Dorothy Maynor

Dorothy Leigh Mainor was born on the third of September 1910 at Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of John James Mainor — a Methodist minister of the Hampton District of the AME Zion Church — and Alice Jeffries Mainor. She was raised in the parsonage Black Methodist Norfolk of the Reconstruction period.

She was placed at fourteen at the Hampton Institute Preparatory School at Hampton, Virginia and at sixteen at the Hampton Institute proper, completing the bachelor’s in home economics in 1933 — having joined the Hampton Institute Choir under the directorship of Robert Nathaniel Dett (placed in this archive). The choir toured Europe in 1930 and gave a private recital for King George V at Buckingham Palace.

She took the master’s in music at the Westminster Choir College at Princeton, New Jersey in 1935 — among the first Black graduates of the institution — and gave her first paid recital at the Westminster Choir College in 1939.

She was heard at the 1939 Berkshire Music Festival at Tanglewood by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who arranged her New York Town Hall debut on the nineteenth of November 1939. Olin Downes of the New York Times reviewed the recital as ‘a phenomenon, a contralto of soprano range, a voice that combines the dramatic and the lyric in equal degree.’

She gave on average between fifty and seventy concerts per year across the American concert circuit between 1940 and 1963 — over twelve hundred concerts in the active career — and recorded for RCA Victor between 1939 and 1958 the principal Lieder and concert-spiritual repertoire of the period.

She was received at the White House by President Harry Truman on the inauguration day of the twentieth of January 1949 — the first Black soloist to perform at a presidential inauguration.

She founded in 1964 the Harlem School of the Arts at the basement of the Saint James Presbyterian Church at 141 West 137th Street, Harlem, on a donation of three pianos and the Saint James basement space. The school was the principal Black community arts school of Harlem of the late 1960s and the 1970s, with a registered student body of over six hundred children by the time of her retirement from the directorship in 1979.

She died at West Chester, Pennsylvania on the nineteenth of February 1996 of complications of a heart attack, at eighty-five.

She is honored here as the founder of the Harlem School of the Arts.