Dorothy Maynor

Dorothy Leigh Mainor was born on the third of September 1910 in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of the Reverend John Mainor, an African-American Methodist minister, and Alice Jeffries Mainor. She sang as a girl in her father's church choir, and at fourteen she entered Hampton Institute, where R. Nathaniel Dett heard her gift and turned her from home economics toward music. She went on to the Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, refining the voice that would carry her name across the concert world.

Her ascent came in 1939, when the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, awestruck after hearing her, declared her voice a musical revelation and helped arrange her New York debut. On the ninth of December 1939 she sang at Town Hall to acclaim that made her, for a season, the talk of American music. Through the 1940s she stood among the foremost recitalists in the country — a voice at once sweet and powerful — recording widely and touring the great halls, even as the racism of the age barred her from the opera stages whose repertory she had mastered.

In 1949 she became the first African American to sing at a presidential inauguration, at the gala for Harry S. Truman. Yet her deepest legacy took root in 1964, when she founded the Harlem School of the Arts, teaching the children of Harlem at rates they could bear. Beginning almost alone as administrator, teacher, and caretaker, she built an institution that grew from a handful of pupils to a thousand by her retirement in 1979. In 1975 she became the first African American on the board of the Metropolitan Opera.

Dorothy Maynor died on the nineteenth of February 1996 in West Chester, Pennsylvania. She had turned a glorious voice into a lasting house of learning, and the children she taught carry her song forward still. May her name be honored.