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[MUSIC PLAYING] JOHN RABE: Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm John Rabe, sitting in for Gary Eichten.

Today on Midday two Voices of Minnesota interviews. Later this hour, we'll hear from Dr. Geneva Southall, retired professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Minnesota. But, first, a conversation with Mary Easter. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Stephanie Curtis.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: After years of training in New York, Mary Easter established her dancing career here in Minnesota. Today, she teaches dance at Carleton College in Northfield and acts as co-director of a repertory performance group. She encourages students of all backgrounds to experience the art form without fearing it.

You don't have to be an aspiring professional to take one of her classes. Mary Easter says everyone can dance. She started off as a dancer who dabbled in poetry. Her work now weaves together singing, acting, and movement. But Easter admits it wasn't an easy transition.

MARY EASTER: Dance is about the moving body, not about the talking body. And if you spend years training yourself to do that, to communicate symbolically, metaphysically, non-linearly, and certainly non-verbally, suddenly you've got 20 pages of text. And the question is, am I still a choreographer or am I changing into something else? It be very threatening.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: How is your dancing changed in the past 10 years or so?

MARY EASTER: Well, I'm 10 years older. That's the main thing that comes to mind. Yeah, I would say it's not just my dancing, but my work. My performance work now has texts that I write. I speak, I sing.

And I like it best when I'm able somehow in the course of what would be a sentence to start it as a song, continue it as movement, finish it as text, to have a complete interweaving of the various aspects.

And I think that that inseparability and interweaving is an essentially African-American thing about my work, even if the subject matter is not overtly political, which often it is.

But I had someone say to me about some of the pieces I did most recently. Oh, this is much more political than your work before. And I thought, look more carefully, widen your notion of what's political.

Political is not just telling somebody off. Political is the way you incorporate what has not been incorporated, the way you mix together things that have always been called separate. So I have thought of my work as political at times when apparently some of my audience has not found it to be so.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Did they find this just straightforward, the dancing was just dancing without text and spoken word less political?

MARY EASTER: Yes. And in some ways, I think maybe that was true for me. I certainly discovered that more of myself was there to communicate when I began to speak and sing, that much more of me showed. So I mean, some of the latest works are somewhat confrontational, even.

(SINGING) I grew up in the South where the white movie theater and a Black movie theater, and you can't come in here. So go to the bughouse, go to the bughouse, go to the bughouse or you stay home.

I'm jumping rope while I sing that, or I'm playing hopscotch as I go through a lot of examples of the conditions of my early life. But those things are-- I mean, I think any maker makes art out of what you have seen, what you have lived, what you know, and what you have observed, the way you put the world together, your perspective on it.

And so my perspective on that is that there are these terrible things to tell, and that they are a normal part of childhood games that are done to rhythm, and that games that were enjoyed at the same time as the horrible details are told.

So perspective, attitude, kind of movement, rhythm of movement, nature of story are all sort of woven in there together in somewhat contradictory ways. And the contradictions are what it's all about.

I hate it when people try to smooth it out into one thing. Oh, how terrible you had to live with segregation? Well, yes, true. But not a downtrodden person. Thank you. Not bereft of all possibility.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Where were you originally from? Where were you born?

MARY EASTER: I was born in Petersburg, Virginia, Southern part of the state, about 20 miles South of the capital, Richmond. And I went to prep school in Massachusetts and to college in New York, graduate school in New York, and taught at my prep school for a couple of years, and then came here.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Why did your parents send you to boarding school?

MARY EASTER: Oh, I grew up in the segregated South, and schools were segregated. The decree to desegregate the schools in 1954, I was 13 years old already.

And obviously, the desegregation didn't take place immediately. Otherwise, we wouldn't know about all these civil rights marches and the dogs and fire hoses being set loose on people, and young children, essentially, going through gauntlets of hell in order just to go to school.

So my parents were college professors and education was very important to them. And the thought that I, as their only child, would have opportunities that were not generally available was another important idea.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: How did your parents explain Jim Crow laws to you, segregation? When did you first realize that there were these lines drawn?

MARY EASTER: If you're born into that situation, you know it before anybody ever explains it to you. I mean, it's not like one day they tell you and you think, oh, I'm Black. oh, how interesting?

But on the other hand, my parents went to great lengths to protect me the best they could. I was never, for instance, allowed to ride the bus because of-- and this is one example, because somebody would have asked me to sit in the back or move or give up my seat or something like that. And one way they could protect me from that they drove me everywhere.

Now you can imagine as a burgeoning teenager who wanted to go with the other kids, I didn't always think that was the greatest thing. But by then I knew why they didn't want that to happen. I was quite aware of that.

And I mean, the energy they put into protection and the energy that many Black parents put into protecting their children is astonishing, and they have to do it if they can. And, of course, the child's duty is to rebel, right? So the child is often not very cooperative.

Though, I think in the South, especially during the segregation period, certain kinds of rebellion-- I mean, you could lose your life. And so the sense of cleaving to the community and maybe to the advice of older people perhaps-- I hate to generalize, but perhaps there was greater--

STEPHANIE CURTIS: There were big stakes.

MARY EASTER: Yeah, the violence that's in large parts of the Black community, that does not originate there. It is not that there's something that matter with Black people that makes them kill each other. We have lived with the threat of violence and loss of life for the slightest infraction since slavery.

And we would be indeed unusual people if that were never played out. I don't say that that explanation is the solution to anything. I just acknowledge that it is there.

So there are different kinds of dangers now, but there are all, to my mind, clearly rooted in a society that has not paid enough attention to what it has done to Black people historically, and then in casual, everyday ways now.

The greatest of these, I think, is the denial that there's any need to do anything at all. Oh, no, it's all solved. All of that stuff was years ago. What does that matter now? Well, I think that attitude is an act of tremendous violence.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: And we're falsely thinking that everything is OK because civil rights was in the '60s and everything's fine now.

MARY EASTER: And everything's fine. Yeah, yeah. And it is better for a lot of people and not at all better for a whole lot of other people. I don't deny that there's progress, that I have my nice job and live in my nice house in Northfield, Minnesota. And my children have had their college educations and are ensconced in what they want to do, and that there are lots of people like me.

But there are a lot of people who through really no fault of their own who simply haven't had these privileges or haven't escaped the loop of, the noose of social injustice. That's what it is.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Do you think being an artist helps deal with-- I mean, you're constantly taking on, thinking about ideas and thinking about society in your own feelings and trying to turn it into-- and trying to express it to other people. Do you think being an artist helps deal with problems with society, your own personal feelings about problems with society?

MARY EASTER: It helps me. Again, I'm loath to generalize. Of course, I'm on the side of artists. I think artists are the most wonderful people around. And I do think artists, their concerns and their solutions and what they're thinking about are the--

They are Different ways of approaching and revealing the problems that we live with, the issues that confront us. That revelation can be valuable to people when a treatise doesn't make its mark, when a particular bill is clouded by a lot of politicizing and lobbying that goes on.

I think artists have a usefulness that is also sometimes disregarded. But I can say as the artist, it's a great way to live for me, to process my life, my situation, what I see around me, all those things that I just said, what you see, what you observe, your take on the world.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: When did you start adding text to your dancing? How did it happen? Were you were you dancing and you just started to say something or you start singing?

MARY EASTER: No, actually, it developed into a very particular piece. I was already a poet and I had been writing, but I hadn't used poems in my work. And I spent a sabbatical in New York. And I swear to god, it seemed like every public place I sat down in, somebody just plopped down and started telling me stories.

I mean, I had not invited this. Who are you anyway? They just talked, and I would go home and write it down. I mean, they all seemed to have these incredible punch lines, unexpected things, little slices of somebody life, and it really interested me.

And I had a collection of them and I didn't know what to do. But somehow, while I was writing them, I could see them in a performance mode. And sometimes they had-- well, sometimes, of course, the people sang with no urging from me whatsoever. I did whatever they do.

And sometimes in my staging of it, I could see them moving, and other times they just sat there and talked. And it was sort of terrifying to me as a choreographer, as a person invested in movement. This is my way of relating to the world. Suddenly, I got all these talking characters and some of them don't even move. What am I going to do with that?

