000024 - Aaron Douglas, African American Artist

Aaron Douglas (b. May 26, 1898, Topeka, Kansas – d. February 3, 1979, Nashville, Tennessee) was an African-American painter and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, to Aaron and Elizabeth Douglas. He developed an interest in art during his childhood and was encouraged in his pursuits by his mother. Douglas graduated from Topeka High School in 1917. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922. In 1925, Douglas moved to New York City, settling in Harlem. Just a few months after his arrival he began to produce illustrations for both The Crisis and Opportunity, the two most important magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He also began studying with Winold Reiss, a German artist who had been hired by Alain Locke to illustrate The New Negro. Reiss's teaching helped Douglas develop the modernist style he would employ for the next decade. Douglas’s engagement with African and Egyptian design brought him to the attention of W. E. B. Du Bois and Dr. Locke, who were pressing for young African American artists to express their African heritage and African American folk culture in their art.
Douglas was heavily influenced by the African culture. His natural talent plus his newly acquired inspiration allowed Douglas to be considered the "Father of African American Arts." That title led him to say," Do not call me the Father of African American Arts, for I am just a son of Africa, and paint for what inspires me."

For the next several years, Douglas was an important part of the circle of artists and writers we now call the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to his magazine illustrations for the two most important African-American magazines of the period, he illustrated books, painted canvases and murals, and tried to start a new magazine showcasing the work of younger artists and writers. It was during the early 1930s that Douglas completed the most important works of his career, his murals at Fisk University and at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).
Throughout his early career, Douglas looked for opportunities to increase his knowledge about art. In 1928–29, Douglas studied African and Modern European art at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania on a grant from the foundation. In 1931, he traveled to Paris, where he spent a year studying more traditional French painting and drawing techniques at the Academie Scandinave.

In 1939, Douglas moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he founded the Art Department at Fisk University and taught for 27 years. Coinciding with this move was a shift to a more traditional painting style, including portraits and landscapes.

Aaron Douglas has been called the father of African American art. His striking illustrations, murals, and paintings of the life and history of people of color depict an emerging black American individuality in a powerfully personal way. Working primarily from the 1920s through the 1940s, Douglas linked black Americans with their African past and proudly showed black contributions to society decades before the dawn of the civil rights movement. His work made a lasting impression on future generations of black artists.

Best represented by black-and-white drawings with black silhouetted figures, as well as by portraits, landscapes, and murals, Douglas's art fused modernism with ancestral African images, including fetish motifs, masks, and artifacts. His work celebrates African American versatility and adaptability, depicting people in a variety of settings—from rural and urban scenes to churches to nightclubs. His illustrations in books by leading black writers established him as the black artist of the period. Later in his career, Douglas founded the Art Department at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Beginning in the 1920s, Douglas's illustrations appeared in books by James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and other prominent black writers, activists, and intellectuals. They were also featured in such magazines as The Crisis, Opportunity, Harper's, and Vanity Fair. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, his art was shown across the United States at universities, galleries, hotels, and museums, including the Harmon Foundation in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Dallas, Howard University's Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and New York's Gallery of Modern Art. In addition, selected works by Douglas were assembled for a landmark traveling show of Harlem Renaissance artworks sponsored by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1988.

Douglas received a B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska in 1922 and a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Kansas the next year. Commenting on his days at the University of Nebraska, where he won a prize for drawing, he recalled: "I was the only black student there. Because I was sturdy and friendly, I became popular with both faculty and students." His ability to get along notwithstanding, Douglas longed to draw from an undraped model and felt constrained by the "Victorian attitudes" that prevented the school from using nudes in the classroom.

The style Aaron Douglas developed in the 1920s synthesized aspects of modern European, ancient Egyptian, and West African art. His best-known paintings are semi-abstract, and feature flat forms, hard edges, and repetitive geometric shapes. Bands of color radiate from the important objects in each painting, and where these bands intersect with other bands or other objects, the color changes.

The works of Aaron Douglas include:

• Illustrations for The Crisis and Opportunity, 1925–1939
• Illustrations for James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones, 1927
• Mural at Club Ebony, 1927 (destroyed)
• Illustrations for Paul Morand, Black Magic, 1929
• Harriet Tubman, mural at Bennett College, 1930
• Symbolic Negro History, murals at Fisk University, 1930
• Dance Magic, murals for the Sherman Hotel, Chicago, 1930–31
• Aspects of Negro Life, murals at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1934
• Illustrations included in selected editions of Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk and Alain Locke's New Negro. Illustrations also published in periodicals such as Vanity Fair, New York Sun, Boston Transcript, and American Mercury.

000023 - Archibald Motley, African American Artist

Archibald John Motley, Junior (b. October 7, 1891, New Orleans, Louisiana – d. January 16, 1981, Chicago, Illinois) was an African-American painter. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America. He specialized in portraiture and saw it “as a means of affirming racial respect and race pride.”

Unlike many other Harlem Renaissance artists, Archibald Motley, Jr. never lived in Harlem. He was born in New Orleans and spent the majority of his life in Chicago. He graduated from Englewood High School in Chicago. He was offered a scholarship to study architecture by one of his father's friends, which he turned down in order to study art. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he received classical training but his modernist-realist works were out of step with the school's then-conservative bent. During his time at the Art Institute, Motley was mentored by painters Earl Beuhr and John W. Norton, and he did well enough to cause his father's friend to pay his tuition. While he was a student, in 1913, other students at the Institute "rioted" against the modernism on display at the Armory Show (a collection of the best new modern art). Motley graduated in 1918 but kept his modern, jazz-influenced paintings secret for some years thereafter.

Motley experienced success early in his career. In 1927, his piece Mending Socks was voted the most popular exhibit at the Newark Museum in New Jersey. He was awarded the Harmon Foundation award in 1928, and then became the first African-American to have a one-man exhibit in New York City. He sold twenty-two out of the twenty-six exhibited paintings.

In 1927, he had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and was denied, but he reapplied and won the fellowship in 1929. He studied in France for a year, and chose not to extend his fellowship another six months. While many contemporary artists looked back to Africa for inspiration, Motley was inspired by the great Renaissance masters whose work was displayed at the Louvre. He found in the artwork there a formal sophistication and maturity that could give depth to his own work, particularly in the Dutch painters and the genre paintings of Delacroix, Hals, and Rembrandt. Motley’s portraits take the conventions of the Western tradition and update them—allowing for black bodies, specifically black female bodies, a space in a history that had traditionally excluded them.

During the 1930s, Motley was employed by the federal Works Progress Administration to depict scenes from African-American history in a series of murals, some of which can be found at Nichols Middle School in Evanston, Illinois. After his wife’s death in 1948 and difficult financial times, Motley was forced to seek work painting shower curtains for the Styletone Corporation. In the 1950s, he made several visits to Mexico and began painting Mexican life and landscapes.

