By the end of the nineteenth century, cakewalk and ragtime music had taken the world so much by storm that Europe’s major classical composers were composing ragtime and cakewalk inspired music. Both Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy sought to break from European classical traditions by investing in the African American vernacular forms that were introducing the Old World to New World rhythmic patterns and melodies. This interest in performance, nightlife, the circus, and café culture was shared by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, Charles Demuth, and George Grosz, all of whom explored themes and aesthetics influenced by the confluence of African American performance culture and African art available in the Western cultural capitals of Paris, New York, and Berlin. By the time author F. Scott Fitzgerald dubbed the 1920s “the jazz age” in the United States, African American music had already been influencing the trajectory of visual culture in the United States for several decades. With its creative fluidity, investment in aesthetics, and ability to mine African diasporic cultures for its most innovative impulses, jazz has been poised to respond to visual culture’s search for new vocabularies of form.

Margaret Bonds’s upbringing and education inculcated in her a profound sense of pride in her racial and familial heritage and an equally profound sense of obligation to “go farther” than those who came before her in using her art for the betterment of the lives of others. Moving from her youth through her years as a struggling musician in New York and Los Angeles during the Depression and World War II, through her ascendance to national and international fame, this chapter traces the development of these themes in her personal philosophy and compositional work over the period ca. 1939–63 in works including the incidental music to Shakespeare in Harlem, The Ballad of the Brown King, and Simon Bore the Cross, leading to their coalescence in The Montgomery Variations (1963–64). The Variations thus emerges as the summit of Bonds’s works centered on the theme of racial justice up to that point.

Bonds’s setting of the Du Bois Credo continues and extends the series of musical appeals for racial justice that had led to The Montgomery Variations, just as the revised version of Credo published at the head of his first autobiography, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, in 1920 extends the ideas that had led to the original 1904 version of Du Bois’s text. This chapter frames both the Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s musical setting thereof as articulations of the themes and issues of the works’ respective biographical contexts and, taken together, a dyadic lens into their creators’ perspectives on the societal upheavals of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. Then, after demonstrating why, and how, the Credo was effectively silenced during Margaret Bonds’s lifetime despite its obvious importance, timeliness, and musical genius – including conversation with the publisher who insisted that the work could not be published unless its text were altered – the chapter closes by exploring the work’s first posthumous performances and documenting the ringing endorsement of Shirley Graham Du Bois, widow of the poet, for this “work of art that is eternal.”

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

Margaret Bonds’s Credo sets the nine articles of W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic manifesto for global equality – first penned in 1904, revised in 1920, and modeled on the sacred symbol of the arch – as a symmetrical set of seven movements for soloists, chorus, and piano (1965) or orchestra (1965–67). This chapter offers a close reading of Du Bois’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, pacifist text and examines the means by which Bonds translated it into a musical structure all her own that reflects diverse influences ranging from gospel song through the cantatas of J. S. Bach (whom she called “the father of all good music”), also emphasizing womanist themes that are at best minimally present in Du Bois’s text.

The Montgomery Variations and Credo were not just timely musical masterpieces; they were also large-scale compositions dealing with racial justice and global equality that were penned by an African American woman, an individual to whom the doors of the classical music performance and publishing establishments were closed because of race and sex. Both works may thus be understood as compositions tendered from within a double application of the “veil” or “double-consciousness” that Du Bois had seminally discussed in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk – one application is that of race; the other, that of sex. Keenly aware of both of her doubly veiled existence and of the near-total absence of Black folk and women in orchestras, as well as their disproportionately small presence in choruses and audiences, Margaret Bonds undertook a gambit of dual perspective. She used the rhetoric of White Euro-American classical music to valorize contemporary African Americans and others who bravely fought against the system with which most performers and audiences of that music normally identified. The chapter closes with a reflection on the crucial role played by Bonds’s personal and professional affinities with Langston Hughes in inspiring her to this gambit.