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BLACK WASHINGTONIANS IN THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY: AN INTERVIEW WITH
MAURICE JACKSON  
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Robert Greene II
February 19, 2025
Black Perspectives
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_ Interview with Dr. Maurice Jackson about his new book on the use of
sport and music. Traditionally not fields touched on extensively in
intellectual history, the book builds on both of these to create a
rich tapestry of life in Washington, D.C. _

Maurice Jackson, Black Perspectives

 

_In today’s post, DR. ROBERT GREENE II
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assistant professor of history at Claflin University and President of
AAIHS, interviews historian DR. MAURICE JACKSON
[[link removed]],
Associate _Professor of History at Georgetown University. Professor
Jackson teaches in the History and African American Studies
Departments and is Affiliated Professor of Music (Jazz) at Georgetown
University. Before coming to academe, he worked as a longshoreman,
shipyard rigger, construction worker and community organizer. He is
the author of _Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of
Atlantic Abolitionism_, co-editor of _African-Americans and the
Haitian Revolution_, of _Quakers and their Allies in the Abolitionist
Cause,1754-1808_ and _DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington,
DC. _Jackson wrote the liner notes to the 2 jazz CDs by Charlie Haden
and Hank Jones, _Steal Away: Spirituals, Folks Songs and
Hymns_ and _Come Sunday._ He has recently lectured in France,
Turkey, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Qatar. He served on Georgetown
University Slavery Working Group. A 2009 inductee into the Washington,
D.C. Hall of Fame he was appointed by the Mayor and the DC Council as
Inaugural Chair of the DC Commission on African American Affairs
(2013-16) and presented “An Analysis: African American Employment,
Population & Housing Trends in Washington, D.C.” to the Mayor and
elected leaders of the D.C. government in 2017. His latest book is
entitled _Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: _
[[link removed]]_How
Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for
Equality_ (Georgetown University Press, 2025).

ROBERT GREENE II (RG): YOUR NEW BOOK, _RHYTHMS OF RESISTANCE AND
RESILIENCE, _IS ALL ABOUT BLACK WASHINGTONIANS. BEFORE WE GET INTO
THE MEAT OF THE BOOK, WHY IS THE BROADER HISTORY OF BLACK WASHINGTON
IMPORTANT TO BOTH BLACK AMERICAN HISTORY AND BLACK INTELLECTUAL
HISTORY? WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE NATION’S CAPITAL THAT HAS MADE IT SUCH
AN IMPORTANT CITY IN THESE BROADER HISTORIES?

MAURICE JACKSON (MJ): Thank you for speaking with me. I am trained in
the history of the Atlantic World
[[link removed]] of
the 17th through 19th centuries. In many ways, the struggles and the
strivings of Black people in Washington have been a reflection of the
Black struggle in the nation and the world. This history reveals the
same mix of structural oppression and inequality with compelling
struggles against that oppression and inequality
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can be found in the rest of the United States. Historian Frederic
Bancroft wrote in _Slave-Trading in the Old South_
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“Washington became the center of the slave trade before 1835” and
for almost “half a century, the slave-trade, although far from being
the largest, was the most notorious.”At the same time, Washington
was becoming a national showcase for the selling of Black people, it
was also becoming a center of the fight against slavery
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internationally. By that time, there were at least 130 local abolition
societies across the nation, many with Washington connections and many
Black and whites worked together. Today, the issue is how can Black
people who have built this city be able to stay here in the midst of
being priced out? And will a multi-racial coalition come together to
halt to economically and racially forced outmigration? Today,
Washington is as segregated as it was when President Harry Truman
established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in December
1946. The report entitled _To Secure These Rights_, ended  “he
must send his children to the inferior public schools set aside for
the Negroes … he must endure the countless daily humiliations
brought on by racism and segregation.” That is as true now as then.

RG: WHY THE USE OF SPORT AND MUSIC? THESE ARE TRADITIONALLY NOT FIELDS
TOUCHED ON EXTENSIVELY IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, BUT YOUR BOOK BUILDS
ON BOTH OF THESE TO CREATE A RICH TAPESTRY OF LIFE IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
HOW DID SPORT AND MUSIC ALIKE PROVIDE NEW AVENUES FOR BLACK PEOPLE TO
BE ACTIVISTS, COMMUNITY BUILDERS, AND THINKERS?

MJ: Music and sports have come naturally to people of African
heritage. Maybe it is so with all the world’s peoples. Yet being
natural at something does not naturally make you good at it. You have
to put in the time and effort. Take a great musician like John
Coltrane. Yes, he was innovative. He could do all kinds of things with
notes and phrasings. But he still had to read sheet music and learn
the western cannons of music. He thought things out. Just look at his
mathematical notations –same with Ornette Coleman or Geri Allen.
Take Wynton Marsalis. He is equally adapt in the world of classical
music as he is at jazz winning awards in both categories. Coltrane
wrote “Alabama” about the 16th Street bombings in Birmingham.
Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit” to protest lynchings.
 Charles Mingus wrote “Fables for Faubus.” Ellington wrote
“Black, Brown and Beige ” in honor of Black people who fought at
the Battle of Savannah and of Henri Christophe who served with the
American forces. Black musicians like Washington’s Sweet Honey in
the Rock have used their abilities and talents to fight for their
people.

