World Premiere: March 2023
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, tuba, percussion, strings, solo violin
Duration: 11 minutes

Curtis Stewart

“The Famous People,” wrote Curtis Stewart, “is a recomposition of five of Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances that fuses them with such traditional American Slave dances as the Ring Shout, Juba, Cakewalk, Pigeon Wing and Buck and Wing. Each movement is named after an American Abolitionist alive during or around Dvořák’s lifetime.

“In looking up the etymology of the word ‘Slavonic’ in the title of Dvořák’s Dances, I found several articles suggesting that it came from the Slavic languages of many Eastern Europe groups. [Dvořák was born in Bohemia, one of the Slavic lands, and proudly proclaimed his national heritage throughout his life, even sacrificing a small fortune by writing his operas in his native Czech rather than in the more internationally saleable German.] ‘Slav’ can denote fame or worth, and families would adopt bori-slav or stani-slav for their names as a mark of distinction. But ‘Slavic’ may also have been a source for the word ‘slave,’ since many Eastern Europeans were forced into slavery by the Ottomans during the Middle Ages.

"I was drawn to the celebration of Slavic dances in Dvořák’s works, and reflected on the American Slave in terms of how Black Americans continue to deal with creating a similar sense of pride, familial storytelling, and lineage today. I hope The Famous People will feel like a similar celebration of five American Abolitionist heroes — David Walker, Frances Harper, Mary Ann Shad Cary, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Mum Bett.’”

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It is perhaps not insignificant that David Walker was born in 1796, the year before the thirteen states gathered in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution that certified the United States’ independence from Great Britain. In 1829, Walker published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, described as “for a brief and terrifying moment … the most notorious document in America” — it advocated nothing less than slaves rising against their masters to gain their freedom. Walker, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, was the son of a slave father and a free Black mother, which, according to the local laws, meant that he was born free. He witnessed the oppression and violence of slavery as a youngster and as soon as he was old enough to travel left for Charleston, South Carolina, home for many free Blacks. In 1825, he settled in Boston, center of the abolitionist movement, where he married, ran a used clothing store, joined civic and religious anti-slavery organizations, and wrote for New York’s Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper owned and operated by African-Americans. His 1829 Appeal was distributed widely in the Northeast and smuggled into the South, where its message so horrified slaveowners that they initiated laws forbidding Blacks to learn to read and advertised a $3,000 bounty for Walker’s head — $10,000 if he was brought to the South alive. Even in liberal Boston, such inflammatory opinions as Walker promoted took courage. “Somebody must die in this glorious and heavenly cause,” he maintained. “I may be doomed to the stake and the fire, or to the scaffold tree, but it is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of emancipation.” David Walker died on August 6, 1830, probably from pneumonia, though many believed he had been poisoned.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born to a free Black abolitionist couple in 1823 in the slave state of Delaware (Delaware prohibited the import and export of slaves in 1878 and did not secede during the Civil War, but it never formally outlawed slavery), and when she was ten moved with her family to the free state of Pennsylvania, where she became a teacher. The Shadds were active in the Underground Railroad and fled to Ontario, the Railroad’s northern terminus, when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made Blacks anywhere in the country liable for enslavement. There she married Thomas Cary, opened a school for Black and white children, and established the abolitionist Provincial Freeman, becoming the first Black female newspaper editor in North American history. When the Civil War broke out in 1860, Cary went to Washinton, D.C., where she wrote, became the first Black female student at the Howard University Law School, taught children, and was an outspoken advocate for abolition and women’s suffrage. Frederick Douglass once wrote of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, “We do not know of her equal among the colored ladies of the United States.” She died in Washington, D.C. in 1893.

Mum Bett was born into slavery in Claverack, New York around 1744 (New York State did not outlaw slavery until 1827), and grew up on the plantation of Pieter Hogeboom, near Albany. She and her sister were included in the wedding dowry when Hogeboom’s daughter married Colonel John Ashley and were sent to his home in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Slavery was coming increasingly into disrepute in Massachusetts during that time, and Ashley himself moderated a local committee that issued the “Sheffield Declaration” of 1773, which stated that “mankind in a state of nature are equal, free and independent of each other, and have a right to the undisturbed enjoyment of their lives, their liberty and property.” That document’s principles and language were adopted into both the United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Bett was inevitably aware of Ashley’s advocacy, and she expressed her ambition for freedom to Theodore Sedgwick, a prominent lawyer who had helped draft the Sheffield Declaration. In early 1781, Sedgwick filed a lawsuit on Bett’s behalf challenging Ashley’s right under the new state Constitution to possess her as a slave. The lawsuit worked its way up to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which held in August 1781 that slavery was not legal in the state under Article I of its Constitution: “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights.” In proud recognition of her longed-for liberty, Mum Bett took the name Elizabeth Freeman, and worked, for wages, in the Sedgwick household for the rest of her life. When she died in 1829, the family buried her in its own plot and marked the grave with an inscribed monument. In 2022, a bronze statue of Elizabeth (Mum Bett) Freeman was dedicated on the Sheffield Green to honor the first slave in America to win freedom in a court of law.