Don Lee White Collection

IMPORTANT NOTICE ABOUT THIS COLLECTION: Boxes 31-33 and 36-39 are currently NOT AVAILABLE for viewing. The entire box or a majority of the materials in these boxes have been sent out to be digitized and should be returning to the Archives shortly. Apologies for the inconvenience and feel free to reach out to us with any questions. Thank you.

The Don Lee White Collection (1772-2010) contains material and papers documenting White’s long career in African-American church music as both an organist and choir director. Most of the material revolves around his work with Los Angeles area churches, particularly his main church and choir at Grant A.M.E. Church. The Personal series includes such items as his professional writings, his transcript from USC, military record, various awards and correspondence. In the Scrapbooks series there are two scrapbooks given to White that show his personal and professional life from those who knew him, as well as a scrapbook about the history of the D.L.W. Community Chorale. The next five series involve his research on various churches. (It begins with general information and papers regarding) the African Methodist Church as a whole (Churches—AME), then delves into his more intensive research on Historic Black Churches (Churches—Historic). This series starts with a focus on the 19th century, but later opens up to include the 18th century as well. The Churches—Los Angeles series is similar to the historic series, but focuses on the Los Angeles area. To support White’s studies on the churches there are two series of research material. The next series, Cultural Reference, is a small collection that focuses on African American history. The series entitled People contains White’s large collection of material regarding African American musicians and singers. Two highlights of this series include records and biographies of local Los Angeles musicians, as well as an annotated biography of African American composers and arrangers that he created in 1970. A large part of the collection consists of sheet music, ranging from handwritten pieces by White and others, to choral pieces, to compilation books featuring historic spirituals. The Music Hymns series includes compilations of hymns as well as supporting material used in lectures about hymns. In addition there are a number of series to do with reference material that White collected over the years during his research. There are also several multimedia series that contain records, audiocassettes, CDs, Reel-to-Reel tapes, videotapes and DVDs. These contain performances of White’s various choirs as well as musical performances he admired. Additional smaller series include Organs, which contains information about various notable organs in churches as well as African-American organists; Photographs, which mostly consists of recent photos of church performances, but also has some from White’s early life; and Programs which contain various programs from performances both by White’s choirs and others. Lastly there is a small collection of 3x5 floppy disks that contain various documents White used to keep track of church information and choir members. The files from those disks were transferred to a CD for ease of use.