Well, what I did was I took the pieces to a director friend and a colleague here at Carleton, Ruth Weiner. And I thought, if they're going to talk, I'd better get a hold of somebody who knows about talking.

And she encouraged me with them. And little by little, I made a piece called And So This Woman Sat Down Next to Me, and all of these things happened. And that turned into an evening length piece called Some People, which is exactly what they were, all different kinds of people.

And it took me a while to realize that-- no, not to realize, to accept the fact that all my characters were Black. Up until then, boy, was I a staunchly equal opportunity choreographer, no matter what.

And all of these stories that captured me were Black characters talking. And some spoke in spoken dialect, some were homeless people. They were all kinds of people. And once I got a hold of what it was I was doing, of course, then I started to manipulate the material, but that was a huge breakthrough for me.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: I'm talking to Mary Easter, Professor of Dance at Carleton College in Northfield. She's discussing the importance of dance and art for her life. On the day I visited, Easter had just wrapped up a class on the history of Black dance.

After two hours of dancing to an African percussionist the day before, students spoke of how the experience was emotional, almost spiritual. Easter, with a smile of satisfaction, says this is why she enjoys teaching so much. Mary Easter didn't follow anyone into this job at Carleton College. She invented it.

MARY EASTER: It's been a career where basically I think I have invented my job and convinced people that it was worthwhile, and they should have me. And then it's turned out quite well.

So you tend to be very much invested in the job that you've sort of fought your way into it and made it up. And the fact that you have it proves that you convinced somebody that it was worth having.

We've just come out of a course where I'm teaching about what was called the social dancing of Black people, and that attitude toward movement and even the movements themselves, which are extremely varied but very rhythmic, and that have taken the world by storm.

I mean, most of what we know in the world as social dancing today has in some ways Black roots, African roots. The polyrhythmic nature of it, the fact that the torso doesn't move all in one piece but moves in a segmented way and rhythmic way, all of those things are Black things.

And I grew up knowing those things, and I have been eager to do something that mixes all of that, that speaks to my whole self. So some of that movement came into my professional life late.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Do you like teaching?

MARY EASTER: Yeah, I do like teaching. And I've just been on sabbatical leave for the last term. So, of course, now I'm loving it. I've had six months of not having to do it, and it's all fresh and new and exciting all over again, and I'm not tired.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: What do you like about it?

MARY EASTER: Oh, well, first of all, I like dancing. And that is a way of dancing, teaching. And then I also like promoting the idea of how large an art form dance is. I love to see that open up in front of people.

And it's not just that I'm the one who knows how big it is and I'm telling them. I'm constantly discovering again that it's even larger, that it can absorb me at this age.

That it can absorb the use of things like my autobiographical work, that that can be done in some combination of movement and other media. That that's possible. That it isn't limited to this kind of story or this kind of movement.

And it's a continuing act of discovery, and I discover it just as much teaching as I would if I were the student. So I like that. And they discover with me and of course, that delights me.

And it's fun for them, so then it's fun for me. And if it's not fun for them, I tell them, see, this is fun and you should be having fun with this instead of grinding your bones or whatever. And it is a whole way of relating to people that is visceral, but it's also intellectual and emotional, all of those things.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Did your students in your-- this is an African-American dance history, history of African-American dance, I think. It's a better--

MARY EASTER: This is black dance and historical survey--

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Black dance. OK.

MARY EASTER: OK.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: That's the title.

MARY EASTER: There we go.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Did they come in with preconceptions of what it was going to be like, or did they--

MARY EASTER: Well, often they come and say, so what are you doing here? So they have some notion. But the very first paper they have to write for me-- and I try to make clear it is not a research paper. It is really a sifting through of the subject matter of the course. The world and themselves is what I know about Black dance and how I know it.

And the first sentence is always, well, I don't know much about Black dance. And then they start ranging back over their experience, and it turns out they had a sister who took African dance or they went to such and such a concert, generally Alvin Ailey or something like that, and they start making relationships between things that in the past seemed separate.

And so I think more direct answer to the question, what are their expectations? It's somehow intriguing to them what is it they want to know that cannot-- and since Carlton is predominantly white, this is a question that comes up in this class often. Can I, as a white person, know about this thing that is not white?

