“WHERE IS THE FREEDOM IN THE LAND OF THE FREE?”
- John Michael Cooper
- Jun 7
- 9 min read
Updated: Jun 12
A COMING MARGARET BONDS PREMIERE WORKS TO RIGHT AN OLD NEST OF WRONGS
Part 1 of 3
Mark your calendar: April 18 and 19, 2026!
One of the main points of my recent Oxford University Press biography of Margaret Bonds is that the conventional wisdom portraying her final years in Los Angeles (1967-72) as an artistically rudderless decline into alcoholism and depression triggered by the death of Langston Hughes is a fiction – a great story, perhaps, but one that is profoundly at odds with the surviving evidence and is essentially a by-product of conventional dismissive modes of woman’s biography. This mode of biography pretends to be sympathetic to the woman who is its subject, but it is actually the opposite: a portrayal of women as exponents of men, and thus an affirmation of male autonomy and female dependency.
That sounds fine, you may object – but where is the evidence of Bonds’s productivity during those years?
The evidence is abundant. And one vitally important testament to the brilliance of the composer’s late California period will receive its world premiere under the direction of Dr. Justin Smith with co-commissioner and co-producer Dr. Sequina DuBose on April 18 and 19, 2026 at Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina. The work in question is Bitter Laurel – a full-length musical based on the life of Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907), the Black woman born into enslavement whose skills in dressmaking and business enabled her to secure her own freedom and that of her son, rising to become one of the most sought-after modistes of Washington, DC (dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln) as well as, more importantly, an author and activist.
Elizabeth Keckley, Margaret’s musical telling of her story in Bitter Laurel, and this historic premiere are the subject of this three-part post. In this first installment I’ll summarize the contexts for Bonds’s Keckley Project, and in Part 2 I’ll talk about Elizabeth Keckley and the 2026 performance itself – its sources, its many moving parts, and its principals, with quotes from Drs. DuBose and Smith. Finally, in Part 3 I’ll say a few words about Margaret Bonds’s Keckley Project itself – its text, its dramaturgy, and its music. The quote in the title of this tripartite post – “where is the freedom in this land of the free?” is taken from one of the more important numbers in the musical, but you’ll have to wait until I get to Part 3 for an explanation of it (So sorry!)
The idea for Margaret Bonds’s musical about Elizabeth Keckley is integrally bound up with its contexts. Most generally, its roots extend back into two of her other large-scale compositions. The first of these is The Ballad of the Brown King, which made history as the first cantata by an African American composer to celebrate the presence of a Black man, Balthasar, among the three magi who visited the Christ child, and thus to confront and correct the conventional whitewashing of the nativity story. The second is the complete-but-never-finished (I’ll return to this later!) Lenten cantata Simon Bore the Cross, which similarly corrected the historical record by illustrating the consequentiality of a Black man, Simon of Cyrene, in bearing the cross of Jesus of Nazareth on the Via Dolorosa.
But The Ballad of the Brown King and Simon Bore the Cross both celebrated historical Black men – and in Bitter Laurel Bonds took their gambit a step further by taking as her subject a Black woman. In so doing she gave voice not only to her own womanism, but also did so in a fashion that would have resonated with the broader movement for women’s rights and recognizing women that was gaining strength in the mid-1960s. Indeed, the possibility can’t be ruled out that Bonds was thinking of a musical about Keckley when she wrote this to Langston Hughes on August 8, 1965:
But Hughes evidently did not reply to this proposition, and until more evidence surfaces it is impossible to say for certain what the “germ idea of a sure-fire musical” was.
But those general creative contexts are attended by two specific, and crucial, contexts, of a social and political nature: (1) the Watts Rebellion; and (2) in the wake of that tragedy, the founding of the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center.
Let me explain:
The Watts Rebellion. Just three days after Bonds invited Hughes to collaborate on a “sure-fire musical,” the Civil Rights movement entered a new chapter that demonstrated the power of violent resistance to violent oppression. The spark to kindling was police brutality. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a twenty-one-year-old African American man, was pulled over for drunken driving in the deeply impoverished, predominantly African American Watts neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Before a crowd of onlookers, he failed a sobriety test and was struck in the face with a baton by a White police officer, who then hustled him into a police car. When Mr. Frye’s mother pled with the officers not to arrest her son they arrested her also; the same happened when his brother asked the police not to arrest the two. Public outrage at this latest incident of police brutality spread rapidly, and civil unrest involving thirty-four deaths, more than 1,000 injuries, and 4,000 arrests, with property damage in excess of $40,000,000 (over $406 million in 2025 dollars) spread over a curfew zone encompassing over forty-five miles. More than 14,000 California National Guard troops were mobilized to try to restore calm, and it took them six days to achieve that goal. By then the Watts neighborhood was a smoldering ruin. Two weeks later Langston Hughes, a friend of actor, singer, and activist Harry Belafonte, traveled to L.A. to see the area – and on August 31 he sent a postcard to Bonds and her husband, Larry Richardson, exclaiming that “You ought to see Watts – whole blocks burnt UP!”
The Inner City Cultural Center. The violence and destruction of the Watts Rebellion were widely reported and televised – and the images of Los Angeles consumed by its own de facto civil war brought renewed attention to the deep injustice of the circumstances that had provided the kindling. Those affected by those images and the terrible loss of lives and livelihoods included numerous celebrities and philanthropists, all keen to do something to make for a better life for the victims of the violence moving forward. Composer and playwright C. Bernard Jackson (1927-96) and neuropsychologist J. Alfred Cannon (1928– 88) launched a widely publicized initiative to establish a nonprofit initiative funded primarily by the Board of Education and the newly created National Endowment for the Arts – and the Federal Government, eager to advance President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” agenda, seized the opportunity.
