Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson (1894–1962) was an American musician and teacher and the founding director of the National Negro Opera Company (NNOC).

Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson was born on February 14, 1894 in Madison, North Carolina to James Abraham "J.A." Cardwell and Elizabeth Webster Cardwell, she was the third of six children.
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Some people know that the Music Division is home to the National Negro Opera Company Collection. They also know that, while it’s not the first African American opera company, it was one of the largest.

It was founded and managed by Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson (1894?-1962), it was active for 20 years (1941-1961), and it had branches situated mostly along the East coast. It also may be well known that Mrs. Dawson’s organization provided opportunities for gifted African American performers while simultaneously challenging racist ideas by her use of White orchestras and conductors to accompany a Black cast. This strategy affirmed her belief that good (diversity) ultimately triumphs over evil.
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The company’s repertory included Verdi’s Aida and La Traviata, Gounod’s Faust, Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, and Clarence Cameron White’s Ouanga.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performed Aida on August 28, 1941 after Mrs. Dawson negotiated an opportunity for African American violinist Lawrence Peeler to play in the orchestra.

Mrs. Dawson struggled to raise funds sufficient to cover expenses associated with staging operas (operas were performed in English translation). This task was especially difficult since she insisted that leads would receive standard (union) wages. As a result, she was often embroiled in battle with the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) because she believed that it conspired to take over her company.

For example, in Washington, DC in 1949, a performance of Aida was interrupted during the first act. A union member abruptly demanded that the conductor stop the orchestra while a dispute between Mrs. Dawson and union members occurred back stage. After five minutes of silence, the curtain was lifted and the performance continued.
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Several years later, the company performed on stage at the Metropolitan Opera House (1956), before it stopped staging operas because it became too expensive. Subsequently, the company performed excerpts from Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses.

There were also defining moments in the company’s pre-history. In the mid-1930s, Mrs. Dawson organized and operated a School of Music that she ran from her Pittsburgh home (Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal was among her students). She also organized the Cardwell Dawson Choir which auditioned on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in New York in 1935.

I listened to many broadcasts of the Major Bowes Amateur Hour in hopes of hearing a recording of the choir, but unfortunately I didn’t come across the choir’s performance. However, I did hear La Julia Rhea’s audition of Verdi’s “Pace, pace, mio Dio” on that show in 1935.

Mrs. Rhea was not only the National Negro Opera Company’s first Aida, but she was also the first African American to audition (unsuccessfully) at the Metropolitan Opera Company in 1934. Fifteen years later, she sang the same selection on the Ted Mack Show (the show that replaced the Amateur Hour).

n 1959, the National Negro Opera Foundation sought funding from the Ford Foundation. According to a draft of the proposal,

“The opera company has never had the benefit of a highly ‘organized’ fund raising campaign which other groups regard as their life blood. Instead, it relied on the organized efforts of its guilds along with thousands of dollars given by Madame Dawson and her devoted husband.”
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The company may never have applied for the grant.

Tragically, Mary Cardwell Dawson died of a heart attack on March 19, 1962. After receiving news of her passing, La Julia Rhea wrote the following to Mrs. Dawson’s husband,

“It seems to me like only yesterday that she invited me to sing the title role of Aida in her very first great grand opera venture. We had differences of opinions, but we always resolved them in the true Christian spirit.”

Source: Library of Congress guest post from Music Reference Specialist Sam Perryman. /March 1, 2019 - Posted by: Cait Miller
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Top left photograph: Mary Lucinda Cardwell Dawson. Source: Library of Congress

Top right photograph: Mary Cardwell Dawson formed this choir before founding the National Negro Opera Company. The choir received numerous accolades and performed at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. Source: Library of Congress
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Bottom left photograph: Mystery Mansion on Apple Street in Pittsburgh is where Mary Cardwell Dawson taught music, and rehearsed and auditioned members for the choir and National Negro Opera Company, which she founded.
The once-grand historic house is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation.
Credit: Kate Blackley, WESA
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Article: Founder of National Negro Opera Company subject of new Charlotte exhibition

WFAE | By Gwendolyn Glenn
Published March 18, 2024 at 5:47 PM EDT

WFAE’s Gwendolyn Glenn spoke to Charlotte Museum of History CEO Terri White about Dawson and the exhibition.

White says until Dawson was about 7 years old, she lived just north of Greensboro in the small town of Madison.

The family moved to Pittsburgh during the early years of the Great Migration, when large numbers of Black people left the Jim Crow South for better jobs and less segregation in northern cities.

