Celebrate BHM With Us in Our “Did You Know?” Series.
If it’s black excellence you’re striving for, do yourself a favor and get fired up by the work of these unsung heroes:
Harriet Gibbs Marshall
Mary P. Burrill
& Rashon Johnson
At Lovelace & Associates LLC we want to uplift the work of 2 black female educators who you probably haven’t seen featured on Tik Tok, but whose work has been just as impactful in the music, and social/political scene.
We also want to highlight a young, Philly-raised King who is leading by example and making big waves as a first generation college scholar and athlete.
Did you know? Harriet Gibbs Marshall
*Harriet Gibbs Marshall Fast Facts*
Harriet Gibbs Marshall was a pianist, writer, educator, and the founder of Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression. One of Washington D.C.’s earliest African American institutions.
In 1889, Gibbs became the first African-American woman to graduate from Oberlin Conservatory with a Bachelor of Music degree in piano performance. Oberlin was a predominantly white institution and the first to admit black scholars.
A true self-promoter. With a faculty of 14 and 600 students enrolled, Mrs. Marshall had to travel the country representing her school in order to gain funding for scholarships. There is record of her traveling to St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh raising capital to fund her all black music conservatory.
Harriet Gibbs Marshall Impact
Before founding Washington Conservatory of Music in 1903, Mrs. Marshall was a gifted pianist who toured throughout Paris and New York. Always an avid learner she first started piano lessons with her sister Ida at the age of 9 and graduated high school early at the age of 15.
Becoming an educator and philanthropist was her life’s work and she is truly a pioneer in the predominately white world of Arts Conservatory.
What started off as a conservatory of music for musicians of color, run by teachers of color, later included speech and drama curricula which is when the name changed to the Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression.
Scholarship was a big part of her philosophy as well as collaborating with other brilliant black thinkers of the time.
She was on the music committee for W.E. Dubois’ play “The Star of Ethiopia” in October 1915 and produced a program on "Negro Folk Songs" at Langston Highschool in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Even when her husband, Napoleon Bonaparte Marshall, a Massachusetts lawyer, took an assignment that moved them both to Haiti. She managed in six years to found another school: the Jean Joseph Industrial School in Port-au-Prince and worked extensively with Haitian social welfare charities.
Upon returning to the states in 1937, as an expansion to the conservatory in Washington D.C., she founded the National Negro Music Center as a resource to both promote creative work and to preserve traditional African American music. Marshall’s conservatory was a landmark in the history of black education.
The Center sponsored regular concerts for the black community, trained many prominent musical professionals and attracted the nation’s most talented musicians as teachers. It remained in operation until 1960.
Did you know? Mary P. Burrill
*Mary P. Burrill Fast Facts*
Mary P. Burrill was an early 20th-century African American playwright who taught and inspired many of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
The first woman of color to graduate from Emerson College (then, Emerson College of Oratory.)
Burrill’s plays were considered protest plays because they advocated progressive stances on issues of race and gender.
She is considered one of the first Black feminist playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance.
As an educator Burrill taught English, history, and drama at Dunbar High School, her alma mater, and at The Washington School of Music and Expression in Washington D.C.
Mary P. Burrill Impact
Mary P. Burill believed that art and education have the power to enact political and social change. As an African-American playwright her work dealt with the black experience of the 1920s, covering topics like lynching, cycles of poverty, and birth control.
One of her most famous plays, They That Sit in Darkness, focuses on the mental and physical effects of a young black mother having multiple children. The consequences fall sadly on the 17yr old daughter who has to give up her dream for college after her mother’s mental breakdown.
Sandra L. West, of Virginia Commonwealth University in a brief essay on Burrill described the work as controversial for its time because the play advocated birth control as a means to escape poverty long before women were given reproductive rights.
Aftermath is set in rural South Carolina and involves a soldier who discovers that his father has been lynched after he returns from fighting overseas. In Aftermath (1919), Mary Burrill presents the character John as an example of the assertive black male who selflessly and fearlessly confronts racial oppression.
While an educator on the high school and conservatory level in Washington D.C. she encouraged several of her students to write plays. One of her prized students was Willis Richardson, who would later become the first African-American dramatist to have a play produced on Broadway. Another was May Miller, who published her first play, Pandora's Box, while still a student at Dunbar.
Many of the prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance credit Burrill as a teacher/mentor inspiring them to create plays, books, and music as deliberate acts of political protest. Her teaching and plays always advocated radical stances on issues of race and gender.
Burrill knew the power of creating safe black spaces. She often hosted literary gatherings in her home, which was known as “the Half-Way House.” It served as a meeting space for creative expression and intellectual discussions among many prominent writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Many of the invited guests where female activists of the Harlem Renaissance gathering to discuss lynchings, women's rights, and the hardships facing African-American families.
Why does their legacy matter?
Change you can see, touch, taste, happens right outside your door and these women took their education and status as educated black women in the 1900s and created opportunity for others in their community.
Rashon Johnson is well on his way, opening doors for others at Shippensburg University as a senior majoring in Sociology and a star basketball player for the Raiders.
When asked why this month is so important to him he had this to say:
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