by Robin Jett
Ragtime is one of the quintessential American music forms. With an
even tempo rhythm and piano accompaniment, this "tin-pan alley"
music was the forerunner of modern Jazz. Of all the Ragtime
composers, Texas-born Scott Joplin is still considered the best.
Joplin was born to former slaves in 1867 somewhere in Northeast
Texas (some sources say Linden). The family moved to Texarkana
where his mother worked as a housekeeper for a white family. She'd
take her son with her to work, and he'd play their grand piano.
Recognizing his talent, his family worked hard to pay for lessons. His
teacher, Julius Weiss, was a German-born musician who introduced
Joplin to classical composition.
As a young man, Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri. He began
working in minstrel troupes, even performing at the Chicago World
Fair, then played and sang in the Texas Medley Quartette, which
performed in Syracuse. He was considered a good singer and
adequate piano player, but Joplin's real passion lay in writing music.
He took classes at the George R. Smith College in Sedalia where he
learned how to master musical notation. He also gave private
lessons, later collaborating with two of his students, Scott Hayden
and Arthur Marshall.
In 1899, Joplin published his first musical score: the Maple Leaf
Rag. Within the next five years, Joplin published and performed
several musical scores. In 1903, he wrote an opera about Booker T.
Washington's historic dinner at the White House, called "Guest of
Honor." However, while touring, the box office receipts were stolen,
and the company had to disband. To pay off outstanding debts, Joplin
had to relinquish all property, including the score to "Guest of Honor,"
and consequently this piece has been lost.
Joplin met his greatest love, Freddie Alexander, in 1903. He wrote
"The Chrysanthemum" for her, which might have led to his divorce
from wife Belle. He married Freddie in 1904, but tragically, she died
just ten weeks after the wedding. Joplin was devastated and took up
the life of a traveling composer, staying with friends throughout the
country. On one of these travels he met Joseph Lamb, a white
Ragtime composer. Joplin helped Lamb publish his own work, and
Lamb quickly superseded his mentor in prominence - not due to talent
but because of skin color.
In 1910, Joplin wrote his second opera, Treemonisha, a story about
achieving racial equality through education. He sent the score to a
publishing company in New York, where a young composer named
Irving Berlin worked. Joplin became convinced that Berlin lifted
some of his own Ragtime material from Joplin's opera. Unfazed,
Joplin rewrote portions of the opera, but it never was completely
staged during his lifetime (the complete version was performed on
Broadway in the 1970s.) The prestigious American Musician and Art
Journal considered Treemonisha to be the "most American opera
ever composed." (Edward A. Berlin, www.scottjoplin.org/biog.htm.
05/24/03).
Joplin remarried in 1914, but by then his brain had been badly
damaged by syphilis. He died in a mental institution in 1917, forgotten
and broke. A prolific composer, he wrote many more works that were
never published. Sadly, those works have all disappeared. However,
Ragtime found a resurgence in popularity during the 1970s due to the
use of Joplin's music for the Oscar® winning movie The Sting.
Americans finally recognized him as the classical composer he
always wanted to be, and posthumously granted him a Pulitzer Prize
in 1976.
You're sure to recognize some of Joplin's most famous compositions,
among them:
The Entertainer (1902)
The Great Crush Collision (1896)
Wall Street Rag (1909).
Sources:
Berlin, Edward A. "King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era" (New York: Oxford 1994).
Lone Star Junction. www.lsjunction.com. Accessed 05/24/03.
by Robin Jett
As a girl growing up in the hills near the Quachita Forest, Wilma
Mankiller didn't seem destined to become an outspoken, radical
advocate of the Cherokee Nation. Yet her strong sense of justice and
love of her culture helped solidify her success as the first female
Chief of any Indian Nation.
From the Country to the City - and Back Again
Born the sixth of eleven children in 1945 to full- blood Cherokee
Charley and his Irish-Dutch wife Irene, Wilma Mankiller lived the first
years in dire poverty. In order to make a better life for themselves,
the family accepted the U.S. government's offer to resettle. They
ended up in the slums of San Francisco, where Wilma became aware
of the injustices done to the American Indian. She began volunteering
most of her time at the Indian community center, and was also a
committed supporter of the 1969 "All Tribes" demonstration at
Alcatraz. While she couldn't participate in the sit-in (she married at 18
and already had young children by this time), she extended her
activism to the Pit River people, a tribe native to California. She
successfully fought an electric company's attempt at confiscating
their land.
