Ruth Wolkowsky Greenfield is a concert pianist and teacher who, through music, broke racial barriers and brought together black and white students, taught by black and white teachers.
Education
She began studying piano at age 5, and later studied with Mana-Zucca, who moved from New York to Miami. She graduated from Miami Beach High School in 1941, then studied for two years at the University of Miami, then obtained her bachelor"s and master"s degrees in music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Career
This pioneering color-blind approach was considered scandalous at the time, but was a breath of fresh air in the then-segregated society. Born in 1923 as Ruth Miriam Wolkowsky in Key West, Florida. At age six months she moved to Miami and was raised there.
Across the railroad tracks from there was the neighborhood then called Colored Town, and now called Overtown.
This town seemed like a strange other world, in which black people had a servile role, doing laundry for white people. She returned to the University of Miami again to teach piano.
Paris of that time was refreshingly integrated, with integration considered as the norm. Her maid of honor was a black pianist from Tennessee.
Upon returning to segregated Miami, she wanted to do something about the situation.
She founded the Fine Arts Conservatory in 1951 along with Tally Brown. The school moved between black and white neighborhoods, holding classes in such locations as private homes, a Masonic lodge, a Young Men’s Christian Association and the most notorious location, a storage room for caskets in an Overtown funeral home, that reeked of formaldehyde. Finally in 1961, the conservatory had raised enough money to buy a building that served as its permanent location until it closed in 1978.
This was in Liberty City, a black neighborhood around Miami"s 60th Street.
The conservatory eventually expanded to six branches throughout Miami. Ruth Greenfield also continued to teach for 32 years at what is today Miami Dade College, Florida"s first integrated college.
In the fall of 2011, the college rededicated its Wolfson Campus auditorium in her honor. Her grandchildren include filmmaker, Liliana Greenfield-Sanders and painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders.