A PEARL FROM I.M. TERRELL: Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw, The Mother of Jazz in Fort Worth, Texas.

 

A PEARL FROM I.M. TERRELL

Before Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw became Fort Worth’s “Mother of Jazz,” she was a young musician shaped by family, faith, segregation, and one of Texas’s most storied Black high schools. Today, a Fort Worth pastor is calling for this extraordinary educator, advocate, and guardian of Black culture to receive her rightful place in the PVIL Hall of Fame.

By Black Texans, Inc., Link: https://youtu.be/yrUS9df4l6A?is=2FhYSY9-qoHDoPCD

Long before Fort Worth promoted itself through polished images of cowboys, culture, and commerce, another city flourished beyond the boundaries drawn by Jim Crow.

It was a Black Fort Worth held together by churches, schools, barbershops, beauty salons, neighborhood businesses, and homes where families gathered around pianos. It was a city within the city—one that created its own institutions because the institutions downtown either excluded Black residents or admitted them only on unequal terms.

The music passing through that Fort Worth was extraordinary.

Duke Ellington came through. So did Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. Onstage, they stood beneath the lights as some of the most celebrated entertainers in America. Their clothes were elegant, their orchestras immaculate, and their music sophisticated enough to fill the finest rooms in the country.

But when the performances ended, the indignities of Texas segregation returned.

The same cities that purchased tickets to hear Black musicians often refused to provide them hotel rooms. Artists treated like royalty onstage could find themselves unwelcome at the front desk a few hours later. In Fort Worth, many stayed in Black homes, where local families offered the hospitality that white establishments denied.

A young Marjorie Hollins watched and listened.

She heard the brilliance in the music, but she also came to understand the burden carried by the people who created it. The musicians passing through her neighborhood were not merely celebrities. They were working artists navigating a nation that loved Black music more readily than it respected Black lives.

That contradiction would remain with her.

Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw would become a pianist, organist, music educator, mentor, historian, union leader, and one of North Texas’s most devoted champions of jazz. She would spend more than three decades introducing Fort Worth schoolchildren to music. She would help establish and lead the Fort Worth Jazz Society. She would defend the professional dignity of working musicians and preserve stories that might otherwise have disappeared.

Eventually, people began calling her the Mother of Jazz in Fort Worth.

But before she became a guardian of the city’s music, she was a daughter of historic I.M. Terrell High School—and of the larger Black educational world represented by the Prairie View Interscholastic League.

That is where her story as a Texas legend begins.

A League Built Behind the Color Line. Link: https://youtu.be/1YReKWujbHw?is=-Vw4mcNAKSfVW9Rv

The Prairie View Interscholastic League was born because Black children possessed extraordinary talent, but Texas refused to provide them an equal stage.

In November 1920, members of the Colored Teachers Association met with L. W. Rogers, first assistant state superintendent of education for the Division of Negro Schools. From that meeting emerged the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools, created to govern athletic and academic competitions among the state’s Black high schools.

Black Texans came to know the organization as the Prairie View Interscholastic League—or simply the PVIL. Prairie View hosted the state track meet each spring, maintained competition records, and became the gathering place where Black students from across Texas could demonstrate what their communities already knew: they were scholars, athletes, musicians, debaters, writers, farmers, and leaders.

The first state track-and-field meet took place at Prairie View Normal College in April 1921. Two years later, the organization came under the authority of Prairie View A&M College and formally became the PVIL. Beginning with approximately forty schools, the league expanded to roughly three hundred by 1927.

The PVIL is rightly remembered for championship football teams, packed gymnasiums, legendary coaches, and gifted athletes whose abilities rivaled those of anyone in Texas.

But the PVIL was never only an athletic league.

It sponsored debate, typing, literary events, music, and band competitions. It provided a statewide stage for members of the New Farmers of America. It affirmed the intellectual ability, physical talent, creativity, and leadership of Black students at a time when the segregated state treated their schools as inherently inferior.

Within the PVIL, excellence was not an exception.

It was an expectation.

Few schools embodied that spirit more powerfully than Fort Worth’s I.M. Terrell High School.

On December 24, 1940, I.M. Terrell defeated Austin Anderson, 26–0, to win the first officially determined PVIL state football championship. That victory permanently established the school within Texas sports history.

Yet football tells only part of the I.M. Terrell story.

Its classrooms and rehearsal rooms produced educators, ministers, business owners, public servants, artists, and musicians. Its teachers instructed children whom the larger society underestimated and prepared them to enter a world that frequently refused to acknowledge their abilities.

Among those students was Marjorie Hollins.

The Girl From Marshall

Marjorie was born in Marshall, among the pine forests of East Texas, and moved with her family to Fort Worth when she was two years old. Marshall gave her a birthplace. Fort Worth became her home, classroom, concert hall, and eventually the community to which she devoted her life.

Her father believed in discipline and educational excellence. He enrolled his daughter in a Catholic school because he wanted her to receive a strong education and be held to high standards. She later attended James E. Guinn Junior High School before enrolling at I.M. Terrell.

