Finding Cornelius Washington (In Unexpected Places)
I am sorry, but no colored students are accepted at the Peabody Conservatory. — Henrietta M. Feuss
Sometimes, hard histories practically land in our laps. This bit from Johns Hopkins’s past comes from the work of historian Eric Foner. Professor Foner mentioned the Peabody Conservatory of Music in in his text book Give Me Liberty! There we discovered that in 1926, writing from Norfolk, Virginia, a man named Cornelius Washington inquired about admission to the Peabody, only to be rebuffed. “No colored students are accepted at the Peabody Conservatory,” wrote Henrietta M. Feuss, a secretary at Peabody.
Ms. Feuss’s message to Cornelius Washington immediately brought to mind the work of Sarah Thomas, a Hugh Hawkins Research Fellow for the Study of Hopkins History from 2019, “A Message of Inclusion, A History of Exclusion: Racial Injustice at the Peabody Institute.” In her study, Ms. Thomas explains: “The Peabody Conservatory … remained segregated for nearly a century after its founding in 1857, despite Baltimore’s large and growing African-American population. It boasted of an international student body from countries all over the world, but would not admit African-American students who lived just miles away.”
At Hard Histories, Professor Foner’s illustration and Ms. Thomas’s research together suggest how the history of Johns Hopkins can be told, in part, as a series of missed opportunities. Such was the case with Kelly Miller who in the 1880s left Johns Hopkins to return to Howard University and launch an important career in social science. This was also the case with the Rev. John Wesley Edward Bowen, who was discouraged from applying, also in the 1880s, and instead earned his Ph.D. at Boston University. Declining to consider Mr. Washington’s application along with those of other Black prospectives deprived the Peabody Conservatory of an opportunity to admit talented musicians who would have added to the school’s distinction and would have set JHU and the Peabody Conservatory among those educational institutions that stood against rather than with Jim Crow, and for a commitment to an interracial democracy.
Who was Cornelius Washington? We have only hints about who he may have been. In 1911, a quartet of young Black men was arrested for, it was reported, singing a hymn on the streets of Baltimore — “Almost Persuaded.” Among them was a Cornelius Washington. Two years later, in 1913, the Baltimore Afro reported that a young man from Baltimore, Cornelius Washington, graduated from Virginia’s Hampton Institute. In June 1917, a 23-year-old Cornelius registered for the World War I draft, noting that he was an unemployed musician and signing his name with a careful script. Likely he was the same young many who, in 1920, lived in his mother’s Baltimore home and was reported by a U.S. Census enumerator as a “band” musician working for wages. That same Cornelius Washington was noted as heading his own household in 1930 and working as a musician in an orchestra while also, with his wife Mabel, running a rooming house on Etting Street. By 1940, life had taken a turn. Cornelius, best we can tell, was a widower and working as a “pin boy” at a local bowling alley.
The term “hard” when it appears in our project name, Hard Histories, has more than one meaning. Yes, it can be difficult to confront facets of our past that make plain how anti-Black racism, and its expression through the structures of Jim Crow, shaped the day-to-day workings of Peabody Conservatory. The exclusion of Black students like Cornelius Washington diminished the school’s capacity to live up to the nation’s best ideals. At the same time, difficult describes how it feels when the historical record reveals only fragementary, murky even, bits of Cornelius Washington’s story. We are left wanting - still wondering about his talents, his ambitions, his accomplishment and, yes, his disappointments. What instruments did he play, artists did he emulate, and composers did he favor? We’ve already discovered some promising leads, and hope that by sharing these shards of his story we might connect with some of you among our readers who know other parts of his story.
Today, Black students at the Peabody Institute are not only an important part of the school’s community; they enliven and enrich the cultural life of Baltimore City. During our recent webinar, Theresa Sotto of the Walter’s Art Museum discussed a program during which students from the Peabody’s Black Student Union performed in the museum’s galleries as part of its “Activating the Renaissance” exhibition. We’ll leave you with this performance of composer Nathaniel Dett’s “In the Bottoms I. Night,” a tribute for victims of police brutality arranged by Peabody Ph.D. candidate and Black World Seminar member, Jasmine “Jazzie” Pigott.
— MSJ.
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