Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) Meets Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) in 1944.
Johann Buis, D.A., Associate Professor of Music (Musicology), Coordinator of Music History Area
This historical fiction account between a young South African activist, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela during 1944 is set nine years before the death of African-American composer Florence Beatrice Price. This is the final year of the Second World war. It contextualizes racial discrimination in South Africa and the USA.
[Mandela] Florence Beatrice, I am honored to meet you. You are well-known as a cornerstone of the music community on the South Side of Chicago.
[Florence Beatrice] That’s true! But only since I won the Wannamaker prize in 1932 for my Symphony No. 1 in E Minor. The $500 prize came in handy, as a single mother who teaches piano, plays organ in the church, even playing in movie theaters in the early days, and composing music instructional pieces that bring in some funds as well.
[Mandela] At least you can sustain yourself by your music activity. The only Black musicians making money in Johannesburg are the jazz musicians who play at swanky hotels, but mostly they pass the hat playing in shebeens, the speakeasies in the Townships, especially Sophiatown and Alexandra.
[Florence Beatrice] Oh, I shouldn’t forget that during the last fifteen years or so, my friends Nora Holt (1883[?]-1974) and her successor, Maude Roberts George (1888-1943), kept my name before the public in their Chicago Defender columns.
[Mandela] Chicago Defender? Is that an activist organization?
[Florence Beatrice] Oh no! It is according to many the largest circulating Black newspaper in the land. Founded in 1905, the Chicago Defender has a clever distribution system. Train porters would distribute stacks of these newspapers in train stations, sometimes tossing them out at small sidings, especially in the Southern states of the USA.
[Mandela] Would they not go to waste?
[Florence Beatrice] Not all! People passed them from family to family, irrespective of their date, reading about the lifestyles of Black folks in Chicago. Many Southerners became famous in search of opportunities for their dreams. Joe “King” Oliver came with his cornet and small band from New Orleans to Chicago in 1918.
[Mandela] The year I was born!
[Florence Beatrice] Soon afterwards, in 1922, Louis Armstrong also moved to Chicago, at the invitation of Joe Oliver.
[Mandela]. Ah, Satchmo! His records are quite the toast of the town around Johannesburg and other Black communities in South Africa. You know, ever since the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church sent missionaries to South Africa’s Black communities starting in 1896, we have always admired Black Americans for their example of Black achievement. They raised our hopes for equality. The European settlers have always maintained inequality, expecting that we were destined for servitude in perpetuity. They import people from Europe to take the most desired land from us by decree. In 1913 the Natives Land Act was passed that gave between 80-90% of the arable land to the settler minority (less than 20% of the population), setting up Black reserves. I would not be surprised if sometime after this war is over, the settlers will codify the de facto segregation and privileges into de jure laws.
[Florence Beatrice] My grandfather, whom my Mother rarely spoke of, was a slave owner who impregnated one of his slave women, giving birth to my mother. When my Father, the only Black dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, died in 1910, my mother abandoned my brother and me. She moved into the white community in Indianapolis, never to have any contact with us afterwards.
[Mandela] Any system that undermines the dignity of each human being, always results in pathologies in both victims and perpetrators. Might your Mother have lost her prestige when your Father died? She was, after all, “the doctor’s wife!” His passing took away her social crutches.
[Florence Beatrice] Perhaps. What pains me is that she was my piano teacher from the age of four. She was my patient champion, publishing my first composition when I was eleven, and even when I entered the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, she tried to shield me from racial discrimination by registering me a “Mexican” from Pueblo, Mexico.
[Mandela] How old were you when your Father died?
[Florence Beatrice] My brother and I were both older than 18 at the time. I was 23 in 1910 and two years later I married Thomas J. Price, a lawyer in Little Rock. The racial tensions were rife in that Arkansas town, culminating in a hideous event in 1927, the year we left for Chicago. There I found a welcoming music community with vibrant music institutions, an outstanding orchestra, the headquarters of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM) founded in 1919, and the Chicago Music Association of which I soon became an officer.
[Mandela] I would like to know more about the hideous event. But going to a big city of opportunities—in my case Johannesburg--is exactly what I also did. My cousin and I arrived in Egoli, the city of Gold, having escaped an arranged marriage! Talking of family, do you have children?
[Florence Beatrice] Two adult daughters. We lost our only son in infancy. Those girls witnessed and often experienced the harsh treatment of their father. Does law school train people to take revenge on others? You’re a lawyer!
