I'm spending some time sorting through my notes and have come across a few things I wrote down which I wanted to share here.
Firstly a snippet from a 1989 newspaper article; the Charleston Messenger on Saturday 7th May reported about the new industrial buildings on Jenkins' farm ''where criminals and little vicious boys can be put to work for themselves and be made to earn their own bread by the sweat of their brow... it makes one feel that God is conducting the whole affairs of the Jenkins Orphanage'' - sadly a view reflected by many white people at the time, and ironic that the Reverend Jenkins himself was such a religious man and strove so hard to give these children a better chance in life than the hand they'd been dealt.
Jenkins was a very humble man and thanked 'good white and colored citizens, one and all' for their help in his achievements in the orphanage. One thing I came across in several different articles/reports was his concern for children's lungs and their health: he thought, and was probably correct, that children learning wind and brass instruments would strengthen their lungs and so make them less susceptible to lung-related illness.
'I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for a living.' (Charleston Sunday News and Courier, May 16th, 1926). Nobody can deny that he achieved these promises. In 1895 the orphanage was damaged in a storm and Jenkins took some band members North to raise funds for repairs - he said 'I felt that I had rather die than return to Charleston without the money to cancel the debt.' (John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery: The Story of the Jenkins' Orphanage Bands).
If anyone has a Time magazine subscription, there is a great article on Daniel Jenkins here from August 26th, 1935 - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748914,00.html
I don't unfortunately so can't read it again, but I was able to read a photocopy of the article in the Avery research center in Charleston.
In the same year the Times article was written, an Associated Press sports writer called Edward J Nell wrote an article which again paints a clear picture of the orphans. He said 'a negro jazz band rolled up to Max Baer's camp at Speculator the other day and insisted on serenading him... there were fifteen of the funniest looking darkies you ever saw. They were from the Jenkins Colored Orphan asylum in Charleston, South Carolina... the truck was coming apart and the wheels were falling off... the negros played their hearts out. They were very happy.' - another stereotypical, mildly but probably unintentionally racist account written by a white man which portrays the poor conditions the orphans live in, but also the way they had been brought up by Jenkins to be grateful for what they had.
Chilton described Daniel Jenkins as a very striking man over six feet tall with a blue-black complexion. He called the children his 'black lambs' which has been used in many articles and references to the orphans.
Jenkins' life was not an easy one, as anyone might imagine. He was arrested in London in 1895 for creating a spectacle of himself by bringing over an all-black orphan band to play in the streets, and was accused of illegally exploiting children. (Sometimes these old laws surprise me how they could arrest a man for 'exploitation' and yet not too long before kept slaves themselves. The age-old irony.) His wife Lena Jenkins was very ill by the time a new secretary, Eloise Harleston, came to travel with the band as a secretary and publicist: a scandal was created when Eloise became pregnant with Jenkins' baby. She had to move to the UK to have the baby, a little girl named Olive. Eloise and Daniel married in 1912 after his wife Lena passed away. The band were also stranded in England for several months in 1914 when the first world war broke out and travel in and out of England was temporarily halted. Jenkins ended up lending some money to some fellow Americans who could not get home either as they were not allowed to use their foreign paper money until wartime relations settled.
And then there were scandals within the bands themselves: one member was imprisoned in 1919 after stabbing another man in the neck. Some very touching stories from the orphanage have been told by John Dowling, who had his hat spat in by a white man when he offered it round for collections. He remembered ''Now, we were schooled in every way and geared up for anything that might happen. I can remember the tears coming in my eyes as I tried not to cry. But I took my handkerchief, wiped out my hat, and turned to walk away. The man reached out and tugged my coat. When I turned around he put five dollars in the hat.''
I've found so many more of these stories and memories that give glimpses into the lives of these orphans, and of the music they they charmed so many hearts with.
'Born perhaps of the dire conditions in which they found themselves in, the orphans' music was infused with a kind of soulfulness that was not lost of the casual listener.' (The Jenkins Orphanage Bands Viewers Guide).
As I continue my research, I will write another post soon on the music the band played, their influences, and how they in turn have had a largely unacknowledged impact on the development of Jazz music in the rest of the US and the world.
Tuesday, 25 August 2015
Monday, 17 August 2015
The final leg
I am very sad to say that we have reached the end of our amazing trip! We arrived back in the UK on Wednesday morning, two days ago. I'm still a bit jetlagged!