Motley’s family lived in a quiet neighborhood on Chicago’s south side in an environment that was racially tolerant. Motley did not spend much of his time growing up around other blacks. It was this disconnection with the African American community around him that established Motley as an outsider. Motley himself was light skinned and of mixed racial makeup, being African, First American and European. Motley wrestled all his life with his own racial identity. He was unable to fully associate with one or the other, neither black nor white. Rather than focusing his energy on establishing his own racial identity, Motley turned his talents to uncovering the secrets of racial identity across the spectrum of skin color. As Motley struggled with his own racial identity, he used distinctions in skin color and physical features to give meaning to each individual shade of African American. Motley was fascinated with skin color and what it meant in the context of racial identity. He realized that in American society, different statuses were attributed to each gradation of skin tone.
In the 1920s and 1930s, during the New Negro Renaissance, Motley dedicated a series of portraits to types of Negroes. He focused mostly on women of mixed racial ancestry, and did numerous portraits documenting women of varying African-blood quantities ("octoroon," "quadroon," "mulatto"). These portraits celebrate skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic. They also demonstrate an understanding that these categorizations become synonymous with public identity and influence one's opportunities in life. It is often difficult if not impossible to tell what kind of racial mixture the subject has without referring to the title. These physical markers of blackness, then, are unstable and unreliable, and Motley exposed that difference.

Motley spoke to a wide audience of both whites and blacks in his portraits, aiming to educate them on the politics of skin tone, if in different ways. He hoped to prove to blacks through art that their own racial identity was something to be appreciated. For white audiences he hoped to bring an end to black stereotypes and racism by displaying the beauty and achievements of African Americans. Motley’s fascination with painting the different types of African Americans stemmed from a desire to give each African American his or her own character and personality. This is consistent with Motley’s aims of portraying an absolutely accurate and transparent representation of African Americans; his commitment to differentiating between skin types shows his meticulous efforts to specify even the slightest differences between individuals.

His night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture, are perhaps his most popular and most prolific. He depicted a vivid, urban black culture that bore little resemblance to the conventional and marginalizing rustic images of black Southerners so popular in the cultural eye. It is important to note, however, that it was not his community he was representing—he was among the affluent and elite black community of Chicago. He married a white woman and lived in a white neighborhood, and was not a part of that urban experience in the same way his subjects were.

Motley married his high school sweetheart Edith Granzo in 1924. Granzo had German immigrant parents who were opposed to her interracial relationship and disowned Edith for her marriage to Motley. Edith died in 1948.

His nephew (raised as his brother), Willard Motley, was an acclaimed writer known for his 1947 novel Knock on Any Door.

Motley's early artistic endeavors include Old Snuff Dipper, a realistic portrait a working class southerner that won Motley a Harmon Foundation award.

One of his most famous works showing the urban black community is Bronzeville at Night, showing African Americans as actively engaged, urban peoples who identify with the city streets. In the work, Motley provides a central image of the lively street scene and portrays the scene as a distant observer, capturing the many individual interactions but paying attention to the big picture at the same time.

In Stomp, Motley painted a busy cabaret scene which again documents the vivid urban black culture. The excitement in the painting is very much palpable. One can observe a woman in a white dress throwing her hands up to the sound of the music, a couple embracing—hand in hand—in the back of the cabaret, the lively pianist watching the dancers. Interestingly, both black and white couples dance and hobnob with each other in the foreground. For example, on the right of the painting, an African American man wearing a black tuxedo dances with a woman whom Motley gives a much lighter tone. By doing this, he hoped to counteract perceptions of segregation.

The Octoroon Girl features a woman who is one-eighth black. In the image a graceful young woman with dark hair, dark eyes and light skin sits on a sofa while leaning against a warm red wall. She wears a black velvet dress with red satin trim, a dark brown hat and a small gold chain with a pendant. In her right hand, she holds a pair of leather gloves. The woman stares directly at the viewer with a soft, but composed gaze. Her face is serene. Motley balances the painting with a picture frame and the rest of the couch on the left side of the painting.

Motley developed a reusable and recognizable language in his artwork, which included contrasting light and dark colors, skewed perspectives, strong patterns and the dominance of a single hue. He also created a set of characters who appeared repeatedly in his paintings with distinctive postures, gestures, expressions and habits. These figures were often depicted standing very close together, if not touching or overlapping one another. Nightlife depicts a bustling night club with people dancing in the background, sitting at tables on the right and drinking at a bar on the left. The entire image is flushed with a burgundy light that emanates from the floor and walls, creating a warm, rich atmosphere for the club-goers. The rhythm of the music can be felt in the flailing arms of the dancers, who appear to be performing the popular Lindy hop.

During his career, Motley received the following awards:

• Frank G. Logan prize for the painting "A Mulatress".
• Joseph N. Eisenrath Award for the painting "Mending Socks".
• Recipient Guggenheim Fellowship.
• Harmon Foundation Award for outstanding contributions to the field of art, 1928.

000022 - Taylor Gordon, Concert Singer

Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (April 29, 1893 – May 5, 1971) was a singer and vaudeville performer associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1920s. He was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana and moved to New York City at the age of 17. His career faded after the 1920s, and in 1959 he retired to White Sulphur Springs, where he died in 1971. In addition to his singing career, Gordon is remembered today for his 1929 autobiography, Born to Be, which recounts his youth as an Afro-American in small-town Montana, and his experiences in 1920s Harlem.

000021 - Countee Cullen, Poet

Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. (He pronounced his name "Coun-tay," not "Coun-tee.")

Countee Cullen was possibly born on May 30, although due to conflicting accounts of his early life, a general application of the year of his birth as 1903 is reasonable. He was either born in New York, Baltimore, Louisville, or Lexington, Kentucky, with his widow being convinced he was born in Lexington. Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. Mrs. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine. She died in 1918. No known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the local minister, and founder, of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.

Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. It is impossible to state with certainty how old Cullen was when he was adopted or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918. By 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen and eventually just Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, Cullen's adoption was never “official.” That is to say it was never consummated through proper state-agency channels. Indeed, it is difficult to know if Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any stage in his childhood.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black activist minister. He established his Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his arrival in New York City in 1902, and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem  where he could boast of a membership of more than twenty-five hundred. Countee Cullen himself stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was “reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage,” and it is clear that his foster father was a particularly strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Frederick Cullen was a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was never remotely that in his life. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was also something of an effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl's clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism.) That Cullen was homosexual or of a decidedly ambiguous sexual nature may also be attributable to his foster father's contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homosexual.
At some point, Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx. He excelled academically at the school while emphasizing his skills at poetry and in oratorical contest. While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life”, a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”.  At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, editor of the weekly newspaper, and elected vice-president of his graduating class. In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.

