Read an Excerpt from “This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement” by Gayle F. Wald
The University of Chicago Press is celebrating Pride Month with a reading list of recent books from Chicago and our client publishers that help illuminate LGBTQIA2S+ lives. As we continue to celebrate, we’re thrilled to share an excerpt from This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement, a look at the remarkable life story of Ella Jenkins, “The First Lady of Children’s Music.” Based on dozens of interviews and access to Ella Jenkins’s personal archives, Gayle F. Wald’s This Is Rhythm shares how Jenkins, a “rhythm specialist” with no formal musical training, became the most prolific and significant American children’s musician of the twentieth century, creating a beloved catalog of songs grounded in values of community-building, antiracism, and cultural pluralism. Wald discusses how, beginning in 1961, Jenkins built a life with a female partner who supported her materially and emotionally. Although Jenkins did not talk publicly about her sixty-three-year relationship, she opened up to Wald, offering insight into how a “private” Black woman in the public eye negotiated sexuality in an era before gay and lesbian liberation movements.
In the following excerpt, twenty-four-year-old Ella Jenkins heads west to California after meeting her friends Nicky Miltenberger and Mary Sherwood at Roosevelt University in 1947. This life-changing journey would grant her the freedom, independence, and self-exploration she had been seeking for years.
Nineteen forty-eight, Ella wrote, “shall always be a memorable year, for it was there that I so easily came upon a very pleasant path to Independence.” She was referring to her work at Camp Reinberg and to her independence from her mother Annabelle, but her words anticipated other, “larger steps down that path.” Ella had enrolled in fall classes at Roosevelt, but late that summer she moved to Berkeley, California, planning to complete her degree on the West Coast. Her choice to depart was so sudden that it resulted in Ls (for “Left”) on her Roosevelt transcript, indicating that she missed the deadline for withdrawal.
Over the years, Ella’s narrations of this period tended to be perfunctory, depicting the move to California as merely another chapter in the story of her education. But she later admitted that she had never entertained relocation to the West Coast until she met Nicky Miltenberger and her friend Mary Sherwood, in 1947. The two Berkeley residents had moved to Chicago to take summer classes at Roosevelt, drawn by the school’s left-of-center reputation. Nicky and Mary were both white, and were both what people called “political,” suggesting an affiliation with the communist left. It is not clear whether they were a couple, or just a couple of free spirits. But Ella—who recalled them as “very independent women”—must have been deeply captivated to join them in California.
Perhaps Ella was lovestruck, or perhaps the two women’s descriptions of their lives in the Bay Area awakened a desire for sexual self-exploration better pursued outside of the South Side of Chicago. Although she attended her DuSable High School prom with one of her brother’s friends, she was firmly aware of her desires: “I didn’t like guys. I liked girls,” she said. “My heart, my feelings, my actions just went that way.”
Ella “knew” from an early age, but she was reticent to put a label on herself. As she disliked the ways that racial labels divided people, subscribing wholeheartedly to the Roosevelt ideal of “brothers under the skin,” so she was averse to the idea of categorizing people according to whom they wished to be with. At Roosevelt College Ella had begun to experiment with “mannish” forms of dress—donning “a sporty cap with three or four points” or neckties, although it is unclear whether she overtly identified as a lesbian. Ella’s reticence to discuss the fact that she “liked girls” was also pragmatic and protective, a means of ensuring no one would have the chance to pathologize, fire, exclude, or further ostracize her. It was emphatically not, however, a sign that she was “repressed” or fundamentally shamed by her desire.
She also regarded her romantic inclinations as no one’s business, just as she assumed that the sexual lives of others were beyond discussion. Like everyone else in Bronzeville, she knew male homosexuals, including Bayard Rustin, from CORE, and Theodore Stone, the opera singer and music critic who attended the Eighth Church. Rudy Richardson, a queer performer who performed torch songs in South Side clubs, graduated in her class at DuSable. In her neighborhood it was broadly understood that you gave such “bachelors” their space to be. In Bronzeville in the 1930s and ’40s, homosexuality was accommodated and tolerated as long as Black gay men, lesbians, and other sexually nonconforming people made no attempt to “flaunt” it. In the mid 1940s there were not yet Cold Warriors seeking to tar homosexuals as a threat to the nation, but neither were there organized spaces in which Black lesbians might create a socially affirming “culture.” The Bronzeville clubs that offered opportunities for meeting other Black women who “liked women” were far outside of Ella’s comfort zone.
Yet even if homosexuality was not discussed, and even if Ella was not the type to venture into queer nightlife, she would still have known about the lives of “sissy” men and “bulldagger” women from the music she had grown up with. There was Ma Rainey, the Georgia-born “Mother of the Blues,” who sang provocative songs of sexual braggadocio even while asserting a right to be left alone, particularly by prying vice officers. “They said I do it, ain’t nobody caught me,” she sang. “Sure got to prove it on me.” In her 1923 version of “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness if I Do,” Rainey’s acolyte Bessie Smith expressed a similar disdain for “nosey” people looking for a reason to talk, even as she portrayed herself as fearless in her own pursuit of pleasure. Ella may have also felt her desires were “nobody’s business,” but she was interested in understanding them better, and perhaps even acting on them, in a new environment.
Ella departed for California on the City of San Francisco train in October or November of 1948. She was twenty-four and had worked full-time while completing half of the credits toward a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She had racked up trophies and ribbons as a competitive table-tennis player. She had joined in civil rights sit-ins and protests, affiliating herself with CORE and a variety of left organizations. She had buried her father and been treated as a second-class member of her church.
But she had never lived on her own or had a romantic partner. Nicky and Mary’s offer held out possibilities of freedom that she could not turn down. “I’m looking for something, I’m not sure what I’m looking for,” Ella told her mother. Annabelle may not have approved, but neither did she stand in her daughter’s way. It was surely becoming clearer to her that Ella would not be fulfilling her expectations of marriage and motherhood. Ella herself was unsure whether California would reveal the “something” she yearned for, but she knew that whatever it was, she had not found it in Chicago. She would have to leave the city that defined her to find herself.
Excerpted from This Is Rhythm by Gayle F. Wald, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by Gayle F. Wald. All rights reserved.
Gayle F. Wald is professor of American Studies at George Washington University. She is the author of three previous books, including Shout, Sister, Shout! the acclaimed biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and It’s Been Beautiful, a study of the groundbreaking Black Power TV program Soul!
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