The Study of Racialism

mymulatto · Experienced User Joined: 06 Jul 2005 {Posts: 137 }

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gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

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Introduction
William Edward Burghardt DuBois, to his admirers, was by spirited devotion and scholarly dedication, an attacker of injustice and a defender of freedom.

A harbinger of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, he died in self-imposed exile in his home away from home with his ancestors of a glorious past—Africa.

Labeled as a "radical," he was ignored by those who hoped that his massive contributions would be buried along side of him. But, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, "history cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois because history has to reflect truth and Dr. DuBois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people. There were very few scholars who concerned themselves with honest study of the black man and he sought to fill this immense void. The degree to which he succeeded disclosed the great dimensions of the man."

His Formative Years
W.E.B. DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At that time Great Barrington had perhaps 25, but not more than 50, Black people out of a population of about 5,000. Consequently, there were little signs of overt racism there. Nevertheless, its venom was distributed through a constant barrage of suggestive innuendoes and vindictive attitudes of its residents. This mutated the personality of young William from good natured and outgoing to sullen and withdrawn. This was later reinforced and strengthened by inner withdrawals in the face of real discriminations. His demeanor of introspection haunted him throughout his life.

While in high school DuBois showed a keen concern for the development of his race. At age fifteen he became the local correspondent for the New York Globe. And in this position he conceived it his duty to push his race forward by lectures and editorials reflecting upon the need of Black people to politicized themselves.

DuBois was naturally gifted intellectually and took pleasurable pride in surpassing his fellow students in academic and other pursuits. Upon graduation from high school, he, like many other New England students of his caliber, desired to attend Harvard. However, he lacked the financial resources to go to that institution. But with the aid of friends and family, and a scholarship he received to Fisk College (now University), he eagerly headed to Nashville, Tennessee to further his education.

This was DuBois' first trip south. And in those three years at Fisk (1885–1888) his knowledge of the race problem became more definite. He saw discrimination in ways he never dreamed of, and developed a determination to expedite the emancipation of his people. Consequently, he became a writer, editor, and an impassioned orator. And in the process acquired a belligerent attitude toward the color bar.

Also, while at Fisk, DuBois spent two summers teaching at a county school in order to learn more about the South and his people. There he learned first hand of poverty, poor land, ignorance, and prejudice. But most importantly, he learned that his people had a deep desire for knowledge.

After graduation from Fisk, DuBois entered Harvard (via scholarships) classified as a junior. As a student his education focused on philosophy, centered in history. It then gradually began to turn toward economics and social problems. As determined as he was to attend and graduate from Harvard, he never felt himself a part of it. Later in life he remarked "I was in Harvard but not of it." He received his bachelor's degree in 1890 and immediately began working toward his master's and doctor's degree.

DuBois completed his master's degree in the spring of 1891. However, shortly before that, ex-president Rutherford B. Hayes, the current head of a fund to educate Negroes, was quoted in the Boston Herald as claiming that they could not find one worthy to enough for advanced study abroad. DuBois' anger inspired him to apply directly to Hayes. His credentials and references were impeccable. He not only received a grant, but a letter from Hayes saying that he was misquoted. DuBois chose to study at the University of Berlin in Germany. It was considered to be one of the world's finest institutions of higher learning. And DuBois felt that a doctor's degree from there would infer unquestionable preparation for ones life's work.

During the two years DuBois spent in Berlin, he began to see the race problems in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one. This was the period of his life that united his studies of history, economics, and politics into a scientific approach of social research.

DuBois had completed a draft of his dissertation and needed another semester or so to finish his degree. But the men over his funding sources decided that the education he was receiving there was unsuitable for the type of work needed to help Negroes. They refused to extend him any more funds and encouraged him to obtain his degree from Harvard. Which of course he was obliged to do. His doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, remains the authoritative work on that subject, and is the first volume in Harvard's Historical Series.

Easing On Down The Road
At the age of twenty-six, with twenty years of schooling behind him, DuBois felt that he was ready to begin his life's work. He accepted a teaching job at Wilberforce in Ohio at the going rate of $800.00 per year. (He also had offers from Lincoln in Missouri and Tuskegee in Alabama.)

The year 1896 was the dawn of a new era for DuBois. With his doctorate degree and two undistinguished years at Wilberforce behind him, he readily accepted a special fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a research project in Philadelphia's seventh ward slums. This responsibility afforded him the opportunity to study Blacks as a social system.

DuBois plunged eagerly into his research. He was certain that the race problem was one of ignorance. And he was determined to unearth as much knowledge as he could, thereby providing the "cure" for color prejudice. His relentless studies led into historical investigation, statistical and anthropological measurement, and sociological interpretation. The outcome of this exhaustive endeavor was published as The Philadelphia Negro. "It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence." This was the first time such a scientific approach to studying social phenomena was undertaken, and as a consequence DuBois is acknowledged as the father of Social Science.

After the completion of the study, DuBois accepted a position at Atlanta University to further his teachings in sociology. For thirteen years there he wrote and studied Negro morality, urbanization, Negroes in business, college-bred Negroes, the Negro church, and Negro crime. He also repudiated the widely held view of Africa as a vast cultural cipher by presenting a historical version of complex, cultural development throughout Africa. His studies left no stone unturned in his efforts to encourage and help social reform.. It is said that because of his outpouring of information "there was no study made of the race problem in America which did not depend in some degree upon the investigations made at Atlanta University."

During this period an ideological controversy grew between DuBois and Booker T. Washington, which later grew into a bitter personal battle. Washington from 1895, when he made his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech, to 1910 was the most powerful black man in the America. Whatever grant, job placement or any endeavor concerning Blacks that influential whites received was sent to Washington for endorsement or rejection. Hence, the "Tuskegee Machine" became the focal point for Black input/output. DuBois was not opposed to Washington's power, but rather, he was against his ideology/methodology of handling the power. On one hand Washington decried political activities among Negroes, and on the other hand dictated Negro political objectives from Tuskegee.

Washington argued the Black people should temporarily forego "political power, insistence on civil rights, and higher education of Negro youth. They should concentrate all their energies on industrial education." DuBois believed in the higher education of a "Talented Tenth" who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro into a higher civilization. (See Chapter 4, "Science and Empire" in DuBois' Dusk of Dawn.)

The culmination of the conflict came in 1903 when DuBois published his now famous book, The Souls of Black Folks. The chapter entitled "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" contains an analytical discourse on the general philosophy of Washington. DuBois edited the chapter himself to keep the most controversial and bitter remarks out of it. Nevertheless, it still was more than enough to incur Washington's continued contempt for him.

In the early summer of 1905 Washington went to Boston to address a rally. While speaking he was verbally assaulted by William Monroe Trotter ( a Harvard college friend of DuBois). The subsequent jailing of Trotter on trumped-up charges, apparently by Washingtonites, raised the wrath of DuBois. This incident caused DuBois to solicit help from others "for organized determination and aggressive action on the part of men who believe in Negro freedom and growth. (Emphasis mine)

Twenty-nine men from fourteen states answered the call in Buffalo, New York. Five months later in January of 1906 the "Niagara Movement" was formed. So called after the cite of the meeting place–the Canadian side of Niagara falls. (They were prevented from meeting on the U.S. side.) Its objectives were to advocate civil justice and abolish caste discrimination. The downfall of the group was attributed to public accusations of fraud and deceit instigated and engineered presumably by Washington advocates, and DuBois' inexperience with organizations and the internal strain from the dynamic personality of Trotter. In 1909 all members of the Niagara Movement save one (Trotter, who despised and distrusted whites and their objectives) merged with some white liberals and thus the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was born. DuBois was not altogether pleased with the group but agreed to stay on as Director of Publications and Research.

The main artery for distributing NAACP policy and news concerning Blacks was the Crisis magazine, which DuBois autocratically governed as its editor-in-chief for some twenty-five years. He was of no mind to follow pedantically the Associations views, and therefore wrote only that which he felt could lift the coffin lid off his people.

His hot, raking editorials oftentimes lead to battles within the ranks of the Association. Besides this, the NAACP was, at that time, under the leadership of whites, to which DuBois objected. He always felt that Blacks should lead and that if whites were to be included at all, it should be in a supportive role. The meteoric and sustained rise in the circulation of the Crisis, making it self-supporting, tranquilized the moderates within the Association. This afforded DuBois the ability to continue his assault on the injustices heaped upon the Blacks.

World War I had dramatic affects on the lives of Black folks. Firstly, the Armed Forces refused Black inductees, but finally relinquished and put the "colored folks" in subservient roles. Secondly, while the war was raging, Blacks in the southern states were moving North where industry was desperately looking for workers. Ignorant, frightened whites, led by capitalist instigators, were fearful that Blacks would totally consume the job market. Thus, lynching ran rampant. Finally, after the war, Black veterans returned home to the same racist country they had fought so heroically to defend.

Dr. DuBois, using the Crisis as his vehicle, hurled thunderbolts of searing script, scorching the "dusty veil," and revealing the innards of a country whose quivering heart beat bigotry. So vitriolic and eloquent was his pen, that subsequent reaction from his followers caused congressional action to:

Inaugurate the opening of Black officer training schools.
Bring forth legal action against lynchers.
Set up a federal work plan for returning veterans.
His articles never quit. The countryside was inundated with DuBoisian unmitigated protest. This period marked the height of DuBois' popularity. The Crisis magazine subscription rate had grown from 1000 in 1909 to over 10,000 in May of 1919. His "Returning Soldier" editorial climaxed the period.