"Yet I do marvel"

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

“

”

"Yet I do marvel" (1925)

After graduating high school, Cullen entered New York University (NYU). In 1923, he won second prize in the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, with a poem entitled The Ballad of the Brown Girl. At about this time, some of his poetry was promulgated in the national periodicals Harper's, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry. The ensuing year he again placed second in the contest.  He finally won it in 1925.

At New York University (1921–1925), Cullen wrote most of the poems for his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).

Cullen competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity. and came in second with To One Who Say Me Nay, while losing to Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues. Sometime thereafter, Cullen graduated from NYU as one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Cullen entered Harvard in 1925, to pursue a masters in English, about the same time his first collection of poems, Color, was published. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the influence of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet. Cullen's Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

“

”

From "Heritage"

This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless. {Although his 1929 poem "The Black Christ" took a racial theme, the lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.)

The Harlem Renaissance movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935). The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of Countee Cullen.  This rather shy black youth, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write “white” verse—ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like—much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first African American  to attempt to write such verse but he was first to do so with such extensive education and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet. Only two other black American poets before Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, the reinvention of the native-born African American as a being who can be assimilated while decidedly retaining something called “a racial self-consciousness,” then Cullen fit the bill. If “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” was the opening salvo in the making of Cullen's literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of “Shroud of Color” in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene.

Cullen graduated from Harvard University with a masters degree in 1926. He then began work as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, "The Dark Tower", increased his literary reputation.  Indeed, between high school and his graduation from Harvard, Cullen was the most popular black poet and virtually the most popular black literary figure in America. One of Cullen's poems and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A'Leila Walker—heiress of Madame C. J. Walker's hair-care products fortune and owner of a salon where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s—to name her salon “The Dark Tower”.

Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine's John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine's first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. He met Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual. At that time Yolande was involved romantically with a popular band leader. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen traveled back and forth between France and the United States.

Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Cullen was placed at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger black intellectuals who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who would not remarry until 1940.
It is rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman ("the handsomest man in Harlem"), was a significant factor in the divorce. The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. Van Vechten had used him as a character model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926).

It is very possible that the conflicted Cullen was in love with the homosexual Jackman, but Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, says there is no concrete proof that they ever were lovers, despite newspaper stories and gossip suggesting the contrary.

Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in various depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that the name of the Georgia accumulation be changed from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection in honor of his friend. When Jackman, himself, succumbed to cancer in 1961, the collection was renamed the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.

By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery - Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus. Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that The Black Christ, his longest and in many respects most complicated poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished.

As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But by 1930 Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932, appeared his only novel, One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life, he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City. (His most famous student at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was James Baldwin.) During this period, he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who perished in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. In the last years of his life, Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt his 1931 novel God Sends Sunday into St. Louis Woman (1946, published 1971) for the musical stage. Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in a poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. Cullen also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.

In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson, whom he had known for ten years.

Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.

The works of Countee Cullen include:

Poetry collections:

• Color Harper & brothers, 1925; [includes the poems "Incident," "Near White," "Heritage," and others], illustrations by Charles Cullen
• Tableau 1925
• Harlem Wine 1926
• Copper Sun, Harper & brothers, 1927
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl Harper & Brothers, 1927, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• The Black Christ and Other Poems, Harper & brothers, 1929, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• One way to heaven, Harper & brothers, 1932
• Any Human to Another (1934)
• The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
• On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947
• Gerald Lyn Early (ed). My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen Doubleday, 1991
• Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, Library of America, 2013

Prose:

• One Way to Heaven (1931)
• The Lost Zoo, Harper & Brothers, 1940; Modern Curriculum Press, 1991
• My Lives and How I Lost Them, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942

Drama:

• St. Louis Woman (1946)

***

000020 - Delbert Tibbs, "Exonerated" Inspiration

Delbert Tibbs (b. June 19, 1939, Shelby, Mississippi - d. November 23, 2013, Chicago, Illinois) was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 and sentenced to death. He was later exonerated and became a writer and anti-death penalty activist. He died on November 23, 2013.

Tibbs was born in Mississippi and grew up in Chicago. He attended the Chicago Theological Seminary from 1970 to 1972. In 1974, he was hitchhiking in Florida when he was wrongfully implicated in a crime for which he would receive the death penalty. That year, a 27-year-old man and a 17-year-old female were violently attacked near Fort Myers, Florida. The man was murdered and the young woman raped. She reported that they had been picked up while hitchhiking by a black man who shot her boyfriend dead and then beat and raped her, leaving her unconscious by the side of the road. Tibbs was stopped by police some 220 miles north of Fort Meyers and questioned about the crime. The police took his picture, but as he did not fit the victim's description of the perpetrator, did not arrest him. However, the photograph was sent to Fort Meyers and the victim identified him as the attacker. A judge then issued a warrant for Tibbs' arrest. He was picked up in Mississippi two weeks later and sent to Florida.

Though Tibbs had an alibi, he was indicted for the crimes. During the trial, the prosecution supplemented the victim's identification with testimony from a jailhouse informant who claimed Tibbs had confessed to the crime. The all-white jury convicted Tibbs of murder and rape and he was sentenced to death.


After the trial, the informant recanted his testimony, saying he had fabricated his account hoping for leniency in his own rape case. The Florida Supreme Court remanded the case and reversed the decision on the grounds that the verdict was not supported by the evidence. Tibbs was released in January 1977. In 1982, the Lee County State Attorney dismissed all charges, ending the chance of a retrial.

In November 1976,Pete Seeger wrote and recorded the anti-death penalty song "Delbert Tibbs."
A portion of Tibbs' story is featured in the play The Exonerated. On February 14, 2011 Tibbs, along with fellow exonerees and anti-death penalty activists, spoke with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn about repealing the death penalty in their state. A month later, on March 14, 2011, the death penalty was repealed in Illinois.

Tibbs is the author of "Selected Poems and Other Words/Works", Edited by O'Modele Jeanette Rouselle, Copyright 2007, Printed by The Manifestation-Glow Press New York City October 2007. His poetry also appears in the chapbook anthology "Beccaria", edited by poet Aja Beech released on April 22, 2011.

***

000019 - Tabu Ley Rochereau, Disseminator of the Sound of Soukous

 

 

Pascal-Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu (b. November 13, 1937 – d. November 30, 2013), better known as Tabu Ley Rochereau, was a leading African rumba singer-songwriter from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was the leader of Orchestre Afrisa International, as well as one of Africa's most influential vocalists and prolific songwriters. Along with guitarist Dr. Nico Kasanda, Tabu Ley pioneered soukous (African rumba) and internationalized his music by fusing elements of Congolese folk music with Cuban, Caribbean and Latin American rumba. He has been described as "the Congolese personality who, along with [the dictator] Mobutu, [most] marked Africa's 20th century history." He was dubbed the "African Elvis" by the Los Angeles Times. After the fall of the Mobutu regime, Tabu Ley also pursued a political career.

During his career, Tabu Ley composed up to 3,000 songs and produced 250 albums.

