Naida McCullough

Naida McCullough was born in Colorado, the daughter of George A. McCullough and Georgia A. McCullough. She was raised in Denver, where she began as a performer and learned to play the church organ,[1][2] and graduated from Los Angeles High School in the winter class of 1917.[3]

She had a sister, Yolande McCullough; the sisters taught music classes together as young women.[4][5] Yolande married Leonard Stovall, a doctor in World War I who worked on tuberculosis prevention after the war.[6][7]

McCullough studied music was described in 1921 as "the first colored girl to graduate from the music department of the University of Southern California".[8] She was the first African American woman to receive a Pi Kappa Lambda Key (Music).[9][10] McCullough was a founding member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority chapter at USC, and she helped to found the chapter at UCLA in 1925, and was a founding member of the west coast graduate chapter, in 1927.[11][12] She performed at the national gatherings of the sorority in Philadelphia in 1925,[13] and in 1932 in Los Angeles.[14][15]

As a student McCullough was also active in the Junior Branch of the NAACP's Los Angeles chapter.[16] As a leader of that organization in 1925, she worked on a production of W. E. B. Du Bois's pageant, The Star of Ethiopia at the Hollywood Bowl,[17] then led a boycott of the same production, when it was taken over by more established theatre professionals.[18][19]

McCullough played gave concerts, including her own compositions in the program of piano music. "Genius is the only fitting description of this remarkably talented young woman", according to a 1936 report, remarking especially on her own works, "Hawaiian Rain Shower" and "E Flat Sonata", and her rendition of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "I'm Troubled in Mind".[20] She joined the Los Angeles Musicians Association in 1931.[21] She accompanied singers Florence Cole Talbert and Lillian Evanti.[22][23][24][25] In 1937 she visited Hawaii to give performances and study at the University of Hawaii.[26][27] In 1940, she and singer Tomiko Kanazawa gave a concert together at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, to benefit a tuberculosis rest home in Duarte, California.[28]

McCullough also taught kindergarten in Los Angeles, and worked with principal Bessie Burke at the Holmes Avenue School.[29][30] She sometimes gave lectures on Hawaii to community groups, after her studies there.[31] Because she was a member of the board of the Musicians' Congress, her name came up in a state Senate report on "un-American activities in California".[32]

Naida P. McCullough eloped with realtor Fitzhugh L. Banks in January 1940;[33] they divorced a few months later.[34] Naida McCullough died in 1989, aged 88 years.