There are so many myths in life, in sports, and in music. For example,
Black kids can’t shoot—Steph Curry, the Washington areas Kevin
Durant have disproved that. So did Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing and who
both when went to Spingarn High School. Black people can’t play
Quarterback and can’t lead. Two Black quarterbacks led their teams
in the Super Bowl. Black folks are only good with big balls like
football and basketball and not small balls like golf and tennis but
look at Serena and Venus Williams, Coco Gauff, Madison Keys and 
Naomi Osaka following the lead of Althea Gibson and DC’s own
Margaret and Roumania Peters.

Washington is the city of James Reese Europe who enlisted in the Army,
during World War One, went to France with the Harlem Hellfighters and
took the music there. Washington is the birthplace of Duke Ellington,
Shirley Horn, Buck Hill, Marvin Gaye and mambo sauce. It is the city
where two Turkish-born brothers, Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, opened
their home in the Turkish Embassy to Black musicians when white
establishments would not. Washington is the city where Chuck Brown
became the Godfather of Go-Go music.

Few things have united Black and white people in DC. But, at times,
music and sports have united residents. In 1939, contralto Marian
Anderson was denied the right to perform at Constitution Hall owned by
the Daughters of the American Revolution’s (DAR). The fight extended
to the DC School Board when the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee
(MACC) tried to reserve Central High School (later renamed Cardozo),
which was all white. The _New York Amsterdam News_ of April 8, 1939
denounced the board’s action as “Nazism in D.C.,” where
“democracy and justice are flaunted so cruelly” in a city claiming
to be the capital of democracy. Howard University professor Doxie
Wilkerson of the National Negro Congress led the MACC to challenge the
Board’s decision. With the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
who resigned her DAR membership, Secretary of the Interior Harold
Ickes arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial. In short, Anderson could perform at a site controlled by the
federal government, but not in Washington, D.C. On Easter Sunday,
April 9, 1939, the concert was held with 75,000 in attendance, one of
the largest truly multiracial actions in US history. Anderson sang
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” and  “Gospel Train,”
arranged by her friend Harry Burleigh, “Ave Maria,” and
“America.”  Broadcast over NBC Radio millions, the world, heard
it live, in rebroadcasts, in newsreels and movie houses. Ickes ordered
the National Park Service to desegregate, including all
government-owned parks. While the city would not desegregated its
public facilities, the Anderson campaign made the city’s cause a
national one and helped pave the way for  the desegregation of  the
Washington in 1957.    

 

 

RG: YOUR PREVIOUS BOOKS, SUCH AS _LET THIS VOICE BE HEARD: ANTHONY
BENEZET, FATHER OF ATLANTIC ABOLITIONISM _AND _DC JAZZ: STORIES OF
JAZZ MUSIC IN WASHINGTON, D.C. _HAVE DEALT WITH DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF
BLACK CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE OVER THE LAST THREE CENTURIES.
HOW IS YOUR NEWEST BOOK SITUATED IN THIS LARGER NARRATIVE OF THE
INTERSECTION OF BLACK CREATIVITY AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE?

MJ: Anthony Benezet was a schoolteacher—a French born Huguenot
(Protestant) whose family was persecuted and exiled from Catholic
France. He saw the oppression of enslaved Africans in Philadelphia
through the eyes of his own oppression. He meant to do something and
opened the African Free School where Robert Allen and Absalom Jones
studied. Benezet studied the enlightenment thinkers especially the
Scottish Moral Philosophers —George Wallace, Frances Hutcheson and
later Adam Smith. He joined that with a profound study of Africa. So,
I studied everything that Benezet studied and wrote _Let This Voice
be Heard._ I coedited _Quakers and Their Allies in the Abolitionist
Cause, 1754-1808 _with Susan Kozel. My own graduate school advisor
Marcus Rediker later wrote a book and produced a play on the Quaker
Benjamin Lay. I co-edited with Jacqueline Bacon _African American and
the Haitian Revolution. _ Since then Leslie Alexander and  Brandon
Byrd have published notable books on the topic.

