Story time: William L.Dawson Black Composer i’ve heard nothing about until recently.
Story Time: First I should make it a known fact that my english professor isn’t great. With that being said our third assignment for the class was to find a scrapbook, or something from a scrapbook in the Centenary University Archives and write a “half research, half argumentative paper” on what we found. My first discovery was an article in a scrapbook about an African American composer named William Levi Dawson. When I presented this information to my professor and informed her that I was going to write about him I was then told that “the assignment requires the information from the scrapbook to have to do with Centenary” and unfortunately Mr. Dawson has had absolutely nothing to do with this school. He in fact was born in Alabama and went to the Tuskegee institute at the age of 13. After changing my topic numerous times to fit something about Centenary (she told me to do one of the buildings) and not finding enough information during my research for me to feel like I could write a proper paper I spoke to my teacher to persuade her into allowing me to do my paper on Mr. Dawson and informing her that I would still hit every point that she wanted in the paper. I am now happy that I did that and that she approved. While researching William Dawson I found out so much information about him, and the Tuskegee Institute choir that I had no prior knowledge of. One thing in specific that shocked me during my research process was one of the higher learning institutes that Dawson went to. He went to the Horner Institute of Fine Arts in Kansas City, Mo which at the time that Dawson attended the school was an all white segregated institute. Several teachers fought for Dawson to get into the school because they believed he was extremely gifted. Dawson graduated from the Horner institute in 1925 with his Bachelor of Music Degree in theory. Now for those of you who haven’t realized yet. This means that Dawson attended this all white school 39 years prior to The Civil Rights Act ending segregation and 29 years before Brown Vs. Board Of education even appeared in court. Prior to seeing the article about Dawson in the scrapbook I have never heard of him. Why is information like this kept from us? When will black history actually be history that we are informed of? You would think that the information of a young, intelligent black male who integrated a school 39 years before segregation ended would be known to us all, but it’s not. For anyone who actually read all of this, I spent the time to actually write this information because I feel like we all should know our history.