This won't be the last post on my blog, as I'm going to keep it updated throughout my dissertation. I've barely even started reading through the material I gathered in the US so there will be so much more to write about.
Our short time in Birmingham Alabama was made wonderful by meeting up with musician, fig-grower, newspaper-producer, dancer, radio presenter, and all-round lovely guy Bob Friedman (a contact passed onto me by Professor Brian Ward, American studies professor at Northumbria University.) Bob set aside his entire day to drive us round the city, showing us the Birmingham Jazz Hall of Fame where he works, his Birmingham black radio museum project which will one day be a museum too, the Vulcan museum which had gorgeous views of the city, and taking us out for dinner to a BBQ place with his lovely friend Margo. Birmingham had even more Jazz than we realised, the Hall of Fame was a wonderful place to learn about its musical history. I even saw a photo of Julian Dash, once a member of the Jenkins orphanage band who I'd been reading about a few days before in Charleston, with Erskine Hawkins (co-writer of the song 'Tuxedo Junction'). Infact, Dash is also credited as writing part of the song too. Before we left to catch a train further south the next day we managed to catch some of the Jazz band rehearsals happening in the Carver Theater, also part of the Jazz hall of fame.
Me, Bob and Joseph infront of a model of Fess Whatley, a famous Birmingham Jazz musician.
New Orleans was amazing, of course. Labelled aptly as the 'big easy' and the birthplace of Jazz, it is impossible not to enjoy any length of time there. It's the only place I have previously visited in the USA, and I loved it so much I wanted to go back with Joseph. We shopped, partied, dined, experienced its famous nightlife on Frenchmen street (you might have heard of Bourbon Street, but we took the hostels advice and went to Frenchmen where the locals go, and heard some fantastic live music - Joseph signed up to play Bass at a jam session and got to play with the locals!), we made friends from all-over the world in our hostel, and went on a swamp tour down the Louisiana bayou - one of the highlights of the whole holiday.
Joe is on Bass guitar on the right
After New Orleans we flew back up to Washington D.C to have our final two nights with the Haskell's again, and spent them both celebrating Kerstin's birthday which was a great way to end the trip, having a final walk around the neighbourhood, and visiting Brookside gardens and butterfly house.
It's been the best five weeks of my life without a doubt. I miss America. I've always said I was born in the wrong continent. For all the hardships and the inequality that still goes on today, there is something about the country that gives you hope for a better life, and a taste for freedom. We all know Jefferson declared every man to be created free and equal, whilst owning slaves himself. And yet we also know that if many could have seen a way around the fear and uncertainty of what would happen if they freed their slaves, many would have done so very quickly. America is moving forwards, there is sadly no country on earth where every person is seen as equal on all aspects, though some are closer than others. We came across the gay Pride parade in Charleston by accident, and I knew it was the first year where same sex couples are allowed to marry in the state of South Carolina, having followed LGBT rights. It's slow, but it's progress, and America is moving in the right direction. In the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, I bought a badge that says 'Rosa sat so that Martin could walk. Martin walked so that Barrack could run. Barrack ran so that our children could fly' - and it's true, the history of America is a history of pain, and loss, and of terrible wars, but it is also one of hope. You can't walk five minutes in Washington D.C or Philadelphia without reading the words of the Declaration or the Constitution and remembering the principles that this great country was founded upon. The recent shootings in Charleston are a tragic reminder of how far race relations still have to go, but standing at the foot of the giant statue of Lincoln filled me with such a feeling of optimism that was hard to ignore.
I still have a lot of work to do on my project. My travel is over, but in the coming year I'll have to turn everything I've found into a dissertation, and I'm excited to do that. I'm still not entirely sure how I'll even turn this into a poster for the scholarship. I'll be up in Newcastle later this week for a poster-help day led by the scholarship team which should help!
I do have some answers but I also have even more questions. I applied for my scholarship stating that I was looking into audience reactions to Jazz music, and the hundreds of newspaper articles I've read have given me just that. Without looking through all my research, off the top of my head, I think it was the music and the Jazz that saved these people and brought them away from the negative connotations of slavery. I've found the musical heritage of America absolutely fascinating, how black people were able to be seen as more than just their skin colour; in a way, music allowed them to be seen as people. They were not just 'negros' to be looked down upon and pushed out of their homes. They had skills that impressed, and made white people want to emulate them. Perhaps this is why music is featured so heavily in the civil rights era of the 1960s; because music gives people a voice that otherwise might not be heard. I've often heard similar phrases to that, but to really understand you have to experience it yourself, and now I really understand what music can do. In a way I started my musical journey through American history by volunteering with Journey to Justice and being involved in events and the exhibition that showcased the power of music in 1960s America. And my personal journey of course has only just begun, I have the rest of my life to keep on learning, and to keep on singing and playing and delivering the joy of music to others.
