A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house.
~ St. Matthew 13:57
This column is about truth vs. expediency; rigor vs. regression; trust busting vs. academic monopoly, serious scholarship vs. affirmative action scholarship. This column is an addendum to last week’s column, “Is a college degree required for success?” and is about the scholarship of Arthur LaBrew and Eileen Southern – a comparative analysis exemplifying the shameful legacy of the liberal academy, their Stalinist control of the education bureaucracy, their defense of ignorance, slipshod scholarship, degree discrimination, liberalism run amuck and self-important elitism, all under the protection of the Ph.D. degree.
LaBrew met Southern in the early 1950s when they were both graduate students under the tutelage of that imminent medieval/renaissance scholar, professor Gustave Reese (LaBrew was at the Manhattan School of Music; Southern attended NYU). In 1971, Dr. Eileen Southern (1920-2002) published her most famous work, “The Music of Black Americans.” The academy heralded her work as the most important contribution to black music history of the past 100 years, or since Monroe Trotter’s path-breaking book, “Music and Some Highly Musical People” (1878). However, LaBrew and a few other iconoclastic scholars like Gilbert Chase, Noel DeCosta and Dr. Robert Stevenson (UCLA) knew the true history of black contributions to classical music and were outraged, for they understood that Dr. Southern’s work was a complete fraud filled with errors.
If Southern had written on any of the pre-eminent white classical masters – Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, etc. – with that level of sophomoric, slipshod scholarship and carelessness regarding attention to details and facts, her manuscript never would have seen the light of day. However, the dirty little secret regarding the presumptions of affirmative action is where a black scholar or black subject matter is involved, the bar can be lowered to accommodate the maladroit.
Below are a few examples of some of the horrible scholarship of Dr. Eileen Southern:
- A hundred years before the great white bandsman John Philip Sousa and 200 years before the trumpet virtuosity of Wynton Marsalis, there was a black bandsman, composer and trumpet virtuoso that played all of the most fiendishly difficult clarion trumpet works of Bach, Handel, Purcell, Mozart and other classical masters on a keyed bugle or a valveless trumpet. This magnificent artist was the Philadelphian, Francis Johnson (1792-1844).
- Southern wrote that Johnson was born in Martinique – wrong! In the liberal-controlled academy, there is a racist presumption that virtually any black person that does something of transcendent note must have gotten it from a white person or originated from a non-American place (Note Sen. Barack Obama’s meteoric notoriety is due in large part to his mixed-race ancestry and spending his formative years outside America).
- Southern had the wrong birth year for Francis Johnson; LaBrew found the correct year by personally researching that info in the records of the Episcopal church where Johnson was baptized.
- Southern failed to understand the big picture of the life and times of Johnson, including the neighborhoods he lived in, how he learned music; what he did before becoming a musician; who were his predecessors; why was he chosen to play before Queen Elizabeth, etc.
- In her articles and books, Dr. Southern created extended passages of fictitious narrative to fill in the years she had neither the interest in discovering nor skill to complete on her own merits regarding Johnson’s stellar musical career.
By the time of the publication of Southern’s book in 1971, LaBrew had already published at his own expense and through his own organization (The Michigan Music Research Center) several books and over a dozen scholarly articles, but the mainstream music historians and the academy took little notice. Why? Several reasons:
- LaBrew had only an M.A. degree; he didn’t have a Ph.D. like Southern, so the presumption (false, I might add) was that his work wasn’t up to the high academic standards or gravitas of other Ph.D. academics.
- Because LaBrew didn’t have a Ph.D., he wasn’t invited to teach at any of the colleges or universities (even the historically black colleges ignored his work, thus the quote from the Gospel of St. Matthew at the beginning of this column).
- Because LaBrew didn’t have a Ph.D., book publisher Norton and other academic music book publishers would not publish his work;
- In the myopic, bigoted minds of white (and black) academics and music historians, Eileen Southern wrote the book on this subject. She said all that was worthy of saying … or did she?
By the early 1980s, Southern’s dreadful academic legacy could no longer be hid or ignored. She was then a professor at Harvard when LaBrew brought to the attention of the dean and faculty of the School of Music at Harvard and other elite Ivy League schools the years and years of blatant plagiarism of LaBrew’s work and omission of his name in her articles, voluminous factual errors, mythological narratives and “scholars” created out of whole cloth – in additional to outright lies in Southern’s works. Only then was Harvard forced to quietly pressure Dr. Southern to “retire.”
The case of Arthur LaBrew and Eileen Southern is merely a paradigm of a much larger problem in the academy of today that has long ago forsaken the original mandate of higher education – explicating biblical law, moral truths, an apolitical canon of true geniuses and dispensing academic excellence to the masses.
In modern times the academy has devolved into propaganda factories of radical liberalism and are basically populated by the aging baby boomers who enshrined in the citadels of higher learning atheism, evolution, relativism, humanism, dialectical materialism, egalitarianism (affirmative action), positivism, Darwin, Marx, Hegel, Freud, Mead, Dewey, Sanger, Spock, Kinsey, Justice Earl Warren, Woodstock/hippies worldview, Haight-Ashbury, Bill and Hilary Clinton, awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore for his global warming propaganda film and mostly notably, a visceral hatred of America and her Judeo-Christian traditions that made this country the greatest in the history of humanity.
Finally, 27 years later “The New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians” is giving professor LaBrew the honor of editing and writing various articles on black contributions to classical music prior to 1950. One of the editors, Raoul Camus, an expert on bands and military music, had recently read passages of LaBrew’s “Black Music of the Colonial Period” (1977) and his magnum opus on Francis Johnson, “Captain Francis Johnson (1792-1844): Great American Black Bandsman Life and Works Volumes I and II” (1994), and was literally knocked out of his chair. Although Dr. Camus is a noted musicologist, surprisingly he had never heard of these works. To his credit, he immediately recommended professor LaBrew to an editorial and contributing writer position with “The New Grove Dictionary of Music.” LaBrew will help this venerable repository put its entire 25-volume encyclopedia on the Internet.
To you, professor Arthur R. LaBrew, indeed you are a true scholar and a brilliant historian of the first rank. Thank you for being my professor, friend, and father figure for the past 20 years. May your magnificent writings, your selfless worldview and your excellent teachings continue to exemplify to the self-important academy that a true scholar is not one who possess a Ph.D. degree, but one who is a true scholar indeed.
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