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Let alone perform it.

MARY EASTER: Yes. And this is not a class about how to do it. The movement and creative assignments of this class are offered as a way to open a window on a culture that is different through imagination and creative experience, through a culture that is different and a time period that is different even when the students are African-American and of the culture.

When we're talking about slavery or Africa, pre-Atlantic slave trade, this is a period we don't know. And we are African-Americans, not Africans, and we need to recognize what we have that is similar and what is really quite different and that we don't know anything about.

So for everyone in the course, at some point, they have to imagine, create, surmise, speculate, connect things that are not a part of their everyday life and not a part in general of the scholarship that they have studied.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: It seemed emotional.

MARY EASTER: If you try to deal with what your body is doing without how you feel about it, what chance do you have of improving something like your technique? I mean, if dynamic and energy and these things have to do with your spirit as well as your physical velocity, that has to be a part of it.

Put on top of that that we're talking about that most explosive and hushed subject perhaps in America today, race, you absolutely have to deal with feelings.

Otherwise, the most important thing that's happening in the room is what people are not saying. And you have no chance to get in there and air it out and let them say what they think, and then have somebody respond and have it be either a collision or OK, whatever it is.

So I am delighted to hear them speak that way and delighted that you noticed that component because this was a rigorous class. I mean, we came out of there wringing wet and everybody just high as a kite in their feelings.

Both the people who felt like, I know what this is about and I can do this, and the ones who were terrified, I'm not going to get it, I'm not going to be able to get it, I can never get it,

There we were with continuous polyrhythmic drum music live the entire time and a teacher exhorting us on and reaching all sorts of understandings while we huffed and puffed and sweated and panted, and all of those things. Yes, your emotions are very much affected by that. Yeah.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Do you envy young dancers ever? No?

MARY EASTER: Do I ever envy young dancers? Of course, I envy young dancers. Every wonderful concert I go to, I have to get through the period of the first 10 or 15 minutes.

I'm grief stricken because I will never do that again. I get over it, and then I enjoy the concert. And then I do something wonderful in my class the next day twice or three times, but not 15 times.

Yeah, it is a huge loss. I don't think it's accepted just like that. And it's a gradual loss, but there is a moment when you go to a concert-- and I just saw Jan Erkert dancers, and the dancers looked virtually superhuman to me.

And there was a time where every concert was an inspiration for what farther thing I could do. Well, now it's just a reminder of what I will never do. But that's not all it is. It speaks to me. So it's the facts of life. What can you do?

STEPHANIE CURTIS: How many kids do you have?

MARY EASTER: I have two daughters.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: I know one of them. I've seen her perform. sing.

MARY EASTER: Yeah, Allison Easter.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Did you encourage-- I mean, did you tell them that they should be artists?

MARY EASTER: Well, yeah, yeah. Both my children studied instruments early, both the piano. Allison played the cello, Mallory the violin, and they both took dance classes.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Your mother was a professor?

MARY EASTER: Yes, my mother was an associate professor of music. She also was a pianist, conductor, and ultimately is known as a composer.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: What did she compose for? Small--

MARY EASTER: She composed for all the instruments, but she's known most primarily for compositions for the Voice. And the first compositions that gained notice were arrangements of spirituals.

And often, they were fragments that she had her mother sing over and over again, and she developed them into full fledged compositions using all of the skills of her theory major, her graduate study.

And also, though, her tremendous sense for what the music of the culture was, not to distort it in the arrangement, and yet to use all of its poetry, its emotion, its beauty.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: What's her name?

MARY EASTER: Undine Smith Moore. And many, many high school and college choirs sing her arrangement of Daniel, Daniel, Servant of the Lord. Over and over I meet students who say, oh, your mom wrote that? Well, yeah, she did.

[UNDINE SMITH MOORE, "DANIEL, DANIEL, SERVENT OF THE LORD"]

(SINGING) Among the Hebrew nation

One Hebrew Daniel was found

They put him in the lion's den

He said there all night long.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: A lot of artists just like straight through, what was your grandmother?

MARY EASTER: My grandmother wasn't an artist. It's interesting you made that because Allison and I were commissioned to make a piece together by John Killacky when he was at the Walker, and we named it Running in the Family. And it was about generations of artists, my mother, myself, her.

