When Southern Methodist University voice professor Barbara Hill Moore first told her husband of her plan to travel around South Africa in search of a student for her voice studio, he was more than concerned.
“He was adamant. He said, ‘No, this is not the time, and no, I am not going with you,’” Hill Moore remembered.
LeAndrew Moore, seeing in his wife a combination of naiveté and what Hill Moore later admitted was “crazy American entitlement,” did not mince words.
“He was convinced that if I went there thinking that people would be respectful, or that they would listen to me … they would just wipe me off the face of the earth,” she said.
She went anyway. Alone.
That was in 2000. South Africa’s democracy was still nascent. It had been only six years since the first democratic election had shifted power from the country’s small white minority to its overwhelming black majority. Nelson Mandela, freed after 27 years of political imprisonment, had been elected the first Black president. Apartheid, the race-centric form of government that denied full citizenship to Black and mixed-race populations, had been defeated, but the country was still in the throes of radical social and political change. Some white resistance still loomed, and the relationship between races was fraught. The jury was still out on how the “new South Africa” would fare.
But the family of a white South African student in the U.S. had convinced Hill Moore that she would not only be safe, but welcomed.
They were right. Hill Moore found a generation of learners and artists. Buoyed by new freedoms, access to education and previously unimaginable opportunities, many talented Black South Africans were drawn to her teaching and to the opportunity to develop their talent through studying classical music abroad.
SMU’s only full-time African American voice professor established a trans-Atlantic connection that has lasted as long as the reimagined nation where she planted it.
“I went from place to place, giving lessons to kids in churches, high schools, community centers, universities,” she remembered. “I went everywhere that year.”
Three of those students followed her back to Dallas. Dozens more followed. Over the past two decades, with support from the SMU Meadows School of the Arts and her own Barbara Hill Moore and Bruce R. Foote Foundation, she has brought 28 voice students to SMU from South Africa. Nearly all have gone on to successful music careers, either on the concert stages or at universities around the world.
