Jenkins’ non-threatening persona made her a subversive figure of sonic civil rights pedagogy.2 In part because she was publicly associated with young audiences, and in part because of her air of perpetual good cheer, she was able to smuggle lessons in Black history into unexpected venues for divergent audiences.
In the early 1950s, for example, when she became Teenage Program Director at the South Parkway YWCA, she created after-school clubs that drew on the popularity of “Latin” dance music to spur Black teenagers’ interest in “African” rhythms. Shaped by respectability politics and by media portrayals of the Continent as exotic and uncivilized, some of these teens resisted her lessons. But Jenkins persisted, convinced of the necessity of Black Americans’ simultaneous embrace of America and Africa.
Later that decade, Jenkins brought her expertise as a “rhythm specialist” to performances at Chicago nightspots and universities, where her conga drumming and chanting was received as “folk” culture. Beginning in 1958, she deployed these same skills as the host of a weekly half-hour children’s television show, “This Is Rhythm.” There, before in-studio audiences of children drawn from across Chicago, she insisted that Africa was the “mother of rhythms” (including the “new” sounds of rock and roll) and modeled cultural pluralism, featuring African American entertainers like Odetta alongside Scottish bagpipers, Appalachian dulcimer players, and flamenco dancers. And in the early 1960s, she toured school auditoriums throughout the Upper Midwest, sharing her lessons in diasporic Blackness with tow-headed middle and high schoolers. In towns that had no restaurants or hotels that would serve Black people, Jenkins persisted, teaching children not only about African-derived percussion instruments (like the conga drum), but about figures like Léopold Senghor, the new president of independent Senegal.
Through call-and-response she replaced notions of musical mastery with democratic horizontality: after enough practice, any “follower” of a song could become a “leader.” Her performances boiled down to a set of simple propositions. Music was for everyone, not just the musically “gifted.” Singing together was a powerful means of being in community. Getting along in the world meant learning to be comfortable with others’ rhythms.