If you've kept up with my blog, thanks for reading, and for your support, and thankyou to everyone who has made it possible for me and Joseph to travel to the USA this summer and have the best time of our lives!
And watch this space, I've only just started!
This won't be the last post on my blog, as I'm going to keep it updated throughout my dissertation. I've barely even started reading through the material I gathered in the US so there will be so much more to write about.
Our short time in Birmingham Alabama was made wonderful by meeting up with musician, fig-grower, newspaper-producer, dancer, radio presenter, and all-round lovely guy Bob Friedman (a contact passed onto me by Professor Brian Ward, American studies professor at Northumbria University.) Bob set aside his entire day to drive us round the city, showing us the Birmingham Jazz Hall of Fame where he works, his Birmingham black radio museum project which will one day be a museum too, the Vulcan museum which had gorgeous views of the city, and taking us out for dinner to a BBQ place with his lovely friend Margo. Birmingham had even more Jazz than we realised, the Hall of Fame was a wonderful place to learn about its musical history. I even saw a photo of Julian Dash, once a member of the Jenkins orphanage band who I'd been reading about a few days before in Charleston, with Erskine Hawkins (co-writer of the song 'Tuxedo Junction'). Infact, Dash is also credited as writing part of the song too. Before we left to catch a train further south the next day we managed to catch some of the Jazz band rehearsals happening in the Carver Theater, also part of the Jazz hall of fame.
Me, Bob and Joseph infront of a model of Fess Whatley, a famous Birmingham Jazz musician.
New Orleans was amazing, of course. Labelled aptly as the 'big easy' and the birthplace of Jazz, it is impossible not to enjoy any length of time there. It's the only place I have previously visited in the USA, and I loved it so much I wanted to go back with Joseph. We shopped, partied, dined, experienced its famous nightlife on Frenchmen street (you might have heard of Bourbon Street, but we took the hostels advice and went to Frenchmen where the locals go, and heard some fantastic live music - Joseph signed up to play Bass at a jam session and got to play with the locals!), we made friends from all-over the world in our hostel, and went on a swamp tour down the Louisiana bayou - one of the highlights of the whole holiday.
Joe is on Bass guitar on the right
Holding Elvis, a baby alligator, on the swamp tour.
Hostel buddies!
It's been the best five weeks of my life without a doubt. I miss America. I've always said I was born in the wrong continent. For all the hardships and the inequality that still goes on today, there is something about the country that gives you hope for a better life, and a taste for freedom. We all know Jefferson declared every man to be created free and equal, whilst owning slaves himself. And yet we also know that if many could have seen a way around the fear and uncertainty of what would happen if they freed their slaves, many would have done so very quickly. America is moving forwards, there is sadly no country on earth where every person is seen as equal on all aspects, though some are closer than others. We came across the gay Pride parade in Charleston by accident, and I knew it was the first year where same sex couples are allowed to marry in the state of South Carolina, having followed LGBT rights. It's slow, but it's progress, and America is moving in the right direction. In the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, I bought a badge that says 'Rosa sat so that Martin could walk. Martin walked so that Barrack could run. Barrack ran so that our children could fly' - and it's true, the history of America is a history of pain, and loss, and of terrible wars, but it is also one of hope. You can't walk five minutes in Washington D.C or Philadelphia without reading the words of the Declaration or the Constitution and remembering the principles that this great country was founded upon. The recent shootings in Charleston are a tragic reminder of how far race relations still have to go, but standing at the foot of the giant statue of Lincoln filled me with such a feeling of optimism that was hard to ignore.
I still have a lot of work to do on my project. My travel is over, but in the coming year I'll have to turn everything I've found into a dissertation, and I'm excited to do that. I'm still not entirely sure how I'll even turn this into a poster for the scholarship. I'll be up in Newcastle later this week for a poster-help day led by the scholarship team which should help!