The result was the creation of the Inner City Cultural Center (ICCC) in Los Angeles, a federally funded institution which would include a professional school of the arts that featured training classes in music and dance, writing, the graphic arts, film appreciation, and permanent repertory theater in order to (in the words of Jackson) “transcend cultural, ethnic and racial differences, utilizing the arts as a bridge, . . . and countering the effects of the status quo myth regarding separation of the races.” Public awareness of the Center – which is still very much in operation today – and the moral imperative for its mission was bolstered when actor Gregory Peck, known for his antiracist awareness not least because of his iconic portrayal of Atticus Finch in Robert Mulligan’s film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, promised to donate his entire fee for narrating ABC television network’s four-hour documentary Africa to the Center.
Among those affected by the Watts Riots and given new hope by the creation of the ICCC was Margaret Bonds. By this point she was a central player in the cultural life of her adopted home city of New York – planning commitments as much as a year and a half ahead, maintaining a full private studio of piano students, and working full-time as music director at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church. Because of those ties to New York, becoming a part of the phoenix rising from the ashes in Los Angeles was easier said than done, but as ever, she was undeterred. Beginning in February 1966 she started clearing her calendar – completing existing obligations in New York but not taking new ones unless they were short-term and generally smaller-scale.
By November 1967 she was ready. With the support of her husband, Larry Richardson, who told her he just wanted to be “the power behind the throne,” and with their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Djane Richardson, in college, she relocated to Los Angeles. Initially she stayed with friends (Dr. Albert McNeil and his wife, her old high-school friend Muriel Landers, and – most importantly – Janice Lovoos, eventual lyricist for Bitter Laurel, and Lovoos's husband). But eventually she moved to the heart of the very Watts neighborhood where Marquette Frye had been arrested in August 1965, taking a two-bedroom apartment located a twenty- minute walk or an easy ten-minute bus ride from the ICCC.
And with that, the seeds for Margaret Bonds’s full-length musical celebrating the life of activism of a Elizabeth Keckley were sown. I’ll talk more about the creation of this never-heard Bondsian masterpiece in Parts 2 and 3 of this post, but for now let me give the essentials in four bullet points:
We don’t know exactly when Bonds first learned of Elizabeth Keckley, but we do know that the mid-1960s witnessed a significant surge in Black-themed bookstores around the U.S. These served as cultural and community hubs for African Americans, separatist solutions to the white-dominated publishing and bookselling communities’ marginalization and erasure of Blacks. So one possibility is that Margaret Bonds picked up Elizabeth Keckley’s important 1868 memoir, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, in one such store – either in Harlem or in Los Angeles. (The former scenario would account for the “germ idea of a sure-fire musical” that she mentioned to Hughes in August 1965, but this must remain speculation because nothing came of Bonds’s invitation.) (We'll come back to this question in part 3 . . .)
By July, 1967 Turkish-American playwright and director Demetrios Vilan (1909-2000) in Los Angeles had written a three-act play about Elizabeth Keckley. Bonds, arriving in SoCal in November, soon began collaborating with Vilan and Lovoos to create a musical on the same subject, with Vilan assuming primary responsibility for the book and Lovoos working as lyricist. (They would later draw Lovoos’s son, actor and documentary filmmaker Edmund Penney [1926-2008], who in 1965 had produced a documentary on the same Angel’s Flight funicular that Bonds memorialized in her recently published 1968 song for Peggy Lee titled “Bunker Hill,” into the project.) By September 1968 Bonds was able to share the musical with Lena Horne (whom she had known since at least the early 1940s), who loved it. Also sometime in that year the team typed up the complete book and Margaret Bonds wrote out the complete set of lead sheets for the music.
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Margaret Bonds Papers JWJ MSS 151 Box 12, folder 72 The team continued to work on the project until 1971, completing an overhaul of the book (but not all the attendant music) in 1969. The musical took on several different titles along the way (Lizzie, Madame Elizabeth, Madame ’Lisbeth, and a couple of others). By 1970 Bonds was sending the music to her longtime friend and collaborator Charlotte Holloman and the soprano was recording demo tapes of the individual numbers – but these seem not to have survived.
Ultimately, schedules and Vilan’s travels prevented the team from closing off the project definitively. After Bonds’s death Vilan renounced his copyright claims on the musical and wrote to Djane and Larry Richardson to convey his “shock and concern” at the passing of a “beloved friend and co-worker” who was “so wonderful to work with. Always warm and gay and full of enthusiasm for life and her work.”
And that brings us to where we stand today. In 1972, Bitter Laurel landed in an ontological limbo: complete but never finished (see above), a musical without a (living) composer. The hundreds of pages of typescripts and music manuscripts, never systematically inventoried, were dispersed in the confusion of Bonds’s papers after her sudden death. And posthumous commentators, evidently persuaded not to look for anything of consequence in Bonds’s late Los Angeles period because of her (fictitious) alcohol-fueled depressive decline, never even mentioned the work.
The upshot? Margaret Bonds’s musical celebration of another remarkable Black woman who used her intelligence, talent, and strength to transcend the barriers her world would impose on her because of her race and sex, instead challenging oppressive societal norms and leaving behind a legacy of artistic distinction, has never been seen or heard. Bitter Laurel – the musical milestone convergence in which the identities and legacies of Margaret Bonds and Elizabeth Keckley converge – still lies silent, buried beneath a mass of unfounded rumors about its composer, its messages never heard.
But that will all change on April 18 and 19, 2026. More about this in Part 2 (next week).
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