"By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight the forces of hell in our own land.

We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting!
Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the great Jehovah, we will save it in the United Stated of America, or know the reason why."

Shortly after the Armistice was signed, DuBois, sailed for France in 1919 to represent the NAACP as an observer at the Peace Conference. While there he decided it was an opportune time to organize a Pan-African conference to bring attention to the problems of Africans around the world. While this was not the first Pan-African Congress (the first one was held in 1900), he had long been interested in the movement.

While the concept was lauded by a few revolutionaries, it failed because of lack of interest by the more influential Black organizations.

DuBois realized that for Africans could be free anywhere, they must be free everywhere. He therefore decided to hold another Pan-African meeting in 1921. While this one was better organized, he was dealt double trouble. First, following the war, "a political and social revolution, economic upheaval and depression, national and racial hatred made a setting in which any such movement was entirely out of the Question." More importantly, however, was the encounter with the astonishing Marcus Garvey.

"Unlike DuBois, Garvey was able to gain mass support and had tremendous appeal." He established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) for the purpose of uniting Africa and her descendants. He instituted the visionary concept of buying ships for overseas trade and travel; he issued forth uncompromising orations on race relations and inspiration ("Up you mighty people. You can accomplish what you will!"); and held pageants and parades through "Harlems" with red, black, and green liberation flags flying (The colors symbolizes the skin, the blood, and the hopes and growth potential of Black people. The green is also symbolic of the earth.). His methodology was refreshing and inspiring. And it was in direct contrast to the intellectual style of DuBois.

DuBois' first efforts were to explain away the Garvey movement and ignore it . But it was a mass movement and could not be ignored.

Later, when Garvey began to collect money for his steamship line, DuBois characterized him as "a hard-working idealist, but his methods are bombastic, wasteful, illogical and almost illegal." Marcus Garvey, choosing to ignore the critiques of DuBois, continued with his undertakings until charges of fraud were brought forth against him. He was imprisoned and upon his release, he was exiled from the United States. He died in 1941.

The conflict between the two men was amplified by the white press. It also served to debilitate the progress of the future planned Pan-African Congress. Nevertheless, DuBois held his conference in 1923, and as expected the turnout was small.

When the conference was concluded, he set sail for Africa for the first time. During the trip through "the eternal world of Black folk" he made a characteristic observation–"The world brightens as it darkens." His racial romanticism was given free reign as he wrote–"The spell of Africa is upon me ..."

Ideology Change
Returning home from his African experience, DuBois had a chance to reflect upon his past. DuBois noted how America tactically side-stepped the issues of color, and how his approach of "educate and agitate" appeared to fall on deaf ears. He felt that his ideological approach to the "problem of the twentieth century" had to be revised.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 illuminated and made clear the change in his basic thought. The revolution concerned itself with the problem of poverty. "Russia was trying to put into the hands of those people who do the world's work the power to guide and rule the state for the best welfare of the masses." DuBois' trip to Russia in 1927, his learning about Marx and Engles, his seeing the beginning of a new nation form with regard to class, prompted him to say–"My day in Russia was the day of communist beginnings."

"He could no longer support integration as present tactics and relegated it to a long range goal. Unable to trust white politicians, white capitalists of white workers he invested everything in the segregated socialized economy." (Shades of Washingtonianism?) His ideology carried over to his editorials in the Crisis magazine.

By 1930 he had become thoroughly convinced that the basic policies and ideals of the NAACP must be modified and/or discarded. There were two alternatives:

Change the board of directors of the NAACP (who were mostly white) so as to substitute a group which agreed with his program.
LEAVE THE ORGANIZATION.
By 1933 DuBois decided his financial, organizational and ideological battles with the NAACP were unendurable, and he recommended that the Crisis suspend its operation. (The Crisis magazine, however, is still in existence today.)

He resumed his duties at Atlanta University and there upon completed two major works. His book Black Reconstruction dealt with the socio-economic development of the nation after the Civil War. This masterpiece portrayed the contributions of the Black people to this period, whereas before, the Blacks were always portrayed as disorganized and chaotic. His second book of this period, Dusk of Dawn, was completed in 1940 and expounded his concepts and views on both the African's and African American's quest for freedom.

As in years past, DuBois never relented in attacks upon imperialism, especially in Africa. (His book entitled The World and Africa was written as a contradiction to the pseudo-historians who consistently omitted Africa from world history.) In 1945 he served as an associate consultant to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He charged the world organization with planning to be dominated by imperialist nations and not intending to intervene on the behalf of colonized countries. He announced that the fifth Pan-African Congress would convene to determine what pressure could be applied to the world powers.

This conference was dotted with an all-star cast:

Kwame Nkruma–dedicated revolutionary, father of Ghanian independence, and first president of Ghana.
George Padmore–an international revolutionary, often called the "Father of African Emancipation," who later became Kwame Nkrumah's advisor on African Affairs.
Jomo Kenyatta–called the "burning Spear," reputed leader of the Mau Mau uprising, and first president of independent Kenya.
The congress elected DuBois International President and cast him a "Father of Pan-Africanism."

Thus, "W.E.B. DuBois entered into his last phase as a protest propagandist, committed beyond a single social group to a world conception of proletarian liberation."

Alienation
Always antagonizing and making guilty groups feel extremely uncomfortable, he wrote in 1949: "We want to rule Russia and cannot rule Alabama." As s member of the left-wing American Labor Party he wrote: "Drunk with power, we (the U.S.) are leading the world to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery, which once ruined us, to a third world war, which will ruin the world."

As the chairman of the Peace Information Center, he demanded the outlawing of atomic weapons. The Secretary of State denounced it as Soviet propaganda. Jumping at the chance to quiet "that old man," the U.S. Department of Justice ordered DuBois and others to register as agents of a "foreign principal." DuBois refused and was immediately indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Sufficient evidence was lacking, therefore DuBois was acquitted. The subversive activity initiated by the U.S. government acted as a catalyst in the alienation DuBois already felt for the present system. His feelings were heard around the world in 1959. While in Peking he told a large audience–"In my own country for nearly a century I have been nothing but a NIGGER." By the time the U.S. press published the account, he was residing in Ghana; an expatriate from the United States. President Nkruma welcomed DuBois and asked him to direct the government-sponsored Encyclopedia Africana. The offer was accepted graciously and a year later, in the final months of his life, DuBois became a Ghanian citizen and an official member of the Communist party.

Free At Last
On August 27,1963, on the eve of the March On Washington, DuBois died in Accra, Ghana.

His role as a pioneering Pan-Africanist was memorialized by the few who understood the genius of the man and neglected by the many who were afraid that his loquacious espousals would unite the oppressed throughout the world into revolution.

WEB Dubois father was mulatto from the Islands his mother was an ex negra slave, Mr Dubois wife was a mulatta(1/2n1/2)

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Major References
Dusk of Dawn (W.E.B. DuBois)
W.E.B. DuBois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (Elliott M. Rudwick)

Other References
Black Revolutionary (James R. Hooker)
The Souls of Black Folks (W.E.B. DuBois)
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (W.E.B. DuBois)
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868–1963 (David Levering Lewis)
The World and Africa (W.E.B. DuBois)

Some of the Major Offerings of W.E.B. DuBois
The Philadelphia Negro (1896)
The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (Harvard Ph.D. thesis, 1896)
Atlanta University's Studies of the Negro Problem (1897–1910)
Souls of Black Folks (1903)
John Brown (1909)
Quest of the Silver Fleece ( 1911)
The Negro (1915)
Darkwater (1920)
The Gift of Black Folk (1924)
Dark Princess (1924)
Black Reconstruction (1935)
Black Folk, Then and Now (1939)
Dusk of Dawn (1940)
Color and Democracy (1945)
The Encyclopedia of the Negro (1931–1946)
The World and Africa (1946)
The Black Flame (a trilogy)
______I. Ordeal of mansart (1957)
_____II. Mansart Builds a School (1959)
____III. Worlds of Color (1961) The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois (1968)
The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906–1960
(Edited by Herbert Aptheker–1973)

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

This song became the signature song of the era of swing jazz. This version has abridged lyrics.

Complete Lyrics:
What good is melody?
What good is music?
If it ain’t possessing something sweet

Now it ain’t the melody
And it ain’t the music
There’s something else that makes this tune complete, YES

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing
Well it don’t mean a thing all you got to do is sing

It makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot
Just give that rhythm ev-ry-thing you got YES

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing

It don’t mean a thing
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing boy

(Ba ba doo dah doo…)

I said it don’t mean a thing and all you got to do is sing

(La la la…)

Now it makes no difference if it’s sweet or hot
Just give that rhythm ev-ry-thing you got OHH
It don’t mean a thing boy, if it ain’t got-a-that-a-swinga

[img]http://hapa2.com/Duke/images/palladium%20&%20duke%20ellington.jpg[/img]

http://www.dukeellington.com/

BIOGRAPHY

By the time of his passing, he was considered amongst the world’s greatest composers and musicians. The French government honored him with their highest award, the Legion of Honor, while the government of the United States bestowed upon him the highest civil honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He played for the royalty and for the common people and by the end of his 50-year career, he had played over 20,000 performances worldwide. He was The Duke, Duke Ellington.

