Black Elegy: Middle School Models for Studying the Life of Florence Mills
Work Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2025
Department
Africana Studies Department; Berklee Online
Keywords
The Apollo; arts integration; Black feminism; variety stage; vaudeville
Abstract
In 2020, The Apollo’s Education Department coordinated school day performances and professional learning sessions spotlighting the life of Florence Mills, an acclaimed Black performer known for her appearances across North America and Europe. Her extensive achievements were chronicled in Renee Watson and Christian Robinson’s book, Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills (2012). Despite her extraordinary accomplishments, there are no existing audio recordings or films of Mills. However, archival photographs, library resources, musical scores, and elegiac songs can be used to investigate Mills’s lasting impact and legacy. In this chapter, I examine hybrid, in-person, and virtual learning models used in my middle school class’s study of Mills. Students opted to title our project “Black Elegy,” an amalgamation of Duke Ellington’s and Constant Lambert’s songs composed in honor of Mills’s life. Our class attended The Apollo’s “Florence Mills: The Queen of Happiness” performance in February 2020. I also participated in the preceding professional learning workshop, “Florence Mills: The Unheard Voice of a Generation,” in January 2020 to learn about Mills prior to launching our study. Between March and June 2021, my class also explored Mills’s life through the New York City Department of Education’s History by Design program, a social studies partnership with cultural institutions including the Apollo Theater and the Museum of the City of New York highlighting historical figures in New York City. I analyze our collective work using Zakiya Adair’s (2013) investigation of Mills’s activism and advocacy and Jayna Brown’s (2008) framework for examining nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black female performers, and demonstrate how Black feminist performance theories influenced our study.
Recommended Citation
Kai-Lewis, Abimbola, "Black Elegy: Middle School Models for Studying the Life of Florence Mills" (2025). Faculty Works.
https://remix.berklee.edu/faculty-works/92
Comments
This chapter appears in The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education, edited by Marissa Silverman and Nasim Niknafs and published by Oxford Academic.