Ella Jenkins’ Fugitive Civil Rights Pedagogy

Ella Jenkins’ Fugitive Civil Rights Pedagogy:

Celebrating the First Lady of Children’s Music at 100

By Gayle F. Wald

Ella Jenkins, the First Lady of Children’s Music, turns 100 on August 6. To celebrate, we feature an excerpt from scholar Gayle F. Wald’s forthcoming biography This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Right Movement. Based on seven years of research and scores of interviews, it sets Jenkins’ life and work within a larger story of civil rights activism, showing how she used music to model a social world in which children—and adults—are comfortable with, and open to listening to, each other’s distinct rhythms.

The following excerpt from This Is Rhythm tells of how Jenkins smuggled chain-gang songs, spirituals (including many retooled as civil-rights anthems), and lessons about African independence movements into programs for white children in small towns in the Upper Midwest in 1962—and how, like the Freedom Riders then protesting Jim Crow in the South, she persisted despite personal costs.

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The sit-ins and pickets of Ella’s “rebel years” in the late 1940s, when she was involved with the Chicago branch of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), were usually small-scale affairs. She and her fellow protesters would enter restaurants, college cafeterias, and lunch counters in groups of three or four. But the mass struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s—the Montgomery bus boycott, the Nashville student sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Albany movement (associated with a wide-ranging civil rights campaign in Albany, Georgia)—called for new organizational tactics. These activists turned group singing into a potent tool of resistance to racial violence and intimidation. We are not afraid, they intoned from Mississippi prison cells, awaiting trial on trumped-up charges. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, they affirmed, infusing the traditional hymn with new meaning. For organizers, songs like “I Woke Up This Morning” were often as effective as any speech or flyer in communicating movement vision and strategy. “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus,” the people sang. “I’m gonna’ walk, talk, sing, shout! / Hallelu I’ve got my mind on freedom!”

Between 1962 and 1964 Ella engaged in her own freedom organizing through music, inspired both by ordinary people and by artist-activists like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and the Chicago-based musician-composer Oscar Brown Jr. When We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, the drummer’s landmark collaboration with Lincoln and Brown, was banned by South Africa’s Apartheid government in 1962, Ella dedicated an episode of her Meetin’ House radio show to it. Using music to bring together domestic and global struggles against racism, she juxtaposed tracks from We Insist! with selections from South African Freedom Songs, a 1960 Folkways EP, and Big Bill Broonzy’s 1957 recording of “I Wonder When I’ll Get to Be Called a Man.”

The South African government’s censorship of a groundbreaking civil rights album sharpened Ella’s desire to make her own definitive music statement about Black freedom. But her plans for a 1963 Emancipation centennial album were scrambled by an opportunity to work for the School Assembly Service, an agency for educational programs, especially in the arts. Musicians sponsored by the service in the early 1960s included Merrill Nelson, a Minnesota trombonist and marching band director; a percussion trio headed by Harold Jones, a Black Chicagoan who taught at the American Conservatory of Music; and Charles King, a soloist and conductor with the renowned Ohio-based Wings Over Jordan Choir.

It took Ella two tryouts to convince the agency of the viability of her proposed “Adventures in Rhythm” program, modeled on her Chicago rhythm workshops for teenagers. The promotional flyer created by the Service to publicize it with school administrators showed Ella with her conga drum and wearing an African-style print shirt. It also bore the Langston Hughes quotation that Ella had cited in the This Is Rhythm liner notes: “Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I, with all the plants and animals and peoples in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.” The combination of image and words put principals on alert: While “Adventures in Rhythm” would be friendly and fun, it would not shy away from themes associated with Black Americans or civil rights.

During her two seasons with the School Assembly Service—from September 1962 through April 1963—Ella traveled with a series of drivers. But the one who lasted the longest and had the greatest impact was Harold Hampton Murray, a twenty-one-year-old flutist and percussionist who would later record with Sun Ra. Together, they undertook what Harold described as a “beautiful adventure,” in which Ella brought her fugitive civil rights pedagogy to children and teens throughout the Upper Midwest. With Harold behind the wheel of a 1959 Pontiac and Ella giving directions, they embarked on tours that could last several weeks and include as many as three programs, at three different schools, in a single day. At each assembly Ella, who now performed with her ukulele as well as drums, would do a version of her rhythm workshop, with Harold lending a hand on flute or conga. In twenty weeks they logged 28,500 miles.

Harold and Ella were never sure what sort of facilities or audiences they would encounter. Sometimes they were shown to gleaming auditoriums. At other times they found themselves cleaning dingy, neglected spaces just to be able to perform in them. At some schools the teachers used the assemblies as breaks, depositing their students and then disappearing, leaving Ella and Harold to fend for themselves. At others the teachers and principal stayed and took notes.

