The Politics and History of Kuumba
Today, the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College is a choir of more than 100 members. Its mission “to express the creativity and spirituality of black people through song” has endured over the years, though the group has experienced many changes and faced various challenges since its founding in 1970. “No one person can understand Kuumba completely,” the choir’s vice president Matthew S. Williams ’14 says. “It’s still a mystery to me how this group has been able to last and maintain so much of what makes it itself for so long.”
The Beginnings
In the late 1960s, colleges across the nation saw an influx in the numbers of black students arriving to their campuses. This was partly a response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination a couple of years before, which sparked a change in the nation’s conscience and caused colleges to open their doors to the black community, as charter member and Alumni President Linda Jackson Sowell ’73 explains. At Harvard, the Class of 1973 included around 30 black women and 75 black men; the previous year had only about 10 black women and 30 black men.
Yet this increase in the number of black students on Harvard’s campus did not necessarily come with a proportional increase in resources and outlets specifically for the black community at Harvard.
“Not only did the curriculum offer little that dealt with the unique history and experience of black people, but the institution itself was culturally alien, and sometimes even hostile, to students of African descent,” Kuumba Singers founder Dennis W. Wiley ’72 wrote in an essay published in Kuumba’s 30th anniversary commemorative booklet.
Current president Lauren E. Fields ’14 adds, “People were sensing a lot of tension and a lot of isolation of the black students.”
“We didn’t really feel that welcome in the traditional organizations on campus,” Sowell says. “Since there were now more of us on campus, it presented an opportunity to create some institutions for ourselves.”
In the spring of 1970, Wiley and his classmate Fred A. Lucas ’72 took a class on the history of black music taught by professor Hubert E. Walters, who later became Kuumba’s first director. Inspired by this class, the two students co-founded a choir, and held the first official meeting in November, 1970, in the old Freshman Union. They wanted to create “a space where people could just come and feel appreciated,” Fields says. Wiley and Lucas named their choir “Kuumba,” which means “create” in Swahili.
Sowell says recruitment was easy in the small black community on campus. “All you had to do was go to a couple of places and go, ‘You want to sing?’ That pretty much did it.”
On Their Own
At first, Fields says, the University was unreceptive to this fledgling organization. “Nothing was easy,” Sowell recalls. “We had to fight for everything.”
Without a real rehearsal space, practices were held in the Freshman Union, then the freshman dining hall. After students had finished their meals, Kuumba members would re-arrange their chairs for practice. As there was no piano, the group sang a capella. Sometimes, the choir even practiced in students’ dorm rooms, where the conductor led the group while sitting on a bed.
For many years the choir was underfunded and had to raise all of its own money. On one tour, the group could not afford a bus ride back to campus, so they asked the audience at their final performance for donations and ended up with just enough to make it back.
When the University released Walters from his contract, tensions rose. The official reason for this termination was that Walters had not acquired his doctorate within an allotted period of time. Fields, however, thinks “it was very clear that it was due to his personal involvement in Kuumba.”
The club’s director of publicity, Ada D. Lin ’14, adds that Kuumba was then very politically active, and the administration “didn’t feel like they could have a faculty member who was associated with that.”
Nor was Kuumba embraced by the student body, Sowell explains. She recounts how at her 40th reunion in 2013, she spoke with non-black students from her class, and most had no knowledge of Kuumba.
Sowell says that she and her classmates were “astounded” to find out that one of the group’s concerts was named after Archie C. Epps, who was the Dean of Students at Harvard from 1971 to 1999, because he had not been supportive of Kuumba. She explains, “His philosophy was that we should come to Harvard and blend in, that we shouldn’t be on campus to do something black.”
Political Roots
From the start, political engagement was central to Kuumba. On May 16, 1971, Kuumba Singers, which then had 39 members, held their first spring concert, entitled “An Evening of Black Spirituality,” in Sanders Theatre. Members stood at the door of the theater and did not allow any white people to enter. They also placed black blindfolds over the eyes of white statues outside the theater. Sowell explains that the goal was to secure a time for “something within our own community, for our own community.”
Fields says, “It was very much this message: ‘We are carving out a space for ourselves at this place that doesn’t want us here.’”