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born into the world on April 29, 1899 in Washington, D.C. Duke’s parents, Daisy Kennedy Ellington and James Edward Ellington, served as ideal role models for young Duke, and taught him everything from proper table manners to an understanding of the emotional power of music. Duke’s first piano lessons came around the age of seven or eight and appeared not to have had that much lasting effect upon him. It seemed as if young Duke was more inclined to baseball at a young age. Duke got his first job selling peanuts at Washington Senator’s baseball games. This was the first time Duke was placed as a "performer" for a crowd and had to first get over his stage fright. At the age of 14, Duke began sneaking into Frank Holliday’s poolroom. His experiences from the poolroom taught him to appreciate the value in mixing with a wide range of people. As Duke’s piano lessons faded into the past, Duke began to show a flare for the artistic. Duke attended Armstrong Manual Training School to study commercial art instead of going to an academics-oriented school. Duke began to seek out and listen to ragtime pianists in Washington and, during the summers, in Philadelphia or Atlantic City, where he and his mother vacationed . While vacationing in Asbury Park, Duke heard of a hot pianist named Harvey Brooks. At the end of his vacation, Duke sought Harvey out in Philadelphia where Harvey showed Duke some pianistic tricks and shortcuts. Duke later recounted that, "When I got home I had a real yearning to play. I hadn’t been able to get off the ground before, but after hearing him I said to myself, ‘Man you’re going to have to do it.’" Thus the music career of Duke Ellington was born.

Duke was taken under the wings of Oliver "Doc" Perry and Louis Brown, who taught Duke how to read music and helped improve his overall piano playing skills. Duke found piano playing jobs at clubs and cafes throughout the Washington area. Three months shy of graduation, Duke dropped out of school and began his professional music career.

In late 1917, Duke formed his first group: The Duke’s Serenaders. Between 1918 and 1919, Duke made three significant steps towards independence. First, he moved out of his parents’ home and into a home he bought for himself. Second, Duke became his own booking agent for his band. By doing so, Ellington’s band was able to play throughout the Washington area and into Virginia for private society balls and embassy parties. Finally, Duke married Edna Thompson and on March 11, 1919, Mercer Kennedy Ellington was born.

In 1923, Duke left the security that Washington offered him and moved to New York. Through the power of radio, listeners throughout New York had heard of Duke Ellington, making him quite a popular musician. It was also in that year that Duke made his first recording. Ellington and his renamed band, The Washingtonians, established themselves during the prohibition era by playing at places like the Exclusive Club, Connie’s Inn, the Hollywood Club (Club Kentucky), Ciro’s, the Plantation Club, and most importantly the Cotton Club. Thanks to the rise in radio receivers and the industry itself, Duke’s band was broadcast across the nation live on "From the Cotton Club." The band’s music, along with their popularity, spread rapidly.

In 1928, Ellington and Irving Mills signed an agreement in which Mills produced and published Ellington’s music. Recording companies like Brunswick, Columbia, and Victor came calling. Duke’s band became the most sought-after band in the United States and even throughout the world.

Some of Ellington’s greatest works include "Rockin’ in Rhythm," "Satin Doll," "New Orleans," "A Drum is a Women," "Take the 'A' Train," "Happy-Go-Lucky Local," "The Mooche," and "Crescendo in Blue."

Duke Ellington and his band went on to play everywhere from New York to New Delhi, Chicago to Cairo, and Los Angeles to London. Ellington and his band played with such greats as Miles Davis, Cab Calloway, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Louis Armstrong. They entertained everyone from Queen Elizabeth II to President Nixon. Before passing away in 1974, Duke Ellington wrote and recorded hundreds of musical compositions, all of which will continue to have a lasting effect upon people worldwide for a long time to come.

Birth name: Edward Kennedy Ellington
Nickname: Duke Ellington
Famous tagline: “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing”

Birth date: April 29, 1899
Birth place: Washington D.C.
Death date: May 24, 1974
Memorial tribute: Buried in Woodlawn Cemetery

Height: 6’1”
Hair color(s): Black
Eye color: Brown

High school: Armstrong High School
Occupation(s): jazz composer, bandleader, and pianist

Parents: James Edward Ellington and Daisy Kennedy
Siblings: Ruth
Marriage: Edna Thompson (1918)
Children: son, Mercer

Favorites
Composers: George Gershwin, Stravinsky, Respighi, and Debussy
Jazz Guitarist: Kenny Burrell
Recording Studio: Universal Studios in Chicago
Musical Pieces: “Chant of the Weed”

Did You Know?

Ellington got his nickname of “Duke” from a childhood friend who commented on his elegant manners, bearing, and dress.

While Ellington began playing the piano at age seven, he initially preferred athletics and art to music. Before he concentrated on his musical career, Duke Ellington planned to study art and was even offered a scholarship to attend The Pratt Institute of Fine Art, which he turned down.

Ellington won a range of awards and honors, including honorary doctorates from Yale and Harvard and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also the first jazz musician to be elected as a member of the Royal Music Academy of Stockholm.

Ellington was a deeply religious man who traveled with a rosary, a bible, and a cross. He studied the Bible intently, particularly the words of Solomon.

Duke Ellington was not only a notable influence on jazz history, but was also a prolific composer. It is estimated that his orchestra recorded around two thousand compositions. These included instrumental pieces, popular songs, suites, musical comedies, various film scores, and "Boola," an unfinished opera.

Ellington separated from his wife in the late 1920s, but never officially divorced her. In 1938, he started a relationship with Beatrice “Evie” Ellis, who became his longtime companion. Ellis was buried next to Ellington in Woodlawn cemetery when she died in 1976.

Numerous memorials have been dedicated to Duke Ellington. In New York City, part of West 106th St. in Manhattan is named after him and the Duke Ellington Memorial can be found in Central Park. The Duke Ellington School for the Arts and The Duke Ellington Bridge, both in Washington D.C., also serve to commemorate him. In addition, a 1986 U.S. postal stamp, art centers, and scholarships throughout the country carry on the legacy of Duke Ellington.

DChapman · Posted: Mon 31 Oct 2005 20:14 Post subject:

DuBois is a descendant of the French Huguenots that founded New Paltz, NY, as I think I am. My line would be the Deyo family, most of whom are related to the DuBois, though neither side likes to admit it!!! LOL!

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

Dorothy Jean Dandridge was born in Cleveland Ohio's City Hospital on November 9, 1922. Her mother was an aspiring actress named Ruby Dandridge. Ruby had walked out on Dorothy's father, Cyrus, five months previous to Dorothy's birth taking her first child, Vivian, with her. Cyrus still lived with his mother and Ruby had come to the conclusion that he would never amount to anything and she resented the fact that they did not have their own home.

Ruby moved into an apartment on Central Avenue and did what work she could find to support her daughters. This usually entailed cleaning houses but Ruby also satisfied her creative aspirations by singing and reciting poetry for local theater groups and churches. Ruby was pleased to see that both of her daughters displayed a great talent for memorizing poetry and singing. A friend of Ruby named Geneva Williams soon moved in with them and Geneva became instrumental in teaching the girls singing, dancing and piano. The girls were too young to realize it at the time, but Geneva was also their mother's lover.

As the talents of Dorothy and Vivian improved, Ruby and Geneva began to plan a future for themselves that they hoped would bring them fame and security. The girls would now be called The Wonder Children and they would be their ticket. They moved to Nashville and The Wonder Children were signed with the National Baptist Convention to tour churches throughout the southern states.

Their act became a family affair with Geneva at the piano while Dorothy and Vivian performed a variety of skits that included singing, dancing, acrobatics, impressions and the ever popular poetry recitations. Mama Ruby became the business manager and she handled all the business affairs and sometimes even joined in the act herself.

The Wonder Children proved successful and they spent three years on the road. To Dorothy and Vivian, their act became tiring and tedious. Long hours were spent rehearsing as Geneva demanded perfection. The sisters had little time for fun and games and the usual activities that girls their age enjoyed. As for education, they were tutored, but education took a back seat to their work. The girls also learned about the harsh realities of racism that was at its worst in the south.

The Great Depression put a halt to The Wonder Children tour and Ruby planned what they would do next. She had wisely studied films and intuitively felt that their future would be in Hollywood. They settled into a house on Fortura Street and Dorothy and Vivian were enrolled in Hooper Street School and a dancing school for afternoon classes. In the meantime, Ruby was using her vivacious personality to gain a foothold in the Hollywood community.

Dorothy and Vivian made friends at the dancing school with a girl named Etta Jones. They would sing together with Geneva at the piano and Ruby decided that the three girls would make a terrific singing trio. With the help of black agent Ben Carter, the girls found work at various theaters in southern California. Their reputation grew and The Dandridge Sisters, as they were known known, landed their first big break when they received an uncredited cameo in the film The Big Broadcast of 1936. Subsequent small film roles followed until the summer of 1938 when their manager informed them that he had booked them in the prestigious Cotton Club in New York City.

