UA students highlight Akron's Howard Street and ties to jazz history

At first glance, the area around the Akron intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and North Howard Street is a nondescript roadway busy with cars heading for the Innerbelt and downtown.

Decades ago, however, this area was bustling in a different way. Howard Street was one of the centers of Akron’s Black community and was a vibrant district for shopping and entertainment. For the community, that entertainment meant jazz clubs where local and legendary musicians performed nightly.

In the 1960s, the area was razed to make way for highways and much of that history has since been lost. A group of University of Akron (UA) students sought to bring the Howard Street jazz heritage to light during a spring 2024 course that explored the roots of jazz in the city.

The “‘Round Howard Street: Telling the Story of Akron Jazz” class was part of UA’s academic offerings known as an [Un]class. A program of the University’s EX[L] Center for Community Engaged Learning, [Un]classes offer UA students the opportunity to focus on real-world issues and create community-engaged, action-oriented solutions. Most of the classes include hands-on activities. For this course, students spent many hours in the UA Archives, created a website, blog and social media to document their work, pursued oral histories of those who remember Howard Street’s heyday and presented their findings in one of Akron’s current jazz  .

The [Un]class was taught by faculty members Dr. Hillary Nunn, a professor in the Department of English, and
Theron Brown, an assistant professor of practice in the School of Music. Nunn has taught several [Un]classes about Akron history, and Brown is an accomplished jazz and classical pianist who performs around the country. Brown and Nunn guided the students as they uncovered stories about the musicians who appeared in and around Akron, the venues at which they performed, and the community and audiences that made the jazz scene what it was.

To get started, the students divided into four groups that each focused on a different topic. One group researched the former Cosmopolitan Club, which was located at 33 ½ North Howard Street and hosted many local and national stars of the day. Another group researched the concept of Howard Street as a place where people from marginalized groups, such as the LGBTQ+ community, found a place alongside the Black community. Other students focused on how jazz legend Duke Ellington’s work with the government to promote war bond sales during World War II brought him to Howard Street. A media group explored how
the neighborhood and the jazz community were covered in the press of the time, and also developed a website, blog and social media to document the students’ findings.

Emily Price ’24, who earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, was part of the media group. She worked on the group’s Instagram page, developed a brochure and contributed to the blog, among various other projects.

“The [Un]class was a really good opportunity to do more research and learn how to present research to the community,” she said.

With support from Vic Fleischer, University archivist and head of Archives and Special Collections, all four groups explored UA’s vast collections to uncover Howard Street’s history. Working in the archives was a new experience for many of the students.

“So many of these technologies were totally new to them,” Nunn said. “Some of them had never used a film camera or knew what negatives were. And they were working with collections that had not yet been processed, so the finding aids were minimal.”

In May, the class presented its research during an event at BLU Jazz+, an Akron music venue that is dedicated to preserving live jazz. Around 75 people attended, and Brown performed.

The research was personally and professionally meaningful for Rose Vance-Grom ’19, who earned a Bachelor of Arts in History before starting graduate work in applied history with a certificate in public humanities. Vance-Grom is a fourth-generation Akronite whose father is a jazz musician. She was a music major as a UA undergraduate before switching to history.

“People talk about this history but mostly focus on the celebrities like Duke Ellington,” she said. “There was such a lively scene here without the big names, so I’m glad we had a lot of good attention on this project. To be able to tie the current jazz scene in Akron with the history and legacy is so important and exciting.”

Story by Jessica Whitehill

*Photos courtesy of the University of Akron Photographs Collection at the University of Akron Archives and Special Collections.