Between the world wars, Chicago Race women nurtured a local yet widely resonant Black classical music community entwined with Black civic life. Samantha Ege tells the stories of the Black women whose acumen and energy transformed Chicago’s South Side into a wellspring of music making.

Ege focuses on composers like Florence Price, Nora Holt, and Margaret Bonds not as anomalies but as artists within an expansive cultural flowering. Overcoming racism and sexism, Black women practitioners instilled others with the skill and passion to make classical music while Race women like Maude Roberts George, Estella Bonds, Neota McCurdy Dyett, and Beulah Mitchell Hill built and fostered institutions central to the community. Ege takes readers inside the backgrounds, social lives, and female-led networks of the participants while shining a light on the scene’s audiences, supporters, and training grounds. What emerges is a history of Black women and classical music in Chicago and the still-vital influence of the world they created.

A riveting counter to a history of silence, South Side Impresarios gives voice to an overlooked facet of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

Samantha Ege is an award-winning researcher and musicologist, internationally recognized concert pianist, and popular public speaker.

Acknowledgments

Introduction    Finding Their Place in the Sun

Part I   “Colored Women Have a Genius for Leadership”

1. When and Where They Entered
2. She Proclaimed a Chicago Renaissance
3. The Black Classical Metropolis

Interlude I       Race Woman’s Guide to the Realm of Music

Interlude II      Fantasie Nègre

Part II  “They Have Worked. They Are Now Working Harder than Ever”

1. Movements of a Symphonist
2. Seizing the World Stage

Conclusion      In Honor of Mrs. Maude Roberts George

Notes

Bibliography

Index