Our next featured 2024 NC Music Hall of Fame honoree is Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder in 1941 of the National Negro ...

Our next featured 2024 NC Music Hall of Fame honoree is Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder in 1941 of the National Negro Opera Company. Born in Madison, with the NNOC Dawson created the first African American opera company in the United States. As an educator, she trained a whole generation of burgeoning operatic talent, and extended the genre for African American audiences by establishing opera guilds in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, D.C., Newark, and New York. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Dawson to the National Music Committee.