Friday, May 26, 2017

New York Times: Barbara Smith Conrad, Singer at Center of Integration Dispute, Dies at 79

New York Times: Barbara Smith Conrad at her home in Manhattan in 2011. (Credit Robert Caplin for The New York Times)

Ms. Conrad as Amneris in the Cincinnati Opera’s production of “Aida” in 1976.  (Credit via University of Texas at Austin)

The New York Times

May 24, 2017

William Grimes

In spring 1957, two weeks before the opening of Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas” at the University of Texas at Austin, Barbara Smith, a 19-year-old mezzo-soprano, received some bad news. She would not be appearing as Dido, a role she had been rehearsing for months.
Ms. Smith was black. The singer cast as Aeneas was white. In the South, then emerging only slowly from strict segregation, this was a problem, even though the two principal characters do not kiss, embrace or even touch.
Joe Chapman, a Democrat in the State Legislature from Ms. Smith’s own district in the pine country of Northeast Texas, had taken the matter up with Logan Wilson, the university’s president. During their conversation, Mr. Chapman had told him that the opera’s casting might be bad publicity for the school, especially since the Legislature was preparing to vote on an appropriations bill.
Three days before the opera was scheduled to open, The Houston Post broke the story, under the headline “Negro Girl Out of UT Opera Cast.” The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, followed with an article the next day. Its reporter asked Mr. Chapman, a former Texas railroad commissioner, if he believed that the Legislature had the right to dictate policy to the university.
“There’s no question about it,” Mr. Chapman said.
In a statement, the university said that it had made the casting change “to ensure Miss Smith’s well-being and to squelch any possibility that her appearance would precipitate a cut in the university’s appropriations.”

More than 100 students rose in protest. Eight state legislators expressed indignation. A petition circulated, gathering 1,500 signatures. Mr. Chapman was hanged in effigy from a balcony in the State Capitol.

Ms. Smith tried to smooth matters over. “After the first shock and hurt had passed,” she told The Daily Texan, “I began to realize that the ultimate success of integration at the university is much more important than my appearance in the opera.”
As wire services and Time magazine picked up the story, national figures spoke out, including Sidney Poitier and Eleanor Roosevelt. The singer Harry Belafonte stepped forward, offering to pay for Ms. Smith’s musical education at any school in the world.

She chose to remain at Texas and, after earning her music degree in 1959, went on to a successful operatic career under the name Barbara Smith Conrad, appearing at major opera houses around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and performing in concert with leading symphony orchestras.
“My heart wanted to go to Fisk,” Ms. Conrad told The New York Times in 2011, referring to the historically black university in Nashville. “But you didn’t run away if your staying could make a difference — it could encourage other black kids. Mostly, it was a matter of pride.”
Ms. Conrad died on Monday in Edison, N.J. She was 79. The cause has not yet been determined, said Bettye Neal, a cousin. Ms. Conrad had advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
Barbara Louise Smith was born on Aug. 11, 1937, in Atlanta, Tex., south of Texarkana. Growing up, she divided her time between Queen City, where she attended school, and the family house in Center Point, an all-black town near Pittsburg, Tex., that had been founded by freed slaves, among them her forebears. It no longer exists.
Both her parents were college-educated teachers. Her mother was the former Jerrie Lee Cash. Her father, Conrad, served in the Army during World War II and the Korean War. When Barbara began her singing career and applied for an Actors Equity card, she took his name to avoid confusion with another Equity member with the same first, middle and last name.


 

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