Music was already part of the Hollins household.

Her father played the violin. Her mother played the piano. Marjorie was taught to read music, study the classics, and approach the instrument with seriousness. She learned piano and organ and shared her gifts in the Methodist church.

In her family, music was not decoration.

It was language, discipline, memory, faith, and service.

That foundation prepared her for I.M. Terrell, where Black achievement was cultivated in a community accustomed to producing excellence under unequal conditions. The school existed within the PVIL world—a statewide network that enabled Black students to compete and create when the white-controlled University Interscholastic League excluded them.

For Marjorie, the legacy of that world would not be expressed through a scoreboard. It would be expressed through the keyboard, the classroom, the concert hall, and a lifetime devoted to opening doors for others.

After graduating from I.M. Terrell, she studied at Wiley College in Marshall and Fisk University in Nashville. At Fisk, one of the nation’s most distinguished historically Black institutions, she earned a degree in music. She later returned to North Texas and, in 1963, earned a Master of Music degree from North Texas State University, now the University of North Texas.

Her educational journey would have been remarkable for any musician. For a Black woman pursuing advanced musical training during segregation, it represented something more.

She was entering institutions and professional spaces that had rarely welcomed people who looked like her. Classical music was frequently treated as though it belonged exclusively to white concert halls. Jazz, although created from the genius and experiences of Black Americans, was still often presented as a man’s territory.

Marjorie Crenshaw claimed her rightful place in both.

The Notes and the Feeling. Link: https://youtu.be/KzxLYskCec4?is=a44fg_zzutXmYCXy

Classical training taught Mrs. Crenshaw to respect what was written on the page. She understood form, notation, harmony, rhythm, and timing. She knew how a composition was constructed and how a musician was expected to honor it.

Jazz asked her to trust something else.

During a trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras with her mother, she encountered music in a city where it seemed to rise from the pavement. Jazz there was not merely a subject to be studied. It was alive—improvised, communal, responsive, and free.

Mrs. Crenshaw once explained that she had not initially considered herself a true jazz musician because she preferred to see the notes in front of her. Then someone heard her playing in church and told her that what she was playing was jazz.

She had learned how to feel it.

That discovery became a fitting description of her life. Mrs. Crenshaw respected structure, but she was never imprisoned by it. She could read what had already been written while listening for what had not yet been played.

Like the finest jazz, her life joined discipline with freedom, tradition with invention, and individual expression with communal memory.

The Music Segregation Tried to Silence

During Mrs. Crenshaw’s youth, nationally renowned Black musicians continued to perform in Fort Worth. Their concerts gave young people access to an art form that belonged to them but was not always made available to them.

When racism and abusive treatment caused many musicians to stop traveling through the South, the cultural loss was enormous. An entire generation of Black children lost opportunities to experience those artists in person.

Mrs. Crenshaw understood that segregation did more than determine where performers could eat, sleep, or sit. It interrupted the transmission of Black culture. It placed distance between young people and their artistic inheritance.

She would spend much of her career closing that distance.

For more than three decades, Mrs. Crenshaw taught elementary music in the Fort Worth Independent School District. Her classroom became a neighborhood concert hall. Children encountered classical music, sacred music, jazz, and other musical traditions. She wanted them to understand that the world of music was larger than whatever happened to be popular or familiar.

Not every child appeared interested. Some were restless. Others may have seemed to forget the lesson as soon as they left the classroom. Like many devoted teachers, Mrs. Crenshaw sometimes wondered whether she was reaching them.

Years later, former students began approaching her at concerts and community performances.

They remembered.

They told her that she had helped them appreciate music. Some became professional musicians. Others continued playing while pursuing different careers. Many simply became adults who attended concerts, supported the arts, and listened with greater understanding because Mrs. Crenshaw had first taught them how.

Teachers do not always witness the moment when a lesson takes root.

Mrs. Crenshaw planted the music and trusted the future.

Fort Worth’s Mother of Jazz

Mrs. Crenshaw’s work eventually carried her beyond the classroom and into the center of North Texas jazz history.

She became a charter member and former president of the Fort Worth Jazz Society. She attended performances, supported local artists, mentored young musicians, and served on boards dedicated to strengthening the musical community.

The title Mother of Jazz was not given to her simply because she loved the music.

Mothering is active work.

It means nourishing, protecting, remembering, correcting, and preparing another generation to continue after you.

Mrs. Crenshaw did all of that.

She understood that a musical tradition could not survive on talent alone. Musicians needed audiences. Young artists needed mentors. Communities needed institutions. History needed witnesses. Working professionals needed advocates willing to defend their right to receive fair treatment and compensation.

Mrs. Crenshaw became a bridge between eras—between the days when Ellington, Basie, Cole, and Fitzgerald traveled through a segregated Fort Worth and the generations of musicians who inherited the city’s jazz tradition.

