In 1876, Florence Irene married a prominent dentist named James H. Smith and moved with him to Little Rock, where they both lived openly as members of the city’s Black elite. Despite their racial ambiguity, the Smiths clearly aligned themselves with Black political causes and at times continued to use the courts to resist tightening Jim Crow constructions of race, largely without success.
After Dr. Smith died in 1910, however, Florence Irene deserted the family altogether to pass as white, entering what the historian Allyson Hobbs has called “a chosen exile.” The musicologist Michael Cooper has recently uncovered that she likely passed as white until she died in 1948, only five years before her daughter’s own death.
One of Florence B. Price’s two daughters, Florence Louise, openly resented that sense of abandonment, passed down in family lore. Florence Irene “wasn’t the one who shouldn’t have married my grandfather,” she once wrote, “just the opposite.” No evidence currently suggests any reconnection between Florence Irene and the rest of the Price family.
Price herself was well aware of racial interstices. In her final year of conservatory study in Boston, she falsely registered as a Mexican resident to avoid harassment from vocally segregationist, Southern white students — a longstanding problem for students of color.
Much later in her career, on July 5, 1943, race, gender and American identity all ran through Price’s mind. In a now-famous letter to Serge Koussevitzky — her second to the influential Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor — she closed with a contemplative assertion, “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” And, repeating a hitherto unanswered call, “Will you examine one of my scores?”
Earlier in the letter, she had written of the “two handicaps of sex and race,” the “Negro blood in my veins,” and how her Arkansas upbringing had shaped her understanding of African American folk music. Knowing of Koussevitzky’s keenness to champion American composers in wartime, Price then introduced the melting pot, not as an idealistic metaphor, but as her reality. He declined to program any of her music.