Pascal-Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabu was born in Bagata, in the then Belgian Congo. His musical career took off in 1956 when he sung with Joseph "Le Grand Kallé" Kabasele, and his band L'African Jazz. After finishing high school he joined the band as a full-time musician. Tabu Ley sang in the pan-African hit Indépendance Cha Cha which was composed by Grand Kallé for Congolese independence from Belgium in 1960, propelling Tabu Ley to instant fame. He remained with African Jazz until 1963 when he and Dr. Nico Kasanda formed their own group, African Fiesta. Two years later, Tabu Ley and Dr. Nico split and Tabu Ley formed African Fiesta National, also known as African Fiesta Flash. The group became one of the most successful bands in African history, recording African classics like Afrika Mokili Mobimba, and surpassing record sales of one million copies by 1970. Papa Wemba and Sam Mangwana were among the many influential musicians that were part of the group. He adopted the stage name "Rochereau" after the French General Pierre Denfert-Rochereau, whose name he liked and whom he had studied in school.

In 1970, Tabu Ley formed Orchestre Afrisa International, Afrisa being a combination of Africa and Éditions Isa, his record label. Along with Franco Luambo's TPOK Jazz, Afrisa was now one of Africa's greatest bands. They recorded hits such as "Sorozo", "Kaful Mayay", "Aon Aon", and "Mose Konzo".

In the mid 1980s, Tabu Ley discovered a young talented singer and dancer, M'bilia Bel, who helped popularize his band further. M'bilia Bel became the first female soukous singer to gain acclaim throughout Africa. Tabu Ley and M'bilia Bel later married and had one child together. In 1988, Tabu Ley introduced another female vocalist known as Faya Tess, and M'bilia Bel left and continued to be successful on her own. After M'bilia Bel's departure, Afrisa's influence along with that of their rivals TPOK Jazz continued to wane as fans gravitated toward the faster version of soukous.

After the establishment of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime in the Congo, Tabu Ley adopted the name "Tabu Ley" as part of Mobutu's "Zairization" of the country, but later went into exile in France in 1988. In 1985, the Government of Kenya banned all foreign music from the National Radio service. After Tabu Ley composed the song "Twende Nairobi" ("Let's go to Nairobi"), sung by M'bilia Bel, in praise of Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, the ban was promptly lifted. In the early 1990s, Tabu Ley briefly settled in Southern California. He began to tailor his music towards an international audience by including more English lyrics and by increasing more international dance styles such as Samba. He found success with the release of albums such as Muzina, Exil Ley, Africa worldwide and Babeti soukous. The Mobutu regime banned his 1990 album "Trop, C'est Trop" as subversive. In 1996, Tabu Ley participated in the album Gombo Salsa by the salsa music project Africando. The song "Paquita" from that album is a remake of a song that he recorded in the late 1960s with African Fiesta.

When President Mobutu Sese Seko was deposed in 1997, Tabu Ley returned to Kinshasa and took up a position as a cabinet minister in the government of new President Laurent Kabila. Following Kabila's death, Tabu Ley then joined the appointed transitional parliament created by Joseph Kabila, until it was dissolved following the establishment of the inclusive transitional institutions. In November 2005 Tabu Ley was appointed Vice-Governor of Kinshasa, a position devolved to his party, the Congolese Rally for Democracy by the 2002 peace agreements. He also served as provincial minister of culture. He was said to have fathered up to 68 children, including the French rapper Youssoupha, with different women.

Tabu Ley Rochereau died on November 30, 2013, aged 76, at Saint-Luc hospital in Brussels, Belgium where he had been undergoing treatment for a stroke he suffered in 2008.

During his lifetime, Tabu Ley Rochereau received the following awards:

• Honorary Knight of Senegal
• Officer of the National Order, the Republic of Chad

***

 

000018 - Ahmed Negm, Dissiednt Egyptian Poet

Ahmed Fouad Negm (Arabic: احمد فؤاد نجم‎) (b. May 22, 1929 – d. December 3, 2013), popularly known as el-Fagommi (الفاجومي), was an Egyptian vernacular poet.  Negm is well known for his work with Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam, as well as his patriotic and revolutionary Egyptian Arabic poetry. Negm has been regarded as "a bit of a folk hero in Egypt."

Ahmed Fouad Negm was born in Sharqia, Egypt, to a family of fellahin. His mother, Hanem Morsi Negm, was a housewife, and his father Mohammed Ezat Negm, a police officer. Negm was one of seventeen brothers. Like many poets and writers of his generation, he received his education at the religious Kutaab schools managed by El-Azhar.

When his father died, Ahmed went to live with his uncle Hussein in Zagazig,  but was placed in an orphanage in 1936 where he first met the famous singer Abdel Halim Hafez.  In 1945, at the age of 17, he left the orphanage and returned to his village to work as a shepherd. Later, he moved to Cairo to live with his brother who eventually kicked him out only to return to his village again to work in one of the English camps while helping with guerilla operations.

After the agreement between Egypt and Britain, the Egyptian National Workers’ Movement asked everyone in the English camps to quit their job. Negm was then appointed by the Egyptian government as a laborer in mechanical workshops. He was imprisoned for 3 years for counterfeiting form, during which he participated and won first place in a writing competition organized by the Supreme Council for the Arts. He then published his first collection “Pictures from Life and Prison” in vernacular Egyptian Arabic and became famous after Suhair El-Alamawi introduced his book while he was still in prison. After he was released, he was appointed as a clerk in the organization for Asian and African peoples. He also became a regular poet on Egyptian radio.

Negm lived in a small room on the rooftop of a house in the Boulaq el-Dakror neighborhood. When he met singer and composer Sheikh Imam in the Khosh Adam neighborhood, they became roommates and formed a famous signing duet. Negm was also imprisoned several times due to his political views, particularly his harsh criticism of Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.

The residence of Ahmed Fouad Negm in the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo, Egypt, exposed him to the most talented professionals such as Sheikh Imam Issa, and impoverished poets and artists. It was Sheikh Imam in particular who compensated Negm for the earlier rejection by his orphanage-mate Abdel Halim Hafez.

In 1962, Negm was introduced to Sheikh Imam by a friend who believed that the two, poet Negm and composer Imam, could make a perfect duo. On the first occasion, Negm noticed that Imam took over an hour to tweak the strings of the Oud before starting his first demonstration to the new guest. Negm shouted "Allah" upon listening to Imam's singing and playing the Oud. The blind Sheikh was equally longing for inspiring words of the sort Negm had. That was the spark that lasted 30 years of concerted writing by Negm, composing by Imam, and singing by the two combined.

Negm was quick enough to sense that the blind Sheikh was a hidden treasure of Islamic literacy and music talent, and with his physical handicap, he could use the help of Negm's eyes and words. Hence, Negm proposed to stay in Imam's residence. As he recounted, his other rented room had property worth 6 Egyptian pounds, thus if he threw away the key for his other room, the landlord was required to take three months before breaking into the room and possessing its contents. Negm took the risk, abandoned his rented room with its contents and stuck with Sheikh Imam from 1962 throughout 1995.

