(RNS) — Zion Earle, a member of the youth choir at the Hamilton-Garrett Center for Music and Arts in the Roxbury neighborhood, sings Negro spirituals like “My Lord! What a Morning” at concerts in the Boston area.
She and the other teenage girls in the choir also learn about the hopeful lessons and coded messages in songs like that spiritual, in which enslaved people sang “done quit all my worldly ways, join that heavenly band.”
“That kind of a message of ‘we won’t be here for long, soon we’ll be going to a better place, we won’t have to suffer any longer,’” the 16-year-old said of the song, “that’s both hope and kind of a message of communication.”
The center that teaches Earle, a Black American with Jamaican and Cuban roots, and other students at its academy has been for the past year a recipient of funds through a Negro Spiritual Royalties Project of the nearby United Parish in Brookline. It is one of at least a dozen churches and organizations across the country committed to monetarily acknowledging spirituals that have been sung for centuries.
“We pledge that each time we sing Negro Spirituals in our worship: We will sing them with holy reverence and open hearts; We will honor the unnamed enslaved people who composed them in our prayers,” reads a statement in the bulletin one summer Sunday when the congregation sang “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian” and “There Is More Love Somewhere.”
“And we will pay royalties from the funds collected in the offering plate to Hamilton-Garrett Music and Arts.”
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The congregation has sent $12,900 so far to the organization that works to support young musicians of color and preserve Black music, including Negro spirituals.
Hamilton-Garrett President Gerami Groover-Flores said her nonprofit, which was birthed out of the Historic Charles Street African Methodist Episcopal Church in Roxbury, is proud to be the first recipient of the program spearheaded by Susan DeSelms, the white minister of music at the Brookline church.
Groover-Flores, the African American musician who also serves as the center’s artistic director, said it is using the contributions to support its operations and aid those inner-city students who otherwise would be unable to afford the $800 annual tuition at its after-school academy.
She sees the program as not only a way to bring recognition to the unnamed creators of the songs but also to bring awareness to other programs that teach and sing spirituals and have not received sufficient financial support.
