DeHart Hubbard grew up in Walnut Hills, completed his studies at the segregated Fredrick Douglass School, graduated from the (primarily white) Walnut Hills High School (1921), and from the University of Michigan (1925). Along the way he became the first African American to win an individual gold medal in the Olympics, for the broad jump, in Paris, in 1924, and tied the world record of 9 3/5 seconds in the 100-yard dash in Cincinnati, in 1926. After graduation from Michigan, Hubbard came back to Cincinnati. His career in The Queen City shows how well rounded that education was.

Hubbard, perhaps surprisingly, played an important role in the cultivation of Black Choral Music in our city. Cincinnati had elected a reformist government in 1926, headed by Mayor Murray Seasongood. One of the progressive innovations created a Cincinnati Public Recreation Commission, independent of the powerful Park Board and staffed under Civil Service rules. Hubbard’s academic work allowed him to earn the highest score in a written exam for the new Commission’s position of Supervisor of the Department of Colored Work. Giving back to the community, Hubbard filled the position for more than a dozen years from his hiring in 1927.

Three other departments of the Commission took on responsibilities for sports, handicrafts, and music – but only for white participants. (It is perhaps worth noting that none of the white applicants for Director of Athletics passed the Civil Service exam, so the position had to be reopened.) It is not surprising that Hubbard succeeded in organizing high-participation adult league sports including track, baseball, basketball, and volleyball. He also set up supervised play for Black children in the summers and lobbied successfully for separate recreation spaces for his race in neighborhoods where the “Public” Commission facilities excluded Black residents. The Department of Colored Work also provided handicrafts in its segregated rooms.

Hubbard’s accomplishments in the Recreation Department point to his roots in Walnut Hills. In the character of the neighborhood and of the community in the city, he organized a large and successful series of Black choirs, orchestras, and concerts. There was not money in the budget of the Department of Colored Work for music; nor did the Commission’s (white) Department of Music provide any support for the Black musicians. Nonetheless, one of Hubbard’s early Recreation Commission projects, in 1929, was to organize a “Large Negro Chorus,” aiming for a choir of more than 200 voices. Rehearsals took place on different weeknights at the two segregated Black public schools, Stowe School in the West End and Frederick Douglass in Walnut Hills.

Hubbard reached out in the African American community to continue recreational music programs. The most successful collaboration came with the Negro Civic Welfare Association, a body organized to coordinate services in the Black community sponsored by the Community Chest. With assistance of James Robinson, the African American Yale graduate at the head of the organization, Hubbard conducted a survey in the Black community to determine recreational needs and opportunities. Music was high on the list. The Public Recreation Commission treated Hubbard’s department as separate and, like so many Black organizations, distinctly unequal. The Commission created an advisory committee of prominent citizens, all white. Robinson and Hubbard responded by creating a Black advisory committee they called the Citizens’ Recreation Council to provide similar, Black advice to Hubbard’s department.

We have seen that there was a rich history of classical music in the Black community from the nineteenth century, and of Spirituals arranged in both classical and “natural” styles, in Walnut Hills as well as downtown. Through the 1920s, the Civic Welfare Association sponsored choirs and orchestras for the Black community. In 1929, Hubbard recruited the African American Artie Matthews to direct a new chorus, in part sponsored by the Public Recreation Commission but administered by the independent (Black) Citizens’ Recreation Council. Matthews had begun his career as a blues and ragtime piano arranger and player. In the 1910s he got a job in a wealthy Black Chicago church and fell in love with Bach and other classical liturgical music. A few years later he moved to Cincinnati as music director for the segregated St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. In 1921 Matthews opened the Cosmopolitan School of Music to teach classical music performance to Black Cincinnati. Hubbard’s Community Chorus in 1929 expanded the reach of the Cosmopolitan School. Hubbard continued to organize the choirs all through the 1930s through the Department of Negro Work in the Recreation Commission, though his own organization, the Public Recreation Commission, still largely ignored his work. For reports of the music program, we need instead to follow the work of the Community Choral Club – by 1932, 80 voices presented in six concerts – and then of the Citizens’ Recreation Council, both Black-organized and -funded.

It is reasonably well documented that the Public Recreation Commission sponsored a series of “June Festivals” featuring Black music and musicians beginning in 1938 and continuing, with a break for World War II, well into the 1950s. The story usually told makes these June Festivals sort of junior adjuncts to white Cincinnati’s long tradition of May Festivals which featured large civic choruses singing European classical music. In fact, all through the 1930s, Hubbard organized his community to practice and present not only European Classical music similar to that of the May Festival, but also classical music with Black melodies and rhythms by composers like the Anglo-African Samual Coleridge-Taylor and African American Henry Thacker Burleigh, and classically arranged Spirituals like those introduced by Fisk Jubilee Singer Jenny Jackson DeHart in Walnut Hills for a quarter-century after her arrival here in 1885.

What seems hard for our city’s white musical community to grasp is that the Black community brought these new styles to our city in a continuous tradition dating back to the heady years of Reconstruction, and before.