In the early hours of 3 December 2013, Negm died at the age of 84 in Cairo.  

In 2007, Negm was chosen by the United Nations Poverty Action as Ambassador of the poor.

Ahmed Fouad Negm won the 2013 Prince Claus Award for ‘Unwavering Integrity’.

000017 - Walter White's Rope and Faggot

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.

In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.

White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

***

With regards to Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, in 1926, Walter White, assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story of a horrific lynching in Aiken, South Carolina, in which three African Americans were murdered while more than one thousand spectators watched. Because of his light complexion, blonde hair, and blue eyes, White, an African American, was able to investigate first-hand more than forty lynchings and eight race riots.

Following the lynchings in Aiken, White took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope and Faggot. Ironically subtitled “A Biography of Judge Lynch,” Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and is based on White’s first-hand investigations. It was first published in 1929.

Rope and Faggot debunked the “big lie” that lynching punished black men for raping white women and it provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of all lynchings. Despite the emphasis on sexual issues in instances of lynching, White insisted that the fury and sadism with which white mobs attacked their victims stemmed primarily from a desire to keep blacks in their place and control the black labor force. Some of the strongest sections of Rope and Faggot deal with White’s analysis of the economic and cultural foundations of lynching.

000016 - Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry

Wallace Henry Thurman (b. August 16, 1902, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. - d. December 22, 1934, New York, New York), was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license.

Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree.

While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.

In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.

He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.

Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.

During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.

In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position.

Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had one child together.

Thurman died in 1934 at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.

Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.

Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.

Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.

***

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by the American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was considered ground breaking for its exploration of colorism and racial discrimination within the black community, where lighter skin was often favored, especially for women.

The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Morgan in her journey to college at UCLA, and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Morgan's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life.

Part 1 Emma Lou

Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl with dark skin, and she suffers from it. Her mother and her family have lighter skin (it shows European ancestry in her family history). Emma Lou learned that her father, who left the mother and daughter soon after she was born, was a dark-skinned black man, and she appears to have taken after him. Her mother's family members comment on Emma Lou's color, thinking it will reduce her appeal for marriage. Her family help the girl try to lighten her skin with commercially available creams and bleaching, but are unsuccessful. Morgan wishes that she had been born a boy, as her mother said, "a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment."

The only "Negro pupil in the entire school," Emma feels conspicuous at graduation in their white robes. Her Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California (USC). He says she can find other black students for friends, and encourages her to study education and move to the South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise "encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town." Emma Lou’s maternal grandmother was closely associated with the "blue veins", those blacks who had skin light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought that Emma Lou could find a better life in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about.

At USC, Morgan intends to meet the "right" crowd among other Negro students. On registration day, she happens to meet Hazel Mason, another black girl, but decides when she speaks that she is lower class and the wrong sort. Other girls are pleasant enough, but never invited Emma Lou into their circle or sorority. Hazel drops out of school and Grace Giles becomes Emma Lou’s friend. One day Grace says the sorority only took light-skinned, wealthy girls.

By summer, Emma Lou felt more trapped by her skin. She began to notice that black leaders tended to have light skin or were married to women with light skin. At a picnic, she meets Weldon Taylor, a young black man. Although darker than her ideal, he attracts her. By the end of the night, she thought she was in love. Over the next two weeks, she is thrilled to be with Taylor, for "his presence and his love making."

However, Weldon traveled from town to town, finding work and a new girl each time. He was leaving Boise to become a Pullman porter but, Emma Lou took his departure as due to her color, and associated it with any setback. Two years later after graduation, she decides to move to New York City and Harlem.

Part 2 Harlem

Emma Lou goes to Harlem, where she soon meets John, a young man she decides is "too dark." She goes to an employment agency, seeking work as a stenographer. Lacking job experience, she encounters difficulties and pads her account of her skills. Sent to a real estate office for an interview, after she arrives, they tell her they have someone else in mind. After returning to the agency, Emma Lou was invited to lunch by its manager, Mrs. Blake. She was "warmed toward any suggestion of friendliness" and excited to have the chance "to make a welcome contact."

Mrs. Blake tells her about work prospects, saying that black business men had certain images for the women they hired; they wanted them pretty and light skinned. She suggests that Emma Lou go to Columbia Teacher's College to complete training for a job in the public school system. After lunch, Emma Lou began to walk along Seventh Avenue. While stopping to check her reflection, she noticed a few young black men walking by. One said to another, "There’s a girl for you ‘Fats.’" Fats replied, "Man, you know I don’t haul no coal."

Part 3 Alva

Determined to stay in New York, Emma Lou finds a job as a maid to Arline Strange, an actress "in an alleged melodrama about Negro life in Harlem." She thinks all the characters are caricatures. Arline and her brother from Chicago take Emma Lou to her first cabaret one night, where he makes her a drink from his hip flask. Emma Lou was entranced by the people dancing, and is invited by Alva, a man from another table. When the lights go up, he returns her to sit with Arline and her brother. The next morning, Alva and his roommate Braxton discuss the previous evening; agreeing that Alva did Emma Lou a favor in dancing with her.

Intrigued by the cabaret, Emma Lou talks to the stage director about being in the dance chorus. He tells her plainly the girls are chosen in part for appearance, and notes they all have lighter skin than hers. She decides to look for a new place to live, hoping to meet "the right sort of people."
One evening she goes to a casino, where she recognizes Alva. After a while she approaches him and asks if he remembers her. He politely acts as if he does, and talks and dances with her, even giving her his phone number. She calls him a couple of times before they make plans. Braxton is critical of Alva's seeing her, but he thinks, "She’s just as good as the rest, and you know what they say, ‘The Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.’"

Part 4 Rent Party

Alva generally did not take Emma Lou to parties or dances, as he didn't want his friends to meet her. He finally decides to take her to a "rent party." Usually he would take Geraldine, a woman with lighter skin, to more events where his friends were present. Used to manipulating young women for money, Alva liked Geraldine for herself. Emma Lou was very excited about the party, and worried that she would encounter more discrimination. Once there, they happened on to a conversation revolving around race: the differences between being a mulatto and a Negro, and individuals who are prejudiced or "color struck." Alva's group went on to rent party, where Emma Lou had more to drink than usual.

The next morning, her landlady told her she had to leave, as she wasn't meeting her boarding house's respectable standards. Emma Lou had consumed enough alcohol to warrant a visit from her land lady the next morning. Emma Lou thought more about Alva, who seemed kinder than others in her life, but she was aware of his manipulation.

Alva was having his own trouble with Braxton, who had no job and did not pay rent. He finally moved out, but Alva did not want Emma Lou to move in. One night the couple went to a theatre show, which included jokes about skin color. Emma Lou said to Alva, "You’re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted."

