The Peabody Archives of The Johns Hopkins University present: “The Storm is Passing Over: Celebrating the Musical Life of Maryland's African-American Community from Emancipation to Civil Rights”.
"The Storm is Passing Over," a traveling and on-line exhibition, uses photographs, manuscripts and memorabilia to document the lives of Maryland's African-American musicians. It tells the stories of their struggles and achievements during the long years of segregation, from Reconstruction to the passage of the first Civil Rights Act in 1964. The exhibition was organized by the Peabody Institute in cooperation with the Enoch Pratt Library and Coppin State College and traveled through the State of Maryland through the year 2000.
The exhibit features well-known personalities like Eubie Blake, Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway, as well as lesser-known figures who played a significant role in the musical life of Maryland. Among the latter are A. Jack Thomas, one of the first black bandmasters in the U. S. Army and the first African-American to conduct the all-white Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; classically trained violinist and composer Henderson T. Kerr, who led a society orchestra in and around Baltimore from 1902 until about 1920; W. Llewellyn Wilson who taught generations of musicians at Douglass High School, including bandleader Cab Calloway and soprano Anne Brown, the first Bess in George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.
The exhibition also examines the hardships imposed by segregation on African-American musicians: the rigors of touring when few public accommodations were available to black artists, and concert halls, especially in the South, refused to present them.
The exhibition's special brochure for schools is organized in sections: Historical Background, The Church, Ragtime and Jazz, Bands and Classical Music, Frederick Douglass High School, Touring Segregated America, Pennsylvania Avenue, The World at War and the Civil Rights Struggle.
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