A rich and substantial archive of photographs and ephemera pertaining to the life and career of Professor William T. Wilkins, a virtuoso musician and beloved educator who founded Wilkins Piano Academy, the first interracial piano school in Los Angeles.

Included in the photographic portion are twenty-one crisp real photo postcards, two of which are striking portraits of Wilkins at the piano, composition in hand. Another shows Wilkins onstage, conducting baton aloft, standing behind six students seated at a trio of Steinway Pianos. Several of the other photo postcards are portraits of Wilkins’ former students, many of which are signed with loving notes to their professor.

There are also several larger format images, many showing group portraits of different classes, and a number of charming mounted photos related to some sort of Christmas affair at the Witkins school. One particularly noteworthy picture shows an elaborate display of Christmas gifts and decoration, artfully placed in front of a blackboard which reads “Merry Christmas W.T.W.” Also included are larger portraits of Wilkins and a few of his students.

This material is accompanied by over a hundred pieces of ephemera from the first few decades of Wilkins’ long and storied career, found either loose or in a scrapbook with a handsome portrait of Wilkins attached to the cover. Included are numerous programs and flyers for recitals put on by his students, as well as programs Wilkins’ own performances and those of his contemporaries, both local and nationally-regarded Black musicians. These artists include noted soprano Ernestine Jones Wade (a one-time student of Wilkins’ best known for playing “Sapphire Stevens on “Amos ‘n’ Andy”), and fellow composers Harold Bruce Forsythe, Gilbert Allen and Carl Diton, the first Black pianist to make a transcontinental tour. There are a number of programs for performances organized by other Los Angeles music instructors such as Lucille Banton Blayechettai, Lilias G. Hart, Ava Shelmoa Brewster, Luvenia Harper and others. A number of these programs are photographically-illustrated with portraits of the principle performers.

One of the most interesting aspects of the ephemera appears on the back of a program for a 1918 recital. Declaring itself to be, “THE NEGROES OPPORTUNITY”, the ad offers the chance to acquire plots of land “55 miles south of San Diego and 20 miles from the ocean,” in Baja, California, courtesy of the Lower California Mexican Land Development Company. This outfit would go on to be known as “Little Liberia” - a self-sufficient, racially-exclusive community organized by activist T.W. Troy, attorney Hugh Macbeth and African American businessmen chiefly from California and Oklahoma. The short-lived venture lasted until the early 1920s, failing to flourish primarily due to financial mismanagement and Mexico’s land repatriation and immigration policies.

The scrapbook also contains dozens of newspaper clippings about Wilkins and his concerts. Many of these mainly articles are from the publication the California Eagle which, prior to its closure in 1964, was one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in the US. Also present in the collection are about twenty pages of manuscript music written by Wilkins.

William T. Wilkins was born Little Rock, AR, in 1887 and came to Los Angeles with his family around 1898. His father, Thomas Wilkins, was later remembered “as one of the early spiritualists in Los Angeles” according to his 1934 obituary. The elder Wilkins would play the flute to communicate with the world beyond and his obituary notes “the musical ability of the Centenarian has been strongly reflected in his well known son.”

William Wilkins attended John Francis Polytechnic High School (then known as “Commercial High School”) and though his father wanted him to become a mechanic, he pursued his passion for music and around 1910 he opened Wilkins Piano Academy, the first interracial piano school in Los Angeles.

Besides being a deft instructor, Wilkins was apparently a musical virtuoso as well. A 1914 advertisement for a Christmas fundraiser put on by LA newspaper publisher Edwin T. Earl, which featured a performance by Wilkins, describes him as a musical genius who “bids fair to become famous as a pianist and writer of music. He practices on a $1500 piano from three to seven hours every day and fairly makes his instrument talk.”

In 1921, LA’s mayor at the time, George E. Cryer, said that Wilkins was “of inestimable worth for teaching white and colored pupils the art of piano playing.” Interestingly, four years later, Wilkins would choose Cryer’s opponent, Judge Benjamin Bledsoe, as his pick for mayor of the city. In an endorsement published in the California Eagle, Witkins frames his decision through the lens of music. Describing a dinner party at the Hotel Alexandria,which featured Witkins and some of his pupils in performance, he writes that Bledsoe and his fellow guests didn't ask Wilkins or his pupils to render his folks’ “good old plantation melodies.” Nor did Bledsoe request them “to play ‘rag time’ or ‘jazz’ as the white American generally does, but he wanted to encourage us in the performance of the classics.” The published endorsement speaks to Witkin’s popularity and influence in the city at the time, and is a fascinating record of his feelings on popular music in regards to racial prejudices.

Wilkins passed away in 1972, having taught music through his piano academy for sixty-one years. Though the first half of the twentieth century found him to be a hugely influential figure in LA’s Black community and a celebrated figure throughout the city, his life and career are largely underrepresented today. There are only a few photos of him institutionally, mostly showing him much later in life, and scant examples of recital programs and other ephemera found here.