One night, after an argument with Emma Lou, Alva returned to his room to find Geraldine sleeping in his bed. She told him she was pregnant with his child.

Part 5 Pyrrhic Victory

Two years later, Emma Lou works as a personal maid, more of a companion, to Clere Sloane, a retired actress. Clere is married to Campbell Kitchen, a white writer very interested in Harlem. He encouraged the young woman to seek more education in order to achieve economic independence. She often still feels out of place, with few friends. She decides to try to see Alva, although they had stopped seeing each other. As Geraldine answers the door, Emma Lou leaves without speaking to him.

Alva and Geraldine struggled with the problem of their boy, who was born disfigured. Sometimes they wished he was dead, as he seemed to have brought trouble. Alva had become alcoholic and wasted money. Geraldine worked and saved, planning to escape.

Having moved to the Y.W.C.A., Emma Lou had found some new friends. She also was studying teaching. Her friend Gwendolyn Johnson tried to make Emma Lou feel better about her appearance, but she still struggled with it. She continued to work.

Emma Lou started seeing Benson Brown, a light-skinned man described as a "yaller nigger." His appearance seemed reason enough to see him.

Emma Lou learned that Geraldine had abandoned Alva and their son. She went to him, and this time he welcomed her to his place, to care for Alva, Jr. After six months, Emma Lou begins teaching at a Harlem public school. She helped the boy to get along, but her relationship with Alva was uneasy. At the school, Emma Lou wore a lot of make-up to disguise her dark skin, but her colleagues teased her for it. Her economic independence did not totally free her.

Deciding to leave Alva and his son, Emma Lou returns to the YWCA, and calls Benson. He announces that he and Gwendolyn had been dating. They are marrying and invite her to the wedding.
Emma Lou realizes she has spent her life running. She ran away from Boise to get away from the color prejudice. Then she left Los Angeles for similar reasons. But she decide she is not running away again. She knows there are many people like her, and she has to accept herself.

***

Wallace Thurman's first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, took its title from an old folk saying, "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice."  It is an autobiographical satire whose neurotic, dark-skinned protagonist, Emma Lou Morgan, internalizes biases against dark complexioned people after a mid-western upbringing by colorstruck relatives mimicking racist societal values.  Like Thurman, Emma Lou goes to the University of Southern California and then to Harlem.  But unlike Thurman, who was primarily drawn to the artistic renaissance blooming there, Emma Lou hopes Harlem will enable her to finally escape the harsh intraracial prejudice that is exacerbated by her sex and egocentrism. 

Among the mundane settings of Harlem tenement buildings, employment agencies, public dance halls, rent parties, cabarets, and movie houses, Emma Lou has numerous opportunities to overcome her obsession with color and class consciousness.  She is, indeed, discriminated against by both African Americans and European Americans, but not to the degree that she believes. 

In a crowded one-room apartment filled with liquor gorging intellectuals resembling Langston Hughes (Tony Crews), Zora Neale Hurston (Cora Thurston), and Richard Bruce Nugent (Paul), and Thurman himself (Truman) explains intra-racial discrimination by examining the parasitic nature of humankind.  He argues that "people have to feel superior to something ... [other than] domestic animals or steel machines.  ...It is much more pleasing to pick some individual or group ... on the same plane.'  Thus, Thurman suggests that COTWs who ostracize darker skinned African Americans merely follow a hierarchy of discrimination set by materially powerful European American people.  Truman's anatomy of racism, however, is ignored by Emma Lou. 

The Blacker the Berry received reviews that, while mixed, praised Thurman for his ironic depiction of original settings, characters, and themes then considered off limits for African American literary examination.  Many others also criticize Thurman for emphasizing the seamier side of Harlem life.

However, Thurman was never pleased with The Blacker the Berry, and his caricature of the female protagonist, Emma Lou, shows why.  Emma Lou behaves unlike traditional African American females who tend to revise rather than accept the values of both African American and European American men.  After she is repeatedly degraded by light skinned Alva, Emma Lou's spiritual liberation begins only when she acknowledges the Thurmanian and Emersonian ideal that salvation rests with the individual, first expressed (in the book) by the European American Campbell Kitchen (Carl Van Vechten).  In a literary context, Thurman becomes trapped in the alien body of Emma Lou and does not have the creative imagination to break her racial fixation by summoning up a female perspective.  Instead, Emma Lou trades an obsession with skin color for one that is viewed by a patriarchal society as being even more perverse.

A00015 - Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Tenor Saxophonist

Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre (March 24, 1936 – November 9, 2013) was an American free jazz tenor saxophonist.

McIntyre, who was born in Clarksville, Arkansas but raised in Chicago, studied at the Chicago College of Music, and during the 1960s began playing with musicians such as Malachi Favors, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Roscoe Mitchell. Along with them he became a member of the ensemble Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the mid-1960s. His first solo record appeared in 1969. During this time he also recorded as a session musician for Delmark Records, playing with George Freeman, J.B. Hutto, and Little Milton, among others.

McIntyre moved to New York City in the 1970s, playing at Sam Rivers' Riveba Studios and teaching at Karl Berger's Creative Studio. He and Muhal Richard Abrams toured Europe several times. After his 1981 live album, McIntyre recorded very little, playing on the streets and in the subways of New York. His next major appearance on record was not until 1998, with Pheeroan akLaff and Michael Logan. The following year, he played with many AACM ensemble members on the album Bright Moments. He continued to release as a leader into the 2000s.

The discography of Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre reads as follows:

As leader

• Humility in the Light of the Creator (Delmark Records, 1969)
• Forces and Feelings (Delmark, 1970)
• Peace and Blessings (Black Saint Records, 1979)
• Ram's Run (Cadence Jazz, 1981)
• Dream Of... (CIMP, 1998)
• South Eastern (CIMP, 2002)
• The Moment (Entropy Stereo, 2003)
• Morning Song (Delmark, 2004)
• Paths to Glory (CIMP, 2004)
• Extremes (CIMP, 2007)

As sideman

With Muhal Richard Abrams

• Levels and Degrees of Light (Delmark, 1968)

With Roscoe Mitchell

• Sound (Delmark, 1966)

With Ethnic Heritage Ensemble

• Welcome (Leo Records, 1982)

A00014 - Claude McKay's "Banjo"

Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay (September 15, 1889 – May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote four novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem that has not yet been published. McKay also authored collections of poetry; a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932); two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously); and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953.

McKay was attracted to Communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party. However, some scholars dispute the claim that he was not a Communist at that time, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at Communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922-1923 during which he wrote about Communism very favorably. He gradually became disillusioned with Communism, however, and by the mid-1930s, he had begun to write negatively about it.

Banjo was McKay's second novel. Banjo is a commentary on colonialism that focuses on the lives of an international cast of drifters living on the Marseilles waterfront. Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without "inhibition or prejudice".

