Biography:

Maud Cuney Hare (née Cuney, February 16, 1874–February 13[1][2]: xvi  or 14,[2]: xxviii [3] 1936) was an American pianist, musicologist, writer, and African-American activist in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. She was born in Galveston, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Norris Wright Cuney, who led the Texas Republican Party during and after the Reconstruction Era, and his wife Adelina (née Dowdie), a schoolteacher. In 1913 Cuney-Hare published a biography of her father.[4]

Essentially part of the second generation after emancipation, Cuney Hare studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and became an accomplished pianist. She lived in Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood of Boston, most of her adult life. A musicologist, she collected music from across the South and Caribbean in her study of folklore, and was the first to study Creole music. Her final work, Negro Musicians and Their Music (1936), documents the development of African-American music.[2]: xv

Early life and education

Maud was born in Galveston, Texas, on February 16, 1874, to Adelina (Dowdy, or Dowdie in alternate spelling) and her husband Norris Wright Cuney. Both parents were of mixed race; her father was of majority-white ancestry. Her mother, one of the “handsome Dowdy girls,” came from Woodville, Mississippi. Her father’s ancestry was African, Indian, European, and Swiss-American. The Cuney children were a “second family” related to a large, wealthy and politically powerful white family headed by Gen. Philip Minor Cuney of Austin County, Texas, who had been born in Louisiana.[2]: xix  Norris Cuney was one of eight mixed-race children born to Cuney and his mixed-race slave housekeeper, Adeline Stuart. Philip Cuney acknowledged and freed his children and Stuart before the Civil War. By 1850 Cuney was one of the largest planters and slaveholders in Texas, with 2,000 acres and more than 100 slaves. He had eight white children born to his ‘legal’ white wives: three children by his second wife, Eliza (Ware) Cuney, who died young; and five by his third wife, Adaline (Spurlock) Cuney.

Philip Cuney sent his mixed-race sons Joseph and Norris to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, before the war for their education. Afterward Norris worked on steamboats on the Mississippi River. After the war, he became an established leader in the Texas Republican Party. He served in the Customs Office and later was appointed as Collector of Customs for the port of Galveston.[5][6] He established a business of stevedore workers, employing about 500 men on the docks and organizing a union.[7]: xii

Interested in Shakespeare and other great writers, Norris Wright Cuney sang and played the violin;[4]: 4  Adelina Dowdy Cuney was a soprano singer and played the piano.[5] Maud and her brother Lloyd grew up in a house filled with music and literature.[2]: xix–xx

After completing school at Galveston’s Central High School in 1890, Maud Cuney went to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music. There she studied piano with Edwin Klahre[8] and music theory with Martin Roeder.[2]: xx  She also studied at Harvard‘s Lowell Institute of Literature.[7]: xii

When white students learned that Maud Cuney and another African American, Florida L. Des Verney, were living in a campus dormitory, some of them tried to have the young women excluded. Fearing financial pressure from white southern families, the Conservatory requested that the women find other lodgings, implying that their safety could not be guaranteed. Maud Cuney told the school that she refused to move. Her father also refused to move her, criticizing the school for dishonoring “the noble men and women” abolitionists of Massachusetts who had fought against prejudice. Members of the Boston black community spoke out against the Conservatory, as did black students, including Harvard Cambridge student W.E.B. Du Bois. The Colored National League took up the issue, and the Conservatory eventually reversed its position. Though Des Verney moved away, Maud Cuney stayed.[7]: 100–101  She later wrote, “I refused to leave the dormitory, and because of this, was subjected to many petty indignities. I insisted upon proper treatment.”[4]

Boston had a vibrant black community. While studying in Boston, Cuney became part of the Charles Street Circle (or West End Set), meeting at the home of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.[7]: 98  She became a close friend of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was based in Massachusetts for a time, and they were briefly engaged.[9] Du Bois described Maud vividly as “a tall, imperious brunette, with gold-bronze skin, brilliant eyes and coils of black hair.”[7]: 98

After graduating from the conservatory, Cuney returned to Texas, studying privately with pianist Emil Ludwig[2]: xx  in Austin. She taught at the Texas Deaf and Blind Institute for Colored Youths in 1897 and 1898. She chose to oppose racial prejudice when management of the Austin Opera House demanded that Negroes in the audience coming to her performance must be segregated and seated in the balconies. She and Emil Ludwig cancelled the planned concert and performed instead at the Texas Institute for Colored Youths, where no distinction of color was applied.[7]: 103–104

Credits: