Scholar Robert H. Clark notes that while some colleges were open to Black students before the land grant Morrill Acts, those laws established significantly more colleges for Black students.
“Many of the new land grant universities established bands,” Clark writes,
and college marching bands began to develop during the early twentieth century concurrent with the rise of football and the growth of historically black colleges and universities. Tuskegee Institute is believed to have the oldest continually active band at an HBCU, established in 1895.
These HBCU bands paved a new and distinctly Black path for American band music. Clark lists different historical influences including musical training acquired in the US military; a tradition of “secondhand learning” and self-teaching in Black communities; the school band movement; the Great Migration; and segregation in public schools. What the historical trends don’t account for, in Clark’s estimation, “is a large measure of creativity belonging to African American culture, manifesting as syncopated rhythms, ‘blue notes,’ angular body movements, and more.”
Where predominantly white bands favored “corps” style shows, with traditional militaristic aesthetic and roll-step performance, Black bands, with a more kinetic style and mix of music, drew on influences ranging from circus music, ragtime, New Orleans brass bands “cutting” in competition with each other, and even Black participation in minstrel culture.
“Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy described one such performance in his autobiography, noting that typical minstrel company parade “was headed by the managers in their four-horse carriage” who acknowledged the audience with a raise of their silk hats. The managers
were followed by the drum major—not an ordinary drum major beating time for a band, mind you, but a performer out of the books, an artist with the baton. His twirling stick suggested a bicycle wheel revolving in the sun. Occasionally he would give it a toss and then recover the glistening affair with the same flawless skill. The drum major in a minstrel show was a character to conjure with; not infrequently he stole the parade!”
Today, these innovative HBCU bands can be seen as emblem and arbiter of Black culture, writes Black and queer studies scholar Antron D. Mahoney, who reads them as “archives of not only ways of performing an idealized Blackness, but material deposits of the very lived experiences of being Black in the US.” Among Black scholars and musicians this is both celebratory and complicated, particularly when the band emphasizes masculinity and heteronormative culture.