DISINVITED, REINVITED
- John Michael Cooper
- 14 hours ago
- 6 min read
Margaret Bonds Speaks Truth to Power – and Wins
Margaret Bonds understood.
Margaret Bonds understood racism. She understood sexism. She understood the violent force of the intersection of those two.
She understood the complicity of corporate media in perpetuating that violent force.
She understood the necessity of grassroots resistance as well as the power of that resistance. And she used that understanding to fight – to fight for those whom injustice would make its victim.
The tale below is one of numerous possible illustrations of that understanding and of Margaret Bonds’s determination to resist – and of her success in doing so.
One of the leading U.S. choral conductors of the 1950s was Robert Shaw (1916-99), whose Robert Shaw Chorale had been founded in 1948 in Bonds’s adopted home city of New York. The Chorale toured widely with a repertoire that ranged from sea shanties and show tunes to the most ambitious staples of the Euro-American classical repertoire, and they achieved distinction by making (with RCA) the first RCA classical album to sell a million copies. Many of the Chorale’s members were recruited from The Juilliard School and other New York City musical institutions. Among these distinguished members were two African American soloists: bass-baritone Eugene Brice (1913-1980) and tenor Howard A. Roberts (1924-2011).
Their story is the story that motivates this one. For in 1955 the Robert Shaw Chorale’s management company, Columbia Artists Management (CAM), asked Shaw to disinvite Brice and Roberts from the upcoming second lap of the Chorale’s Southern tour for fear that Southern stages would cancel the Chorale’s engagements. Shaw complied (sarcasm: Southern racists paid good money for their tickets and ought not have their sensibilities offended).
By the time of these events, December 1955, Margaret Bonds had been living and working in New York for sixteen years. She had relocated there from her native Chicago in October 1939, acquired a national reputation for her activities on behalf of racial justice, become the and organized the Allied Arts Agency – a cooperative of African American Artists loosely modeled on New York’s legendary Clef Club. And, in a development that she said made her "feel a grave responsibilty," she was elected in 1955 to full membership in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP)-- only the third woman of color to have been elected to that organization, and after Florence Price (who had died in 1953) only the second woman of color in classical music.
Word of CAM’s and Shaw’s cowardice probably reached Bonds through her close friend and collaborator Eugene Brice. And when she heard it, she was incensed.
So on December 30, 1955, writing on Allied Arts Agency stationery, Margaret Bonds fired off a press release and sent it out with the headline “COLUMBIA CONCERTS FORCED TO DROP NEGRO SOLOISTS ON SHAW CHORALE SOUTHERN TOUR.” She closed with an all-caps parenthetical: “THIS RELEASE WAS WRITTEN BY MARGARET BONDS AS A PUBLIC SERVICE.” And the following day she sent a copy of the letter to Langston Hughes – prefacing it with a blisteringly wry prefatory note that attested to the reluctance of the public and the press to criticize those in power: “Langston, did you know about this? For fear someone else might not get around to writing it, I did.”
But of course, the U.S. press was segregated – and consequently, I can find no evidence of Bonds’s report having circulated in the white Press. Even so, Bonds’s words were picked up and syndicated by the Associated Negro Press (ANP), which had been founded as a separatist solution to the segregated journalism of the day, and which reached thousands of African American readers through hundreds of papers. Here’s one:
You see the point, I hope: as an African American and a woman, Margaret Bonds was systemically denied the privilege and power that Shaw and Columbia Artists Management enjoyed; indeed, the systemic segregation of the press corps limited her ability to get her message out to Black readers and even more severely restrictred her access to white allies, who would have opposed CAM’s and Shaw’s cowardice and might have applied counter-pressure. Even so, Bonds was determined to use what voice she had to tell the world of the CAM’s and Shaw’s cowering before the forces of racism. She denounced wrong, stood up for right, and denied cowardice and racism the darkness they needed to grow. The white press abetted the disinvitation of Brice and Roberts and the suppression of her voice, but the ANP did not. Because of the ANP's amplifying of Bonds's denunciation of injustice, potentially thousands of readers across the nation learned that two powerful and widely respected forces in the world of classical music were, in fact, also cowards who valued southern dollars more than Black representation, more than their art itself.
At the outset I stated that Margaret Bonds "won." Here's the basis for that claim:
As of December 30 and 31, 1955, Eugene Brice and Howard Roberts had been disinvited from the second lap of the Robert Shaw Chorale’s 1955-56 tour. Margaret Bonds wrote and sent out her press release on those dates.
Brice and Roberts were to rejoin the group for its European tour beginning on March 16, 1956.
Margaret Bonds’s truth-to-power press release was nationally syndicated in the ANP on January 13 and 14, 1956. As of that date, Brice and Roberts were still disinvited. Here are a couple of the headlines that appeared with Bonds's release in ANP papers on those dates:
That was January 13-14. But then came the aforementioned victory – because even though Shaw’s and CAM’s plan was for Brice and Roberts to be disinvited from the Chorale’s tour until its departure for Europe on March 16, 1956, newspaper announcements and reports show that (wonder of wonders) Brice and Roberts did tour with the group in the weeks leading up to that – in Delaware, in Lynchburg, Virginia (Feb. 3), Norfolk,Virginia (Feb. 4), Durham, North Carolina (Feb. 6), Greensboro, North Carolina (Feb. 7), Columbia, South Carolina (Feb. 8), Charlotte, North Carolina (Feb. 10), Atlanta, Georgia (Feb. 14), Pensacola, Florida (Feb. 22), Birmingham, Alabama (Feb. 29 and March 6), Chattanooga, Tennessee (March 2), and Nashville, Tennessee (March 3), among many other places. Here’s the review of the Lynchburg concert (from The Daily Advance [Feb. 4, 1956]):
Although some of the press releases and reports do not mention Brice’s and Roberts’s presence, the above report and several others make clear that the two African American soloists who had been disinvited in December had been reinvited by the time the tour began.
Now, it’s possible that CAM and Shaw had a change of heart – that their consciences and their commitment to the musical art led them, between 13 January and 29 January, to realize that wrongness of their disinvitation of Brice and Roberts.
But I doubt it.
What’s more likely, in my view, is that the publication of Margaret Bonds’s press release worked as she hoped. Perhaps readers wrote to and called CAM and/or Shaw in just indignation after reading her article, perhaps threatening to cancel their own reservations and force the famed ensemble to sing before half-empty houses. Or perhaps Shaw and/or someone at CAM read her article in one of the many papers where her article was printed and decided that they were facing a public-relations debacle because of their disinvitation of Brice and Andrews. Perhaps, several months into the landmark Montgomery Bus Boycott and at the leading edge of an age where public demonstrations about Civil Rights were becoming fixtures of U.S. life, they feared some sort of activity of that nature. Or perhaps something else.
We may never why Shaw and CAM reinvited Eugene Brice and Howard Roberts. But what we do know is this: that Margaret Bonds, knowing that others would be reluctant to criticize the disinvitation publicly, spoke truth to power.
And she won.
[Postscript: In my recently released biography of Margaret Bonds (pp. 102-104) I a broader context for Bonds's press release that some readers may find noteworthy -- namely, that in the previous two year her own and her mother's relationship with her father, Dr. Monroe Majors, had (temporarily) thawed; Bonds was in regular contact with her father and he had encouraged her to "let [them] have it." Because the forceful outspokenness of Bonds's writing in this press release recalls the journalistic habits of Dr. Majors, it is possible that the tone of Bonds's press release, and perhaps her decision to go public, owed partly to her father’s encouragement. (When the biography went to press I had not yet learned that the Shaw Chorale would reinvite Brice and Roberts. That information is new to this post.)]
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