[Mandela] No! Lawyers pursue justice, not revenge. That’s the reason a few young professionals and I founded the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), to train young people to pursue justice. The parent organization, the ANC, was founded three years after its model, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Such organizations should diagnose the societal ills, strategize to correct those ills by legal means, but if the laws are discriminatory, to fight for non-discriminatory laws, even if it means sacrificing one’s life.
[Florence Beatrice] That’s noble and idealistic of you. Thomas lost many clients during the Depression after 1929, depending on my income from piano lessons and compositions that also lost demand. His violent temperament caused me to divorce him four years after arriving in Chicago, leaving me with the two young girls and the memory of having lost a child to death.
[Mandela] How did you cope with that time in your life?
[Florence Beatrice] I was destitute, to the extent that the girls and I moved in with my friend, Estella Bonds (died 1952), a church musician and mother of a protégé, Margaret (1913-1972), my student. It was a humiliating time. The very next year I won the Wanamaker prize for my first symphony and a smaller prize for my Piano Sonata. Margaret, mind you, won prizes for Vocal works at the same competition. She also was the first woman to solo with the all-male, all-white Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She continues to make a name for herself, despite great professional obstacles. Her friendship with Langston Hughes produced many musical settings of his poems.
[Mandela] That is the joy of being a teacher, your legacy. As a Black lawyer in South Africa, during this wartime, my assignment is to fight the unjust laws of a racist society. You call them Jim Crow Laws? It is quite astonishing that many of your eugenics and scientific racism ideas laid the groundwork for racism in South Africa.
[Florence Beatrice] I fear for my daughters. The dysfunction of our family, my husband’s lack of tenderness and compassion, the trauma that all the subsequent experiences visited upon them, must some day leave deep scars on them. What if they denounce me and my racial ardor to bring beauty into the world? I took to heart Antonin Dvořák’s advice—given in the 1890s—for Americans to use spirituals and folksongs as building blocks for compositions of the concert stage. I even substituted Beethoven’s invention of the Scherzo (the jocular third movement in a symphony or concerto) by elevating the West African dance called Juba from the derogatory stereotyping of the blackface minstrel stage to the concert stage in two of my four symphonies and in a concerto. Other Black composers followed this lead of mine.
[Mandela] So, you are an activist! Raising Black culture from the gutter to the heavens!
[Florence Beatrice] Musicians will have my music to inspire them. But I’m still concerned about my daughters. Their aloofness to my Black musical passion and pride is something I wake up from, having nightmares, sometimes waking in cold sweats. I dream that they will walk away from my life’s work or throw it away. The thought really haunts me.1
[Mandela] Don’t trouble yourself with these nightmares. Your music will be honored in its time. I have always maintained that history never validates the lies of racism, provided people expose truth and eventual reconciliation. What was the hideous event you referred to when you fled from Little Rock to go to Arkansas?
[Florence Beatrice] A certain Black man named John Carter who lived in Little Rock, was accused of harassing a white woman. A white mob beat him severely, dragged his body behind a truck, and hung him from a tree near my husband’s law office. The AME church across the street was ransacked, furniture and fabric piled up under John’s hanging body and set on fire. He was innocent of the accusations. The girls were school age at the time. What an impression this must have made on them, even if they only heard the story and never witnessed the atrocity, I do not know.
[Mandela] Such brutality springing from unexamined evidence! Wasn’t it the Bible that says, “the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth?” This year we have witnessed a war trying to pursue hope. Will peace be achieved through the Normandy landings (D-Day), the liberation of Paris, the Battle of the Bulge, and other triumphs against the evil of Nazism? I hope so. What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others. Your music, Dear Florence, will make a difference to the lives of others. That is your genius, and your gift to others.
1Indeed, for fifty-six years after Florence Beatrice’s death, in 2009, a couple bought an abandoned house, overgrown with weeds and shrubs, in St. Anne, Illinois, only to discover a treasure trove of her unpublished manuscripts. These valuable items are housed in the Archives at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. G. Schirmer, the respected publisher, is in the process of publishing these works. Thanks to this discovery, a resurgence in Florence Beatrice’s music has come about. Note: I’m following the practice of her first biographer, Rae Linda Brown (died 2017) who refused to call her by Price, the last name of the ignominious husband.