And picked up exactly that idea Running in the Family, and also the fact that we are a Black family in which that runs. So I feel very connected and grounded into the generations of my family, both backward and forward.

(SINGING) To lock the lion's jaws.

STEPHANIE CURTIS: Carlton College dance professor Mary Easter. I'm Stephanie Curtis, Minnesota Public Radio.

JOHN RABE: It's 27 minutes before 1 o'clock. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interviews on Midday. Next, a conversation with Dr. Geneva Southall. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DAN OLSON: Dr. Geneva Southall was a graduate student in Iowa when she first heard about the Black composer Blind Tom. Thomas Greene Wiggins, he was born a slave and became a composer. Southall, who lives in Minneapolis, has published two volumes of history on his life.

Geneva Southall is a Professor Emeritus of Afro-American studies at the University of Minnesota. She's also an accomplished keyboardist. Here's a portion of her playing a piece by Thomas Greene Wiggins called Concert Walzer.

[THOMAS GREENE WIGGINS, "CONCERT WALZER"]

I talked with Dr. Geneva Southall about growing up in the deep South, about witnessing the end of official segregation in this country, and about Blind Tom. New Orleans, Louisiana, your hometown. I believe I have read, I have heard your father was a minister. Are you a preacher's kid?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: My father was a Methodist minister, and my brother, who recently died, was a Methodist bishop. So I'm Methodist through and through.

DAN OLSON: So there you were growing up in New Orleans, Louisiana, which when you were growing up, was it a highly segregated, completely segregated time?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, my god, yes. Oh, yes.

DAN OLSON: Which meant what for a kid? I mean--

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, you sat in the back of the bus. We went to segregated schools. But some of the best learning, best teaching was in those segregated schools.

DAN OLSON: I've heard that from others.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: That's right.

DAN OLSON: Why is that so?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, one thing. They were determined that we were going to always do better, and they did not accept our minimum. I tell people all the time, teachers always went to the dictionary and say there's no such word as can't.

DAN OLSON: That was the--

GENEVA SOUTHALL: That was the theory.

DAN OLSON: That was the theory. And then when the Supreme Court decision came along saying that separate but equal was unconstitutional, you were past school age, I assume.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, I was teaching. In fact, when that decision was made, I was teaching my first college teaching job at Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas.

DAN OLSON: I'll be darned.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: And that's when I--

DAN OLSON: What was your reaction when you heard that separate but equal was ruled unconstitutional?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, it meant-- I wasn't so much the educational thing that got me as much It meant that the end of segregation was coming. The bus thing was very important. See, that's symbolism. It's sitting in front of you. Only colored people. And we survived that, I guess, because we learned to have humor in things.

And I can remember one year how it really stopped is that the students used to steal it off the bus, and then they go put them up on their dormitory rooms for colored people only.

DAN OLSON: The signs were being stolen as a badge of honor.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, that's right. So what happened, though? What happened? They would get off the bus and one would hand it to the other. And one day the bus moved before the boy got completely out, and it drug him a little. He ended up in the hospital. And that's really what broke it up, the reality of how dangerous it was.

But the kids, remember, these kids in the dormitory were from away, and they hadn't seen these great big signs like that. This was something that day. So they put it up on their door for colored people and everybody laughed. You had to laugh to survive.

DAN OLSON: Your father, Methodist minister. Growing up in New Orleans, a segregated city, so how did he teach you-- what did he teach you and say to you as a way to cope, as a way to get along, as a way to be safe living in a segregated city?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, my father, thank God for him. Always had a saying all black people aren't good and all white people aren't bad. You have to remember, in the Methodist church, it was the white Methodists that did a lot of the schools for the newly freed slaves. And so that educational component was very important to my daddy, that whole thing. So he had a different kind of outlook.

And he lived to see his son confirmed and ordained as a United Methodist bishop over one of the most segregated state conferences there is, the Missouri. He lived to see that. That was a wonderful thing for him.

DAN OLSON: Somewhere along the line, music got into your blood. Did you live in a musical household? Were you surrounded by music?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, yeah. My mother was one of those home music teachers. And in my house, there were two things that were a part of your education. Everybody had to learn to type and everybody had to learn music.

