Two Lives Dedicated to Opening Doors

No doubt their lives would have been different had they been born in another time.

But it was their destiny to be born black in 1909. So the Moseleys took their talents and their education and taught the next generation. Faced with closed doors, they prepared others to someday walk through them.

“The real satisfaction we got--and I wouldn’t trade it for love or money--was in knowing you’ve given service, you’ve influenced lives and helped them,” said 90-year-old Vivian Hyde Moseley, who taught with her late husband at Los Angeles city schools from the 1950s through the 1970s. “That was the best thing blacks could do during our era.”

Like the city itself, life inside classrooms has changed. But the experiences of the Moseleys illustrate the essence of what it means to teach--and demonstrate the bonds between teachers and students that survive decades and great distances.

“I’ve kept some of the notes” students have sent, said Moseley, whose husband died five years ago.

“I may be leaving but not for good, for you are my best friend and teacher. I love you, Mrs. Moseley,” wrote Maria Caserus on June 12, 1961.

Moseley is writing a book about her husband, Orville, a classically trained composer, arranger and pianist who penned the school anthem for Morehouse College in Atlanta. One of Orville Moseley’s former students, now a college professor, is writing the foreword.

“I had to write it,” she said, “even if nobody else reads it but the children.”

Like that of many African Americans who moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, the Moseleys’ story began in the South.

Reared in Crowley, La., Vivian Moseley attended Tuskegee University in Alabama and sang in the Tuskegee Choir.

“We opened up Radio City Music Hall,” she said. “Neon lights, New York City. A little country girl from Crowley, La., I had never seen anything like that. It was just a whole new horizon.”

After graduation from the black college in 1933, her horizons dimmed. “There was no place for me in my hometown because of segregation,” she said.

Crowley’s public schools were segregated, and anything but equal. The schools designated for the town’s black students didn’t offer the subjects Moseley had been trained to teach, such as business. And a black woman teaching at a white school was out of the question.

So she found work on the campus of another historically black college, Southern University in Louisiana. The music department was headed by an impressive young man named James Orville Brown Moseley, known to friends as J.O.B. A child prodigy who began playing piano at the age of 2, he studied at a Chicago music college at 11 and entered Morehouse College when was 15.

The two, both lovers of music, became friends, she recalled, “and, honey, that blossomed into pure love.”

They married and charted their lives together. Since childhood, Orville had won honors in music. Yet all he possessed--talent and education--was not enough. He had been born into a world where race mattered more.

In 1939, Marian Anderson’s rich contralto was barred from Constitution Hall, which was then owned by the all-white Daughters of the American Revolution. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the group in protest. And on Easter Sunday of that year, Anderson gave an awe-inspiring concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Still, two decades would pass before Anderson could realize her dream of singing with the Metropolitan Opera.

“Unfortunately, blacks in our days--I don’t care how good you were, you were black,” Moseley said. “Marian Anderson was one of the best contraltos we’ve ever had. They didn’t want her. . . . She isn’t the only one. Loads went through that.”

Orville Moseley decided he could do more good by teaching music than by putting all of his energy into trying to make it in the performance world.

Teaching at Black Colleges

The couple spent years teaching at historically black colleges such as Natchez and Tougaloo in Mississippi, Tuskegee, Grambling State in Louisiana and Morgan State in Maryland.

During World War II, Orville was drafted. In the service he entertained troops with his music. He won a military contest with his composition “Bronze Airmen,” written in honor of the black pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

The couple came to Los Angeles in the early 1950s to study at USC. A professor encouraged them to apply at the Los Angeles school district, but they went back to Baltimore.

A few years later, they returned to Los Angeles, lured by better-paying teaching jobs and a good climate. Most important, they could work with young people, and in their chosen fields, music and business.

Orville had headed music departments at three colleges. He held a master’s degree in music from the University of Michigan and had done post-graduate work at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, New York University and USC.

In Los Angeles, he taught music at 66th Street Elementary School--and loved it.

“He was very cognizant of the fact that the little ones had to get a head start for music,” Moseley said. “He felt the earlier, the better.”

Moseley, who earned her master’s degree in education from USC, had done postgraduate work at the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland and New York University.

At Edison Junior High School, she taught typing, and for years she was chair of the business department. She also taught at Dorsey High’s adult school.

“Youth gave respect to adults then,” she recalled. “You heard the ‘thank yous,’ the ‘yes,’ the ‘please.’ They seemed to have respect for authority.”

At Edison she taught in Room 216. Her typing classes worked on Underwood manual typewriters--until one memorable day in the late 1960s.

“When we got that one electric typewriter, we thought we had something,” she laughed. “That was heavenly. . . . One typewriter, 40 students, and we were thrilled to death.”

The news of the day sometimes helped her convince students to take typing seriously. If you’re drafted, she would say, you’ll get a better assignment if you type.

In the 1950s, Leimert Park, where the couple lived, was still a white community.

“When we moved in the neighbors brought us cookies, which to me welcomed us,” Moseley recalled. But others voted with their feet and moved out over the next few years.

Friends From College Days

Later the couple moved to Baldwin Hills and enjoyed exceptionally good years. The neighbors, the view, the peace, and, oh, the parties, she said. They threw faculty and Christmas parties each year. There would be musicians, singers and alumni.

“No matter how many people were there we always ended up singing,” she said.

Friends and former students from the Moseleys’ days at black colleges had also come to Los Angeles for better jobs and better lives.

The Moseleys felt right at home, joining the local Tuskegee Alumni Assn. Morehouse also had a local alumni club.

Orville served as a music director at several area churches, including Lincoln Memorial Congregational, St. Paul Lutheran, Redeemer Presbyterian, Second Baptist, Baldwin Hills Baptist and Bellevue Presbyterian.

In 1963 he founded a group known as the Ebony Choraleers, which performed until 1992. He also taught at Long Beach State and ran his own music studio.

In Los Angeles, the Moseleys reconnected with friends like R.C. Ola Brown of Leimert Park, who still remembers the couple’s kindness.

Brown was a biology major at Tougaloo College in the early 1940s when the Moseleys taught there. Vivian Moseley offered her a job in the dean’s office.

One evening, a Southern University group was scheduled to give a concert on Tougaloo’s campus.

Brown said she wasn’t going because she had to study.

“I really didn’t have to study, but I didn’t have anything to wear,” Brown said. “Everybody wore formals then to concerts and I didn’t have anything.”

As Brown walked home that evening, Moseley called to her from her apartment: “Come here, dear.”

Inside, Moseley pulled out a pink chiffon dress. She said she’d gotten too big for it.

“I put it on and it fit perfectly,” Brown said. “She said, ‘Oh you can have it.’ She said, ‘Why don’t you come to the concert?’ I was so happy.”

Through the years the Moseleys would run into former students and receive letters and calls. And one time Moseley heard from a former student who had been drafted.

“He called and said, ‘I just want to thank you,’ ” she said. “ ‘I’m in the office and it’s all because I learned how to type.’ ”