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HomeNewsArchivesAlton Adams: Island's Official Greeter Hosted W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt

Alton Adams: Island's Official Greeter Hosted W.E.B. DuBois, Eleanor Roosevelt

April 7, 2008 — Reading about the world as Alton Adams Sr. saw it is to meet a man given to expressions of uncommon kindness and generosity, and a man with a highly developed discipline.
The University of California Press this month is publishing The Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams Sr.: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy. (See "New Book Shows V.I. History Through Eyes of Bandmaster, Booster.")
Adams at the onset absolves himself from the restrictions of a historian, which has its literary delights: No historian would have described U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Joseph Wallace Oman, the territory's second governor, as a "peach of a man."
In 1921, Oman persuaded the Navy Department to waive Chief Petty Officer Adams' seagoing requirement and grant him permanent appointment in the territory as bandmaster, a "singular service," Adams says, for which he felt he owed Oman.
After a ceremony at Government House one afternoon where his most famous composition, "The Virgin Islands March," was played, Adams says he was inspired to create a march in Oman's honor. As he left Government Hill, he says, fragments of a march came to him.
"Oman was a short, jaunty, snappy sort of fellow, and that provided me with a motif," Adams writes.
Adams went home and by nightfall had written "The Governor's Own."
"Oman was jubilant," Adams says, "and it became through custom the march of all following governors."
Adams had a close relationship with all seven of the V.I. gubernatorial naval appointees, as well as the civilians that followed, in his post as government welcoming coordinator. The memoirs abound with anecdotes, local names side by side with renowned figures: Irving Berlin, Thornton Wilder, John Phillip Sousa, Eleanor Roosevelt and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Adams was born in 1889 to a musical family. His father, Jacob, played the guitar, and a group of his musically inclined friends would gather at the Adams' home Sunday afternoons, augmenting the guitar with their own instruments. The young Adams listened keenly. He fell in love with the flute.
Starting off with a flute he fashioned from papaya stems, the nine-year-old Adams graduated to a $1.60 piccolo he persuaded his father to send away for, along with a 50-cent instruction book.
Adams says he treasured that piccolo more than the Boehm system sterling silver flute awarded him by the Cundy-Betttoney Co. in Boston in recognition of the many columns he wrote for Jacobs' Band Monthly.
Adams was mentored by two local craftsmen to whom he apprenticed, men who also had an ear for music: Jean Pierre and Albert Francis, father of Rothschild Francis.
Meantime, he took a correspondence course in harmony, counterpoint and composition from H.A. Clarke, Ph.D., a University of Pennsylvania music professor. And that was Adams' formal music education.
He joined the Municipal Band led by Lionel Roberts, but Roberts' ideas of bandleading clashed with Adams' stringent standards. They parted company, which led to the birth of the Adams Juvenile Band, which became enormously popular for its precision and musicality.
The 1917 transfer of the islands from Denmark to the U.S. profoundly affected Adams' career. Less than three months after the transfer, Adams became Chief Petty Officer Adams, the first black bandmaster of the U.S. Navy. His 21-member band also joined the Navy for a four-year hitch.
Adams' was a staunch defender of the Navy's presence in the islands, while some protested it. He gained opportunities he felt were essential to the growth of the islands. When the celebrated 1924 band tour of the U.S. eastern seaboard was proposed, Adams was thrilled. It was not only the "apogee" of his musical ambitions, he recognized its value in national recognition of the Virgin Islands, and of black communities nationally. This was still a time of pervasive racial inequality.
Adams remained close to Government House through naval and civil administrations, as official greeter, a post that afforded him advance knowledge of who was coming to town. This happy circumstance came in handy when Adams became publisher of the Bulletin newspaper in 1940.
"The Bulletin was able to 'scoop' its competitors," he writes. "Thus, I was first to interview Dominican Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo."
Adams came to know well the renowned black intellectual and civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois, who was a guest at the Adams' 1799 Guest House, which Adams opened in 1947.
"Because of our unique backgrounds," Adams says, "we held a different racial attitude than American Negroes. I explained that race had little meaning for Virgin Islanders because we judged a person by his deeds, not his color, and we expected the same in return."
The renowned author of The Souls of Black Folk had a different perspective.
"DuBois tended to see everything and everyone in purely racial terms," Adams says. "He had a great sense of humor and his conversation revealed the deep love he had for his race. However, I found his broad genius and great intelligence somewhat disturbing and self-damaging because of his overriding preoccupation with race. I often pondered whether this great man was mentally still a slave."
The guest house holds a special place in family lore.
"My father loved running the guest house," Alton Adams Jr. says. "Everybody that came in was welcomed as a friend. He was always the island's official greeter."
Editor Mark Clague has meticulously annotated the book, with an extensive section of notes by himself and by Adams, along with a selected bibliography.
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