Stephen Foster’s legacy unfairly maligned

This letter is in response to the article (Jan. 13,“Why we don’t celebrate Stephen Foster Day anymore”).

I believe the article misinterprets Foster’s work and ignores his historic significance. Foster, a Lawrenceville native, is considered by many to be our greatest 19th century songwriter and the father of American music.

Biographer Ken Emerson believes Foster essentially created popular music by merging the various strands of the American experience.

In his lifetime (1826-1864), Foster’s views on race relations were much more enlightened than most. While many of his songs were for performance in black-face minstrel shows popular at the time, Foster commonly portrayed Black people with dignity and sentimentality. For example, “My Old Kentucky Home” emphasizes how Black people, while under enormous stress, typically maintained warm and close family ties. Frederick Douglass said, “The song awakens sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root, grow and flourish.”

In 2018 Pittsburgh chose to discard Giuseppe Moretti’s 10foot-tall bronze depiction of Stephen Foster because it portrayed a “vacantly smiling barefoot musician in a way that is at best condescending and at worst racist.”

The statue’s triangular composition actually depicts Foster as an attentive student with pen in hand to compose what he is hearing from a banjo-playing Black musician. The statue does not defame but exalts African Americans’ contribution to American culture.

In my view we must first examine a person’s character, entire body of work and the world he lived in before hiding his memorials.

HOWARD VOIGT

O’Hara