I do have some answers but I also have even more questions. I applied for my scholarship stating that I was looking into audience reactions to Jazz music, and the hundreds of newspaper articles I've read have given me just that. Without looking through all my research, off the top of my head, I think it was the music and the Jazz that saved these people and brought them away from the negative connotations of slavery. I've found the musical heritage of America absolutely fascinating, how black people were able to be seen as more than just their skin colour; in a way, music allowed them to be seen as people. They were not just 'negros' to be looked down upon and pushed out of their homes. They had skills that impressed, and made white people want to emulate them. Perhaps this is why music is featured so heavily in the civil rights era of the 1960s; because music gives people a voice that otherwise might not be heard. I've often heard similar phrases to that, but to really understand you have to experience it yourself, and now I really understand what music can do. In a way I started my musical journey through American history by volunteering with Journey to Justice and being involved in events and the exhibition that showcased the power of music in 1960s America. And my personal journey of course has only just begun, I have the rest of my life to keep on learning, and to keep on singing and playing and delivering the joy of music to others.
If you've kept up with my blog, thanks for reading, and for your support, and thankyou to everyone who has made it possible for me and Joseph to travel to the USA this summer and have the best time of our lives!
And watch this space, I've only just started!
The Lincoln memorial
Thursday, 6 August 2015
'The flash and dash'
Hi!
I'm currently posting from our hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Things are going good here in the US, we're just getting into the travelling life and now only have a week left which is sad. I knew that I wouldn't want to come back! We still have 8 days; today and tomorrow in Birmingham, 5 in New Orleans, and nearly three days back with our family friends in Washington D.C to finish off the trip.
I last posted after we'd been in Richmond on our first day, and a lot has happened since then, I'm not the best at posting regularly... Richmond's Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar Iron Works was wonderful, and made me very excited for studying my civil war module in September. We also paddled in the James river where British America was first founded: we walked along a pipeline underneath a traintrack over the river to find a sandy cove and some rocks where many people were sunbathing. It was supposedly an official trail, but it makes you wonder when you looked down at the river and realised that if someone fell off, as there were no railings, there is no way they'd get back onto the pipe which is a few feet above water level! Public safety in America doesn't seem to be #1 priority; last night leaving Charleston I asked the Greyhound bus driver where the seatbelts were, who just laughed and replied ''Watchyou want seatbelt's for? You plannin' on fallin' down or somethin'?'' !
The James River
Williamsburg was our next point of call, me and Joseph both agree it was one of the highlights of our holiday. The whole town is set in the 1770s in the midst of the American revolution, with all the staff dressed up in colonial period costumes and the shops set in the past.
We saw a fife and drum procession, an actor as Thomas Jefferson read out part of the Declaration of Independence (he held out his arm to me in a photo, such a gentleman), saw General George Washington ride in on his horse to give us an update on the revolutionary war, and watched colonial infantry fire cannons and muskets. It was a really special experience, and very different to living history museums I've been to in the UK such as Beamish.
An unpleasant 22 1/2 hour journey with a wait from 3am-8:15am in Fayetville, NC bus station, brought us to Charleston, which is a gorgeous southern city set right on the coast and surrounded by sea islands. Every street is lined with palmetto trees, the state symbol of South Carolina, and the houses along the harbour and old cobbled streets have huge French balconies and shutters. It reminded me a lot of New Orleans' French Quarter, where we will be in a few days. Charleston was of course the main focus of my research, and it certainly delivered. We managed to get out on the harbor and visit Mount Pleasant across the bay, and go to a few museums including the Confederate Museum, where the daughters of the Confederacy have collected a staggering amount of civil war memorabilia, the old Exchange and dungeon where prisoners and traitors to the crown were kept during the revolutionary war (there we learnt of Charleston's own 'tea party', overlooked in the shadow of Boston's), and the Old Slave Mart museum, the largest indoor site in the area where slaves were bought and sold.
The College of Charleston were extremely accommodating to me and actually gave Joseph and I four nights in one of their guest houses on campus, giving me easy access to their libraries, and they covered the costs for us, which was wonderful of them. The dean of the college libraries John White was my contact there, given to me from Ben Houston, a US history lecturer at my University. I met with John whilst doing my research and he's a great guy, we're very grateful to him and the College for the beautiful accommodation. We also got a ride in a police car because it was raining, from the public safety office where we picked the keys up, to our guest house, which was an experience! That's southern hospitality for you.
Me on the water taxi.