This trend of political engagement continued the following decade, with Kuumba singers performing before and after an anti-apartheid protest on Harvard’s campus in 1985. Lin describes how in the ’80s, there was a national movement of multiculturalism and assimilation that made its way to Harvard. In the ’70s, there had been many initiatives designed to help foster a black community at Harvard, such as a pre-frosh week devoted specifically to black students.
In 1981, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations was founded. Funding that had previously gone towards black initiatives were now funneled to this new foundation. The pre-frosh week for black students was discontinued, and there was an attempt to get rid of the African and African-American Studies department, Kuumba alumnus Curtis Hairston ’84 explains in an interview with Lin conducted by Kuumba as part of an oral history project. Hairston says black students were supportive of funding interactive events, but not the the exclusivity of activities targeted at black students. Kuumba members led and were involved in protests of this shift in support, including the boycotting of the Harvard Foundation.
More recently, the group participated in the Trayvon Martin rally in Harvard Square in March of 2012. “We’re less political,” Williams says, “but we still have that spirit that leads us to stand up for the rights of black people this century.”
A Musical Palette
Kuumba has always performed songs from a wide variety of genres. Williams explains that at a concert, they perform spirituals, contemporary gospel, and one piece from somewhere else in the diaspora such as jazz, reggae, or blues. “Kuumba was a palette upon which all this kind of music could be presented,” Sowell says.
The music is rooted in a historical, religious, and cultural context, expressing the experiences of black people who lived through slavery, through civil rights, and through more contemporary black experiences. These songs were born out of struggle, Lin says. “They were what was sung in the fields.”
The students also explain that the group chooses songs that celebrate the diverse cultural heritages of the members. “We try to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to expressing black creativity and spirituality,” Williams says. At the most recent anniversary concert in 2010, the group performed a song in Igbo, a language spoken by the Igbo people of Nigeria, because their assistant director was Igbo.
The Kuumba Community
Kuumba has never had auditions, so from the very beginning any student could come join the group regardless of their singing abilities—and members do not need to be enrolled in Harvard College. Students from other schools as well as Boston and Cambridge residents have been part of Kuumba since it was founded. “It’s been open to anyone if they want to celebrate the black experience,” says Dennis J. Henderson ’79, a former president of the Kuumba Singers.
In the mid-’70s, several Latino students wanted to join the choir. There was some initial conflict around the matter, although the students were ultimately accepted into the group. Although some members appreciated solidarity, Fields explains, other members worried that the comfort level of the community could be damaged with the inclusion of those “who aren’t from those experiences and don’t have direct contact with the issues that we struggle with.”
Sowell, who had already graduated by the time non-black students joined the choir, explains her surprise on hearing of this change: “Our visions didn’t include that.” But she describes how Kuumba provides an anchor through the spiritual connections within the group and with God, and asks, “Why shouldn’t it be an anchor that would be valued by more than the African American students on campus?”
Hairston recalls when a white female student wanted to join the choir when he was a member. The ultimate consensus, he says, was that “anybody can join the choir as long as they share the focus and goals of the organization.”
The group “began as a community, and we still really are a community first,” Fields says. In fact, sometimes the group is even a family, members explain, as there are currently many “kuumbabes” in the choir: students whose parents met through Kuumba. “Many of our children followed us to Harvard,” Sowell says, “and most of them also join Kuumba, which I think says a lot.”
A Necessity
For Kuumba members today, the history of the group lives on. The Kuumba office in the SOCH is full of relics from the past, with old photos, posters, and quotations from old members lining the walls, and binders of old concert tickets and news clips. Currently, Lin is spearheading a project to write a book about Kuumba’s history.
“So much of black history is not documented and not kept up with,” Fields says. “It’s amazing that we have this ability to reach back, and look at what happened forty-some odd years ago.”
Fields explains how her mother was telling her that at the beginning, the members “were just trying to get to the next day—they had no idea that this thing they created would last 44 years.”
Though many things have changed since 1971, Williams says that being a black student at Harvard remains a defining experience. He says Kuumba has shown him “a dimension of my life that [he] wasn’t even aware of.”
As Williams explains, “Kuumba was and still is a necessity for black students.”