Sigma Alpha Iota

10 Fall 2026 | sai-national.org By Hollis Thoms The United States just finished celebrating our country's 250th anniversary. Many of us watched Ken Burns' television series "The American Revolution: An Intimate History," which presented a provocative look into our revolutionary past. The Washington DC area provided many opportunities to visit Washington's Mt. Vernon, Jefferson's Monticello, and Madison's Montpelier, an eighteenth-century encampment at the French Ft. Frederick, and historic Williamsburg. I read some books that analyzed the history and meaning of the Declaration of Independence: Danielle Allen's Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (Liveright Publishing Company, 2014); Scott Liell's 46 Pages: Thomas Paine, Common Sense and the Turning Point to Independence (MJF Books, 2003); Annette Gordon-Reed's Jefferson on Race: A Reader (Princeton University Press, 2026); and Jeffrey Rosen's The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024). Jefferson's declaration that "all men are created equal" and that government needed to secure for its people "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were the themes of this past year. COMPOSERS M O R E C O M P O S E R D I S C O V E R I E S Phillis Wheatley and Jouelle Roberson Jouelle Roberson, soprano Phillis Wheatley, poet I also learned about Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), a young slave poet, who for a brief time achieved remarkable fame. She was named "Phillis" after the slave ship that brought her over from Africa, and her slave owners "Wheatley" gave her their last name—an identity given to her by her slave ship and slave owners. Despite this burdened identity, she learned to read and write. She began to write some astonishing poetry, and her "enlightened" slave owners sought to get her published. She was brought before a panel of white clergy, poets, and citizens to determine if a Black slave girl could indeed write poetry. After hearing her read her work, they decided that she had written her poetry and could get her published. Thomas Jefferson, however, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, wrote that he thought Phillis Wheatley's poetry was not worth commenting on, because Black people did not possess the ability to write poetry. But Phillis Wheatley finally did find a publisher in England for one volume of her poems. But shortly after her brief literary success, and her freedom granted by her slave owners, she married and died suddenly in childbirth, poor and forgotten. This Founding Father who wrote the Declaration of Independence and asserted that "all men are created equal" had an incomprehensible blind spot when it came to buying, keeping, and selling slaves. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s book The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (Basic Books, 2003) is a stunning essay on the Jefferson pronouncement to Black people—that they could not write poetry. Phillis Wheatley's poetry became a challenge to Jefferson's pronouncement. As I read her poetry in Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (Penguin Classics, 2001), my musical muse began to be stirred by her poetic muse. Her poetic muse and imagination sought to free her from her past and present slave existence. Consequently, I set to music five of her poems in a song cycle entitled Mneme: "On Being Brought from Africa to America," "Virtue," "Thoughts on the Works of Providence," "On Recollection," and "On Imagination." Jouelle Roberson, soprano When I finished writing the fifteen-minute work for soprano and piano, I began to think about a premiere performance and realized that the work had to be sung by a young Black soprano, who would represent the poetic voice of Wheatley. I was fortunate to meet Jouelle Roberson, a young Black opera singer, who I'd heard sing in an opera entitled Oshun and is a member of Sigma Alpha Iota. I asked if she would premiere T

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