Black Migrants to the Industrial North
Foster was a jazz saxophone player, born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He performed with Count Basie, his own band, the Loud Minority, and many other groups throughout his career. The National Endowment for the Arts names Foster a Jazz Master, the highest jazz honor in the United States. These excerpts are from an oral history conducted by the Smithsonian Museum of American History in 2002.
Foster's parents migrated from South Carolina to Cincinnati, during the “Great Migration” (1900-1980) when 20 million Southerners, both black and white, journeyed to the North and West. Economic opportunities in urban industrial centers drew sharecroppers and other low-wage southerners, especially during the First and Second World Wars. Black southerners like Frank Foster’s parents were also leaving behind the dangers and indignities of the Jim Crow system of legal discrimination.
I was born Frank Benjamin Foster the Third at 2:15 a.m., September 23rd, 1928, to Lillian Watts Foster and Frank B. Foster. My mother’s maiden name was Lillian Iona Watts. My mother and father were natives of South Carolina, my father from Greenville and my mother from Seneca. My father came north with the idea of marrying a northern girl, and he ended up marrying this girl [laughs] from his home state.
Cincinnati was I think the third largest city in Ohio, located in the southwest corner of the state and the hub, the musical hub of what’s referred to in that area as the tri-state area—Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky.
Cincinnati was a very culturally diverse town, principally resided in by people of German ancestry, and I suppose there was a large influx of blacks from the south. Cincinnati has been referred to as one of the gateways to the south. One of the strongest cultural institutions in Cincinnati is the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, associated with the University of Cincinnati. In the 1930s, during which period I grew up, and the ’40s, the Conservatory did not admit African-Americans as students. In fact most areas of activities in Cincinnati were segregated at that time.
I grew up in the midst of a strong musical heritage because it was almost like a sort of crossroads for big bands coming back and forth across the country. There was an establishment called the Coliseum, which was a big dancehall. All the big bands came through and played there, the well-known bands, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Erskine Hawkins, et cetera. . . .
There were no musicians per se in my family. I had a brother who was six years my senior. My father and mother kept an upright piano. This was a fact of most black households at the time. Most households had an upright piano. A good many of them had player pianos. We didn’t have a player piano, but we did have this upright.
My brother at this time was a teenager. He was listening to the bands of Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, and Duke Ellington, et cetera, and he started me listening. In fact at age eight he started me listening to all these bands. We’re talking about late ’30s --’38, ’39, ’40. I started taking music lessons, wind instrument music lessons around 1940, but from say ’37 on, he had started me listening to the bigbands.
My father was a postal clerk. He worked -- this is the only job I’ve ever known him to hold, for my entire life, until he retired in his sixties. He was a postal clerk in the main post office in Cincinnati, Ohio, downtown Cincinnati.
My mother worked as a welfare worker. You’d refer to it as a social worker at the time. She was also a teacher. She was a kindergarten instructor, and she founded her own daycare center right in her house. It wasn’t called a daycare center. It was called a playschool for tiny tots. In other words, she was her own -- she was a daycare entrepreneur, so to speak. Later she went on to get her Masters degree at the University of Cincinnati, and she went into teaching. She taught English and speech. She did so privately for a number of years. Then she took a position as a professor at Wilberforce University.
I think it’s most important to say that at a very early age I discovered that I had a strong appreciation for music, music that I refer to now as quality music. For instance when I was five years of age, I really got off on Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite and things of that nature. I didn’t hear any jazz per se until I was about nine years old.
It’s not that it wasn’t -- I wasn’t frequenting places where at that age -- I wasn’t hearing much on the radio, but I was hearing a lot of classical music and popular music, and my mother regularly took me to what was referred to as the summer opera at the Cincinnati Zoo. They had a pavilion where they had operatic performances every summer. I saw most of the major operas by the time I was ten years of age. I really loved classical music and some of the better popular songs of the day, but I’d like to say that very early I developed a taste for quality music and a distaste for garbage. . . .
