Heading: (African American, 1947)
Author: Stearns, Marshall
Title: Jim Crow at College
Place Published: New York
Publisher:
Date Published: 17199
Description: Tomorrow magazine, pp. 5-10. Original wrappers.Years before he became America's leading musicologist and historian of Jazz, Marshall Stearns was a Professor of English with a PhD from Yale, teaching classes in medieval British literature at Indiana University. In this rare article, published in an obscure short-lived magazine, he describes the small college town of Bloomington, where Ku Klux Klan-promoted racial segregation was still rampant at hotels, shops and parks. At his school, white and black students could at least eat in the same Commons and swim together in the college pool - though the college newspaper and yearbook barred photographs of such integration.Stearns, as a white New Englander whose interest in Jazz and its African American roots had begun while a Harvard student, felt a related personal commitment to the advancement of Black civil rights at a time when "Jim Crow" was widespread in the north as well as the south. So he eagerly became faculty mentor to students in a a newly-formed college chapter of the NAACP, encouraging their protest of the illegal refusal of city restaurants to serve Black customers. His activism cost him his job. When the University failed to reappoint him for another year, he moved to Cornell where he was able to teach classes in Jazz as well as English and went on to write articles and books and research on Jazz, the mass popularity of which, he felt, would help promote the Black movement for civil rights.

Slight wear and soil; very good.