A00013 - Ibrahim Abatcha, Chadian Politician

Abatcha, Ibrahim
Ibrahim Abatcha (1938 – February 11, 1968) was a Muslim Chadian politician reputed of Marxist leanings and associations. His political activity started during the decolonization process of Chad from France, but after the country's independence he was forced to go into exile due to the increasing authoritarinism of the country's first President Francois Tombalbaye. To overthrow Tombalbaye he founded in Sudan in 1966 the FROLINAT, of which he was the first leader and field commander. Two years later he was killed in a clash with the Chadian Army.

Originally from Borno (a province of the British colony of Nigeria), Abatcha was born into a family with a Muslim background in the French colony of Chad at Fort-Lamy (today N'Djamena) in 1938, and learned to speak French, English and Chadian Arabic, but not to write Classical Arabic, as he did not study in a Qur'anic school. He found work as a clerk in the colonial administration and became a militant trade unionist.

Abatcha entered politics in 1958, becoming a prominent figure in the new radical Chadian National Union (UNT), mainly a split from the African Socialist Movement (MSA) by promoters of the No-vote in the referendum on Chad's entry into the French Community. The party's followers were all Muslims, and advocated Pan-Africanism and socialism. Towards the end of the colonial rule, Abatcha was jailed for a year either for his political activities or for mismanagement in the performance of his duties.

After independence in 1960, Abatcha and his party staunchly opposed the rule of President Francois Tombalbaye, and the UNT was banned with all other opposition parties on January 19, 1962. After that Abatcha was briefly imprisoned by the new Chadian government.

After his release, the UNT cadres decided that if the political situation in Chad became too unbearable to allow the party to survive, it would be wise to send out of the country some party members so that the organization would in any case maintain its existence. Thus Abatcha, who held the position of second adjutant secretary-general of the UNT, was sent in 1963 to Accra, Ghana, where he was later joined by UNT members Aboubakar Djalabo and Mahamat Ali Taher. By going into exile, the UNT members meant also to ensure their personal safety and organize abroad an armed revolt in Chad. As part of the means to preserve the unity of the movement, Abatcha wrote for the UNT a policy statement; this draft was to be the core of the official program of the FROLINAT.

Abatcha led the typical life of the Third World dissident in search of support in foreign capitals, first residing in Accra, Ghana, where he received his first military training and made friends among members of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon that had found asylum there. The Cameroonians helped him attend conferences organized by international Communist groups.

After leaving Accra in 1965, Abatcha started traveling to other African capitals always seeking support for his project of beginning an insurgency against Tombalbaye. The first capital he reached in 1965 was Algiers, where the UNT had already a representative, probably Djalabo. His attempts were unsuccessful, as were those made from there to persuade the Chadian students in France to join him in his fight. From Algiers, he traveled to Cairo, where a small secret committee of anti-government Chadian students of the Al-Azhar University had formed. The students in Cairo had developed a strong political sensitivity because they had come to resent that the degrees obtained by them in Arab countries were of no use in Chad, as French was the only official language. Among these students, Abatcha recruited his first supporters, and with the help of the UPC Cameroonian exiles contacted the North Korean embassy in Egypt, which offered him a military stage. Seven Cairo students volunteered, leaving Egypt in June 1965 and returning in October; these were to be with Abatcha the first military cadres of the rebels. Abatcha with his "Koreans" went then to Sudan in October 1965.

Once in Sudan, Abatcha found fertile ground for further recruitment, as many Chadian refugees lived there. Abatcha was also able to enroll in his movement former Sudanese soldiers, including a few officers, of whom the most distinguished was to become Hadjaro Senoussi. He also contacted Mohamed Baghlani, who was in communication with the first Chadian insurgents already active in Chad, and with the insurgent group Liberation Front of Chad (FLT).

A merger was negotiated during the congress at Nyala between June 19 and June 22, 1966 in which the UNT and another rebel force, the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT) combined, giving birth to the FROLINAT, whose first secretary-general was agreed to be Abatcha. The two groups were ideologically ill-fitted, as they combined the radicalism of the UNT and the Muslim beliefs of the FLT. FLT's president, Ahmed Hassan Musa, missed the conference because he was imprisoned in Khartoum; Musa suspected with some reason that Abatcha had deliberately chosen the moment of his incarceration to organize the conference due to his fear of FLT's numerical superiority over the UNT. As a result, once freed Musa broke with the FROLINAT, the first of many splits that were to plague the history of the organization. Thus Abatcha had to face from the beginning a level of considerable internal strife, with the opposition guided by the anti-communist Mohamed Baghlani.

The unity was stronger on the field, with Abatcha and his so-called Koreans passing to Eastern Chad in mid-1966 to fight the government, and El Hadj Issaka assuming the role of his chief-of-staff. While his maquis were badly trained and equipped, they were able to commit some hit-and-run attacks against the Chadian army, mainly in Ouaddai, but also in Guera and Salamat. The rebels also toured the villages, indoctrinating the people on the future revolution and exhorting youths to join the FROLINAT forces.

The following year Abatcha expanded his range and number of operations, officially claiming in his dispatches 32 actions, involving prefectures previously untouched by the rebellion, that is Moyen-Chari and Kanem. Mainly due to Abatcha's qualities as both secretary-general and field-commander, what had started in 1965 as a peasant uprising was becoming a revolutionary movement.

On January 20, 1968 Abatcha's men killed on the Goz Beida-Abéché road a Spanish veterinarian and a French doctor, while they took hostage a French nurse. Abatcha disavowed this action and ordered his men to free the nurse. However, due to these actions, on February 11, Abatcha was tracked down by the Chadian army and killed in a clash.

Abatcha's death was the end of an important phase in the history of the FROLINAT and more generally of the rebellion. Abatcha had been the one generally acceptable leader of the insurrection. After him, the FROLINAT was more and more divided by inner rivalries, making it more difficult to provide the insurgents with a coherent organization.

A00012 - Nella Larsen's Passing

Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen, born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), was an American novelist who was most prominent during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels -- Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929)-- and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.

Nella Larsen's second novel Passing appeared at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. Many of its characeters and occasions resemble other novels written during that era. Indeed, the working title of Passing, "Nig," alludes to Nigger Heaven, the novel by Larsen's friend and mentor Carl Van Vechten.

However, Passing is more complex and ambitious than many of its predecessors and this may account for the title change and for earning its author the distinction of being one of the first Africnn American women to win a Guggenheim Fellowship for literature.

The central characters of Passing are Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, two African Americans who look like European Americans. These two women had been girlhood friends but separated for years before they accidentally meet when Clare is seated next to Irene in an expensive Chicago restaurant that only serves European Americans.

Although both women are exploiting their appearance and passing for white, for Irene this is an occasional indulgence. She has established an identity as the doting mother of two sons, the wife of a prominent African American physician, and a supporter of appropriately conservative and uplifting community affairs.

Clare on the other hand has married a successful European American but also deeply dislikes African American people.

