INFEMNITY™ Voices of Color

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INFEMNITY Voices of Color is a platform for margnilized voices to speak up and speak out about how they experience their truth.

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Letters from my Grandmother

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Recently I came across a notebook of letters written by my maternal grandmother, Nina Hortense Clinton of Zanesville, Ohio. This was my first encounter with a notebook of lined, onionskin paper followed by a blank, thicker page, so that the writer could put a piece of carbon paper between the pages and thus keep a record of correspondence. Of course, most of the onionskin pages had been torn out. And there were the two little pieces of carbon paper in the back of the book.




The first letter is dated 1902, when my grandmother was 21 years old. She had traveled to Europe as part of a group of Jubilee Singers directed by Frederick Loudin. My grandmother wrote this first letter to her niece while all of London was filled with excitement over the up-coming coronation of King Edward VII.






“London E.C.¹
                                                                            March 27, 1902
Dear Blanche,       Your most interesting letter was received March 7. I certainly did enjoy reading i…
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The National Museum of African American Music

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Back in October when we were in Nashville for the Fisk Jubilee Singers Alumni Awards Concert, we met with the directors of the new National Museum of African American Music, which is scheduled to open later this year. The curators for the museum had asked me for some materials on my parents, which would be included in the exhibit on the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They were also interested in the fact that my maternal grandmother Nina Hortense Clinton had sung with Frederick Loudin's group of Jubilee Singers from 1900 to 1903. 

Frederick Loudin had sung with the original Fisk Jubilee Singers of 1872. But after he was no longer affiliated with the school, he formed his own group of singers and traveled with them across the globe. The museum curators were especially interested in the letters my grandmother had written to her parents in Ohio while travelling with the group in Great Britain, in which she described the mourning period following the death of Queen Victoria, and the coronation …
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The Fisk Jubilee Singers in Great Britain: 1900-1903

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I am currently having a delightful correspondence with a gentleman in Dublin, Ireland, who is a member of the Historical Society of Dublin. As some of you are aware, I have been steadily transcribing letters written by my maternal grandmother, Nina Hortense Clinton, during her travels in Great Britain with the Fisk Jubilee Singers under Frederick Loudin. In a letter written in Dublin in 1901, my grandmother mentions that she and the group were filmed with a "cinematograph." Of course, I am now on a mission to find that footage.

Meanwhile, here is a short promotional article on her letters, which will certainly become a book in the near future.



Letters to my Parents from the United Kingdom: 1900-1903

By Nina Hortense Clinton Edited by Nina Kennedy*

While rummaging through my parents’ belongings after their deaths, I happened upon a small suitcase containing tied bunches of letters addressed to my great-grandparen…
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