Geneva and the girls moved to New York. Ruby was forming a successful career for herself as a character actress so she remained in Hollywood. On the first day of rehearsals at the Cotton Club, Dorothy met Harold Nicholas, who with his brother, Fayard Nicholas made up the famous Nicholas Brothers dancing team. Dorothy was almost 16 and she was developing into a beautiful young woman. People would stop to stare at her beauty and Harold Nicholas was no exception. They began dating much to the dismay of Geneva, who kept the girls on a tight leash.

The Dandridge Sisters were a hit in The Cotton Club and the critics gave them glowing reviews. Their success earned them another exciting engagement - they would tour in Europe. Again, the girls received good reviews but their tour was cut short by the advent of World War II.

The girls returned to Hollywood, where ironically The Nicholas Brothers were filming Down Argentine Way. Dorothy and Harold resumed dating. The Dandridge Sisters played a few more engagements but they eventually split up due in part to Dorothy's increasing desire to have a solo career.

Dorothy had aspirations to succeed on her own and in the fall of 1940, her prospects looked promising. She landed a small but significant role in a low budget film called Four Shall Die. She then went on to small parts in Lady From Louisiana and Sundown. She was teamed with the Nicholas Brothers for a lively rendition of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" in the film Sun Valley Serenade. Dorothy wanted desperately to be a film actress but she adamantly refused to portray stereotypical black roles such as maids.

Both Dorothy and Vivian worked steadily on their own but they longed to break free from Ruby and Geneva. In 1942, both sisters married. It would be Vivian's first of many marriages but Dorothy dreamed of having a fairytale marriage that would last. On September 6, 1942, she married Harold Nicholas at the home of Harold's mother.

The couple bought a beautiful house not far from Harold's mother. After a lifetime of non-stop hard work and striving to please others, Dorothy decided that she could be perfectly happy leading a quiet home life. She proved to be the 1940's image of the ideal wife - she was an excellent cook and their home was beautifully decorated and always immaculate. She was also a wonderful hostess and they often had small parties and dinners. Dorothy became very good friends with her sister-in-law, Geri Branton. Harold Nicholas, on the other hand, did not prove to be the ideal husband. He spend most of his free time on the golf course and eventually he started seeing other women. Dorothy blamed her lack of sexual experience for Harold's wanderings. When she became pregnant, she hoped that their child was keep Harold at home. A daughter, Lynn (short for Harolyn), was born on September 2, 1943.

Dorothy appeared in a brief scene in David O. Selznick's Since You Went Away and as a singer in Pillow to Post in 1944 but she mostly devoted her time to her daughter Lynn. By the time Lynn was two, however, Dorothy could not help but notice that Lynn was not acting normally. She was a very hyper child who cried incessantly. She was not learning to talk and worse, she acted as though she did not recognize those around her. Dorothy was determined to find out what was wrong with Lynn and took her to every doctor she could find. All of them could give her no answer except to say that Lynn was retarded. Harold was often on the road touring and he did not offer much solace. Dorothy, with her marriage a shambles and a daughter who was getting out of control, began to see a therapist.

In 1949, Dorothy informed Harold that their marriage was over. Ruby and Geneva agreed to look after Lynn while Dorothy tried to re-establish her career. She still wanted to act in films but she realized that that possibility was slim. She did not relish the thought of returning to nightclubs, but felt that she had little other choice. She met with Phil Moore, an arranger she had worked with while in The Dandridge Sisters, and he was optimistic about working with her again.

Phil Moore helped Dorothy with her songs and image. The result was a smoldering and sexy Dorothy that left audiences mesmerized. Their act was booked in clubs throughout southern California and in Las Vegas. Dorothy hated doing the nightclubs, especially in Las Vegas where racism was almost as bad as in the south. She was only allowed to do her act and was forbidden to talk with patrons or use any of the hotel facilities such as the elevator, lobby, swimming pool or bath rooms. Her dressing room was often an office or a storage room.

The nightclub reviews were very good and gave her the much needed publicity that would help her get film work in Hollywood. She was offered the role of Melmendi in Tarzan's Peril in 1951. Dorothy first balked at playing a jungle queen but after reading the script she didn't think it was that bad. Next up, she played an athlete's girlfriend in the low budget but successful The Harlem Globetrotters.

She returned to the nightclub scene in May of 1951 and opened in Hollywood's top club, The Mocambo. This very successful appearance led to offers to appear in Paris (Cafe de Paris), New York (La Vie en Rose) as well as numerous guest television appearances. She was the first black woman to perform at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

MGM planned to make an all black drama called Bright Road, which was based on a short story by Mary Elizabeth Vronam and dealt with a young schoolteacher's experiences in Alabama. Dorothy enthusiastically accepted the role and filming began in August of 1952. Her co-star was another up and coming actor named Harry Belafonte. They become very close friends. The filming of Bright Road was very rewarding to Dorothy but heartbreaking as well. She was constantly reminded of Lynn, who was now being kept by a family friend named Helen Calhoun.

Dorothy resumed her nightclub act and she also began to date again. She had brief affairs with Gerald Mayer (director of Bright Road), the actor Peter Lawford, and a millionaire from Rio de Janeiro whom she met while playing there.

Bright Road opened in April of 1953 to good reviews. Dorothy, especially, got good notices. There was a role just over the horizon that Dorothy had been dreaming of for many years. And Dorothy was determined to get it.

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Leading roles for black actors in Hollywood were very scarce so when Dorothy heard that an all black production of Carmen Jones was being planned, she knew this was the role she had dreamed of. Carmen Jones was an Americanized version of the Bizet opera with new lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein. The lead character, Carmen, is a sultry vixen whose independent inclinations to love her men and then leave them lead to her violent demise.

The project was the mastermind of Austrian director Otto Preminger. Preminger was a director who liked to take risks and he was not afraid of controversy. The previous year, he had openly defied the Production Code by filming the controversial play The Moon Is Blue and he left the racy dialog intact. When the Production Board refused to give him a rating of approval, Preminger released the film without it. Preminger also could see that black actors were underused and not given the chance to show their full potential and he wanted to do something about it. Preminger also had a reputation of being a tyrant on the set and he was often brutal with his actors.

Dorothy arranged a meeting with Preminger to discuss Carmen Jones. He knew her from her work in Bright Road and when she came to his office, he was under the impression that she was interested in the part of Cindy Lou, the sweet demure girlfriend of Harry Belafonte at the start of the film. When Dorothy informed him that she was only interested in the role of Carmen, Preminger told her that she was not right for the part. Dorothy was furious but determined to change his mind. She bought a wig, a skirt and a low cut blouse that she wore off the shoulder. She met with Preminger again and he could not believe the transformation. He had found his Carmen.

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Almost immediately, however, Dorothy had doubts about her own ability to play the part. This time it was Preminger's turn to convince her that she could do it. Dorothy cooked him his favorite dinner of cold steak and cucumbers and after dinner one thing lead to another. It would be the start of a long and troubled relationship.

The filming of Carmen Jones progressed smoothly. Both Dorothy and Belafonte were disappointed to learn that their voices would be dubbed for the singing sequences. Carmen Jones was released in November of 1954 and it was a resounding success. Dorothy was all over the media. She appeared on the cover of the November 1, 1954 issue of Life, photographed as Carmen by Philippe Halsman. The next few months would be a whirlwind round of premieres, promotions and photo shoots. It was heavily rumored that she would receive an Academy Award nomination. She refused to listen to the gossip but when the nominations were announced in February of 1955, she read her name along with Audrey Hepburn, Jane Wyman, Judy Garland and Grace Kelly. Dorothy Dandridge was the first black woman to be nominated in the category of Best Actress. The buzz in Hollywood for the next month was that the winner would be either Dorothy or Judy Garland. But when the winner was announced in late March, the surprize winner was Grace Kelly for her role in The Country Girl.

Dorothy next attended the Cannes Film Festival with Preminger and then returned to the U.S. for more nightclub work as she awaited her next film offer. She did not have to wait long. She was wanted for the role of Tuptim in The King and I. Dorothy did not like the part which she considered nothing more than a slave and was further disappointed to see that it was not the leading role. Preminger advised her not to do it. She turned down the role but her decision would haunt her for the rest of her life. She later felt that her refusal to play Tuptim was the beginning of her downfall in Hollywood. The role was given to Rita Moreno and the film was a huge success.

Dorothy's success and fame changed her life tremendously. She bought a beautiful home overlooking Los Angeles and she continued to get lots of publicity. Not all of it was good. In 1957, the infamous tabloid Hollywood Confidential ran a story about an alleged one night stand between Dorothy and a bartender in Lake Tahoe. Dorothy sued them. Fame also affected Dorothy's personal life. She had not heard from her sister Vivian in over two years and she did not know where Vivan was living. She spoke to her mother every day. Ruby Dandridge was a successful character actress and was now living with another woman. Geneva had been shown the door a few years previously and when she came to Dorothy for financial help, she was refused. Dorothy would never forget her beatings from Geneva.

