Frances Walker-Slocum
By Sam Roberts
Frances Walker-Slocum, who overcame childhood burns that left her arm impaired to become a pioneering classical pianist and the first black female tenured professor at Oberlin College and Conservatory, died on June 9 in Oberlin, Ohio. She was 94.
Her death was announced by Oberlin, where she had taught from 1976 until she retired in 1991 and was named a professor emerita.
“Miss
Walker’s playing has sweep and impetuosity,” John Briggs wrote in The
New York Times in a review of her debut concert at Carnegie Recital Hall
in Manhattan in 1959, which included works by Liszt, Rachmaninoff and
Chopin. She was known professionally as Frances Walker at the time.
“She proved well able to do justice to the big virtuoso pieces on her
program,” Mr. Briggs added. “It was an impressive first appearance by a
young pianist of considerable talent.”
Her performance at a bicentennial concert at Oberlin in 1976 was so
impressive that she was immediately hired to teach there. She became an
outspoken champion of black composers, including Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor, Scott Joplin and William Grant Still, and waged a
continuing campaign for gender pay equality among the faculty.
Peter Takacs, a music professor at
Oberlin, said in a statement that Professor Walker-Slocum’s “deep,
noble, unhurried” interpretations of all music, but especially Brahms
and Liszt, imbued the works she played with even deeper profundity.
The younger sister of George Walker,
who in 1996 became the first black classical composer to win the
Pulitzer Prize for music, Professor Walker-Slocum was not only an accomplished pianist
but also a popular teacher, at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, the
Third Street Settlement School in Manhattan, Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania, Rutgers University in New Jersey and Oberlin, where she
rose to chairwoman of the piano department.
“Ms.
Walker was a tough teacher, but one who knew how to tap into every
student’s motivation,” said Lee Koonce, a senior adviser to the dean of
the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and a former student.
Frances Walker
was born on March 6, 1924, in Washington, the granddaughter of a slave
and the daughter of Dr. George Walker, an immigrant from Jamaica, and
Rosa (King) Walker, who worked for the Government Printing Office. Dr.
Walker had studied at Temple University; when the couple moved to
Washington, their first major purchase was a piano.
When Frances was 5, about the time she grudgingly began piano lessons, her dress caught fire as she was playing with matches.
She
was taken to the emergency room of Freedmen’s Hospital, Washington’s
only hospital for blacks at the time. She was in a coma, and her right
arm was severely burned. Hospitalized for a year, Frances underwent
several operations, but her right arm remained shorter and weaker than
her left, its movement impaired. That meant that later on she struggled
to perform more challenging works, she said.
“I felt sorry
for myself and at the same time guilty for all the trouble I had
caused,” Professor Walker-Slocum wrote in her memoir, “A Miraculous
Journey” (2006). “I was constantly in fear of dying.”
But
while attending Dunbar High School, she began private piano lessons and
also studied piano at the junior division of Howard University’s music
department.
“The arts build moral strength and all kinds of inner strength,” she said.
She
enrolled in Oberlin, which she described as “a vanguard in those days”
as the only institution where a black woman could earn an undergraduate
degree in music. She graduated in 1945.
She met Henry Chester Slocum Jr., a white Oberlin alumnus, in Mississippi. They got married in New York City because interracial marriage was banned in Mississippi. But even living in Astoria, Queens, she said, they were subjected to bigotry.
Mr. Slocum died in 1980. Professor Walker-Slocum is survived by their son, Jeffrey Slocum; her brother; a granddaughter; and two great-granddaughters.
She received a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a professional diploma for completing the credits for a doctorate but not her dissertation.
Her career soared after she expanded her classical repertoire in 1975 with a performance at Carnegie Recital Hall, “Bicentennial Program: The Music of Black American Composers.”
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