A musical gift "Fullilove" from Waterloo
Longtime residents mentored by unifying Black Waterloo music teacher make gift to surviving centenarian family member.
WATERLOO — Lizzie Fullilove never had children of her own, but she was like a mother to hundreds of boys and girls, regardless of their color.
She taught vocal and instrumental music to young people — Black and white — in Waterloo for a half century.
Even today, those kids and their parents, now ranging in age from their late 60s to their early 90s, speak with reverence when they talk about Lizzie Fullilove. Her citywide music recitals were high points in the young lives of her charges and their families.
She was only survived by nieces and nephews when she passed away in the 1980s. Now, a few people whose lives were impacted by her made a small but poignant gesture to one of those last surviving extended family members - Melvina “Mel” Harrington of Bellevue, Neb.
It was a gesture conceived by Marlys Messingham, who was one of Fullilove’s former students and also a teacher at the school; former longtime Waterloo City Council member Willie Mae Wright and her son, retired Waterloo teacher Alvin Wright, also a former student at the Fullilove school.
They gathered by a new display on the Fullilove School of Music at the Grout Museum in Waterloo — containing posters and programs of various recitals of decades past. It’s part of the museum’s “Black Stories Collective” local Black history exhibit.
The trio had photos taken of themselves around the exhibit, to be sent to Mel Harrington for her 100th birthday March 6.
”Mrs. Fullilove raised four of her niece and nephews. They’re all gone now. But one of the nephew’s wives (Harrington) is going to be 100,” Messingham explained. Melvina Harrington’s husband, Paul Harrington, a retired U.S. Air Force master sergeant living near Offutt Air Force Base, passed away in 2007.
”This niece in law, she’s the one we want to send the pictures to, because she’s the only one left,” Wright said.
It may not seem like much. But for Wright, it’s a big gesture of gratitude that reaches out across the generations. Not only did Wright’s children learn music from Lizzie Fullilove, their beloved teacher was their godmother as well.
And Lizzie Fullilove, who grew up in Mississippi like Wright, took Wright under her wing when Wright came to Waterloo in the 1950s and inspired her to civic involvement. Wright has cited Fullilove’s influence in community awards she has received.
Similarly, Marlys Messingham recounted stories of her whole family playing music together due to Lizzie Fullilove’s influence.
The fact that members of a Black family and a white family retain fond memories of Lizzie Fullilove’s lessons in music and life are a representative testimonial to her and her husband Harvey’s unifying influence on the community.
According to Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier files, the Fulliloves originally opened their music school downtown in the building at East Fifth and Lafayette streets where Roth Jewelers and the Beecher Law Firm are now located. The building had previously housed a local Disabled American Veterans chapter. The music school was on the level above Roth’s store.
Lizzie Fullilove enjoyed all genres of music, including country and swing, and taught mandolin, banjo and guitar, among other instruments, in addition to vocal music. Harvey, who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, also taught piano in his off-work time.
While other music schools may have been color restricted, the Fulliloves taught white and Black students. Several longtime residents recounted that race was never an issue within the school.
”One of my brothers started there when he was six years old,” Messingham said. “He was all into the cowboy thing,” a fan of singing cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. “He wanted to play the guitar, but Mrs. Fullilove said he should start on the mandolin, because with his small fingers, it would be easier to do. I started when I was seven on the mandolin, then I took guitar and piano. I still play the mandolin; I took it up again after several years.”
”Mrs. Fullilove had a band” of her students, Wright said. She and Messingham said they would play for local churches and civic organizations. One major performance in town in the late 1950s was a benefit for the construction of present-day Payne Memorial AME Church.
However, sadly, it became an issue in the 1950s when the Fulliloves saved up enough money to buy a lot outside their redlined Black neighborhood with the intention of building a home. Their would-be white neighbors feared a decline in their property values. There were rumors of possible Ku Klux Klan activity against the Fulliloves — so much so, that their friends and neighbors armed themselves to defend the couple from any such action.
No such action occurred, but when a cross was burned near the lot they had purchased, the Fulliloves instead decided to build in their redlined neighborhood. According to Courier files, Harvey Fullilove died of cancer in 1966. But the school continued. Lizzie moved the school to her home and continued teaching Black and white students from there almost up to her death in 1985 at age 90.
”The last recital was in ‘83. She was in a nursing home but we kept the lessons going,” Messingham said. That was the 54th annual recital. It was held at the Waterloo Recreation and Arts Center downtown, now the Waterloo Center for the Arts.
Willie Mae Wright’s late eldest daughter, Yolanda LaJune Stinson, who passed away in 2007 at age 55, was one of Lizzie Fullilove’s star pupils and made some history of her own at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
Stinson, known as LaJune to family and friends, was a student and teacher at the Fullilove School of Music. She graduated from Waterloo East High School in 1970 and from Iowa in 1974. She was an organist, pianist and soloist and co-founded the groundbreaking Voices of Soul Choir at the University of Iowa. She later worked for John Deere and was transferred to Georgia, where she received a degree in music composition at Clayton State University near Atlanta and became an executive with Delta Air Lines.
Another alum of the Fullilove school was Floyd Warren, who led a popular local country and western band for many years and had a Sunday morning show on KWWL television in the 1960s and ‘70s.
The house where the music school was located remains in Lizzie Fullilove’s extended family. Alvin Wright has owned and lived in Fullilove home, where the music school was located in its later years, since 1986, shortly after his teacher’s passing.
In 2001, one of the instructors at the Fullilove School of Music, the late Betty Mae Page, widow of James Lincoln Page who organized Black Boy Scout troops in Waterloo after serving in World War I, honored the Fulliloves in a letter to the editor of the Courier.
”Their name "Fullilove" truly was befitting of the enthusiasm and the inspiration directed to the future musicians,” Page wrote. “Yearly shows and recitals were a community highlight and a testimony that students of all races could share music and skills of different categories.”
Lizzie Fullilove taught music, and more. To borrow a title from a Stevie Wonder album, she taught songs in the key of life.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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Lovely story. Beautiful. Thank you.