But most of the time was spent inside the College of Charleston's Addlestone library which houses the special collections, and the collections of South Carolina's History Society. I was able to find some wonderful information on the Jenkins orphanage band, including some amazing pamphlets written about the band that I could not get access to anywhere else. I have not had time to digest all the information that I found as that will be a job for when I get back to the UK as I work on my poster for my scholarship. I also spent some time in the Avery research center for African American history and culture (http://avery.cofc.edu/).
There me and Joseph met with the amazing Dr Karen Chandler who has done so much work and research on Jazz music in the area, and on the Jenkins orphanage band. Together with Jack McCray, sadly now passed, she set up the Charleston Jazz Initiative which both aims to uncover the incredible history of Jazz music in Charleston, as well as researching into the lives on the musicians who came from there and the fantastic careers some of them went on to have. Some of you reading might know trumpet player Cladys 'Jabbo' Smith, a talent rival to Louis Armstrong, or Cat Anderson who played in Duke Ellington's orchestra, both of whom were taught music at the Jenkins orphanage. The Avery center contained all of the original documents from the orphanage, including bills, receipts transactions and financial information, administration files, donations and funding records, records of every child to ever attend the orphanage, and Reverend Daniel Jenkins' death certificate. And of course, I found many wonderful photographs which I was able to photocopy (I've only put one in here of Daniel Jenkins, not sure yet about copyright for the others.)
Something very touching I read through were folders and folders of handwritten and type-written letters from mothers, family members and friends of orphans in the care of Jenkins. Some wrote asking if their child could attend and what the procedure was for admittance, as they had heard of how good the musical education provided at the school was. Some children who went there were not orphans.
I read in the records that in 1947, the average cost of feeding a child was $1.44 a day, or $43.23 a month. Daniel Jenkins himself said ''I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for an honest living.'' A devoutly religious man, he made all children go to church on a Sunday no matter what. Sarah Finley Dowling, matron of the orphanage for over 50 years, wrote of them ''it would have done your heart good to see the children on Sunday going to church.' Sometimes the boys went to church wearing girls shoes or coats, 'they did take up a lot of room but they had a special place in that church... They went to church and they tried; they did what they were told to do.''
Reading these personal accounts, holding the documents in my hand, seeing Reverend Daniel Jenkin's personal replies to some of the mothers who inquired after places for their children, seeing photographs of the children dressed up in their uniforms and smiling for the camera because Jenkins had a vision that gave so many destitute children a home and a way of living, made the band come alive more than ever.
A few days ago I visited the original orphanage building on Franklin Street. Today the area around is quite run down. One of the first things you notice about the building is that it is situated right next door to the now derelict and quite spooky-looking town jail. I'd read the day before that the poor children could hear prisoners moaning and shouting at night.
The plaque outside the orphanage building.
Me outside the orphanage, 20 Franklin street, August 2015.
These children's story is a very important one and I am so excited to further research it.
Another quote from Sarah Finley Dowling perhaps sums up best how I feel even though I wasn't even there, though I can close my eyes and hear their music.
''The music lessons, the practice sessions, the beat of the drums, the shining horns, the colorful uniforms, the flash and dash, the excitement of those marching bands exist only in the reminiscences of those in whose lives they played such a memorable part.''
I'm currently posting from our hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. Things are going good here in the US, we're just getting into the travelling life and now only have a week left which is sad. I knew that I wouldn't want to come back! We still have 8 days; today and tomorrow in Birmingham, 5 in New Orleans, and nearly three days back with our family friends in Washington D.C to finish off the trip.
I last posted after we'd been in Richmond on our first day, and a lot has happened since then, I'm not the best at posting regularly... Richmond's Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar Iron Works was wonderful, and made me very excited for studying my civil war module in September. We also paddled in the James river where British America was first founded: we walked along a pipeline underneath a traintrack over the river to find a sandy cove and some rocks where many people were sunbathing. It was supposedly an official trail, but it makes you wonder when you looked down at the river and realised that if someone fell off, as there were no railings, there is no way they'd get back onto the pipe which is a few feet above water level! Public safety in America doesn't seem to be #1 priority; last night leaving Charleston I asked the Greyhound bus driver where the seatbelts were, who just laughed and replied ''Watchyou want seatbelt's for? You plannin' on fallin' down or somethin'?'' !
The James RiverWilliamsburg was our next point of call, me and Joseph both agree it was one of the highlights of our holiday. The whole town is set in the 1770s in the midst of the American revolution, with all the staff dressed up in colonial period costumes and the shops set in the past.