It seemed that Dorothy now moved in mostly white circles. Her relationship with Preminger would increasingly become strained due to the fact that he was married and they could not be seen in public together. Dorothy found that white men were especially attracted to her and would go out with her but to most of them, marriage would be out of the question. Most all men, black or white, found Dorothy to be a fascinating woman. In addition to her beauty, she was very intelligent and a wonderful conversationist. She was particularly fascinated by psychology and was constantly reading books about the subject.

It would be almost two years following the making of Carmen Jones before Dorothy set foot in front of a movie camera again. Darryl Zanuck wanted her for the role of Margot Seaton in Island In The Sun. Based on the bestselling book, the story dealt with two interracial relationships and was of course highly controversial. The two relationships would involve Dorothy's character and John Justin and between Joan Fontaine and Harry Belafonte. The producers were afraid to go far with the relationships, however, and the film suffered as a result. Dorothy herself protested that her key scene with Justin displayed no intimacy whatsoever despite that it was a love scene. The film was successful upon release due to the controversial theme, but critics dismissed it as being simply boring.

Dorothy's next project was an Italian/French production called Tamango which was more daring (Dandridge and Curt Jurgens have some steamy scenes together, on screen and off) but the film was not released in the U.S. until four years later. Today, it is considered a cult classic.

In 1959, Samuel Goldwyn announced that he would film George Gershwin's musical Porgy and Bess. The story was highly unpopular with blacks and when Harry Belafonte and Dorothy were approached to star in the lead roles, Belafonte flatly turned it down. He urged Dorothy to do the same. Dorothy did not want to do it but all she could think about was The King and I and the role that she had turned down. She was in a turmoil because here was a big budget Hollywood production. Her past two films (Tamango and The Decks Ran Red) had been low budget foreign productions and it looked as if Hollywood work was slowly eluding her. She reluctantly accepted but the entire shoot was to be an unhappy one. Director Reuben Mamoulain was replaced with none other than Otto Preminger. Their relationship was now over and Preminger was particularly harsh with Dorothy during the filming. His reprimands were often so cruel and embarrassing that she would rush from the set in tears.

Sidney Poitier and Sammy Davis, Jr. were her co-stars in the film. Porgy and Bess was not as successful as Carmen Jones and the reviews were mediocre. Dorothy managed to rise above it all, however and won a Golden Globe Award for her performance.

Dorothy did not know it but her career would be downhill from here.

Dorothy's life seemed to unravel in late 1959. First, she met a handsome white restaurant owner named Jack Denison who pursued her relentlessly. Not many people had kind words to describe Denison and most considered him a gold digger. Dorothy, however, basked in his attentions and when he proposed, she accepted. They were married on June 22, 1959.

Dorothy was a kind and extremely giving individual and she always wanted to please everyone. When Denison asked her to perform at his restaurant, she agreed. Everyone, including her close friend and former manager, Earl Mills and her friend Geri Branton, felt that this was a terrible mistake. Mills told her that a person of her magnitude should not be performing at a small restaurant. Dorothy would only listen to her husband but unfortunately her friends were right.

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Denison (left) not only took over Dorothy's career but he attempted to shut out her friends. He was also very abusive and it is known that he beat her. He was only interested in her money and he took it whenever he could. On top of this, an oil investment that Dorothy had entered into with other Hollywood stars turned out to be a scam and Dorothy lost a large amount of money. She had never handled her money very well and she always relied on other people to handle it for her. To alleviate her troubles, she began to drink heavily.

After almost two years of abuse, Dorothy finally threw Denison out of her house and filed for a divorce. She hoped that things would begin to get better but they only seemed to escalate. Helen Calhoun, whom Dorothy had been paying handsomely through the years to look after Lynn, returned Lynn when Dorothy could not longer pay her. She agonized over what to do and finally she had to have Lynn committed to a state hospital.

On April 26, 1963, she declared bankruptcy. She lost her beautiful home and found a smaller house near her friend Geri Branton. She contacted Earl Mills, who agreed to help her find work again. Dorothy had made one film after Porgy and Bess called Malaga, but it was another low budget feature which came and vanished quickly. She was later cast in a film version of Marco Polo and even shot some scenes before the project went bankrupt. She was then offered the role of a down and out jazz singer for a television series called "Cain's Hundred". The episode, Blue For A Junk Man, concerned a down and out jazz singer who is trying to restore her life after serving time in jail on drug charges. The role had many fine dramatic moments. Other scenes were shot so that a feature length version could be shown in Europe. The film version was titled The Murder Men (photo above).

Dorothy continued to drink heavily and she would call various friends at night and talk for hours about everything that was going on in her life. She was a very lonely woman and she often sounded disoriented. She was given a prescription antidepressant drug which seemed to lift her spirits. She did get nightclub work again but many critics noticed that her performances did not contain the magic that they once held.

Earl Mills worked with Dorothy to help her regain her health and put together another nightclub act. She attended a health spa in Mexico and then began a series of nightclub engagements in Mexico and Japan. She was scheduled to play again in New York but she sprained her ankle which resulted in a fracture in her foot.

On the morning of September 8, 1965, Dorothy had an appointment to have a cast put on her foot. Earl Mills called her early but she asked that he reschedule the appointment for later so that she could sleep a few more hours. Mills tried calling again later in the morning but he could get no answer. He went to Dorothy's apartment but he could not get in. He returned around 2 pm and finally forced his way in. He found Dorothy lying dead on the bathroom floor. She was nude except for a blue scarf around her head.

A few months earlier, Dorothy had given Earl a note which read "In case of my death - to whomever discovers it - don't remove anything I have on - scarf, gown or underwear. Cremate me right away. If I have anything, money, furniture, give it to my mother Ruby Dandridge. She will know what to do. Dorothy Dandridge."

Her death was first attributed to a blood clot caused by the fracture in her foot but an autopsy revealed that she had died of an overdose of Tofranil, the antidepressant that she was taking. Whether the overdose was accidental or intentional remains a mystery to this day.

Dorothy was cremated and buried at the Little Church of the Flowers at Forest Lawn.

Ruby Dandridge died in 1987. Cyril Dandridge died in 1989. Vivian Dandridge died in 1991. Dorothy's daughter, Harolyn, still lives in a California institution.

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph was the grandfather of the modern civil rights movement. In 1925, Randolph began a long and strenuous campaign to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This was the first time a group of black workers forced recognition by their employers. The Brotherhood eventually won certification in 1937 and Randolph went on to become the first black vice-president of the AFL-CIO. In 1941, Randolphs threat of a massive March on Washington to protest grievances led President Roosevelt to issue an executive order banning discrimination in defense industry jobs and government employment. Randolph also was a major force behind the 1963 March on Washington. Throughout his entire life, Randolph was a coalition builder who fought for the rights of all working people, black, whites, Puerto Ricans, Indians, Mexican Americans, and others. It was in this spirit of coalition building that A. Philip Randolph co-founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

One middle class organization that supported the Brotherhood was the Northern District Association of Colored Women. They invited A. Philip Randolph, head of the BSCP, to speak to them. So did the Women's Forum, headed by Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She invited Randolph to speak to her group in her home after he was turned down by The Appomattox, a men's club, for political reasons. Twenty-five professional and business women heard Randolph speak and, by the end, were ready to offer the help of the Women's Forum to further the goals of the BSCP.

Asa was known to be of Native American ancestry, he worked with W.E.B. Dubious and was considered to be one of the Talented 10th

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

With things going so well I distributed my letters in the mornings, and saw the city during the afternoons. Walking about the streets, sitting on subways beside whites, eating with them in the same cafeterias (although I avoided their tables) gave me the eerie, out-of-focus sensation of a dream. My clothes felt ill-fitting; and for all my letters to men of power, I was unsure of how I should act. For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable...

--from Invisible Man

The American writer Ralph Waldo Ellison, b. Oklahoma City, Okla., Mar. 1, 1914, achieved international fame with his first novel, Invisible Man (1952). He was influenced early by the myth of the frontier, viewing the United States as a land of "infinite possibilities." The close-knit black community in which he grew up supplied him with images of courage and endurance and an interest in music.

From 1933 to 1936, Ellison attended Tuskegee Institute, intent upon pursuing a career in music; his readings in modern literature, however, interested him in writing. In 1936 he moved to New York City, met the novelist Richard Wright, and became associated with the Federal Writers' Project, publishing short stories and articles in such magazines as New Challenge and New Masses. These early details of his life, set down in Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, enhance an understanding of Invisible Man. The influences of the frontier tradition, the black community, and Ellison's interest in music combined to create the richly symbolic, metaphorical language of the novel, as displayed in the Rhinehart and Mary Rambo episodes. Its theme, the human search for identity, also reflects Ellison's early interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau and his later debt to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Andre Malraux, and Wright. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. Since 1970, Ellison has been Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University and has lectured extensively on black folk culture....

Addison Gayle

Bibliography: Benston, K.W., ed., Speaking for You: Ralph Ellison's Cultural Vision (1986); Hersey, John, ed., Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays (1974); O'Meally, R.G., The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980).

Text Copyright © 1993 Grolier Incorporated [This text is from 1993; Ellison died in 1994.]

[Just published: The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995).]

In his Writers' Project interviews, Ralph Ellison began to experiment with ways of capturing the sound of black speech that he refined in his novel Invisible Man. "I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded. I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings." A Pullman porter Ellison interviewed in a Harlem bar told him, "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me," a refrain he later borrowed for Invisible Man.

