Event: Leta Miller | UNION DIVIDED: Black Musicians’ Fight for Labor Equality
Date & Time: Tuesday, 2/6 at 7:00 PM
More info: https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/leta-miller

BOOK:

For about 75 years during the twentieth century, the American Federation of Musicians maintained racially segregated locals in more than fifty US cities. The Black locals that formed in the early decades of the century did not arise out of any federation policy. Rather, they organized at the request of Black musicians themselves, who anticipated better access to jobs, more competitive wage scales, admission standards that recognized improvisatory music-making, and guaranteed representation at national conventions. Although these separate organizations helped Black musicians for a few decades, competition with white locals in the same jurisdictions made them increasingly untenable during the Great Depression. Conflicts arose throughout the country and a lawsuit in San Francisco pitted Black local 648 against white Local 6. After 1953, when the first pair of dual locals merged in Los Angeles, the federation moved to mandate amalgamation throughout the country. Black musicians resisted, however, fearing they would become an invisible presence in the much larger white organizations. Two large Black locals, in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, held out to the end and had to be dissolved by the national organization. By 1971, mergers were completed in all cities, but Black musicians did suffer as a result—a situation the federation tried to remedy by new, more inclusive rules, and which the organization is still addressing today.

AUTHOR:

Leta Miller, Professor of Music Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has published widely on music in the twentieth century, including her 2011 book Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, two books on composer Lou Harrison, and biographies of composers Aaron Jay Kernis and Chen Yi. Miller has written more than twenty articles on Harrison, John Cage, Henry Cowell, and Charles Ives; on various aspects of music in the San Francisco area; and on the musical philanthropy of Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Her article on Henry Cowell and John Cage in the Journal of the American Musicological Society won the Lowens Award from the Society for American Music. Miller has lived in Santa Cruz since 1980 and has been active in the community as a flutist, choral director, and teacher.

PRAISE: 

“This work shines light on a little known and understood chapter of the American Federation of Musicians' Unions. It explores the creation by Black musicians, history of, and eventual collapse of dual unionism through the amalgamation of separate African American and white organizations. This was a complicated matter lasting some sixty-plus years and author Miller skillfully shows both the benefits and pitfalls of this development."—David Keller, author of The Blue Note: Seattle's Black Musicians' Union, A Pictorial History, distributed by Washington State University Press.