We saw a fife and drum procession, an actor as Thomas Jefferson read out part of the Declaration of Independence (he held out his arm to me in a photo, such a gentleman), saw General George Washington ride in on his horse to give us an update on the revolutionary war, and watched colonial infantry fire cannons and muskets. It was a really special experience, and very different to living history museums I've been to in the UK such as Beamish.
An unpleasant 22 1/2 hour journey with a wait from 3am-8:15am in Fayetville, NC bus station, brought us to Charleston, which is a gorgeous southern city set right on the coast and surrounded by sea islands. Every street is lined with palmetto trees, the state symbol of South Carolina, and the houses along the harbour and old cobbled streets have huge French balconies and shutters. It reminded me a lot of New Orleans' French Quarter, where we will be in a few days. Charleston was of course the main focus of my research, and it certainly delivered. We managed to get out on the harbor and visit Mount Pleasant across the bay, and go to a few museums including the Confederate Museum, where the daughters of the Confederacy have collected a staggering amount of civil war memorabilia, the old Exchange and dungeon where prisoners and traitors to the crown were kept during the revolutionary war (there we learnt of Charleston's own 'tea party', overlooked in the shadow of Boston's), and the Old Slave Mart museum, the largest indoor site in the area where slaves were bought and sold.
The College of Charleston were extremely accommodating to me and actually gave Joseph and I four nights in one of their guest houses on campus, giving me easy access to their libraries, and they covered the costs for us, which was wonderful of them. The dean of the college libraries John White was my contact there, given to me from Ben Houston, a US history lecturer at my University. I met with John whilst doing my research and he's a great guy, we're very grateful to him and the College for the beautiful accommodation. We also got a ride in a police car because it was raining, from the public safety office where we picked the keys up, to our guest house, which was an experience! That's southern hospitality for you.
Me on the water taxi.
But most of the time was spent inside the College of Charleston's Addlestone library which houses the special collections, and the collections of South Carolina's History Society. I was able to find some wonderful information on the Jenkins orphanage band, including some amazing pamphlets written about the band that I could not get access to anywhere else. I have not had time to digest all the information that I found as that will be a job for when I get back to the UK as I work on my poster for my scholarship. I also spent some time in the Avery research center for African American history and culture (http://avery.cofc.edu/).
There me and Joseph met with the amazing Dr Karen Chandler who has done so much work and research on Jazz music in the area, and on the Jenkins orphanage band. Together with Jack McCray, sadly now passed, she set up the Charleston Jazz Initiative which both aims to uncover the incredible history of Jazz music in Charleston, as well as researching into the lives on the musicians who came from there and the fantastic careers some of them went on to have. Some of you reading might know trumpet player Cladys 'Jabbo' Smith, a talent rival to Louis Armstrong, or Cat Anderson who played in Duke Ellington's orchestra, both of whom were taught music at the Jenkins orphanage. The Avery center contained all of the original documents from the orphanage, including bills, receipts transactions and financial information, administration files, donations and funding records, records of every child to ever attend the orphanage, and Reverend Daniel Jenkins' death certificate. And of course, I found many wonderful photographs which I was able to photocopy (I've only put one in here of Daniel Jenkins, not sure yet about copyright for the others.)
Something very touching I read through were folders and folders of handwritten and type-written letters from mothers, family members and friends of orphans in the care of Jenkins. Some wrote asking if their child could attend and what the procedure was for admittance, as they had heard of how good the musical education provided at the school was. Some children who went there were not orphans.
I read in the records that in 1947, the average cost of feeding a child was $1.44 a day, or $43.23 a month. Daniel Jenkins himself said ''I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for an honest living.'' A devoutly religious man, he made all children go to church on a Sunday no matter what. Sarah Finley Dowling, matron of the orphanage for over 50 years, wrote of them ''it would have done your heart good to see the children on Sunday going to church.' Sometimes the boys went to church wearing girls shoes or coats, 'they did take up a lot of room but they had a special place in that church... They went to church and they tried; they did what they were told to do.''
Reading these personal accounts, holding the documents in my hand, seeing Reverend Daniel Jenkin's personal replies to some of the mothers who inquired after places for their children, seeing photographs of the children dressed up in their uniforms and smiling for the camera because Jenkins had a vision that gave so many destitute children a home and a way of living, made the band come alive more than ever.