Frankfurt, Germany, September 28, 1954: Author Ralph Ellison listens to a question during an interview. Ellison, who had just spent a month as a lecturer at a seminar in Salzburg, noted that "many Germans seem to be puzzled by assumptions which Americans take for granted when they write. American writers have a tendency to be critical of American civilization. They (the Germans) find it hard to understand that such criticism comes out of a feeling of love for the country." Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man — a copy of which is on the table in front of him — is considered one of the top works of 20th-century American literature

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
By Langston Hughes, The Nation, 23 June 1926
[In 1926, the Harlem Renaissance was in full flower; the poet Langston Hughes was one of its central figures. In this essay, Hughes urges black intellectuals and artists to break free of the artificial standards set for them by whites.]

One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, "I want to be a poet--not a Negro poet," meaning, I believe, "I want to write like a white poet"; meaning subconsciously, "I would like to be a white poet"; meaning behind that, "I would like to be white." And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America--this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

But let us look at the immediate background of this young poet. His family is of what I suppose one would call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry--smug, contented, respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The father goes to work every morning. He is the chief steward at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they read white papers and magazines. And the mother often says, "Don't be like niggers" when the children are bad. A frequent phrase from the father is, "Look how well a white man does things." And so the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues. It holds for the children beauty, morality, and money. The whisper of "I want to be white" runs silently through their minds. This young poet's home is, I believe, a fairly typical home of the colored middle class. One sees immediately how difficult it would be for an artist born in such a home to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people. He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught rather not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when it is not according to Caucasian patterns.

For racial culture the home of a self-styled "high-class" Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there will be perhaps more aping of things white than in a less cultured or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doctor, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may be a social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing and have a maid. Father is often dark but he has usually married the lightest woman he could find. The family attend a fashionable church where few really colored faces are to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. And in the South they have at least two cars and a house "like white folks." Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic hair, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist to climb in order to discover himself and his people.

But then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority--may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would tell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him--if they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty is their own without question.

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who can escape the restrictions the more advanced among his own group would put upon him, a great field of unused material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their "white" culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient material to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand. To these the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears. But let us look again at the mountain.

A prominent Negro clubwoman in Philadelphia paid eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian popular songs. But she told me a few weeks before she would not think of going to hear "that woman." Clara Smith, a great black artist, sing Negro folk songs. And many an upper-class Negro church, even now, would not dream of employing a spiritual in its services. The drab melodies in white folks' hymnbooks are much to be preferred. "We want to worship the Lord correctly and quietly. We don't believe in 'shouting.' Let's be dull like the Nordics," they say, in effect.

The road for the serious black artist, then, who would produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mountain is high. Until recently he received almost no encouragement for his work from either white or colored people. The fine novels of Chestnutt go out of print with neither race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and humor of Dunbar's dialect verse brought to him, in his day, largely the same kind of encouragement one would give a sideshow freak (A colored man writing poetry! How odd!) or a clown (How amusing!).

The present vogue in things Negro, although it may do as much harm as good for the budding colored artist, has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the attention of his own people among whom for so long, unless the other race had noticed him beforehand, he was a prophet with little honor. I understand that Charles Gilpin acted for years in Negro theaters without any special acclaim from his own, but when Broadway gave him eight curtain calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin pan in his honor. I know a young colored writer, a manual worker by day, who had been writing well for the colored magazines for some years, but it was not until he recently broke into the white publications and his first book was accepted by a prominent New York publisher that the "best" Negroes in his city took the trouble to discover that he lived there. Then almost immediately they decided to give a grand dinner for him. But the society ladies were careful to whisper to his mother that perhaps she'd better not come. They were not sure she would have an evening gown.

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. "O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are," say the Negroes. "Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you," say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write "Crane." The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people who did read "Cane" hated it. They are afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work of Du Bois) "Cane" contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it is truly racial.

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the desires of some white editors we have an honest American Negro literature already with us. Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great individual American Negro composer who is to come. And within the next decade I expect to see the work of a growing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expressions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like flame and the singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen--they will be with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms of jazz. I am sincere as I know how to be in these poems and yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn't read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find any thing interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren't black. What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile. Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created it and she does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious "white is best" runs through her mind. Years of study under white teachers, a lifetime of white books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all its manifestations--likewise almost everything else distinctly racial. She doesn't care for the Winold Reiss portraits of Negroes because they are "too Negro." She does not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants the artist to flatter her, to make the white world believe that all Negroes are as smug and as near white in soul as she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people, to "Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro--and beautiful!"

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poet, not a Negro poet," as though his own racial world were not as interesting as any other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner of the academicians because he fears the strange un-whiteness of his own features. An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid too what he might choose.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

triguy · Superuser Joined: 27 Apr 2005 {Posts: 878 }

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

*Josephine Beall Wilson Bruce was born on this date in 1853. She was a Colored teacher and social activist.

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Willson was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of a Dr. Joseph Willson who was a dentist and writer and Elizabeth Harnett Willson a talented musician. After graduating from Cleveland’s Central High School in 1871, and completing a teachers training course, Willson was the first Colored to join the faculty of an integrated Cleveland elementary school. In 1878, she married Blanche K. Bruce, Senator from Mississippi.

The couple moved to Washington D. C. and started a family together. While assisting in her husband political career moves and raising their only child, Bruce held a prominent place in the social life of Washington’s Colored elite and aided a number of ventures to promote the welfare of African-Americans. She was a strong advocate of industrial education for the Colored masses as a way of overcoming obstacles in the path of racial progress. Following the death of her husband, Bruce became lady principal of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute from 1899 to 1902. Upon leaving Tuskegee, Bruce moved to Josephine, Mississippi to manage her family’s cotton plantations.

She returned to Washington D. C. when her (Harvard-educated) son became assistant-superintendent in charge of the district’s Colored schools. An early leader and advocate of the club movement among Black women; she was a founder of the Booklovers’ Club and the Colored Woman’s League and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Josephine Bruce spent the last few months of her life in Kimball, West Virginia, where her son had become a school principal. At the age of seventy, she died on February 15, 1923.

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

Rise and Fall of the House of Bruce
How a former slave built a huge fortune -- and how his descendants lost it.

Reviewed by Eric Foner
Sunday, July 2, 2006; Page BW05

THE SENATOR AND THE SOCIALITE

The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty

By Lawrence Otis Graham

HarperCollins. 455 pp. $27.95

It is a revealing commentary on the history of American democracy that, of the 1,885 men and women who have served in the U.S. Senate since the founding of the republic, only five have been black. Remarkably, the first two were elected from Mississippi during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. Hiram Revels served for a few weeks in 1870 and then returned to relative obscurity. Blanche K. Bruce, who held his seat from 1875 to 1881, amassed a small fortune and founded what Lawrence Otis Graham calls "America's first true black dynasty."

In this flawed but fascinating study, Graham, a black attorney and author of Our Kind of People , a bestseller about the black upper class, tells the story of three generations of the Bruce family. It is a poignant tale of struggle, accomplishment and weakness -- and an illuminating account of American racism.

Graham's cast of characters begins with Bruce and his wife, Josephine, the senator and the socialite of the book's title. Born a slave in Virginia in 1841, the son of his owner, Bruce escaped during the Civil War, studied at Oberlin College and made his way to Mississippi, where he rose quickly in politics and purchased a plantation in 1874. His beautiful, light-skinned wife, whom he married in 1878, came from the North's tiny black upper class. After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D.C., where he held lucrative patronage posts, acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society.

The second generation of Bruces enjoyed privileged lives far removed from those of most Americans, white or black. Their only child, Roscoe, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, worked for a time as head of academic education at the Tuskegee Institute, then served as superintendent of black schools in Washington and manager of the Dunbar Apartments, a Harlem housing complex built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. His talented wife, Clara, attended Radcliffe and Boston University Law School, where she became the first woman anywhere to edit a law review. The third generation, also named Roscoe and Clara, followed in their parents' footsteps to Harvard and Radcliffe.

Graham does not shy away from describing the costs of these accomplishments, among them the Bruces' complete dissociation from most of black America. On the Bruce plantation in Mississippi, black sharecroppers lived in "flimsy wooden shacks" and labored in the same oppressive conditions as on white-owned estates. Equally telling, Roscoe Bruce Sr. found the exuberant mode of worship practiced by lower-class Tuskegee students "disgusting."

That Roscoe Bruce worked at Tuskegee is not coincidental, for the family shared its founder Booker T. Washington's philosophy of accommodation, as well as his reliance on connections with wealthy white patrons. Blanche Bruce said little in the Senate as white violence stripped his people of their rights. Indeed, Graham writes, the senator had "an almost single-minded obsession for maintaining favor with powerful whites." While attending Harvard, his son spied for Washington on Boston's "anti-Bookerite" black radicals. Even though he had received an elite academic education, Roscoe Bruce tried to introduce Washington's philosophy of industrial training in the District of Columbia's black schools, causing an uproar among black parents proud of their children's educational attainments. When a scandal erupted in 1919 because Bruce allowed a white man to take nude photographs of black high school students, allegedly as part of a study of physical differences between the races, he was forced to resign.

