Born: 8 December 1903, United States
Died: 3 July 1994
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Zelma Watson
African-American philanthropist and opera singer Zelma Watson George is known for being an alternate in the United Nations General Assembly and starring in Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Medium, the first African-American to perform a role typically played by a white actress. George was honored with the National Association of Negro Musicians’ Merit Award, and she was later cast in Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul and Kurt Weill’s The Three Penny Opera.
After earning her bachelor’s in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1924, George studied the pipe organ at Northwestern University and voice at the American Conservatory of Music. In 1943, George completed her master’s degree in personnel administration from New York University, followed by her Ph.D in sociology in 1954. Her doctoral dissertation, A Guide to Negro Music: Towards a Sociology of Negro Music, catalogued around 12,000 musical compositions written or enthused by African-Americans, earned her honorary doctorates from Heidelberg College and Baldwin Wallace College in 1961 as well as Cleveland State University in 1974. George received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study African-American music, after which she wrote the musical drama Chariot’s A’Comin!, which aired on local television in Cleveland in 1949.
In the 1950s George was an advisor to the Eisenhower presidential administration and was involved with a range of national government committees, often concerned with women, youth and African-Americans. She served on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Forces from 1954 to 1957 and the executive council for the American Society of African Culture from 1959 to 1971. George was an alternate delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1960 and 1961 and served as part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1971. She received a variety of awards for her accomplishments, including the Dag Hammarskjöld Award (1961), the Dahlberg Peace Award (1963) and the Mary Bethune Gold Medallion (1973).
George was active in the the Cleveland community as a member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the League of Women Voters, Girl Scouts and Alpha Kappa Alpha along with singing in church groups, directing choirs and appearing on lecture programs. She was the director of the Cleveland Job Corps from 1966 to 1974 and taught classes at Cuyahoga Community College in the Elders program. George was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1982, and there is a community center named for her in Cleveland.