Learning music was very important because you sang in your school choirs or in your church choirs, and you had to read notes. So for me, it was my salvation. My daddy had sung in the Tuskegee Quartet when he was in Tuskegee.

DAN OLSON: Was this before the days of William Dawson?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: He sang with William Dawson.

DAN OLSON: Wow.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: William Dawson was one of the five in his group. So Daddy sang with-- they traveled together.

DAN OLSON: What a trill.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: And the last-- they sang at Booker T. Washington's funeral.

DAN OLSON: Now, for those of us who are needing a little brush up on our African-American musical history, where in the scheme of things would you place this individual, William Dawson, pretty famous name?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Very famous, very fine composer. He did not get, I would say, the kind of PR support he needed from the white musical community, like William Grant Still, but they were contemporaries.

DAN OLSON: Now, what was the emphasis on typing? Why was it important to learn typing?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, anything you're going to do if you went to college, you had to know how to type. And my brother says, because he learned to type, he stayed off the battlefield in World War II. He worked in the office. So he said, he could thank mother for that.

DAN OLSON: You wanted to bring to students and to higher education a broader view of Black music, of African-American music.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, what happened is I came to the University of Minnesota in 1970. It was the year after the Morrill Hall takeover for the Afro-American studies department. And any time you're going to deal with Afro-American history and culture, the music is vital to that culture.

And so I had begun to do heavy research, serious research into Afro-American music. I guess in the summer of '67 when I was at the University of Iowa, I went there with-- my daughter was going back to school and she had a little baby, and I did a paper on Black music for the-- they had a seminar.

DAN OLSON: Is this the paper on paper on Blind Tom?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Yeah, but that one wasn't. That one was on Black composers of the 19th century. That's the one I did. And from that, the interest in Blind Tom was part of that.

DAN OLSON: Who was Blind Tom?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: He was a slave pianist-composer from 1849. Died in 1908. But the story is one in which I tried to show the exploitation. And that's why my book, the last one that's coming out in a few weeks, is Blind Tom-- the Pianist-Composer Continually Enslaved because this is a guy who was exploited and really kept that way all his life. A blind genius, really.

DAN OLSON: How did you hear about him?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: I first heard about him in 1964. I was in a piano class at the University of Iowa when I was finishing my doctorate, and a student walked in with the book by Hal Schoenberg. It was all about great pianists.

Now, of all the great pianists I knew who were Black, it was interesting to me that the only one Schoenberg put in his paper, in his book was Blind Tom, who he described as a deficient imbecile who went to Europe and was heard of no more with a couple of things like that.

And the way he was described, and I'm this only Black in this class of white folks, white males, and I resented it. So I didn't want to have nothing to do with Blind Tom, frankly. I resented that they left out people like George Walker, Hazel Harrison, who had played with the Berlin Symphony when she was 18, in 1906.

So I remember by going to Black colleges, I knew about this. That's the thing that helped me. I knew there were Black composers because when my teacher gave me Chopin, they also gave me pieces by R. Nathaniel Dett. So I was aware that we had Black composers and pianists. And so that's where I really first heard about him.

And I finally decided-- when I went back to Grambling, I taught there before I came to university, I decided for my faculty recital that year I was going to do a black composers of piano music from 1850 to 1950.

And naturally, I wanted to have a piece by Blind Tom. So I did a little research. I wrote to the University of Georgia because I knew that he had been a slave in Georgia. And through interlibrary loan, they sent me a lot of music of his.

Well, one thing I noticed right away, one of the pieces was published in 1890. So how could he have been heard of no more? Then I began to play a piece, and I knew then no idiot--

DAN OLSON: No imbecile,

GENEVA SOUTHALL: --no imbecile, and no none taught could have done that.

DAN OLSON: Really?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: So what I did is that's really when I made the decision that I've got to right the wrong. So that was a 30-year-- I guess you'd say about a 30-year research project.

And what happened is his slave master and the family would take him to places to hear these works, hear orchestras and things. And then he'd go home and reproduce them. He was a genius. There's no doubt about it.