A few days ago I visited the original orphanage building on Franklin Street. Today the area around is quite run down. One of the first things you notice about the building is that it is situated right next door to the now derelict and quite spooky-looking town jail. I'd read the day before that the poor children could hear prisoners moaning and shouting at night.
The plaque outside the orphanage building.
These children's story is a very important one and I am so excited to further research it.
Another quote from Sarah Finley Dowling perhaps sums up best how I feel even though I wasn't even there, though I can close my eyes and hear their music.
''The music lessons, the practice sessions, the beat of the drums, the shining horns, the colorful uniforms, the flash and dash, the excitement of those marching bands exist only in the reminiscences of those in whose lives they played such a memorable part.''
Sunday, 2 August 2015
Jenkins used the fear of black crime to get support for his orphanage
Just a quick post about a heartbreaking paragraph I just read in Walter J. Fraser's CHARLESTON! CHARLESTON! The history of a Southern City (1989), whilst I do some research in the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library.
The end of the nineteenth century in Charleston saw a rise of crime covering assaults, robberies, prostitution, illegal trafficking and gambling, with fights and stabbings frequent, and bootlegging preferred by many poor blacks over paying for the expensive goods. Wealthy African-Americans often requested the protection of police because they were afraid to leave their homes incase they were broken into by their own race.
According to Fraser, this heightened fear of black crime was used by Reverend Daniel Jenkins to gain funds for his newly founded orphanage, a perspective I have not come across before. A paragraph I found reads as follows:
'Fear of black crime helped a black Baptist minister, Daniel J. Jenkins, persuade the City Council to support the orphanage he had recently founded. The ingenious Reverend Mr. Jenkins argued that he was keeping potential juvenile offenders off the streets and making ''breadwinners out of beggars and loafers,'' and in 1897 the city council voted $250 to support the fifty-four ''colored orphans'' lodged at the Jenkins orphanage. The News and Courier believed he would provide a place where ''the small...thieves, crap shooters, and razor pushes could...learn an honest trade,'' and annually the city government continued to support the orphanage.' - p.34.
I found it touching that Jenkins, a black man himself, had to almost lie and say things he didn't agree with to get white funding for his orphans, which just shows the racial climate of the time period.
The city annually donated around $1,000 to Jenkins, yet the upkeeping of the orphanage cost $20,000 each year: in 1912 donations from the North and collections by the Jenkins orphanage band exceeded the city's donation by ten times. As you might expect, the two orphanages for white children in Charleston were given much more money from the city.
On a slightly more positive note, out of the seventy three lynchings that took place in the state of South Carolina between 1882 and 1900, none were in Charleston. Which isn't to say that the city wasn't highly segregated and unequal.
Yay a photo!
The end of the nineteenth century in Charleston saw a rise of crime covering assaults, robberies, prostitution, illegal trafficking and gambling, with fights and stabbings frequent, and bootlegging preferred by many poor blacks over paying for the expensive goods. Wealthy African-Americans often requested the protection of police because they were afraid to leave their homes incase they were broken into by their own race.
According to Fraser, this heightened fear of black crime was used by Reverend Daniel Jenkins to gain funds for his newly founded orphanage, a perspective I have not come across before. A paragraph I found reads as follows:
'Fear of black crime helped a black Baptist minister, Daniel J. Jenkins, persuade the City Council to support the orphanage he had recently founded. The ingenious Reverend Mr. Jenkins argued that he was keeping potential juvenile offenders off the streets and making ''breadwinners out of beggars and loafers,'' and in 1897 the city council voted $250 to support the fifty-four ''colored orphans'' lodged at the Jenkins orphanage. The News and Courier believed he would provide a place where ''the small...thieves, crap shooters, and razor pushes could...learn an honest trade,'' and annually the city government continued to support the orphanage.' - p.34.
I found it touching that Jenkins, a black man himself, had to almost lie and say things he didn't agree with to get white funding for his orphans, which just shows the racial climate of the time period.
The city annually donated around $1,000 to Jenkins, yet the upkeeping of the orphanage cost $20,000 each year: in 1912 donations from the North and collections by the Jenkins orphanage band exceeded the city's donation by ten times. As you might expect, the two orphanages for white children in Charleston were given much more money from the city.
On a slightly more positive note, out of the seventy three lynchings that took place in the state of South Carolina between 1882 and 1900, none were in Charleston. Which isn't to say that the city wasn't highly segregated and unequal.
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