How Philadelphia’s Wanamaker organ played a role in the birth of Black History Month

The closing of Macy’s at the historic Wanamaker Building has received its deserved attention. Among the tributes to the building’s legacy and our memories of it, though, it is worth highlighting its important role in one of Philadelphia’s signature — though long-forgotten — public programs, which was a forerunner to today’s Black History Month celebrations.

In April 1928, the Wanamaker organ was a star feature of a weeklong series of events during “Negro Achievement Week” when the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance came to Germantown.

Negro Achievement Week was the brainchild of historian Carter G. Woodson, and it is the forerunner of what has become Black History Month. Philadelphia hosted the third such weeklong celebration of African American arts and letters after New York and Chicago hosted one in 1926 and 1927.

A local committee led by the YWCA of Germantown enlisted a stellar advisory group that included such notable civil rights leaders as Alain Locke (often called the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance”) and folklorist Arthur Fauset. The week’s program included NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson, artist Laura Wheeler Waring, and W.E.B. Du Bois, among many others.

The 1928 program ran April 15-21, and involved tie-ins among businesses, community groups, libraries, all four segregated branches of the Germantown YWCA and YMCA, as well as the racially exclusive institutions Germantown Friends School and Cheyney University (then known as Cheyney Normal School).

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Waring’s paintings were displayed in local stores, the Woman’s Club of Germantown (then housed in the Johnson House) devoted a night to Black literature, and Du Bois spoke to broader civic issues about exercising the right to vote at any cost.

In any neighborhood, but especially one as diverse — and bigoted — as Germantown, such collaborations were exceptional.

Each night’s programs focused on a topic, and Monday’s musical theme featured acclaimed organ soloist Harry T. Burleigh playing the Wanamaker organ. Accompanying Burleigh were the Robert C. Ogden Association Chorus and Band, both little-known aspects of Wanamakers’ approach to racial integration.

Robert C. Ogden was a marketing executive at Wanamakers, first in New York and then in Philadelphia.

He implemented John Wanamaker’s goal to promote interracial activities such as an integrated lunchroom and promoted Black employees to better-paying jobs than janitor and elevator operator, which was the norm.

Ogden’s practices were later discontinued by company chiefs after the deaths of Wanamaker in 1922 and his son Rodman in 1928.

Ogden organized cultural activities for Black workers including the band and chorus, both of which performed on April 16, 1928, and were heard on Wanamakers’ radio station, WOO, an AM station the store operated from 1922 until June 1928, mostly to feature organ concerts. Germantowners were invited to hear the broadcast at the Carnegie Library in Vernon Park.

As the Philadelphia Tribune reported, “Never in the history of this community have Germantown residents been so stirred up as they were during the past seven days where Negro Achievement Week took place.”

Nearly 4,000 people took part in the week’s events that brought the nation’s preeminent African American artistic and intellectual elite to the neighborhood.

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The two Negro Achievement Week programs in New York and Chicago took place downtown and involved the New York Philharmonic and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively. Philadelphia’s week happened not in predominantly Black North Philadelphia or West Philadelphia, but in a neighborhood noted for its conservative institutions.

Why Germantown?

The reason was the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Germantown Klavern, with more than 1,200 members, was the largest branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia in the mid-1920s and was active well into World War II.

The national YWCA leadership pressed for interracial programming in Northern cities, like Philadelphia, where Blacks had been moving for decades during the Great Migration.

The KKK stood against immigration and newly empowered people of color. But the YWCA, together with many local institutions, pushed for progressive approaches, one of which — born of Woodson’s idea — would ultimately become Black History Month.

And the Wanamaker organ played a part.

Now that Black History Month is under attack, we should bear witness to all our city’s connections to African American heritage and culture so that, like the organ itself, they continue to be experienced.

David W. Young is the executive director of the Historical Society of Montgomery County, and author of “The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America,” awarded the 2020 Klein Prize by the Pennsylvania Historical Association.