DAN OLSON: A musical genius.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Yeah.

DAN OLSON: Did he die penniless and essentially unrecognized?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: That's what they say, but the black papers question that, the Black papers question it. He was owned interestingly by lawyers because that particular slave master was a political figure, a newspaper editor.

In fact, he had the newspaper, which was the first to ask for secession. That's the kind of political figure he was. But he was also a lawyer, so he knew how to write the things so that he could own him after slavery.

And then in 1887, when the old slave master lost him, he lost him to his son's widow, who was married to a lawyer. So you had these legal people exploiting this situation.

It's a very interesting story, but that's how I got interested in it because I was angry that this is what my classmates were finding out. And that sexism, racism was just-- they're subtle, but there.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota interview with Dr. Geneva Southall, Professor Emeritus of African-American studies at the University of Minnesota. I'm Dan Olson.

When her first husband died, Southall was a young widow with a six-year-old child. She relied on her father and one of her brothers to help care for her daughter while she returned to college. Later, Southall worked in South Carolina at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: In Orangeburg, South. Carolina I was picketing in the civil rights, and then I got to jail a couple of times. I was an activist in '63. But one of the things my father had always told me, you have to love. I think the spiritual part kept me going.

DAN OLSON: Why was it worth, in your judgment, fighting to make sure that those titles were clear in people's minds?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: I remember once Frank Saroff, the dean, wondered why, when things were going out in the paper, it always stressed Dr. Southall. And he said, you never say you're a full professor. And I explained to him that in my community, the word professor had a negative connotation.

DAN OLSON: Where did that come from?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Because in the South, they would make fun of Black people and call them professor, fessor, fessor so-and-so, fessor so-and-so. I said, so that was why to my people, doctor with the PhD was a much greater importance.

DAN OLSON: When I was talking to somebody in the community about Dr. Geneva Southall and asking them about you, they expressed the concern that while there's been progress in recruiting and retaining African-American students at places like the University of Minnesota and other colleges and universities, the graduation rate is still low.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: That's right.

DAN OLSON: Somewhat low. Is that true?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Yeah.

DAN OLSON: And what's the reason? What's the explanation, do you think?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, students have to battle racism and the expense. They have to work and go to school, too. But a lot of it, it's the social climate. I mean, it's the climate. And I'm talking about the winters.

And this is why a lot of the faculty leave. They'll come, you recruit them, get them here. And then four or five years, you look up, they're gone. And that has been a real problem, the retention rate of the youth for faculty.

When our people come here, if they can tie into the community base, they can make their own life outside of the university, which, of course, is what I did when I first came here. The first thing I didn't have to battle a tenure mess.

Also, I found my-- I've always believed in the community. I have outreach. So as a result, I got very active in Urban League and NAACP and all these things, in my church and all of that right after I got here. So I didn't have those kinds of social problems from the very outset. I moved right within my community base.

DAN OLSON: You arrived in Minnesota, in Minneapolis just as white flight had really peaked, the movement of--

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, really?

DAN OLSON: --white people from the city of Minneapolis and Saint Paul to suburban communities. Now, we appear to be living through a time when the flight is diverse. People of all colors are moving to the suburbs.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: That's right.

DAN OLSON: You're still living in the city, I think.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: I certainly am, living just where I came before because I have an integrated neighborhood. It's a neighborhood that we have seen children grow up, have their own children and everything else. It's a very, very seldom do people move from my block, and I like that. It's stable.

DAN OLSON: What was it like for a young woman, a daughter of a preacher from New Orleans, Louisiana who decided she wanted to go to college? Was that the norm?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, that was understood. I mean, that wasn't even a question.

DAN OLSON: Really?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: What are you going to do if you don't go to college. You're going to end up working for white folks in their kitchen. And so in the South, they put a great deal of emphasis on education.

In fact, my father there was nothing he wouldn't do to see that we got-- I mean, it was just no question. You go to school. So that was-- in fact, he would go to the schools to get scholarships for the members of his church children to make sure they-- it was very important in our community.

I think one of the things now that I think flashback, I think one of the things that helped me to curb my personality and the way I look at things-- I was a widow at age 27, and I watched my husband die one solid year. He was 29. It was before they had dialysis machines.

