Archive: Arts & Entertainment

The Dorothy Cotton Jubilee Singers (DCJS) will present a pre-tour concert of Negro Spirituals at 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 10 in Ford Hall at the Ithaca College Whalen School of Music.

The memorial concert is in honor of Ithaca hero Dorothy Cotton, the civil rights activist who served as education director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She often delivered her messages of freedom and hope through music and lived in Ithaca, N.Y., for many years. "The DCJS, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, Ithaca-based organization dedicated to preserving the Negro Spiritual and its themes of sorrow, despair, and hope to promote racial healing and social justice," says Founding Director Dr. Baruch Whitehead associate professor of music education at Ithaca College.

"We are also intent on furthering civil rights leader Dorothy Cotton's mission of conveyed hope for freedom through music."

DCJS has more than 85 members, including some 20 Ithaca College voice students, who perform many of the solos, alongside community members of different ages (11 to 81), heritages and backgrounds. The diverse chorus performs locally and throughout the region; the singers have performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., the Clemens Center in Elmira, and in Rochester, Buffalo, Toronto, Harlem and Brooklyn. This concert kicks off a three-day tour to Goldsboro, N.C. and Washington D.C. The chorus will perform again at the Kennedy Center in 2020.

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