Black History: More African Americans in German-Speaking Europe

Below you’ll learn more about three African Americans who were influenced by living and studying in German-speaking Europe. None of the three are very well known or famous, but each made a unique contribution to American culture and history. Selma Hortense Burke, Angela Gisela Brown (Prinzessin Angela von und zu Liechtenstein), and Milton S.J. Wright were African Americans whose lives were altered by their experiences in Germany, Austria, and/or Liechtenstein.

Also see: Black History and Germany – more African Americans with German connections.

Selma H. Burke (1900-1995)

If you have a United States dime in your pocket or purse, you have a sample of a work originally created by Selma Burke. The African American sculptor Selma Hortense Burke was born on 31 December 1900 in Mooresville, North Carolina, as one of ten children born to a Methodist minister and his wife. Her family was not financially well off, and she attended a one-room segregated elementary schoolhouse. Her formal education began at Winston Salem University, but she later graduated (in 1924) as a registered nurse from St. Agnes Training School for Nurses in Raleigh. Burke then moved to New York City to work as a private nurse. It was in New York that she developed her artistic talents as a sculptor. She once said that as a child she enjoyed the feeling of squeezing the North Carolina clay through her fingers: “It was there in 1907 that I discovered me.” Her maternal grandmother, a painter, had encouraged her interest in sculpting.

In New York City Burke enrolled in art classes at Sarah Lawrence College, while also working as a model to help pay for her schooling. Burke traveled to Europe twice in the 1930s, first on a Rosenwald Fellowship (as the Black contralto singer Marian Anderson also did) to study sculpture in Vienna in 1933-1934. Burke returned to Europe in 1936 to study in Paris with the sculptor Aristide Maillol.

The FDR Plaque
Burke’s best-known work is a bronze relief portrait honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms. She had to win a national contest to earn a commission to create the sculpture. Once she had the assignment she realized she could not do justice to her subject using photographs alone. She requested and was granted permission to have live sittings with the president. The first of two 45-minute sittings took place on 22 February 1944, but the president died before a third sitting could happen.

Eleanor Roosevelt objected to how young the sculptor had portrayed her husband, but Burke responded with: “This profile is not for today, but for tomorrow and all time.” Burke’s 3.5-by-2.5-foot plaque was unveiled by President Harry S. Truman in September 1945 at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C., where it is still located today. The Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, John R. Sinnock, designed the profile for the Roosevelt dime in 1946. His engraving for the coin was in all likelihood adapted from Burke’s 1945 plaque. Although Sinnock later claimed his design was a composite of two studies that he made from life in 1933 and 1934, and denied that Burke’s portrait was an influence, most experts see a strong resemblance between the two profiles.

Selma Burke also created notable sculptures or busts of other prominent figures, including fellow African Americans Duke Ellington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Booker T. Washington. The Washington bust was done for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the mid-1930s. Her nine-foot statue of Martin Luther King Jr., completed when Burke was in her eighties, is on display in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. Other statues by Burke were more symbolic, such as “Temptation” (1938), “Despair” (1951), “Fallen Angel” (1958), “Mother and Child” (1968), and “Together” (1975). During her lifetime Burke received several honorary doctorate degrees and numerous honors and awards, among them a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art (1979), and the Pearl S. Buck Foundation Women’s Award (1987).

In 1949 Burke married architect Herman Kobbe, and moved with him to an artists’ colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Kobbe died in 1955, but Burke continued to live in her New Hope home until her death on 29 August 1995, at the age of 94.

Princess Angela of Liechtenstein (Angela Gisela Brown)

Two decades before the African American actress Meghan Markle became the British Duchess of Sussex in 2019, another woman of African heritage married into a European royal family, that of Liechtenstein, in January 2000.*

With her marriage to Prince Maximilian of Liechtenstein, Panamanian American Angela Gisela Brown became Princess Angela of Liechtenstein, Countess of Rietberg (Prinzessin Angela von und zu Liechtenstein, Gräfin zu Rietberg in German). Born on 3 February 1958 in Boca del Toro, Panama, Angela Brown was the daughter of businessman Javier Francisco Brown and Silvia Maritza Burke. Angela Brown was only five when her family moved to New York City, where she attended elementary and high school before being accepted at the Parson’s School of Design.

