Sixty-eight years ago, in November 1950, Z.I. Riley of the Orlando Negro Chamber of Commerce announced that for the first time black residents would be represented in the city’s Christmas parade, which then kicked off the holiday season and was a must-see event in a city of about 52,000.
Leading the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other marchers from the black community, the Orlando Evening Star reported, would be the Jones High School Band “under the direction of James Wilson” — a 1950 graduate of Florida A&M University who was at the beginning of a remarkable career.
Recently the Historical Society of Central Florida honored Wilson, 90, long affectionately known as “Chief,” with the 2018 Donald A. Cheney Award for his dedication to the community’s history — and his role in shaping it.
Building a band
The timing of that 1950 announcement is remarkable, because Wilson had just arrived at Jones, when there was no high-school band. He looked so young himself, one parent recalled years later. “I thought, ‘What is this kid going to do with these other kids?’ ”
But the young man dispelled any doubts, working long days and weekends. He offered lessons to younger children. Recruiting band members, he wrote out the practice scales for each one. Over the years, he became like another parent to many.
In 1950, in those days of segregation, education for black and whites was separate but hardly equal. In general in the South, “few African-American schools offered music classes, and even fewer supported bands or orchestras,” writes historian Tana Porter.
But Jones parents and supporters raised $10,000 in 1950 “to buy hats and secondhand instruments for the band.” Students “searched through attics and pawn shops for band instruments,” repairing “the broken ones with wire and adhesive tape,” Porter writes.
Wilson’s first band wore hand-me-down uniforms from Orlando High School. Mothers sewed a green stripe by hand on the trousers to convert the orange and white of OHS to the orange and green of Jones.
Marching into history
Wilson shaped his band into a legend in Central Florida, earning top marks at competitions and sending a thrill through parade crowds with the fast-stepping techniques Wilson had learned at FAMU as a member of Dr. William P. Foster’s Marching 100.
Before long, the Jones Band not only marched in Orlando’s holiday parade — Jones led the parade. At the recent award presentation, fellow audience member Gail Padgett recalled how her father, Reggie Moffatt, had placed the band at the front of the parade when he was a leader of the Orlando Jaycees.
Orlandoans knew superb musicianship and showmanship when we saw it, and like so many others, I cherish childhood memories of the Jones Band in that parade — although at the time we young fans had no idea of the hard work and sacrifice behind its excellence.
“Of course,” Wilson has said, “music was the first thing to break down the barrier of discrimination” in the United States generally. In 1964, he participated in a demonstration of that, when Orlandoans raised money to send the Jones Band, as well as the Edgewater High Band, to play at the 1964 New York World’s Fair — quite a big deal in a still-segregated society. It was a marching step forward, into possibility.
After his retirement in 1990, Wilson continued to teach and inspire students. He long served on the board of the Central Florida Educators Federal Credit Union and was instrumental in its growth, fellow board member Mary Lynn Williams recalled at the recent award presentation.
Also honoring Wilson there were Ernest Boyd, a member of Wilson’s first band, Michael Moody of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, the Rev. Erika Rembert Smith of Washington Shores Presbyterian Church, and daughter Nina Wilson Jones. They spoke about a remarkable legacy, one that reaches far and wide. In this season of gratitude, Chief Wilson’s gifts to our community truly inspire deep thanks.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.
