Last spring quarter, Northwestern University music student Timothy McNair, a master’s candidate in voice, had a problem with an assignment in Professor Donald Nally’s chorale class. Among the pieces the class was required to learn and perform in concert was “Song of Democracy,” which sets 19th-century poetry by Walt Whitman to mid-20th-century music by Howard Hanson.
Yes, McNair says. Whitman considered blacks to be less evolved than whites, opposed voting rights for them, and didn’t think they’d survive as a race to have a future in the great American democracy.
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He points to passages in Whitman’s essays such as this one: “As if we had not strained the voting and digestive caliber of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of ignorant foreigners, we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons.”
That didn’t sound good to McNair, who had only a single B on a transcript that was otherwise all A’s. He says he showed up for the next class, but was pulled out immediately for a meeting in the dean’s office, where he reiterated his objections and was shown the door. He didn’t try to return to the class after that.
“It was very difficult, if you lived back then, not to participate in the general racism of that era,” Reynolds adds. “For his era, in his poetry, Whitman’s progressive. After the Civil War and late in life, mostly privately, you encounter a certain amount of racism.”
Nally says he can’t comment, and NU spokesman Alan Cubbage says the law prevents the university from “public discussion of disciplinary actions in regard to individual students.” However, he adds, “the university’s expectation of all students is that they complete work assigned by their professors.”