As a fashion design student at Parson’s, Brown had won the distinguished Oscar de la Renta Gold Thimble Award. After graduation in 1980 she established her own “A. Brown” fashion label in partnership with the Hong Kong firm Adrienne Vittadini. She later worked at that firm as a fashion director.

Grace Kelly’s German Heritage The American actress Grace Patricia Kelly (1929-1982) also married into royalty. Her Hollywood film career (11 films in all) ended when she married Prince Rainier III to become Princess Grace of Monaco on 18 April 1956. Kelly was obviously not of African heritage, but she was a commoner who married into royalty. Kelly’s mother, Margaret Katherine Majer (1898-1990) was the daughter of German immigrants, Carl Majer (1863-1922) and Margaretha Berg (1870-1949). Her Irish-American father, John B. Kelly Sr., came from an affluent Philadelphia family. Like Princess Angela of Liechtenstein, Kelly’s royal marriage ceremony also was divided into two parts on different days, a civil wedding and a church wedding, as required by the laws of Monaco and the Catholic Church.

Brown first met her future husband, Maximilian Nikolaus Maria von Liechtenstein, the second son of the reigning Liechtenstein Prince Hans-Adam II, at a private party in New York in 1997. Maximilian, a successful Harvard-educated investments executive, proposed to her, complete with engagement ring, in the summer of 1999. That same year Brown sold her fashion business. Since her marriage Princess Angela keeps a low public profile and routinely declines interviews.

The German-speaking Principality of Liechtenstein (Fürstentum Liechtenstein) is a constitutional monarchy set in the Alpine mountains, landlocked between Austria to its east and Switzerland to its west. The upper waters of the Rhine River form the tiny nation’s border with Switzerland. Since 1923 the Rhine bridge border crossing has had no passport controls. The two nations also share the Swiss franc (CHF) as their official currency. Liechtenstein is one of the smallest nations in the world with an area of only 62 square miles (160.5 sq km) and a population of less than 40,000. But it is known as a financial powerhouse, having more registered companies than residents.

*The African-born Countess Mary von Habsburg of Austria married Ferdinand Leopold Joseph Count von Habsburg of Austria (in Nairobi, Kenya) in August 1999, but Austria has not had a reigning royal family since the end of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1918.

Milton S.J. Wright (1903-1972)

In 1931 Milton Samuel J. Wright, an African American born in Savannah, Georgia on 28 June 1903, was in Germany studying for a doctorate in economics at the University of Heidelberg. In August 1931 he published an article in the respected African American quarterly The Crisis (founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois as a publication of the NAACP). In his article Wright proposed setting up an exchange program between “American Negro colleges and universities” and foreign (European/German) universities, so that “students of our group” and “other peoples” might get to know one another better. His exchange-student proposal was inspired by his own experience, in his own words: “I have found during my year of study and travel here in Europe that the average European has either a most prejudiced and entirely false conception of the Negro (the American Negro) as he really is, or is almost entirely ignorant of his life and activities.”

He had already contacted the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD, as it is still known today) in Berlin in person and in writing about his Germany-USA exchange proposal, and had received a favorable response of support. But there was a “hitch,” as he put it. There was an informal agreement between the DAAD and the Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York City that any exchange of university students between Germany and the United States must be handled through those two organizations. But more than a month after contacting the IIE in New York (founded in 1919 right after WWI, and still going strong), Wright had yet to receive any response. His Crisis article was an attempt to get help from American readers to light a fire under the IIE.

We don’t know exactly what happened after that, but conditions in Germany would soon make any US exchanges difficult, if not impossible. The failing economy (hyperinflation and the Depression) along with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany made Wright’s dream impossible. By 1932 the DAAD itself was having financial problems. (Ironically, the DAAD was founded in 1925 in Heidelberg.) Scholarship payments were often replaced by fee exemptions and free room and board.

But it was precisely this developing situation that led to an extraordinary event in Milton S.J. Wright’s life: a face-to-face meeting with Adolf Hitler!

