Category: Barbara Conrad

  • Spirituals, Black English, and the Sonic Color Line

    Map of American English dialects. On July 5, 2018,  The Nation, a left-leaning magazine of politics and culture founded in 1865, published a poem on its website called “How-To.” The poem, meant to be an ironic critique of the limits of white liberal compassion, uses what is called in the field of linguistics African-American Vernacular English…

  • Classical Music Can Save Your Life

    It saved this violist’s life during the Great Depression. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen told the great African-American mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad in the 1970s that her singing might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience. Miss Conrad was one of the students who broke the color barrier at the University of…