Just Miles Away but Worlds Apart: Examining Jewish Participation in Integration Programs at Black Mountain College and Highlander Folk School, 1933–1964

AJS Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-233
Author(s):  
Wendy F. Soltz
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Highlander Folk School ◽  
Black Mountain

Small liberal arts and folk schools attempted desegregation decades before other southern colleges and universities. Historians have long argued that Jews were active and influential in the fight for civil rights in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, but were Jews involved in these early attempts to enroll black students in historically white schools? If they were, were they successful and how did their Jewishness affect the efficacy of their attempts? In order to answer these questions, this article compares and contrasts two such schools, Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which established “integration programs” in the 1940s. This research reveals that when Jews saturated a school, and were visibly involved in desegregation, their attempts to desegregate the institution were ultimately unsuccessful. When Jews supported a school through donations behind the scenes and occasional visits, however, the institution successfully desegregated.

Bohemian South

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
New South ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Research Triangle ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Black Mountain ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

From the southern influence on nineteenth-century New York to the musical legacy of late-twentieth-century Athens, Georgia, to the cutting-edge cuisines of twenty-first-century Asheville, North Carolina, the bohemian South has long contested traditional views of the region. Yet, even as the fruits of this creative South have famously been celebrated, exported, and expropriated, the region long was labeled a cultural backwater. This timely and illuminating collection uses bohemia as a novel lens for reconsidering more traditional views of the South. Exploring wide-ranging locales, such as Athens, Austin, Black Mountain College, Knoxville, Memphis, New Orleans, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, each essay challenges popular interpretations of the South, while highlighting important bohemian sub- and countercultures. The Bohemian South provides an important perspective in the New South as an epicenter for progress, innovation, and experimentation.

Rauschenberg, Robert (1925–2008)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Wallis
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Pop Art ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
American Artist ◽  
Experimental Approaches ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Black Mountain

Robert Rauschenberg (Milton Ernest Rauschenberg) was an American artist who pioneered new approaches to art prototypical of the Pop Art movement and postmodernism. Born October 22, 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, Rauschenberg attended the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julien in Paris. From 1948–1952, while attending sessions at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Rauschenberg studied under the Bauhaus painter Josef Albers and the musical composer John Cage, both of whom became important influences. The experimental approaches encouraged at Black Mountain College informed Rauschenberg’s artistic philosophy and broadened his practice to include dance-theatre and performance.

Jonathan Williams

2020 ◽  
pp. 279-281
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Blue Ridge ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Blue Ridge Mountains ◽  
Black Mountain

Poet and publisher Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina. He studied at the experimental Black Mountain College, located near Asheville, as well as at Princeton University and the Chicago School of Design. As an adult, Williams and his partner, Thomas Meyer, divided their time between North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and England. In addition to writing poetry, Williams founded the Jargon Society in 1951. Jargon published avant-garde poetry and fiction, photography, and folk art....

Blurring Public and Private: The Pragmatic Desegregation Politics of an Elite Private School in Atlanta

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-89
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Students ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private Schools ◽  
Private School ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
White Elite

The school desegregation narrative often references historically white public schools as sites of massive resistance and historically white private schools as segregationist academies. Yet some historically white elite private schools or independent schools, such as The Westminster Schools (plural in name only), established in 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia, chose to desegregate. Such elite institutions, which have served as one catalyst for the creation and maintenance of social and cultural capital, became more accessible after Brown v. Board of Education through a combination of private and public decisions galvanized by larger social, political, and federal forces. Westminster's 1965 decision to consider all applicants regardless of race was emblematic of the pragmatic desegregation politics of Atlanta's city leaders during the civil rights movement and a national independent school agenda focused on recruiting black students. Drawing on institutional, local, regional, and national archival records and publications, this article examines the import of schools like Westminster to civic and business leaders, to the politics of race and desegregation occurring in large cities, and to the range of educational opportunities available in metropolitan areas. This examination yields an analysis of the leadership and politics of a southern historically white elite private school that black students desegregated in 1961.

