Samuel Rodney Browne: the Music Teacher at Broke L.A. s Color Barrier

Portrait of Samuel Rodney Browne, music teacher at Jefferson High School, 1926. | Photo: Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of L.A. archive.

On Tuesday, June 9, 1936, a 28-year-old pianist gave a public concert at the Metropolitan School auditorium near downtown Los Angeles. In a program that was equal parts formal recital, community f te and high-wire act, he performed three classical compositions, including Chopins Scherzo and Barcarolle by the African-American composer Nathaniel Dett, before accompanying a guest vocalist on a popular torch song. He finished out the program by taking tonal requests from the audience that he wrote down on a blackboard. When completed, previewed The Metropolitan Mirror, the tones would be played as a waltz, a ballad and a jazz number.1

The pianists full name was Samuel Rodney Browne, and in three months, after a years-long battle that the California Eagle called tireless and the L.A. Sentinel called tedious (both in their own way were right) he, along with social studies teachers Hazel Gottschalk Whitaker and Marjorie Bright, would officially break the color barrier for Black teachers in the secondary schools of L.A. Unified. All three were respected members of their community (the Eagle dubbed them pioneers in secondary education2) but what distinguished Browne was that he had already integrated his old alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School by -- in an exquisite twist of racial irony -- slipping in the back door.

Born on April 11, 1908, Browne came of age in a community that increasingly valued music lessons as a cause for social and professional advancement and musicians made up the largest contingent of L.A.s Black professional class.3 His piano lessons began at age seven with Amelia Lightner, wife of the pastor of the Congregational Church at 43rd and Central,4 before moving on to the conservatories of William T. Wilkins and John Gray, who offered the formal model of music instruction, even emphasizing the term European System in their print ads in the California Eagle.5

Samuel Rodney Browne, a music teacher at Jefferson High School, poses by a house. | Photo: Los Angeles Public Library/Shades of L.A. archive.

But Browne also came of age with the rise of jazz, a louche and primitive music made by ear readers that made his elders curl their noses. He grew up in their neighborhood and walked their siblings home from school when he was a senior at Jeff. Like them, he bore the scars (his words) of hearing his white teachers hurl racial epithets at him and his fellow students, like the third grade teacher who drawled to her class: Im from the South and I wont take anything from niggers.6 [Jeffersons faculty] was still mainly white then, Browne recalled. I remember I had to fight to play Chopin at the commencement exercises. They didnt think much of a black kid doing that kind of thing, no matter how talented he might be. But they let me, and patted themselves on the back about how democratic they were.7

Outside of school, Browne had to accept many of the same jobs as the jazzbos, and thusly traversed the worlds of serious music and Jim Crow-era entertainment. During his senior year he sang in the choir of jubilee singer Emmanuel Hall for Hearts of Dixie, an RKO Radio picture that also featured the only filmed performance of blues singer Bessie Smith. There were pictures that depicted racial themes set in the South, so they wanted Negro choirs to do the singing of the spirituals and the slave songs, Browne later explained. After graduating summa cum laude from USC in 1929, where he reasoned he was one of only six Black students, he joined a Southern-hokum revue called The Alabama Crooners whose act teetered on the edge of minstrelsy. These were not Alabama people, but thats the way things had to be, Browne remembered. If you were black and you wanted to sing... you wore the bandannas and overalls... It was a matter of survival. If you said, Well I wont do it, you dont eat because then you dont work.8

Brownes big break would come during the Great Depression, courtesy of President Roosevelts Civil Works Administration. My wife-to-to-be was telling me to come home, that the barriers were coming down, he remembered.9 He secured a job teaching night classes at the Colored YMCA at East 28th and Central. Fortuitously, also meeting weekly at the YMCA10 were the pooh-bahs of the Los Angeles Forum, a progressive consortium of influential community leaders and business owners who formed back in 1903 to promote equal education and employment opportunities for Afro-Angelenos. The Forum raised finances for the education of Ruth Temple, L.A.s first African-American doctor of record,11 and they soon took note of the ambitious young scholar teaching night classes just down the hall.

Exterior view of the entranceway to Jefferson High school, 1939. | Photo: Los Angeles Public Library.

Brownes alma mater still had an all-white faculty despite the fact that by the 1930s its student body was predominantly Black. From there I thought I would like to teach night school at Jefferson High. So I asked, Why cant I teach there too? I went to see the principal and he said, Ill hire you but youll have to get fifty people to sign up. Browne summarily returned with 50-plus signatures from his church choir and congregation and was eventually hired in what amounted to a soft rollout as a day-to-day substitute teacher for Jeffersons adult night classes for $166 per month.12 I thought I was the richest person in Los Angeles, he remembered.

After his official hiring in fall 1936, an assistant district superintendent called Browne into his office. Remember, Brownie, he cautioned, now that youve got the job, youre going to have to do the work of three white men. According to Browne, once news spread of his hiring, teachers on the all-white faculty immediately asked to be transfe

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