She did more than remember the music.

She remembered the people inside the history.

Fighting for the People Who Made the Music

There is romance in the public image of a musician—the spotlight, the applause, the encore—but music is also labor.

Mrs. Crenshaw knew that talent did not guarantee fair treatment. Applause did not pay a musician’s bills, and prestige did not prevent exploitation. American music history is filled with artists whose performances enriched promoters, venues, and audiences while the musicians struggled for dependable wages.

At the urging of Ray Hair, former president of Local 72-147 and later president of the American Federation of Musicians, Mrs. Crenshaw became deeply involved in the Musicians’ Union.

She served on the Executive Board of Fort Worth Local 72 before its merger with Dallas Local 147 and continued serving after the merger. She encouraged former members to return and persuaded new musicians to join.

Her reasoning was practical. Doctors belonged to professional associations. Other skilled workers formed organizations to represent their interests. Musicians, she argued, deserved the same protection.

The union could not remove every obstacle, but it gave individual artists collective strength in the pursuit of fair wages, representation, and professional respect.

Her union work completed a circle that had begun in the classroom.

There, she taught children to value music.

In the union, she taught the public to value the people who created it.

The Authority of “Mrs. Crenshaw”

To her students, colleagues, fellow musicians, and friends, she was simply—and respectfully—“Mrs. Crenshaw.”

The name became its own title.

Some people receive authority through appointment. Others accumulate it over a lifetime of showing up when needed, doing the work, remembering the history, and making room for those coming behind them.

Mrs. Crenshaw belonged to the second group.

Her community service extended across education, music, culture, faith, and organized labor. She remained connected to the Texas Retired Teachers Association and Saint Andrews Methodist Church and was formerly associated with the Fort Worth Opera Guild.

Each part of her life strengthened the others.

Her family taught her that music was an inheritance.

The church taught her that music was service.

I.M. Terrell taught her to pursue excellence in the face of exclusion.

Her formal education gave her discipline.

Jazz taught her freedom.

The classroom allowed her to pass the gift forward.

The union allowed her to defend the people who carried it.

The Full Meaning of the PVIL Legacy

The history of the PVIL is sometimes reduced to what Black students accomplished despite segregation. But that explanation is incomplete.

Segregation created the obstacles.

It did not create their excellence.

Black families created the foundation.

Black teachers cultivated the talent.

Black churches sustained the community.

Black schools built the institutions.

The PVIL created the stage.

I.M. Terrell gave its students the confidence to step upon it.

Mrs. Crenshaw represents the full meaning of that legacy. Her life reminds us that the PVIL world was never limited to football fields, basketball courts, running tracks, and championship trophies. It included concert bands, music competitions, debate teams, literary events, classrooms, and educators who believed Black children deserved opportunities to demonstrate the full range of their gifts.

Her PVIL legacy can be heard in a piano played inside a church. It can be felt in a jazz phrase discovered between written notes. It can be seen in an elementary classroom filled with children who do not yet understand that their teacher is placing a lifelong gift within them.

It can be witnessed in a union meeting where musicians insist that their labor has value.

It can be remembered when a former student, now grown, realizes that Mrs. Crenshaw taught them not merely to hear music but to listen.

A Place in the Hall

As the PVIL preserves the achievements of Black Texas schools, it must recognize the entire culture of excellence those institutions created.

The PVIL Hall of Fame should honor the athletes who won championships, broke records, and inspired communities. It should also honor the educators, musicians, mentors, and culture keepers who carried the PVIL spirit beyond segregation and into the life of modern Texas.

Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw belongs among them.

She does not deserve induction merely because she graduated from I.M. Terrell. She deserves induction because she embodied what I.M. Terrell and the PVIL were created to produce.

She pursued educational excellence.

She preserved Black history.

She mentored young people.

She elevated Texas music.

She defended working musicians.

She enriched the cultural life of Fort Worth.

She became a living bridge between the segregated institutions that formed her and the generations that benefited from her service.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s story is not merely the story of a gifted musician. It is the story of a woman who protected the conditions under which music could be taught, valued, remembered, and passed forward.

Some people perform music.

Some teach it.

Some preserve its history.

Others fight for the dignity of those who create it.

Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw did all four.

She is a pearl from I.M. Terrell, polished by discipline and strengthened by history. She is an educator whose lessons continued long after her students left the classroom. She is an advocate who understood that artists deserve dignity as well as applause. She is a guardian of Black cultural memory and a link between the masters who traveled through segregated Fort Worth and the musicians who now stand upon their shoulders.

For her lifetime of achievement in music, education, cultural preservation, labor advocacy, and community service, Pastor Kyev P. Tatum proudly recommends Marjorie Juanita Hollins Crenshaw for induction into the PVIL Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame would honor her name.

Her name would also honor the Hall.

And somewhere in Fort Worth—a city still learning how to remember all of itself—the music continues to play.

If we listen closely, Mrs. Crenshaw is still teaching us how to hear it.