Ella Jenkins and Sonic Civil Rights Pedagogy

Ella Jenkins sat smiling in her wheelchair, ready to greet her public. It was noon on August 4, 2024, and she had just arrived at the North Side Chicago park bearing her name for a community-wide 100^th birthday celebration. For the occasion she wore a celebratory rose-gold tiara and a Kente-cloth style blanket draped across her legs. Next to her was her partner and manager Bernadelle Richter, with whom she had been sharing a life since 1961. Before her was a long line of Chicagoans, of all ages and backgrounds, who had queued up to meet her.

The well-wishers came to snap selfies and say a few words. Most were there to bear witness to Jenkins’ importance in their lives. Some shared their memories of having interacted with her as children. Others brought their children and grandchildren to see the famous “First Lady of Children’s Music.” Local performers led the crowd through her signature songs. “Did you feed my cow?” they sang. Everyone knew to sing back the answer: “Yes, Ma’am!”

When Jenkins died peacefully three months later, she left behind an enduring legacy. She is the only Black woman to have received lifetime honors both for recording (a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award) and for composing and publishing (a lifetime award from American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers).

As Atlantic Records was the “house that Ruth built”—a reference to hit-maker Ruth Brown—so the venerable Folkways label (now Smithsonian Folkways) profited from the popularity of Jenkins’ recordings, particularly after the waning of the 1960s folk revival. Her work has been incorporated into the score of Alvin Ailey’s Revelations and is part of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Over the years, her friends and fans have included Margaret Burroughs, Armando Peraza, Pete Seeger, Big Bill Broonzy, Odetta, Fred Rogers, and Michelle Obama.

Yet Jenkins’ achievements have often been de-politicized, ironically in narratives that celebrate her as a charismatic and skillful performer with an uncanny knack for connecting with children. As I show in my biography This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement, however, Jenkins was a radical figure in American children’s music. Beginning in the 1950s, she pioneered a “call-and-response” method of group performance rooted in Black diasporic musical aesthetics and drawing on her own rich sonic Black girlhood on Chicago’s South Side. While embracing music from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, she introduced young people to the living legacy of African American work songs, play songs, chain-gang songs, and spirituals, the latter then being reworked as civil rights anthems.

Perhaps no self-taught musician—Ella played harmonica, hand drums, and the ukulele, although she never learned formal Western musical notion—has had as profound an impact on American children’s music. Through some forty albums released between 1957 and 2017, most for children but some for older audiences, she rejected a musty mid-century children’s repertoire and old habits of rote learning.¹ Her “call and response” method insisted on everyone’s aptitude for music-making, no matter their perceived virtuosity. As preschool gained popularity in the 1960s—and was supported by national programs such as Head Start, which grew out of the War on Poverty—she gave teachers of young children tools to bring music into their classrooms, regardless of whether they had any formal musical training.

Jenkins’  non-threatening persona made her a subversive figure of sonic civil rights pedagogy.² In part because she was publicly associated with young audiences, and in part because of her air of perpetual good cheer, she was able to smuggle lessons in Black history into unexpected venues for divergent audiences.

In the early 1950s, for example, when she became Teenage Program Director at the South Parkway YWCA, she created after-school clubs that drew on the popularity of “Latin” dance music to spur Black teenagers’ interest in “African” rhythms. Shaped by respectability politics and by media portrayals of the Continent as exotic and uncivilized, some of these teens resisted her lessons. But Jenkins persisted, convinced of the necessity of Black Americans’ simultaneous embrace of America and Africa.

Later that decade, Jenkins brought her expertise as a “rhythm specialist” to performances at Chicago nightspots and universities, where her conga drumming and chanting was received as “folk” culture. Beginning in 1958, she deployed these same skills as the host of a weekly half-hour children’s television show, “This Is Rhythm.” There, before in-studio audiences of children drawn from across Chicago, she insisted that Africa was the “mother of rhythms” (including the “new” sounds of rock and roll) and modeled cultural pluralism, featuring African American entertainers like Odetta alongside Scottish bagpipers, Appalachian dulcimer players, and flamenco dancers. And in the early 1960s, she toured school auditoriums throughout the Upper Midwest, sharing her lessons in diasporic Blackness with tow-headed middle and high schoolers. In towns that had no restaurants or hotels that would serve Black people, Jenkins persisted, teaching children not only about African-derived percussion instruments (like the conga drum), but about figures like Léopold Senghor, the new president of independent Senegal.

In all of this work, Ella translated the ideals of contemporary Black freedom movements into forms that children could both enjoy and grasp, nurturing their political consciousness through gentle and inclusive forms of music-making.

Through call-and-response she replaced notions of musical mastery with democratic horizontality: after enough practice, any “follower” of a song could become a “leader.” Her performances boiled down to a set of simple propositions. Music was for everyone, not just the musically “gifted.” Singing together was a powerful means of being in community. Getting along in the world meant learning to be comfortable with others’ rhythms.

Although children’s music has never enjoyed the prestige of other genres, Jenkins’ career and oeuvre—which developed alongside the broader 20^th-century movements for civil rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, workers’ rights, and environmentalism—point to it as a site of significant creative and intellectual labor. Jenkins was not an ideologue, but her music always had a message. Along with opening children’s eyes to the wideness of the world, she nurtured their capacity for self-love as well as love for others and for the natural world. In her work, caretaking, creativity, and activism are braided together.

A story about Jenkins—too late to include in my biography, but recently shared with me by Chicago musician and educator Chris Christmas—beautifully illustrates this point.³ On August 5, 1966, Jenkins joined a Chicago march against housing discrimination led by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Marquette Park, on the city’s southwest side. At one point, members of the massive crowd of jeering white counter-protesters erupted into physical violence, hurling rocks, bottles, and other objects at the marchers. King suffered a blow to his head that briefly knocked him to a knee.⁴

Jenkins, a veteran of non-violent civil rights activism going back to sit-ins with Chicago CORE in the late 1940s, was further back in the crowd that day. When the debris started raining down, she tried to protect herself by using a baritone ukulele she had brought to the march as a shield. Through quick thinking that day she managed to avoid injury. But a projectile opened up an angry gash in the side of her ukulele. In the ensuing pandemonium, she tossed it to the ground and ran.

The damaged instrument–ironically a Harmony model–might be seen as a symbol of the many creative and personal risks Jenkins took over decades of promoting music that taught children about equality, democracy, and pluralism. (Perhaps she thought of it when she made the 1970 album A Long Time to Freedom, in tribute to King.) In this sense, the story of Jenkins’ ukulele invites us to consider the social and political significance of children’s music. It helps us understand that even “simple” songs carry world-making significance, if we take the time to listen.

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