In 1888, sociologist and author W.E.B. Du Bois arrived at Harvard as the first black scholar to study for a doctorate from the University. Du Bois broke barriers on campus, but faced exclusion from social life, including the all-white Glee Club founded in 1858.
More than 100 years later, the Harvard Glee Club is starting to reckon with its role in Du Bois’ campus experience. On Saturday, the club will perform a concert titled “The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois,” a celebration of African-American spiritual music and Du Bois’ writings on race and inequality.
“Our troubled relationship with Du Bois was an impetus for the show,” said Glee Club publicity manager Michael Baick ’22. “We’re trying to honor Du Bois and make [the concert] about him, not us. We should always be thinking about how our music can resonate beyond the space where we’re singing.”
The concert honoring Du Bois is a step toward reconciliation with the organization’s past while looking toward its future. Andrew Clark, the music director and conductor of the Glee Club, as well as director of choral activities and senior lecturer on music, conceived the project in 2015. He had learned of Du Bois’ exclusion from the Glee Club after joining the faculty in 2010 and had audited courses on race and modernity and Du Bois’ writing with Cornel West, professor of the practice of public philosophy. It was in these classes that Clark began to form the foundation for the project.
“Music is such a big part of Du Bois’ work,” said Clark, “and he considers music as a vehicle for transformation, reconciliation, defiance, and resistance.” He added that the great sociologist and historian’s influence is clear in both the program’s content and form.
In his pioneering work, “The Souls of Black Folk,” Du Bois began each chapter with an excerpt from both a black spiritual and a European poem, asserting their equality as cultural products. The Glee Club is applying this method to their concert, singing work from both traditions.
