Born in Cuba, Azira G. Hill moved to the U.S. to complete her education, ultimately earning a degree in nursing from Grady Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Atlanta. She was shocked by the discrimination she experienced — even in Georgia’s churches. Hill said that on her first Sunday in the country, she was taken to church. When they got there, they were told it was fine that they were visiting today, but next Sunday? They were to go to the black church. “I was just stunned, you know, I thought that was so horrible. How could you be separate on Sunday?” She soon found her way to Big Bethel A.M.E. Church, where she would meet her husband, Jesse Hill. The couple became leaders in the civil rights movement — and targets for unrelenting threats and harassment. As she recalled in an interview, “the most distressing thing were telephone calls.” For years, she said, it was her husband who always answered the phone because they received “so many threats and ugly calls.”
Hill’s love of music eventually led her to volunteer with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She noticed that both the audience and the musicians on stage didn’t reflect the diversity of the city. “When we asked why there was so little participation among children of color in the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, we were told, ‘Most blacks don’t know how to audition.’” To address this problem, in 1993 Hill founded the orchestra’s Talent Development Program (TDP), a year-round musical education diversity program that provides young Black and Hispanic musicians with the highest level of musical training each school year. TDP fellows receive weekly private lessons with musicians from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, funding for summer music programs, opportunities to perform live, and training for auditions. For the past 30 years, the TDP has served as a model for musical education diversity programs across the nation. More than 100 TDP fellows have gone on to attend top music schools and conservatories and then on to successful careers as orchestral musicians, teachers, and performers. For Hill “success was that the students were serious about the music, that they studied, that they made progress.… That’s the reward.”
