Detail of the original Shuffle Along orchestra from The Music of Black Americans, 1st edition
This timeline charts significant moments in the life and career of Eileen Southern, together with selected events in U.S. racial history.
1920
Eileen Stanza Jackson is born on February 19 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Lilla Gibson Jackson and Walter Wade Jackson
1920
On June 15, three Black circus workers performing in Duluth, Minnesota (150 miles north of Minneapolis) are accused of raping a white woman and lynched by a mob
1932
Jackson presents a piano recital at Grace Presbyterian Church in Chicago
1936
Jackson graduates from Lindblom Technical High School in Chicago
1940
Jackson graduates from the University of Chicago with a BA in the Humanities (music)
1941
Jackson earns her MA in the Humanities (music) from the University of Chicago in August, having started in January of that year. Cecil Michener Smith advises her thesis, “The Use of Negro Folksong in Symphonic Forms”
1941
Jackson arrives on December 1 to begin a position as an instructor at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College, a public, historically Black university in Prairie View, Texas. Joseph Southern is secretary to the registrar at Prairie View, and he and Eileen meet while working there
1941
The December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor draws the U.S. into World War II. The U.S. military is segregated throughout the war and remains so until 1948
1942
Jackson marries Joseph Southern in August
1942
Southern and her husband move to Charlotte, North Carolina for the 1942-43 school year; she teaches music at the Second Ward School, the first Black high school in the city which had opened in 1923
1943
Southern serves as an instructor at Southern University, a public, historically Black university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana for the 1943-44 and 1944-45 academic years
1945
Southern moves to Lorman, Mississippi and works as an instructor of music during the 1945-46 academic year at Alcorn A. & M. College, a public, historically Black institution
1946
Southern begins teaching at Claflin University, a private, historically Black university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She develops the music major as assistant professor and department chair
1949
Southern returns to Southern University in Baton Rouge as an assistant professor for the 1949-50 and 1950-51 academic years
1951
Southern travels north during the summer to inquire about enrolling in the PhD program at Radcliffe College, the women’s college associated with Harvard University. Turned away, as she later recalls, she instead takes a course with Gustave Reese at New York University on the music of Renaissance composers Palestrina and Lassus
1952
Southern returns to New York City in January and lives in Harlem while beginning graduate coursework at NYU
1954
The US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declares segregation of public schools to be unconstitutional
1954
Southern begins teaching music in junior high schools in the New York City Public School System, starting in the fall semester
1955
Southern performs one of her last major concerts as a pianist at the YMCA in Harlem on January 2, as reported in the Amsterdam News on January 15
1955
Marian Anderson becomes the first African American to perform a leading role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on January 7
1958
Southern serves as lecturer at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY) for one academic year, starting in the fall, while she continues to teach junior high school
1960
Southern joins the faculty of Brooklyn College full-time in the fall
1961
Southern earns the PhD from New York University, completing a 2-volume dissertation titled “The Buxheim Organ Book”
1963
Southern learns of her promotion to assistant professor at Brooklyn College, which takes effect on January 1, 1964
1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in an attempt to end decades of inequality under Jim Crow laws
1968
Southern publishes "Foreign Music in German Manuscripts of the 15th Century" in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, becoming the first African American author in that scholarly journal
1968
A Black Studies department is founded at San Francisco State College and hailed as the first in the United States
1969
Southern joins the faculty of York College (CUNY) as an associate professor
1971
The first edition of The Music of Black Americans is published by W. W. Norton, together with Readings in Black American Music
1972
Southern is promoted to full professor at York College in January 1972
1973
Eileen and Joseph Southern publish the first issue of their academic journal, The Black Perspective in Music
1974
Southern begins teaching one course at Harvard while still working full time at York College; she does so for the 1974-75 academic year and the fall term of 1975
1976
Southern begins her appointment as a tenured full professor and chair of Harvard’s Department of Afro-American Studies in January
1979
Southern is on leave for the spring term after three calendar years of chairing the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard
1982
Southern leads her first NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) summer seminar at Harvard
1982
Southern publishes Biographical Dictionary of Afro-American and African Musicians with Greenwood Press
1983
The second edition of The Music of Black Americans is published together with that of Readings in Black American Music
1986
Southern leads a second National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar
1986
Southern retires from Harvard at the end of the fall term
1990
The Black Perspective in Music ceases publication
1992
New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern is published, edited by Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.
1996
George Walker becomes the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, a prize first awarded in 1943
1997
The third edition of The Music of Black Americans is published
2000
Southern receives the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music
2001
Southern receives the National Humanities Medal for “having helped transform the study and understanding of American music”
2002
Southern dies on October 13 in Port Charlotte, Florida due to complications from Alzheimer’s