![]() ![]() ![]() It was one of the first public performances of the secret music African Americans had sung in fields and behind closed doors.Ĭharged with keeping the financially troubled school afloat, treasurer George Leonard White proposed taking Fisk's most gifted singers on a fundraising tour of the North. ![]() After a few standard ballads, the chorus began to sing spirituals - "Steal Away" and other songs" associated with slavery and the dark past, sacred to our parents," as soprano Ella Sheppard recalled. On November 16, 1871, a group of unknown singers - all but two of them former slaves and many of them still in their teens - arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio to perform before a national convention of influential ministers. ![]()
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