scholarly journals Progressive Education and Modernist Literature: Black Mountain College, 1933–1940

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-315
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Teaching Situation ◽  
Democratic Pedagogy ◽  
Arts Curriculum ◽  
Creative Experience ◽  
Creative Artists ◽  
Black Mountain

Black Mountain College (1933–57) is famous for the creative artists who taught and studied there. But behind its celebrated alumni was a modernist institution, whose liberal arts curriculum entwined modernist aesthetics with progressive principles developed from John Dewey. Under John Andrew Rice's pioneering leadership, Black Mountain College began to work out a democratic pedagogy of creative experience quite different from most other US institutions of Higher Education. Modernist principles of method informed the entire teaching situation and the relations between students and staff, rather than just being studied inside discrete textual objects.

Albers, Josef (1888–1976)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Saletnik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Optical Effects ◽  
Important Publication ◽  
Color Value ◽  
Black Mountain

A student, and later instructor, at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers introduced aspects of the German design school’s curriculum to the United States upon his emigration from Germany in 1933. Although he designed furnishings, worked in stained and etched glass, and made prints, Albers is known particularly for his "Homage to the Square" series of paintings of which he completed several hundred beginning in 1950. In these, three or four painted squares of different hue, color value, and saturation are nested within one another, thereby creating various optical effects as one square appears to float above another or as color differentiation is neutralized. How the chromic context in which any one color is situated contributes to its relative appearance also corresponded to Albers’s teaching of the topic and the important publication Interaction of Color in 1963. Albers taught at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, between 1933 and 1949, and at Yale University from 1950 until 1958.

Paul Williams: The Cage Mix

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-140
Author(s):  
MARK DAVENPORT
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Magnetic Tape ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Intentional Community ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
First Time ◽  
Black Mountain

AbstractDemystifying a largely misunderstood chapter in John Cage's biographical narrative, this article explores the pivotal role architect and philanthropist Paul Williams played in Cage's life, and for whom Cage named his famous magnetic tape composition Williams Mix (1952–53). Retracing the activities of both men, beginning with their earliest encounter at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948, this investigation documents for the first time the extent of their mutually devoted relationship. Newly uncovered source material and photographs also reveal the valuable contributions Williams made as primary benefactor and mastermind of the intentional community called the Gatehill Cooperative (a.k.a. “Stony Point”), a place Cage called home for seventeen years (1954–71). There Cage developed a “hunger for nature,” wrote his widely read and influential book Silence (1961), and undertook some of his most significant musical projects.

A Community Far Afield

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Horne Carter
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Experimental College ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Black Mountain

This chapter examines Black Mountain College, an experimental college of exiles—cultural, political, and social, who created a utopian Appalachian avant-garde art community that emerged in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1933. The author examines the history, social ecosystem and legacy if this innovative and short-lived college that played host to the likes of R. Buckminster Fuller and John Cage.

Black Mountain, Provincetown, and the Woman Paintings

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy Curtis
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Real Life ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Black Mountain College ◽  
Merce Cunningham ◽  
Willem De Kooning ◽  
Female Figures ◽  
Summer Session ◽  
Erik Satie ◽  
Black Mountain

In 1948, Willem de Kooning taught at the Black Mountain College summer session in Asheville, North Carolina. Elaine thrived in this experimental ambience. She worked on Buckminster Fuller’s first geodesic dome, studied with Josef Albers, and played the ingénue in The Ruse of Medusa, choreographed by Merce Cunningham, with music by Erik Satie played by John Cage. While Bill labored over his breakthrough painting Asheville, Elaine produced rhythmic abstractions on wrapping paper. That fall, he painted Woman, the first of his grotesque female figures. It is impossible to fully parse the real-life and artistic influences that led to these paintings, but his deepening rift with Elaine was surely among them. The following summer, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she studied with Hans Hofmann and socialized with friends. One of her self-portraits was included in a group exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery that fall; portraiture would change the course of her creative

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