Milton Wright’s 1932 Hitler Encounter
Not many months after Wright’s efforts to establish a Germany-USA student exchange, the Black American university student had an unusual encounter with the future German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, in Heidelberg in the summer of 1932. With some German friends, Wright had attended a local political rally featuring a typical Hitler speech. A joking remark to his friends that he would be willing to assassinate Hitler was apparently overheard by one of Hitler’s people.

As Wright was walking along and approaching the Europäischer Hof, a luxury hotel in Heidelberg where Hitler was staying, he was accosted by some of Hitler’s men who sternly informed him that the future Führer wanted to speak with him. Wright was escorted into Hitler’s hotel room, more than a little concerned about what might happen next. He was well aware of Nazi ideology and their views about race. After all, he had recently completed his doctoral dissertation, titled “The Economic Development and the Natives Policy in the Former African Protected Areas of Germany from 1884 to 1918.”

During his four-hour ordeal, Wright, fluent in German (which even drew a compliment from Hitler), mostly had to listen to Hitler express his views of Black people in the US (“a third-class people, cowardly slaves…”). But Hitler also expressed his respect for certain African Americans, including Booker T. Washington and Paul Robeson.

Not long after his odd Hitler experience, Dr. Wright returned to the United States and resumed employment at Samuel Huston College in Austin, Texas (a historically Black college, renamed Huston-Tillotson College in 1952, and Huston-Tillotson University in 2005). In 1933 Dr. Wright would become a professor and head of the Department of Economics and Political Science at his alma mater, Wilberforce University (Ohio). In 1934 he married the former Sue H. Hurt. In 1959 he became the Dean of the College. Wilberforce is a private historically black university, affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Founded in 1856, it was the first college in the US to be owned and operated by African Americans. The college was named after the British abolitionist and statesman William Wilberforce (1759-1833). During the 1890s, the African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois taught at Wilberforce.

In 1950 Dr. Wright published a short 10-page book (with a long title) about his Hitler meeting: I Spent Four Hours with Adolph [sic] Hitler: First and Only Negro to Meet Nazi Dictator Tells of Terrifying Session After Storm Troopers Accuse Him of Plotting Hitler Assassination.

Dr. Milton S.J. Wright retired in 1969. He died at the age of 68 on 11 March 1972 in Xenia, Ohio, survived by his daughter Francine.

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Related Books: Recommended Reading

The following books are related to Marian Anderson and other Black artists. You can order them using the Amazon.com partner links below, or at your favorite online or local bookstore.

Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey (Music in American Life) by Allan Keiler
The best, most comprehensive biography of Marian Anderson – Her personal life and career
Buy it from Amazon.com: Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey – University of Illinois Press, 2002 (hardcover, paper, mass paper)

My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography by Marian Anderson
A 2002 reprint of Marian Anderson’s 1956 autobiography, ghost-written by music critic Howard Taubman, based on tape-recorded interviews. With a foreword by her nephew, James Anderson DePreist.
Buy it from Amazon.com: My Lord, What a Morning – University of Illinois Press, 2002 (hardcover, paper, mass paper)

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman
Marian Anderson was not the only Black singer of classical music who spent time in German-speaking Europe. This interesting book is an overview of that aspect of musical history, including Anderson’s role.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Singing Like Germans – Cornell University Press, 2021 (Kindle edition)

More | Black History and Germany

Related Pages
AT THE GERMAN WAY

• Marian Anderson in Salzburg – A brief bio and details about her 1935 Salzburg concert and encounters with bigotry in the US and in Europe
• Martin Luther King, Jr. and his German connections
• Auma Obama – The US president’s half-sister
• Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin
• Bruce Darnell – African American TV personality in Germany
• Notable Germans, Austrians and Swiss
• Famous Graves – The graves and cemeteries of the famous
• Mini Bios A-Z – Brief biographies of people from the German-speaking world
• Featured Biographies – More detailed bios of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Notable Women from Austria, Germany, Switzerland

ON THE WEB

• African-American Expats – More American Blacks who lived abroad – from Biography.com
• Black History and Germany is an edited version of an article I wrote about “Afrodeutsche” for ThoughtCo.com (formerly About.com).
• The Crisis – The NAACP’s official magazine, co-founded by W.E.B. Du Bois

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