Roland Hayes

Roland Wiltsie Hayes was born on June 3, 1887, in a plantation cabin at Curryville, near Calhoun in Gordon County, northern Georgia. He was the son of William Hayes, a tenant farmer, and Fannie Mann Hayes, a woman who had herself been born into slavery on the land they worked. Through his mother's line ran a proud West African inheritance: her great-grandfather, remembered as Aba 'Ougi and renamed Charles Mann, was held to have been a chieftain of the Ivory Coast. Roland lovingly called his mother "Angel Mo'."

When Roland was eleven his father died, and Fannie carried the family to Chattanooga, Tennessee. There the boy sang in the church choir and in the streets, and his gift drew the notice of a teacher who gave him his first lessons. At twenty he entered Fisk University in Nashville, singing with the Fisk Jubilee Singers and carrying the spirituals of his enslaved forebears out into the world.

Hayes went on to become the first Black man to win international fame as a concert artist. Denied the stages white singers were granted, he arranged and promoted his own recitals, and in May 1920 sang at London's Aeolian Hall. By the late 1920s he was among the highest-paid tenors alive, honored before kings and celebrated for his luminous readings of German Lieder and the sacred songs of his people. In 1924 the NAACP awarded him its Spingarn Medal.

He married Helen Alzada Mann and had a daughter, Afrika. Roland Hayes died in Boston on January 1, 1977, in his ninetieth year. He opened a door that had been sealed shut, and every voice that followed passed through it because he sang first. May his name be honored, and his song remembered.