Abstract This article examines how barbershop quartet singing functioned as a key battleground for debates over civil rights and racial segregation during the long civil rights era. It centers on the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA), an international fraternal organization, from its founding in 1938 to its reluctant desegregation in 1963. Drawing on previously unexamined internal documents, in combination with newspaper accounts and oral history, the article excavates a segregationist past largely absent from scholarly and popular accounts—a history, the archive reveals, that was purposefully buried by the society itself. Barbershop served as a unique site for civil rights discourses, the article argues, owing to its reputation as a quintessentially American art form and its prominent use of the metaphor of “harmony”—musical, social, and racial. While a nostalgic myth of innocent musical enjoyment has long sanitized the history of barbershop, this article shows that the society served as a microcosm of a politically divided nation. Beyond offering an unvarnished look at how musical and fraternal organizations discussed matters of racial segregation behind closed doors, the article unearths the stories and voices of several Black musicians who, despite being characterized as “dissonant” to the barbershop style, mobilized their presence as political action, ultimately leading to SPEBSQSA’s desegregation. What emerges is a history of music and race that sheds light both on deliberately suppressed Jim Crow–era racism and the agency of Black amateur musicians who shaped the history of US civil rights activism and reform.
Clifton Boyd (Thu,) studied this question.