06/04/2026
Today we celebrate the birthday of American lyric tenor and composer Roland Hayes (1887-1977)! Hayes was invited to teach at Black Mountain College's 1945 summer music institute. This came one year after Alma Stone Williams had been invited to the '44 summer institute, making Black Mountain College the first southern college to integrate, 10 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
Theodore Dreier, Edward Lowinsky and other faculty members had two famous African American singers, Roland Hayes and Carol Brice in mind, to be guest teachers in the 1945 summer music institute. According to Dreier, they both expressed interest in coming to Black Mountain because “it is perhaps the only place in the south where [they] would be accepted completely as a member of the College community without any discrimination”.
Roland Hayes put on a concert on one of the last evenings of his three-week stay, which attracted one of the largest crowds Black Mountain had ever seen, with more than three hundred outside guests. The audience was both black and white with integrated seating arrangements.
If you'd like to learn more about Roland Haye's time at BMC and integration at the college, check out "Social Justice at BMC Before the Civil Rights Age: Desegregation, Racial Inclusion, and Racial Equality at BMC" by Micah Wilford Wilkins, which is featured in the Journal of BMC Studies. https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/6-17-micah-wilkins/
___
John Harvey Campbell, Roland Hayes Recital, August 4, 1945. Gelatin silver print. Collection of Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
