10 “She takes up music as a profession”

Women had to rethink and rebuild themselves during the Reconstruction, a period when ideas of gender and class were in flux, and professionals challenged antebellum strictures about the public gaze by embracing career women and musical directors. Reconstructed spaces allowed for new realizations of gentility, and the networks of meanings surrounding musical performance evoked power in ways hitherto unavailable to women. At Fisk University, Ella Sheppard and other women of color crafted careers as professional musicians, on the stage or in their own communities. Women began to perform Beethoven’s works in public, and this shift coincided with striking alterations in southern society that are best explained by new ideas of what they could and should do after the war.

Motion and the Noise

William Faulkner's dislike of unwanted sound is well documented. The acoustic environment of rural Mississippi amplified irreversibly after the introduction of the automobile, airplane, and automated farm machinery. In his Intruder in the Dust (1948), the jukebox and radio absorb pointed criticism for producing "canned" sounds outside of their "proper" environment. The narrowing gap between town square and dance hall signifies encroaching chaos, as noise drowns out the attenuated "harmony" that keeps elite whites in power and Intruder's African American protagonist Lucas Beauchamp out of the hands of the lynch mob. For Faulkner, the shift in the auditory environment presents both a disruption and an impediment to a system built on white bourgeois ideals. However, Faulkner's pessimism is counterpointed by sociological studies undertaken by Fisk University researchers. The Fisk study identifies the emergence of a blues culture in the Delta whose energy and boundary-crossing impulses illustrate the liberating possibilities of an expanding soundscape. By juxtaposing Faulkner's damning descriptions of "the motion and the noise" with the Fisk University researchers' illuminating fieldwork, this essay interprets a transformative period in the constantly shifting soundscape of the U.S. South. In line with Jacques Attali's dictum that "our music foretells our future," Intruder in the Dust anticipates the cultural upheaval that would energize the Civil Rights Movement. Both in fiction and in fact, the "noise" emanating from jukeboxes and radios in 1940s Mississippi accelerated social change at a volume much higher and a tempo much faster than Faulkner and other gradualists desired.

Industrial Education and Symbolic Home Building in the Congo Free State, 1898–1907

Chapter 1 explains trends in the African American Protestant missions movement up to 1907 with a focus on William Henry Sheppard and the black staff of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission. The literary and musical accomplishments of Althea Brown are introduced in the context of her classical training at Fisk University. The role that Alonzo Edmiston played in developing industrial education at the Congo Mission is introduced through his childhood working on a Tennessee plantation and his education at Stillman Institute. The final section explains how both ministers applied their academic backgrounds and the lessons of previous black missionaries to rebuilding a mission station despite political turmoil in the region.

A Higher Mission

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, alumni and students from historically black colleges and universities contributed to the American Protestant mission movement in West Africa. Those contributions extended beyond the manual labor endeavors promoted by Booker T. Washington and the Phelps Stokes Fund; African American missionaries also adapted classical studies and self-help ideology to a transnational context. This book analyzes the effects and significance of black education strategies through the ministries of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston from 1902 to 1941. Brown specialized in language, music, and cultural analysis while her husband engaged in preaching, agricultural research, and mediation on behalf of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in what became the Belgian Congo. Personal and professional partnership motivated the two missionaries to interpret their responsibilities as a combination of training from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Stillman Institute. Each of these institutions held a symbolic meaning in the contexts of the Southern Presbyterian Church and European colonialism in Africa. Denominational administrators and colonial officials understood African American missionaries as leaders with the potential to challenge racial hierarchies. This perception influenced the shifting relations between African Christians and black missionaries during the development of village churches. The Edmistons’ pedagogical interest in adapting to local conditions encouraged Presbyterian converts and students to promote their interests and their authority within the Congo Mission. At the same time, occasional segregation and expulsion of African American missionaries from overseas ministry enabled them to influence early civil rights activities in the American South.

Congo Missionaries and the Perpetuation of Manual Labor, 1908–1936

Chapter 2 analyzes the effect of globalized industrial education strategies on the career prospects of African American missionaries. It identifies the restrictive policies applied to students and graduates from the three institutions that the Edmistons were affiliated with: Fisk University, Stillman Institute, and Tuskegee Institute. The chapter explains how the couple tried to adjust to new work expectations without either reducing their ministries to manual labor alone or falling victim to undisclosed moratoriums on African American international travel. It also shows how increased colonial demands for African laborers increased the pressure for African Americans to design a just alternative within the setting of the mission stations.

Implementing Historically Black Education Strategies at the Presbyterian Congo Mission, 1918–1919

This chapter details aspects of Fisk University, Stillman Institute, and Tuskegee Institute that Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston adapted for religious education from 1918 to 1919. It analyzes each missionary’s experiences at one of these campuses between 1892 and 1904 to show the academic roots of their perspectives on art, folklore, finance, local politics, and sustainable agriculture. Details of the consequences of colonial taxation and forced labor help explain why the Edmistons’ plans for the Luebo Agricultural College failed the following year. Descriptions of the student body suggest that the legacy of the college reflected its balance of classical and industrial education even when its agricultural goals went unmet.