Only when it came to their own family did the Bruces turn militant. In 1923, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell barred the college's six black freshmen, including Roscoe Jr., from living in freshman dormitories. Roscoe Sr. organized a national campaign that forced Lowell to rescind his order.

An indefatigable researcher in primary sources, Graham sometimes seems unaware of current scholarship. The opening chapters present a confusing picture of Reconstruction politics because Graham uses the word "liberal" in its modern sense of racial egalitarianism rather than its 19th-century meaning of belief in limited government and laissez-faire economics. Contrary to his account, those who called themselves liberal Republicans opposed Reconstruction.

Nonetheless, The Senator and the Socialite offers a compelling portrait of the Bruce family's rise, dynamics and downfall. In 1936, Roscoe Sr. lost his job when Rockefeller sold the Dunbar Apartments. His children lacked the drive and self-discipline of their forebears. The younger Clara failed to complete her studies at Radcliffe and eloped with a black actor. Roscoe Jr. embezzled money from an apartment complex he managed in New Jersey and then arranged a phony burglary to explain the absence of funds. He served 18 months in prison. The legal costs bankrupted the family.

Problems in the third generation of privileged families are standard grist for gossip columnists. But the black elite faced greater obstacles to recovery and had fewer resources and connections to fall back on than their white counterparts. No New York law firm would hire a black female attorney such as Clara Bruce. In their hour of need, the elite whites the Bruces had cultivated for decades abandoned them, refusing repeated requests for assistance. Roscoe Sr. and his wife were reduced to living for a time on welfare. Many of their relatives, including the younger Clara and her actor husband, avoided racism by passing for white. Today, Graham reports, most descendants of Sen. Bruce live as white persons -- an ironic but in some ways understandable end to a black dynasty to which Jim Crow America never truly offered a secure place. ?

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. His most recent book is "Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction."

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

http://faculty.berea.edu/browners/chesnutt/

I think I must write a book. I am almost afraid to undertake a book so early and with so little experience in composition. But it has been a cherished dream, and I feel an influence that I cannot resist calling me to the task. . . . The object of my writing would not be so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites--for I consider the unjust spirit of caste which is so insidious as to pervade a whole nation, and so powerful as to subject a whole race and all connected with it to scorn and social ostracism--I consider this a barrier to the moral progress of the American people: and I would be one of the first to head a determined, organized crusade against it.
--Charles W. Chesnutt, written May 1880 in his journal at age 22

Chesnutt Family Timelines

Chesnutt

Ethel(daughter)
Helen(daughter)
Edwin(son)
Dorothy(daughter)

Family Tree

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(This page was developed by a Berea College student as part of a course on Chesnutt.)

Biography:
Charles W. Chesnutt, America's first great Black novelist, lived in the distinct political, social and cultural environment that found expression in his literary works. By analyzing the works of a writer, we can gain the general insights of the author's contemporary environment - the world he grows up in and the world he later writes to. Charles W. Chesnutt is not an exception, and his novels reveal the harsh world of prejudice and social indifference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Charles W. Chesnutt was born June 20, 1858, in Cleveland Ohio, the eldest child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and Anne Maria Sampson, free blacks from North Carolina. The increasing civil turmoil regarding slavery and coming political unrest forced Charles Chesnutt's parents to move to Ohio, where they remained before the end of Civil War, and came back to Fayetteville, North Carolina with five young children. Charles's father, Andrew Jackson Chesnutt, was a product of union between Waddell Cade, a prosperous slaveholding farmer and Ann Chesnutt, his mistress and later his housekeeper.

Charles's mother also descended from a free mulatto Fayetteville family. Charles Chesnutt's family heritage gave him the features that barely distinguished him from whites, but determined his social status as lower than that of the white Americans.

That Chesnutt's works are centered around social issues, racism in particular, is not accidental and is mainly due to the environment and experiences in Chesnutt's life. He was born two years before the Civil War, grew up in a turbulent sociopolitical atmosphere, and experienced the futile attempts of Reconstruction of Southern states.

After settling in Fayetteville at the age of eight, Charles started working at the grocery shop operated by his father, and attended the school set up by Freedman's Bureau. After the death of his mother, Charles decided to contribute to the family's poor budget by taking position at the school as pupil teacher. Deprived of the opportunity of formal education, Charles continued vigorous self education while teaching in various black educational institutions.

After teaching at black schools of Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Charlotte, North Carolina, Charles returned to Fayetteville in 1877 to become an assistant principal of the normal school. Here Charles met his colleague and future wife, Susan Perry, daughter of a prosperous barber. They got married in 1878. Being in a new position of a family man, Charles Chesnutt stood before two important decisions: determining the place for him and his family to settle and deciding on his future career. Despite his physical features that gave him close look to whites, Charles Chesnutt's chances of success in impoverished and deeply prejudiced South were minimal. His mixed racial heritage was a burden that would always haunt him in the South. The entry in his personal journal shows Charles's opinion about his place in the society of the South:

"I occupy here a position similar to that of Mahomet's Coffin. I am neither fish, flesh, nor fowl-neither "nigger," white, nor "buckrah." Too "stuck-up" for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites."
Belief that the North would provide fair treatment and a place where his endeavors would bare fruit attracted Charles to New York City. But it was not only the prejudice-free atmosphere that prompted his departure to North, but the immense desire to dedicate his career to literary work. Having a thorough realization and good knowledge of pre and post slavery life in the South, Chesnutt felt confident that he was in a position to start a successful literary career concentrating on problems and issues of the South.
After working for six months in New York City, Chesnutt decided to return to his birth city and in 1884, settled in Cleveland with his family. Here he begun working as a stenographer for Nickel Plate Railroad Company and simultaneously started studying law. At that time, his family included two little girls and a baby boy.

His spare time Chesnutt dedicated to writing. His first short story, "Uncle Peter's House," appeared in the Cleveland News and Herald in 1885. Chesnutt's other novels followed, and he became the first African American author to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, one of the major contemporary literary journals. The title of the story that first appeared in the Atlanticwas "The Goophered Grapevine," in which Charles used Uncle Julius as a bridge between the past and the present realms in order to capture the miseries of the slavery and display them to the contemporary reader. "The Goophered Grapevine," as well as other short stories by Chesnutt, included tales about black hoodoo practices and beliefs, and presented slave culture with African elements to white readers.

After the publication of "The Goophered Grapevine," Houghton Mifflin publishing firm showed interest in Chesnutt's works, and organized them into a collection of short stories. In March of 1899, Charles Chesnutt's first book, The Conjure Woman,was published. The stories from The Conjure Woman describe the struggle between ill-natured, cruel slaveholders and witty, clever slaves. Using the magic of conjuration, slaves in "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," and "Hot-Foot Hannibal" manipulate the will and power of their masters to their own advantage.

The success of his first book prompted Charles W. Chesnutt to publish the second collection of short stories. "The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line" includes nine stories, all of them united under common theme and based on same fundamental social issue - miscegenation in America. The book met a harsher criticism than its predecessor, because many reviewers were bothered by Chesnutt's excessive concentration on issues such as segregation and miscegenation.

Financial problems regarding the second book did not discourage Chesnutt from following his lifelong dream of being a full-time author. In march of 1900, Houghton Mifflin accepted Chesnutt's first novel, The House Behind the Cedars for publication. According to the author, the plot of the novel was simple: it is "a story of a colored girl who passed for white." The story brings out a problem that many Chesnutt's contemporary writers and politicians tried to cope with - the issue of racial identity. By introducing racially mixed characters like John and Rena Walden, Chesnutt advocates the right of mixed races to be accepted on equal terms with whites.

After the success of his first novel, Charles used the opportunity to address pressing racial issues in a new novel, The Marrow of Tradition. The novel was published on 27 October 1901, with the expectations of high sales, but to the author's disappointment, turned out to be a financial disaster. The Marrow of Tradition is based on the Wilmington, N.C., race riot of 1898. As the critics noted, the reason of the book's failure to sell was not the poor workmanship or weakness of Chesnutt's writing, but the subject matter and the moral thesis that Northern readers declined to accept.

In order to support his family, Chesnutt was forced to reopen his court reporting business which he closed in 1899. Chesnutt shifted his literary concentration towards essays and short articles regarding racial issues. He also experimented in writing entertaining, non-controversial novels about the high society of the North. The result was "Baxter's Procrustes," his last novel to be published in the Atlantic.

When Chesnutt finally completed a new novel about racial issues, The Colonel's Dream, Houghton Mifflin didn't accept it with previous enthusiasm, and requested much revision and development from the author. After the book was published, critics evaluated it poorly, and declared the novel full of pessimistic mood and unpleasant for reading. The Colonel's Dream gave Chesnutt a final hint that the interest of public didn't coincide with his own, and in order to sell, he had to turn to other forms of literature. In 1906, Chesnutt wrote a play in four acts, "Mrs. Darcy's Daughter," but again failed to find a producer to make it a financial success. At this moment, Charles Chesnutt set his literary carrier aside and got absorbed in social and political activities, devoting his time to preparing speeches and writing articles in defense of his race. Together with prominent black activists, such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Chesnutt advocated the reform of the racial conditions in the South and better treatment of black population of that region.

