Ruth W. Greenfield

Ruth Wolkowsky Greenfield (born November 17, 1923) 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. 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. While growing up, she was unaware of the pervasive segregation of the time, except when visiting her grandparents in Spring Garden. 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 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. While studying with the renowned pianist Artur Schnabel, she broke more racial taboos by dating a classmate who was a young black man from Jamaica. She returned to the University of Miami again to teach piano.

She later left Miami for Paris, France, in 1949, in order to study composition with Nadia Boulanger, the teacher of such luminaries as Aaron Copland and Astor Piazzolla. Paris of that time was refreshingly integrated, with integration considered as the norm. She married Arnold Merwin Greenfield there, who was an attorney and friend of her brother's from Miami. He enjoyed painting and cooking and listening to his wife play the piano. Her maid of honor was a black pianist from Tennessee.

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