The first Black power couple blazed a trail, broke barriers from Fort Worth to New York

We know the term “power couple” today because of people like Barack and Michelle Obama or Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Fort Worth gave us the first black power couple, Manette (or Manet) Harrison and Stephen Hamilton Fowler, who are largely unknown today.

She began life in Fort Worth in 1895 as Minnia Helen Harrison. While still a young woman, she changed her given name to “Manette.” Stephen was born in Fort Worth in 1881. Both were products of the segregated Fort Worth school system, which before 1910 ended with primary education. Yet both went to college, she to Tuskegee Agricultural and Normal School, he to Prairie View Normal and Industrial College. After graduation, he returned to Fort Worth to teach in the Colored High School.

Manet was also drawn to teaching, but her first love was music. She was a child prodigy, giving piano recitals at the age of 6. Though she majored at Tuskegee in “domestic science,” she subsequently joined the faculty at Prairie View as a music teacher before being drawn back to Fort Worth to teach in the segregated school system.

It was a love of music and church that brought them together. Both were members of Mount Gilead Baptist Church. He taught Bible classes. She was the director of the choir and church organist. In 1915, they married at Mount Gilead in one of the biggest social events of the year in the Black community. In the next 10 years they would have five children whom they raised to value education and make their way in the professional world.

It was as professionals that Stephen and Manet made their mark. Within two years of being hired by the Fort Worth school system, she was promoted to “director of music” for the system’s three “negro schools.” She reached out to the larger community by putting on choral programs of African American folk music, breaking down walls between whites and Blacks. Meanwhile, Stephen resigned from the Fort Worth school system in 1919 to become the first general secretary of the Negro YMCA of Fort Worth. He made it a center of the black community by opening a trade school and an employment bureau on site.

Both were talented and entrepreneurial. Their first collaborative effort was a pageant, “Up from Slavery, which she wrote and they co-directed in 1921, to raise money for the Negro YMCA. A decade later, they took another original pageant, “The Voice,” to Chicago for the golden jubilee of the National Baptist Convention of America.

In 1926, she organized the Texas Association of Negro Musicians (TANM), a branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), whose mission was not just bringing musicians together but promoting youth education among African Americans, using music as a vehicle. Two years later she brought the TANM to Fort Worth for a four-week “Master School.” Stephen was vice president and treasurer of the school, which proved so successful they brought it back the following summer.

Somehow during these years, Manet found time to study voice at the Chicago Musical College and the American Conservatory of Music (Chicago), winning new plaudits as a dramatic soprano. After 1929, she was more in demand as a vocalist than as a concert pianist.

Manet dreamed of transforming her Master School into a year-round school teaching African art and culture as well as music. It took a few years, but finally in 1933 she realized her dream, opening the Mwalimu School of Music and Creative Art in New York City. (The name is Swahili for “noble or distinguished teacher”). Its curriculum included music instruction, interpretive dance, artistic photography, African history, elementary journalism, and cosmetology.

The school’s public face was the Mwalium Festival Chorus, created and directed by Manet, that performed numbers from across the musical spectrum. Within a year, they were performing in some of New York’s finest concert halls and touring Boston and Chicago to rave reviews. In June 1938, the Mwalimu School celebrated its 10th anniversary dating from its Fort Worth beginnings.

After Manet left Fort Worth, Stephen remained here, working for the Colored YMCA, shepherding its growth and its move into nicer quarters. In 1938, he resigned and moved to Harlem to become director of the Mwalimu School.

They spent their final years in New York. She performed, represented the school, and served on the board of the National Association of Negro Musicians. He took a leadership position in the Mt. Olivet Baptist. Occasionally they came back to Fort Worth to see friends and family. In 1962 she attended the 50th anniversary of I.M. Terrell High School’s 1912 graduating class.

Stephen Fowler died in 1965 at the age of 84 while attending the Empire State Baptist Convention. After a service at Mt. Olivet Church, he was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in New Jersey. Memory of him flickered briefly in Fort Worth in 1989 as the school board looked for a name for a new elementary school. One name suggested was that of Stephen H. Fowler, but trustees rejected it because he was largely unknown to people, and naming the school for him “would promote little neighborhood identification” with it.

Manet died in New York on Feb. 16, 1976, at the age of 80 and was buried with Stephen in Rose Hill Cemetery. Quickly forgotten, her final resting place was a mystery until a recent inquiry discovered it.

Manet and Stephen may not have been the most distinguished Fort Worth African Americans of their day — that honor belongs to William “Gooseneck Bill” McDonald — but they were certainly the first black power couple, breaking down walls between races and blazing a trail in education and the arts from Fort Worth to New York City.

Author-historian Richard Selcer is a Fort Worth native and proud graduate of Paschal High and TCU.