From KUTX:
On Dec. 8, 1903, opera singer and civic leader Zelma Watson George was born in Hearne, TX.
As the daughter of a prominent Baptist minister, Zelma moved around as a child, from Hearne to Palestine to Dallas to Hot Springs, Ark. Her father’s prominence meant that congregants found him wherever he was, and Zelma recalled visits to the family home from such civil rights figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington during her childhood.
In 1917, her family left Texas for Kansas when vigilantes threatened her father over his work on behalf of Black prisoners.
She moved to Chicago for college, studying sociology at the University of Chicago, pipe organ at Northwestern, and voice at the American Conservatory of Music before pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at New York University with a dissertation on the history of Black music in America. Throughout her life, Zelma Watson George would balance her myriad careers in education and social work, civic engagement and musical performance.
Starting in the 1940s, George took on leading roles in a series of operas and musicals, perhaps best-known for her work in Cleveland-based productions of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium and The Consul and Kurt Weill’s experimental Threepenny Opera.
In the 1950s, George’s interest in civil rights led her to serve as an adviser in the Eisenhower administration, and she would go on to become a member of the U.S. United Nations delegation by 1960.
She represented America abroad in both her political and cultural capacities, attending a Ban the Bomb conference in Ghana in 1963 and a World Festival of Black Art in Senegal in 1966 with Duke Ellington and Marian Anderson. She worked with the Ohio Job Corps of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program and as a leader in PBS during the Nixon years in addition to her work with the NAACP and the League of Women Voters in Cleveland.
Zelma Watson George lived a long and full life — fitting for an operatic diva — and passed at age 90 in 1994.