All of Dawson’s family members sang in the church choir, which was when Dawson’s parents realized she had exceptional talent.

“They wanted her to have formal training, so they saved for years and years to send her off to Boston to study music at the New England Conservatory,” White said.

But opera companies wouldn’t hire African American performers — and so many talented Black musicians turned to teaching. White says Dawson turned down a teaching job in Georgia and instead earned money by giving private piano and voice lessons to students in Pittsburgh, where she was living.
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The National Negro Opera Company was the first commercially successful Black opera house in the country. A few others lasted for only a single production or a handful of runs before closing.

But Dawson’s tenacity led to more than two decades of staged productions in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Her niece, Barbara Edwards Lee, who was also Dawson’s secretary, talked about her aunt’s legacy in a documentary produced by Pittsburgh PBS station WQED.

“Aunt Mary was delightful and she was quite the musician,” Lee said. “She could do it all. She was tough, a hard taskmaster — everybody would tell you that — but she got results. Her reputation was all over the country, you see. She left a love of good music and an appreciation of the arts as her legacy.”

White: In fact, the jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal studied under her, and it just goes to show how her influence spread across musical genres.

Glenn: Yes, I love his music. And my understanding is that he was a 7-year-old little boy when she was teaching him.

White: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.

Glenn: And she was teaching piano lessons in this particular house that was known as the Mystery Manor, I understand.

White: Yes. It was in Pittsburgh and served as a place at a time when Black entertainers, athletes, etc., etc., weren't allowed to stay in the local hotels.
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They knew that they were welcome to stay at Mystery Manor. And it was so called because you just never knew who was going to be there or what was really going on in there.

Names like Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Roberto Clemente, and just a list of who's who, stayed at the Mystery Manor. It is where Dawson auditioned members for the choir she formed in the late 1930s, which performed nationally, including at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. With that success under her belt, Dawson forged ahead with her mission to create opportunities for Black musicians by establishing the National Negro Opera Company — using many of the vocalists in her choir.

White: She took the vast majority of vocalists and musicians that worked with her choir and just formalized them into this opera company. The people who sang in this group would go on to be powerhouses in multiple musical genres, including opera, around the world.

The thing the company struggled with was funding. Throughout its 21-year reign, it was just a constant battle for fundraising and sponsors from the organizations that were already supporting institutions like the Met and other established opera companies.

Glenn: Because it was a Black opera company. And my understanding is that the first show she did in New York, financially, it was not a success, and many thought the company would fold. It didn’t. And about two years later, after founding the company in 1943, Dawson put together a big show in Washington, D.C., correct?

White: Yes. She eventually moved the operations of the company from Pittsburgh to D.C. because her husband moved to D.C. for a job. But while in D.C., she wasn't permitted to bring her company into any of the established theaters.
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And so, what she did is she outfitted barges with these massive, elaborate sets where the symphony was on them, there was a stage with a full production layout, and audiences would have their chairs and blankets on the shore of the Potomac, while this barge is floating.

Unfortunately, it rained for days straight, so the first night they had to cancel. The second night they had to cancel, so it really took a big financial hit to the company that the weather just did not cooperate with them.

Glenn: Too, it was important to her that her audiences be integrated.

White: I think it's something she struggled with all the time because she would find theaters and they would say, ‘OK, you can come, but Negroes must be upstairs or Negroes aren't allowed to buy tickets.’

Even within her company, although it was majority Black, she had white musicians and a white music director and would bring in non-Black people. This was a way to show African Americans can compete and perform with all people in these high-art forms.

Glenn: The exhibit, "Open Wide the Door" looks at Dawson’s life, but also the contributions of other African American opera singers and musicians who have been overlooked.

White: This is something we, as a people, have always done. And we want to show in this exhibition that it's the people from rural North Carolina, nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of Alabama, who went on to become these mega superstars.
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We also go into just opera as a genre and how it is not just a European music form. We talk about Asian opera and African opera, and stuff like that.

But then beyond that, we go into the individual profiles of people who were in the company and people who, through today, have been influenced by this company — Robert McFerrin, Sr., whose son, Bobby McFerrin, Jr., is out there still making music to his day. We talk about Carol Brice, who went on to found an opera company of her own in Oklahoma, and people who are still carrying on the tradition of what Mary Cardwell Dawson started 80 years ago.

Glenn: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Dawson to the National Music Committee. Dawson died a year later of a heart attack in 1962. She was 68 years old.
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Narrative sources:
Library of Congress

WFAE-PBS- All Things Considered