So both of his kidneys went bad and he died one year later in the Veterans Hospital in Oklahoma City. That has an effect on you. You're never the same if you watch something like that. And it has a way of helping you to become much more spiritual, much more understanding. You take things differently.

DAN OLSON: But it can break some people, it can depress some people.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Well, I did have the extended family. See, I had-- after Pat died, he made sure I had his VA insurance. So getting back to going to graduate school, money wise was not the problem.

But I had a six-year-old daughter. And what happened? I had to stay in the YWCA. Remember, that's the '50s. He died in 54. So in order to stay in the YWCA and go to American conservatory, my brother and my sister-in-law kept my little girl that year. And so I always have been very close to my family.

And then when I was at Iowa, my father and mother kept her. So she's kind of the family, the family reared child. I never felt like a single parent because of that kind of help. So I owe a lot to so many people. I didn't do it on my own.

DAN OLSON: You've lived in the deep South. You've lived in the Midwest. Are you optimistic about race relations in this country after spending time here in cold, cold Minnesota?

GENEVA SOUTHALL: The problem with race relations is it's so institutionalized. And that's why in places where they didn't have open segregation, it's worse, It's much worse. The South is doing very well. So I was doing very well because you grow up and you are conditioned to not accept it, but you begin to learn things. Your self-worth and all that is greatly.

One of the things I remember from my Southern background is how connected the educational and the church community were to each other and the family. Everybody helped rear you.

Can you imagine four of my high school teachers sang in my church choir? Paulo Geneva couldn't do nothing. And they always remind you, which is the thing I have a thing about, remember, you reverend's daughter. Oh, I hate people to do that to kids.

DAN OLSON: Northern whites, as you know, are very resistant to this notion that somehow we are as racist as anyone else in the country.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: Oh, because they don't understand what inside of them. They say things-- like, for instance, my advisor, when I went back after I had a PhD, that's the worst time to ask you a question. And he said, Geneva-- and I loved Mr. Sims, he said, I never think of you as a Negro.

Now, he didn't know that was the worst thing to say to me. He was so sure he was doing me a favor by telling me that. And I had to educate him on the cultural realities because he was a good man. He was from Little Rock, outside of Little Rock.

Mr. Sims was really a nice man, but he called himself giving me this information about how much he loved me. And I had to go and tell him about why what he said was so racist. It was a no, no. You just don't say that.

I never-- well, it's like what Ventura just said. I don't see color. Please give me a break. Please see my color. Don't take that from me, you see? It's a historical statement you don't make. In other words, it's like being a Negro would be bad. So I don't think of you as a Negro. Yeah, those are the kind of things people say and think.

Like, if there's an interracial marriage that would take place like at Iowa, they would love to tell you whose child this Black boy was. Well, his father is a dean. It's almost that he's not one of them, you see?

So these are the kinds of things-- that's why Afro-American history and culture courses are so important to help people understand racism. And it has been wonderful for me as I left you or before I left you.

A lot of my white students would call me because they were maybe social workers or working in social service agencies and something would be happening. And they called me to find out, to work with them on that because they remembered something from the class.

And I was in an exercise class yesterday morning and one of my colleagues exercise students, I didn't realize she had been in one of my earliest Afro-American music classes. She's a retired public school teacher.

And she said, Geneva, I'm cleaning out my house because she's getting ready to sell it. And she and her husband are going in a condo. She said, and I found my notes from your class.

And one of the things was written, there's no such thing as a good slave master. I said, the whole idea being if a person is owned, there's no freedom. How can you be good and own them, you see? And so she told me that. I said, wow, did I do that back in the day? But it stuck with her, it stuck with her. And she was Prince's music teacher at Central.

So you do affect the lives, and they began to integrate-- some of my kids who were high school, public school teachers were integrating Black composers in their repertory. So I could see some of the things where I was affecting some students. And that's the important thing.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Geneva Southall, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

GENEVA SOUTHALL: And thank you for having me.

DAN OLSON: Dr. Geneva Southall performing a piano piece by Blind Tom, Thomas Greene Wiggins. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio.

[MUSIC PLAYING]