The folk revival was filled with musicians trading war stories about gigs played in obscure coffee houses or to a handful of drunk patrons in a ratty basement bar. But they had nothing on Ella and Harold, who had to win over indifferent adolescents and high schoolers who would not hesitate to express their boredom. In such situations Ella relied on the interactivity of call-and-response rhythmic group singing. When most musicians performed in schools, they enforced the “rules” of the concert hall, demanding stillness and silence until it was time to applaud. Ella had no such rules; more than that, she expected them to raise their voices. She also paid attention to stagecraft, appearing in her African print dresses and shirts and laying out tables of exotic instruments to pique the students’ interest. She appealed to their desire for forbidden knowledge, explaining that songs could convey histories that were not in their textbooks.

Whereas other people might not have lasted long with such lonely and demanding work, Ella gathered her resolve, approaching her performances as opportunities to plant seeds of tolerance and openness. She invited tow-haired children of Northern European ancestry to join her in singing spirituals that spoke of deliverance from the “Egypt” of slavery. By giving context to Black work songs, she countered textbook fictions of the contented slave and contemporary myths of the Black agricultural laborer. In some assemblies she decorated the stage with a cloth stamped with images of Léopold Senghor with the word “President” underneath. Maybe her audiences would not remember Senegal as the name of the African country that had chosen Senghor as its first leader, or maybe they would not be able to find Senegal on a map. But the powerful notion that Black men could be presidents might lodge in their minds.

Ella and Harold’s “beautiful adventure” was also beset by the ugliness of racism, in an area of the country that infrequently made it into national headlines about civil rights. Not unlike the “real” Freedom Riders, they too were pioneers of freedom, putting their bodies on the line. Many of the children Ella entertained at her assemblies had never seen a Black teacher, or encountered a Black woman in a position of authority, within a school or any other setting. White children would occasionally confide that she resembled their family’s Black domestic servant. Even when their school hosts were courteous and welcoming, Ella and Harold ran the risk of being seen as “intruders” rather than as guests. A school principal once called the police on them for “loitering” outside of the school building, when they had merely arrived early for their performance.

However, the schools were safe havens in comparison to the restaurants and hotels where they sought meals and lodging. Finding places that would serve them was a greater hardship than long days, endless drives, and inhospitable weather. Sometimes their only choice of lodging was miles from the schools where they performed, putting pressure on their already-crowded schedules. Some restaurants refused them peremptorily, with only a look.

Ella experienced such encounters as a form of bodily pain. As she would tell an interviewer years later, “I don’t know if you’ve ever been discriminated against, if you’ve—if anyone had any prejudices against you—[but] there is something in your stomach that curls up. A knot gets into your stomach, and in your throat and you can hardly swallow, ’cause you don’t know what to expect.” When she was dreading an unpleasant encounter, the ordinary friendliness of a waitress or hotel manager could make an average apple pie taste better and a thin mattress feel luxurious. But anxiety always loomed over the next interaction.

To manage the strain, Ella leaned into smalls acts of subversion. Once when the host of a restaurant refused them service on the pretense that the establishment was a “private club,” Ella wrote “Does not serve colored” on a piece of paper and put it in the window as they were leaving. Humor could also take the sting out of sharp emotions. When the white people in small towns openly stared at them, Ella would joke with Harold, “Boy we’re celebrities! Everybody’s watching us.” At times when levity would not do, they took solace in each other. “We kind of talked to each other and therapized each other as we went along,” Harold said. “We rationalized what they were going through, [saying] whatever it is, we’re not carrying their baggage.”

Ella revealed the strain of such experiences in an October 1962 letter to Folkways head Moe Asch, after a traumatic experience in Greencastle, Indiana. “At present I am on tour of Indiana schools presenting school assemblies,” she wrote, “and learning very fast that Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. are not the only states who are afraid and suspicious of the Negro.” At the same time, she wrote to the School Assembly Service’s Betty Carlson, explaining that she would have no choice but to break her contract if they did not begin booking her hotels in advance.

Ella’s tour concluded on April 10, 1963, a couple of days before Martin Luther King Jr. entered the cell from which he penned his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In it he praised the courage and discipline of “the Negro sit inners and demonstrators.” Ella, too had shown courage and discipline. “I know there have been difficult times,” Carlson wrote to her in a parting letter of thanks, “but I hope the joyous ones will come out ahead and am sure that if you think in terms of what you have done for the young people, you will be gratified and feel it has been worth all the effort you have put into it.”

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Reprinted with permission from This is Rhythm by Gayle F. Wald, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by Gayle F. Wald. All rights reserved.

Sources: Author interviews with Ella Jenkins and Baba Atu (fka Harold Murray); Ella Jenkins, interview by Larry Crowe, August 5, 2002, The History Makers, n.d.; Ella Jenkins personal papers, Chicago.

About the author:

Gayle Wald is a professor of American Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her book This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement will be published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press. Wald is also the author of Shout, Sister, Shout!, an acclaimed biography of the rock-and-roll trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. You can follow her on Instagram [@gayle.wald] or find out more about her here.

Reprint requests must be directed to the University of Chicago Press.

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