The experience with radical activism gave Wilma the courage to
leave an overbearing husband and return to her roots. She moved
back to Tahlequah in 1975, and landed a position with the Cherokee
Nation in 1978.
Rise in the Cherokee Nation
The skills she learned in California - the ability to interpret treaties,
obtain grants, and organize people towards a common goal - served
Wilma well in her employment. After obtaining millions of dollars in
grant money for the Bell community (near the Arkansas border), she
became the head of the Cherokee Nation Community Development
Department. Unlike her predecessors, however, Wilma disliked the
emphasis on urbanization as a solution to rural poverty. Instead, she
insisted on supporting self-sustaining communities that valued the
Cherokee traditions of interdependence and hard work. She
encouraged small businesses and championed community's rights
for local control.
Amid some hostility, Wilma became Deputy Chief of the Nation in the
early 1980s. It surprised Wilma that her detractors did not criticize her
for her well-known radicalism, but for her gender. As the Cherokee
are a matrilineal society, she didn't think that citizens would be
bothered by a woman in a high position.
Chief Accomplishments
When Chief Ross Swimmer left the Cherokee Nation to head the
Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington in 1986, Wilma assumed the
role as Chief. She was duly elected in 1987, although her opponents
suspected voter fraud (nothing came from this accusation). As Chief,
she ruled out bingo as an economic solution, and continued to focus
on rural development. Becoming Chief also afforded her celebrity
status. Ms Magazine named her Woman of the Year, as did the
Oklahoma Federation of Indian Women.
Wilma wrote her autobiography Mankiller: A Chief and Her People
and contributed to The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History.
Although Wilma Mankiller is no longer Chief of the Cherokee Nation,
her legacy lives on in her work as a radical champion of rural
self-sufficiency.
by Robin Jett
One of Oklahoma's modern day heroines is Karen Silkwood, the
woman who attempted to expose safety hazards at a nuclear power
plant and died under mysterious circumstances. Her complicated
story, which paints her simultaneously as a conscientious worker
and a troublemaker, shows how in history, there are never clear-cut
winner or losers.
At first glance, Karen Silkwood's story sounds pretty mundane. Born
1946 in Longview, Texas to working class parents, she, like many
small town girls, married and started a family early. But during a bitter
divorce, she abandoned her three children. She then moved to
Oklahoma City in 1972, where she found work at the Kerr-McGee
nuclear power plant in Cimarron (see Red River Historian Issue #1 for
a biography on Robert Kerr). As a lab technician, Silkwood was
responsible for inspecting and cleaning fuel rods, a dangerous job
where she daily handled radioactive plutonium.
Silkwood was said to have found a real sense of purpose when she
joined the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union and participated
in the 1974 strike. To her surprise, she was voted Union Safety
Inspector for the plant, a job that she conducted with the utmost care.
Silkwood had already noticed early in her career at the Kerr-McGee
plant that safety was not a major concern. She reported her findings
to the Atomic Energy Commission, where she testified that the plant
lacked adequate shower facilities and hazard controls.
Shortly thereafter, Silkwood's body began registering high levels of
plutonium. The toxic chemical was also discovered inside the gloves
that she used to handle the plutonium, although no holes were found.
It was subsequently found in Silkwood's stool and urine as well.
Upon further inspection, the Kerr-McGee Health Physics Lab
uncovered that her food had been contaminated with plutonium.
Most of Silkwood's property was destroyed in an effort to contain the
radioactivity. She became convinced that she was being poisoned.
Now, more determined than ever, she wanted to reveal the sinister
side of Kerr-McGee.
On November 12, 1974, Silkwood planned on meeting a national
Union representative and a New York Times reporter. Colleagues say
she had with her papers that would expose Kerr-McGee knowingly
produced faulty fuel rods. But she never made it to the meeting.
Instead, Karen Silkwood was found later that evening dead in a
culvert, victim of a one car accident. Police ruled it an accident,
although tracks in the grass suggested that she had been forced off
the road. An autopsy revealed a massive amount of undigested
sleeping pills ( she was in the habit of taking them to relieve stress),
and even more plutonium - meaning she had ingested plutonium
within hours of her death. The papers she supposedly had could not
be found.
Did some sinister plot kill Karen Silkwood? Or was she a careless
worker looking to make trouble? No evidence has been found to
substantiate a conspiracy, and Kerr-McGee did not admit any
wrongdoing, even after paying a million dollar settlement to the
Silkwood family. However, her children have said that she was one
to always look out for her own interests above anyone else's. What
is certain is that her death continues to be shrouded in mystery.
