favorite? Please let me know!
No. 1:
or No. 2: (the most complete):
or No. 3 (without the JMUMC):
or No. 4 (minimalist, but beautifully reflective of Dr. Majors's concept: two "Noted Negro Women"):
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