Thursday, February 13, 2025
An evening of Black history and music returned to Holy Trinity on 36th Street for its third annual gathering, headlined as “Rhythms of Resistance and Resilience: How Black Washingtonians Used Music and Sports in the Fight for Equality with Dr. Maurice Jackson.”
The Feb. 5 event was co-hosted by the Citizens Association of Georgetown, the Holy Trinity Social Justice Ministry and Holy Trinity History Team.
It featured performances by Duke Ellington School of the Arts’s talented students — Layla Rochelle Bunch, Cynaa Nicole Moorman and the Jazz Combo Trio.
“There will be cuts in the arts,” lamented LaMarr Funn, Associate Director of Development & Community Engagement at Duke Ellington School. “Pray for us. … There is a great erasure of African American history happening … African American history is American history.”
Nevertheless, Funn was proud to acknowledge that Duke Ellington students would be going to France to sing with the Notre Dame Choir this summer.
Paul Maco, chair of Holy Trinity’s history committee, welcomed the audience by saying, “Our human nature is to yearn for community. And so, as this evening progresses, may all here begin to feel a greater sense of community. … Listen, learn and let your heart soar.”
Man of the hour, author and Georgetown University Professor of Music and History Maurice Jackson said a prayer for Georgetown’s President Emeritus Jack DeGioia, who is recovering from a stroke, before beginning his talk.
“Music is balm,” declared Jackson as he took listeners on a magical history tour of Black musical arts.
As connected to jobs and music, the professor invoked the genius of Duke Ellington, jazz pianist and composer, who was born in the West End neighborhood, not far from Georgetown.
Jackson explained how Czech composer Antonín Dvorák admired “Negro Spirituals” and saw Black music as a foundation for American music.
He highlighted the popularity of “The Song of Hiawatha” by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
The professor spoke of the Harlem Hellfighters and the jazz version of “La Marseillaise” in World War I.
Of course, he also spoke of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, singer Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial — and the fight against racial prejudice.
Jazz trumpeter Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong criticized President Dwight Eisenhower on the delayed integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Jackson noted.
Jackson listed some of the jazz places closed due to gentrification and said that “D.C. is more segregated now” that in his younger days.
Still, he smiled, there’s Sweet honey in the Rock, the all-female singing group.
The professor also claimed that Ellington’s last concert was held at Georgetown University on Feb. 10, 1974, three months before his death.
And so it went, with the professor illuminating his audience with the meetings of Black musical history and social history.
After all, Black history is everyone’s history.