From this accidental reunion, the two women's lives become entangled as Clare increasingly seeks opportunities to socialize with (and Irene reluctantly sponsors Clare's entree into) the African American middle class. Clare's recklessness worries Irene because it threatens Clare's carefully constructed "white" identity. However, Irene also finds Clare's choices and the danger they entail both frightening and fascinating until she discovers that Clare is having an affair with her husband. This plot twist creates a climate of tension which climaxes when Clare's enraged husband rushes into one of these African American social gatherings, startling Clare and causing her to fall to her death. An air of ambiguity is added by the fact that, as Clare falls Irene is seen reaching towards her. In the context of the story, Irene's culpability is unclear. It is unclear whether Irene sought to reach Clare to save her or was partly responsible for the fall with a push.

Passing explores the relationships between appearance and reality, deception and unmasking, manipulation and imaginative management, aggression and self-defense. The novel's epigraph from Countee Cullen's poem "Heritage" encourages one to read Passing as another in the genre that explores the ambiguity and conflicts inherent in prevailing constructions of race. When it was first published, many reviewers referred to the novel as a "tragedy," alluding to both its shocking ending and to its obvious similarities to the tragic COTW genre exemplified by works such as William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). Larsen's examination of passing, however, is more in the tradition of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice (1868) or James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) because it focuses more upon the psychological dimensions than upon the physical acts that the tragic COTW novels portrayed.

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Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends of mixed-race ancestry—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title and central theme of the novel refer to the practice of racial "passing"; Clare Kendry's passing as white for her husband, Jack Bellew, is the most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for its tragic story.

Passing's depiction of race is informed by the racial discussion taking place in the United States during the 1920s, and the "Rhinelander Case" is a notable precedent for the Kendry-Bellew relationship. Praised upon its publication, the novel has since been celebrated in modern scholarship for its complex depiction of race, gender and sexuality. As one of only two novels by Larsen—along with Quicksand — it has played a significant role in positioning her at the forefront of several literary canons.

The 1920s in the United States was a period marked by considerable anxiety over the crossing of racial boundaries—the so-called "color line" between blacks and whites. The practice of crossing the color line and attempting to be recognized as a member of another racial group came to be known as "passing". Although the exact numbers of people who passed is — for obvious reasons — unknown, many estimates were made at the time.   The sociologist Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956) calculated that 355,000 blacks had passed between 1900 and 1920.

A significant precedent for Larsen's depiction of Clare Kendry's and Jack Bellew's relationship was the 1927 legal trial known as the "Rhinelander Case" (or Rhinelander v. Rhinelander). The case was an annulment proceeding in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for fraud.  Rhinelander alleged that Alice had failed to inform him of her "colored" blood.  Although the jury eventually returned a verdict for Alice, it came at a devastating social cost for both parties — the intimate exchanges between the couple were read out in court, and Alice was forced to disrobe in front of the jury in order to assess the darkness of her skin. The case is mentioned near the end of the novel, when Irene wonders about the consequences of Jack discovering Clare's racial status: “What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case”.

The book opens with Irene Redfield receiving a letter from Clare Kendry, causing her to recall a chance encounter she had with her at the roof restaurant of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago, during a brief stay in the city. The women — both of mixed ancestry — were once friends, but lost touch when Clare's father died and she went to live with her two paternal white aunts. Irene is perturbed by her suggestion that she could "pass" for white — as Clare does — but is also fascinated by her. Although she attempts to rescind on a promise she made, she nevertheless meets up later with Clare and her black friend, Gertrude Martin. Towards the end of their talk, Clare's white husband John (Jack) Bellew arrives. Unaware that all three women are actually mixed race, Jack voices some very racist views and makes them uneasy.

The book resumes in the present day, when Irene lives in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. She identifies as part of and is actively involved in the black community — part of the committee for the "Negro Welfare League" (NWL). Her husband is a black doctor, Brian Redfield, and she has two children. After ignoring the letter, Irene is visited by Clare, who has been concerned at the lack of reply. Clare decides to involve herself with the black community — in spite of Irene warning her of the risks should her husband find out — and attends the NWL dance. The two resume their childhood friendship, and afterwards Clare is frequently at her home. However, Irene — who has been constantly aware of Clare's attractiveness — becomes increasingly suspicious that her husband is having an affair with Clare. During a shopping trip with her visibly black friend Felise Freeland, Irene encounters Bellew, who becomes aware of her — and by extension, Clare's — racial status; Irene considers warning Clare, but decides against it.  Later, Clare accompanies Irene and Brian to a party hosted by Felise on the top floor of a building. The gathering is interrupted by Bellew, who accuses Clare of being a "damned dirty nigger!". Irene rushes to Clare, who sat by an open window. Clare then falls out of the window to the ground below, and is pronounced dead by the guests who eventually gather at the site.  Whether Clare falls accidentally, is pushed by Irene, or attempts suicide, is unclear. The book ends with Irene's fragmented anguish at Clare's death.

Passing has been described as "the tragic story of a beautiful light-skinned mulatto passing for white in high society." The tragic mulatto (also, "mulatta" when referring to a woman) is a stock character in early African-American literature, the light-skinned offspring of a white slaveholder and his black slave, whose mixed heritage among a race-based society means she is unable to identify with either blacks or whites. The resulting feeling of exclusion is variably manifested in self-loathing, depression, alcoholism, sexual perversion, and attempts at suicide.

On the surface, Passing conforms to this stereotype in its portrayal of Clare Kendry, whose passing for white has tragic consequences. But the book resists the conventions of the genre through Clare's refusal to feel the expected anguish at the betrayal of her black identity, and her socializing with blacks for the purposes of excitement rather than racial solidarity. This has led scholars more generally to consider Passing as a novel in which the major concern is not race.

Scholars have identified a homoerotic subplot between Irene and Clare, centered on the erotic undertones in Irene's descriptions of Clare. In this interpretation, the novel's central metaphor of "passing" under a different identity occurs at a surprisingly wide variety of levels. The apparently sexless marriage between Brian and Irene — e.g., their separate bedrooms and identification as co-parents rather than sexual partners — allows Larsen to flirt, if only by suggestion, with the idea of a lesbian relationship between Clare and Irene.  Brian has been subject to a similar interpretation: Irene's labeling of him as queer and his oft-expressed desire to go to Brazil—a country then more tolerant of homosexuality than the United States—are given as evidence.

Passing was published in April 1929 by Knopf in New York. Sales of the book were modest.  Knopf produced three, small print runs each under 2,000 copies — and while early reviews were primarily positive, it received little attention beyond New York City.


In modern scholarship, Larsen is recognized as one of the central figures in the African-American, feminist and modernist canons, a reputation that depends on her modest output of two novels—Passing and Quicksand—and some short stories.  As of 2007, Passing is the subject of more than two hundred scholarly articles and more than fifty dissertations, offering a range of critical interpretations.