Miriam Makeba Remembered

In 1962 I was a freshman at Ottawa University, a small liberal arts college in eastern Kansas. I had gone there from my New England home with my collection of folk music albums - Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary. That year OU had a cultural concert series and brought to campus a folk singer I had not heard of, Miriam Makeba. The university was quite proud of bringing this international star to our campus in our small Kansas town. There was quite a crowd who flowed in to hear this woman who would later sing at JFK's birthday, star with Harry Belafonte, protest apartheid, travel with Paul Simon's Graceland tour, marry Stokely Carmichael and be banned from her homeland for three decades.

I didn't know much about her music before the concert, but the events that night have stayed with me a long time. You see, in Ottawa, Kansas in 1962 black women were not welcome at motels. Miriam Makeba, international music star and activist, was not allowed to spend the night and had to travel back to Kansas City with her crew after the concert. As a New England Yankee I had heard of such segregationist attitudes, but my first college semester was the first time I had personally witnessed such. My first week in Ottawa a small group of dorm mates went shopping "uptown". It was a hot afternoon and we charged into a soda shoppe for some cold drinks. Once inside we realized that one girl had stayed outside. We went out to see why and she pointed to a sign in the window "whites only". Many of the black students at Ottawa that year were from back east and for them, too, these were new, if not unexpected, occurrences. The black students were denied other types of services too - a haircut required traveling over an hour to Kansas City. There must have been so many other instances that as a nonblack I would have been oblivious to, so many prejudices without foundation, so many injustices that should forever be relegated to the past. CJJ


BBC bio of Makeba.