[Foster started taking clarinet lessons at Wurlitzer music. His parents paid $1.50 a week for the instrument and $1.50 a week for instruction.] My father made me practice. We had a big yard, and the guys used to play baseball in the yard, my brother and his friends, some of our friends. My father would say, “No baseball until you practice that instrument.” I’d be inside practicing, watching the cats outside play baseball. I applied myself diligently to practice, and I made a reasonable amount of progress in a reasonably short period, so that after two years I was able to pick up a saxophone and play in a matter of minutes. . . .
[My father made me practice] at least an hour [every day]. My father really cracked the whip in that regard, in a very nice way. He wasn’t mean or abusive. He just said, “You’re going to practice that horn.” . . . He was a leonine personality, so to speak. He had a short temper, but as quickly as he became angry, he forgot about it, and all was forgiven. But he really -- he was a strict disciplinarian in a very humane sense. He was never abusive. . . .
[In high school Foster played with a band, traveling in] southern Ohio, eastern Indiana and northern Kentucky. . . . Dayton, Xenia, Columbus, Chillicothe. . . . Portsmouth. We never got as far as Indianapolis. We played a lot of little cities in eastern Indiana. . . . We played for black folks. There were no mixed audiences in those days. You either played for all black audiences or all white audiences.
Interviewer: Would there be some white people at the black thing but no black people at the white thing?
Foster: Exactly, yeah. Some white, only a smattering.
Interviewer: Were they typically musicians or more hip people? Who were the whites who ventured into the black world to hear this music?
Foster: A lot of them were so-called slummers. You know, “Let’s go slumming tonight. Let’s go see what’s happening,” and so forth. Not particularly hip people but people who -- they may have had black friends who brought them to the affairs, or they may have been people who actually had an appreciation for music and who didn’t know where else they would be able to hear this band, so they would come to this black dance. . . .
I looked at Cincinnati as a good place to come up to be raised but there was always a sense of knowing one’s place, if I may use that expression, and knowing where one was not welcome.
In high school I got a sense that, okay, the black community is here, the white community is here, and never the twain shall meet. If you have white friends, you’ll talk to them in the hallways, but you won’t leave school together. . . .
It did not require a sign. . . . But the ballpark where the Cincinnati Reds played, Crosley Field, was definitely segregated. When I joined the Knothole Club and we went to the games, they had people assigned, designated to lead black kids in one direction and white kids in another. Make sure, all the white kids over here, all’ you black kids go this way. They didn’t even say “black” then. They said “colored.” . . .
In my high school classes, academic classes were not segregated, but swimming classes were. I have to describe the situation. White kids in the seventh grade swam together. White kids in the eighth grade swam together, and so on through senior year. Black kids in seventh, eighth, and ninth through senior year all swam together in one class, which was the sixth period on Friday, the last period of the week, and for some reason they had the second period Thursday. I don’t know why that was.
One Friday the pool was in disrepair or something was wrong with it. I don’t know what was wrong with it, but the black kids could not have a swimming class. The principal instructed the gym instructors or whoever they were to give us a bat, a ball, and some gloves, and told us to go out on the athletic field and play baseball.
I got an idea of how we were perceived by the white community at that time. There were no -- we didn’t know from race riots and heavy, heavy tensions, but the principal of Walnut Hills High School got us all, these black kids, boys, and said -- . . . He said, “We’re sending you out on the athletic field to play. You just play some baseball. And you’ll be noticed by the community.” In other words, so don’t do anything that would make the school ashamed of you. So what he’s saying is, a bunch of black kids -- now we know you guys have -- you people have bad tendencies, but don’t go out there and act up. . . . We knew how we were perceived. Whether or not we wanted to stay there, we knew our place. [2]
Questions to Think About and Discuss
- Describe situations and actions that illustrate the values of Frank Foster’s parents. How did their values and behavior affect Frank?
- What did Foster and his classmates learn about white attitudes from the instructions of the Walnut Hills High School principal?
- How do you think white “slummers” perceived black music and musicians?
- In what ways were Cincinnati and surrounding communities segregated? Does this change you understanding of segregation or of differences between the northern and the southern regions of the United States?