From an intellectual history view, Black scholars and thinkers were
always in the forefront, along with regular working people to fight
for racial, social and economic equality in DC, the nation and the
world, especially the Caribbean and Africa. Washington’s Mary Church
Terrell proclaimed on February 18, 1898 before the National American
Women’s Suffrage, “And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward
we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms
of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.” Anna
Julia Cooper published _Slavery and the French and Haitian
Revolution_ and played leadership roles in W.E.B. Du Bois’
Pan-African movement. Nannie Helen Burroughs founded the National
Training School for Women and Girls in 1909. Alain Locke the
foundational thinker behind the “New Negro” concept was at Howard
University. A Washington Renaissance, was proclaimed even before a
Harlem Renaissance as expressed by Edward Christopher Williams in
his_ When Washington Was in Vogue._ Carter G . Woodson, “the
father of Black History “was here founding the Association for the
Study of Negro Life and History and the _Journal of Negro _History
and Negro History Day, now Black History Month. In Washington, W.
Alphaeus Hunton and Leo Hansberry researched and taught about Africa
at Howard University. My wife Laura and I just visited the Elizabeth
Catlett exhibit at the Brooklyn  Museum. A 1934 graduate of DC
prestigious Dunbar High School and later Howard University, her work
helped inspire the Black Arts Movement that had its foundation in WDC
going back to when my late friend Amira Barak was a student at Howard
and studied with Sterling Brown. I could go on for days.

RG: MUCH OF YOUR SCHOLARLY WORK HAS INTERSECTED WITH PUBLIC WORK ON
BEHALF OF THE D.C. GOVERNMENT. HOW DO YOU SEE YOUR ROLE AS A SCHOLAR
AND WRITER IN A CITY LIKE WASHINGTON, D.C.? DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS
PART OF A LONGER LINEAGE OF BLACK SCHOLARS AND CONCERNED CITIZENS IN
THE NATION’S CAPITAL?

MJ: Under President Woodrow Wilson, African-American federal
employees saw an increasingly hostile and segregated atmosphere as
they sought the same job and housing opportunities as whites. After
World War I, the “Red Summer” riots saw white mobs kill more than
100 Blacks in 25 U.S. cities, including D.C. where at least three
whites, including two policemen and four Black men were killed and
hundreds injured. One  hundred years later, we again see attacks on
federal workers. Washington became the first major city in the U.S.
with a Black majority population by 1957. Eleven years later, in 1968,
the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prompted widespread
protest and rioting as underlying factors such as job and housing
discrimination and police brutality contributed to a spontaneous
display of frustration.

By 1970, the Black population was 70%. Today, Washington is undergoing
a “renaissance” of redevelopment, with gleaming office buildings
and expensive apartments, but the benefits have not gone equally to
everyone.

The Mayor of Washington appointed me as the inaugural chair (2013
2017) of the DC Commission on African American Affairs
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offer ideas toward a solution. Today, housing costs, fewer job
opportunities, crime, and poor inner-city schools have driven the
Black population to below 45 percent. And with the loss of the Black
population a lot of the city’s Black history and culture is in
danger of being lost. My latest manuscript, which ought to be out
within a year is titled _Halfway to Freedom: The Struggles and
Strivings of Black Folk in Washington, DC, 1780 to 2020. _It tells
the long social history of a people, a national and even global
history through the eyes of Black people in the nation’s capital. I
have put my heart and soul into the book just as I have put my heart
and soul into this city [[link removed]].

RG: IN CONCLUSION, WHAT WAS MOST SURPRISING ABOUT WHAT YOU DISCOVERED
WHILE RESEARCHING YOUR LATEST BOOK?

MJ: A Russian thinker once wrote,  “you can’t swim the same
river twice.” It means you have to keep up with the currents—to
adjust to the conditions; to keep moving; and to try to grow as best
you can. I do not know if it is a surprise or a further affirmation of
the boundless capacity of Black people to endure and to fight for
equality; to learn along a continuing journey; to seek the truth; and
to use that truth to better humanity. That is what Paul Robeson, Du
Bois, Angela Davis and others have taught us. That is what Amiri
Baraka taught as he studied the Turkish author Nazim Hikmet, the
Haitian poet Jacques Romain, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Irishman
Sean O’Casey. Of course, he knew the works of Georgia Douglass
Johnson, Nikki Giovani, Sonia Sanchez and Gwendolyn Brooks, of
Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Nadine
Gordimer. Black scholars have learned as Tony Morrison said of
Dr.King: “to look beyond ourselves.” Blair Ruble and I enlisted 
top jazz scholars in the city to edit a volume _DC Jazz: Stories of
Jazz in Washington, DC._  The pianist and composer Jason Moran wrote
the forward. I wanted to look deeper and wrote _Rhythms of
Resistance.
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reaffirmed my belief that music and sports teaches us —to seek to
grow individual and collectively. “To look beyond
ourselves.” _Always._

_Copyright © AAIHS [[link removed]]. May not be reprinted
without permission
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* African Americans
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* Black History
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* Music
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* sports
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* Black musicians
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* Black athletes
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* Washington DC
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* Activism
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* Black politics
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* Black protest
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* Black radicalism
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* civil rights movement
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* Equality
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* race
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* Racism
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* jim crow
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* slavery
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* racial violence
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* resistance
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* Government Workers
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