To the Profession.
Ladies and gentlemen: I find it necessary to explain my position as a writer on the Freeman. I write under signature as a special “Musical and Dramatic Critic.” This is plain and already understood to the intelligent people. My efforts are for the best interests of performers and productions. My standard is “Justice to all” and “partiality to none.” I insult nobody and pay no attention to ignorance. The most deserving performers must be better presented in these columns hereafter and the ignorant outsiders who write disparagingly about stage people will find me in a solemn waterloo.
sylvester russell
By this notice’s 1902 publication, readers of the Indianapolis Freeman knew that Sylvester Russell, the first Black arts critic to gain national recognition in the U.S., was a man of strong opinions. Russell used his role as a popular critic to share his incisive vision of Black music and theater with the general public. Decades before musicologists examined Black performing arts with the same seriousness they offered white, European-derived traditions—and well before Black ethnomusicologists would earn the long-deserved respects of their peers—Russell used his column to argue for the perfection and elevation of Black performance on the popular stage.
He saw a path for racial uplift through his consideration of Black performers’ work, driven largely by the development of a systematic musicology, or study of musical form and practice, that set African American performance on a scale from cheap blackface minstrelsy to the finest operatic vocals. His columns ranked artistic works in a sort of hierarchy ranging from “low comedy/minstrelsy” at the bottom to classical composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at the top. He took part in artistic debates that continue to unfurl on the internet today.
Throughout his career, which lasted until his death in 1930, Russell wrote for the major Black papers of the day—the Indianapolis Freeman, later the Chicago Defender, and finally the Star, a theatrical paper he published himself—from his perch in New York City, the capital of the performing arts. He viewed his readers as advanced experts on Black music and culture, and he knew that his audience deserved a critic that could meet its expertise with the analysis it merited and couldn’t get anywhere else. And he recognized his methods were innovative and advertised them as such, as in this review of a 1902 production of the musical In Dahomey, playing at the Grand Opera House in Brooklyn, which mentions William Randolph Hearst’s theater critics James J. Montague and Alan Dale, two of the most influential cultural critics at the time.