Among the clubs, organizations and sororities honored by Charles W. Chesnutt's membership, Chamber of Commerce of Cleveland, the City Club, and the Rowfant Club were most important. Serving on the General Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt was awarded NAACP's Spingarn Medal for his "pioneer work as a literary artist depicting the life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent, and for his long and useful carrier as scholar, worker, and freeman of one of America's greatest cities."

Chesnutt died on 15 November 1932, leaving behind him a rich artistic legacy for twentieth-century African-American literature.

Obituary by W.E.B. Du Bois for Charles W. Chesnutt (Crisis,January 1933).

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

Description: Carrie Allen McCray (1913-) social activist, poet and wife of John Henry, was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, the ninth of ten children. She earned her BA degree from Talladega College (Talladega, Alabama) and her MSW from New York University. McCray's career-long commitment to social activism has reached far and wide. She served as the Director of Health Services in the Essex County Tuberculosis League from 1940-1965, and worked as a social worker in New York City. Though she wrote scholarly articles and some short stories and poems over the years, it was not until she reached age seventy-three that McCray began writing "seriously". Her work has since appeared in numerous publications.

Carrie Allen McCray's most recent book, 'Freedom's Child: The Life of a Confederate General's Black Daughter,' is a memoir of her mother's life. She encouraged young and older people to write memoirs, she said, because 'it's amazing how little whites know about our culture.' (Staff photo by Justin Ide)

Panel probes invisibility of black women in media
By Beth Potier
Gazette Staff

When poet and author Carrie Allen McCray attended Alabama's Talladega College in the early 1930s, images of black women were everywhere: on pancake mix, on cookie jars, on salt and pepper shakers.

Decades later, Tricia Rose, assistant professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and an expert on music and black popular culture, sees an explosion of images of African-American women in movies, in music videos, and on network and cable television.

But if Aunt Jemimah slims down, trades her headscarf for an Afro, and sings rap, are black women portrayed more fairly? Are they more visible, less of a commodity?

Television news producer Callie Crossley and moderator Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, professor of history and Afro-American Studies, joined McCray and Rose to discuss "Invisibility to Commodity? Constructions of Black Women in Art and Media" at a forum at the Kennedy School of Government Friday afternoon (March 1).

The forum, co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee and the Harvard College Black Arts Festival, was the opening event of the festival. Two scheduled panelists, filmmaker Julie Dash and Essence magazine executive editor Joan Morgan Murray, were absent because of last-minute emergencies.

A narrow view of black women

In a lively discussion and question-and-answer session, the panelists seemed to concur that while black women are more visible in media and popular culture, the range of their visibility remains narrow. And although they are no longer being bought and sold as slaves, they are still commodities.

Images of black women, said Crossley, are "being bought and sold in a different arena. We're no longer on the auction block, but we're in that little square" of the television screen.

Higginbotham opened the event with a historical perspective, reading slave-trade advertisements from a day when black women were very literally commodities, for sale with or without their children.

The first speaker McCray, 89, brought perspective to that history. Strong, charming, and self-effacing, she said, "I think she started with me because I'm the oldest thing in this room." Her most recent book, "Freedom's Child: The Life of a Confederate General's Black Daughter," is a memoir of her mother's life. She encouraged young and older people to write memoirs, she said, because "it's amazing how little whites know about our culture."

"We have moved a long way, but I don't think we've gotten there yet," she said.

Amplifying that point, Crossley recalled participating in a similar forum in the same room about 10 years ago. "I'm sorry to say that 10 years later the same discussion is taking place because the same things are in evidence," she said.

On local news programs - with the notable exception of Boston - there are lots of black women, said Crossley, a former producer for ABC News "20/20" and several public television programs, including the acclaimed "Eyes on the Prize" series.

Yet she cautioned that there might not be as many as there seem: That very visible black anchorwoman may be the only black woman in the entire newsroom. And, she said, black women on the air are not powerful: They may deliver the news, but they don't decide on it. Crossley got a laugh when Higginbotham asked, "Who decides what becomes news?" and she quickly responded, "About six white men." She was not, however, joking.

More is not necessarily better

Funny, fast-talking, and impassioned, Rose, author of "Black Noise: Rap Music and the Black Culture in Contemporary America," said that more is not necessarily better when it comes to images of black women.

"While we have much more space to be visible in American popular culture than [at] any other moment in its history, our images are extraordinarily narrow," she said.

She cited Anita Hill as an example of popular culture's inability to embrace a broad spectrum of images for black women. "In the national consciousness of what categories black women can fall into - mammy, shrill, Jezebel, now the welfare queen - Anita Hill didn't make sense," she said.

While Crossley's "six white men" might be controlling images of black women in the news media, Rose conceded that in popular culture, black people are creating the media that portrays them, often as commodities. Yet in many ways - rap videos, for instance, that glorify the ghetto and present women as sex objects - they are reinforcing negative images.

"This idea of 'keeping it real' has a way of feeding into the stereotypes," she said.

While none of the panelists had tidy solutions to the media's portrayal of black women, they offered up some hopeful actions.

"At the risk of sounding like an old civil rights activist, you have to work within and without the system," said Crossley. By portraying "ordinary" black families in her "20/20" stories about a range of issues, not just "black" ones, Crossley knows she made an impact. She also recalled a group of African Americans from Detroit so upset about something they had seen on the show that they flew to New York and picketed ABC's offices. "They ended up meeting with the vice president of ABC and some stuff changed," she said.

Crossley also advocated armchair activism: changing the channel. "If you're clicking away, that's money," she said.

Salsassin · SuperWizard Joined: 04 Apr 2005 {Posts: 3515 }

Here is a good one of Walter White

He reminds me of this picture I found of a Black couple. I guess he was a famous doctor. I beleive Dewhit or something like that.

Obviously they both look White as hell.

gemini072 · Moderator Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 3042 }

IN THE SPRING OF 1986, Duke University students protesting the school's investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England's Canterbury Cathedral. The nature of the protest prompted one undergraduate to complain to the student newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate "our rights as students to a beautiful campus."

Julian Abele
African-American Architect,
designer of Duke University Cathedral

For Duke sophomore Susan Cook, the letter was a call to action. She had told only a couple other classmates that she was related to the man who had designed the Duke chapel—indeed, who had designed most of the original buildings on the school's neo-Gothic west campus and many on its Georgian east campus. She had never met him, but she felt certain that if he were still alive, he would sup-port the divestment rally as wholeheartedly as she did. So she penned an emotional rebuttal. Duke's beauty, she wrote, was an example of "what a black man can create given the opportunity." Her great-granduncle, Philadelphia architect Julian Abele (pronounced "able"), was "a victim of apartheid in this country" who had conceived the Duke campus but had never seen it because of the Jim Crow laws then in force in the segregated South.

That an African-American had designed Duke, a whites-only institution until 1961, was news to nearly everyone. Abele's role was not a secret, as documents in the university archives make clear. But it had never been acknowledged so publicly. Cook's letter changed that. Now, an oil portrait of the architect—the first of a black person at Duke—hangs in the main lobby of the administration building. Even the university Web site devotes a page to him.

The recognition was long overdue. Abele was not the first black architect in the United States, but he was probably the most accomplished of his era. Between 1906, when he joined the all-white Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, until his death in 1950, he designed or contributed to the design of some 250 buildings, including Harvard's Widener Memorial Library the Museum of Art and the Free Library, both in Philadelphia, and a host of Gilded Age mansions in Newport and Newark City Abele's race, coupled with his self-effacing personality, meant he would not be widely known during his lifetime outside Philadelphia's architectural community The custom of signing sketches with the firm's name rather than an individual designer's also made credit impolitic to claim. "The lines are all Mr. Trumbauer's," Abele once said of the Free Library, "but the shadows are all mine."

Born in 1881, Julian Francis Abele was the youngest of eight in a family of achievers that had long been a fixture of Philadelphia's African-American aristocracy On his mother's side he could claim Absalom Jones, co-founder of the Free African Society, an early (1787) mutual support group for the city's free blacks. His older brother Robert became a physician. Two other siblings were successful sign makers. "Julian's is not a rags to riches story" says Susan Cook, now a senior art director at the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding in New York City.

As a boy Abele attended the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker-founded teacher-training school. For his prowess in mathematics he was awarded a $15 prize. He was also chosen to deliver a commencement address. His topic: the role of art in Negro life. After studying at Brown Preparatory School and the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Indus-trial Art, Abele enrolled in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied architectural design at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1902 to 1903.

Penn's program emphasized the classical methods then in vogue at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, techniques that had found expression in America in the buildings of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Abele embraced them. (His public buildings would rely heavily on Greek, Roman and Renaissance conventions while striving to harmonize with adjacent buildings and the surrounding landscape—a characteristic typical of the City Beautiful Movement that grew out of Beaux-Arts methods.) In his senior year, Willing and Able, as he was nick-named, was elected president of the student architectural society, the highest honor his classmates could bestow, and he won student awards for his designs of a post office and a botanical museum. When he graduated from the university in 1902, he was the first black ever to do so. By then, at 21, he had already been listed as an architect in the city directory for a year.