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.



A00011 - Jessie Fauset' s Plum Bun

Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882 – April 30, 1961) was an editor, poet, essayist and novelist.  Fauset was the editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. She also was the editor and co-author for the African American children's magazine Brownies' Book. She studied the teachings and beliefs of W. E. B. DuBois and considered him to be her mentor. Fauset was known as one of the most intelligent women novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, earning her the name "the midwife". In her lifetime she wrote four novels as well as poetry and short fiction.

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Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral is one of the four novels written by Jessie Redmon Fauset. First published in 1929, it is often seen as an important contribution to the movement that has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, 

Overtly conventional through its employment of elements and techniques of traditional genres such as the romance or the fairy tale, Plum Bun at the same time transgresses these genres by its depiction, and critique, of racism, sexism, and capitalism. The heroine, a young, light-skinned African American woman named Angela Murray, leaves behind her past and passes for white in order to be able to attain fulfillment in life. Only after she has lived among white Americans does she find out that crossing the racial barrier is not enough for a woman like herself to realize her full potential. The detailed description of her coming of age makes Plum Bun a classic bildungsroman -- a classic coming of age story.

Plum Bun, Fauset’s second novel, sold 100,000 copies within 90 days of its publication, thus giving it the status of a best-seller in its time. The title, Plum Bun, illustrates some of the forces which drive the novel’s main character Angela Murray. The novel’s epigraph quotes the nursery rhyme from which the title is taken: "To market, to market / to buy a plum bun / Home again, home again / Market is done." A plum bun itself, which may be similar to the English Chelsea Roll and the American Cinnamon Roll, is a sweet pastry made of white flour, in which deeply colored currents, raisins, or prunes (plums) are baked. The use of the term "plum bun" is also a sexual innuendo as a plum bun can also be read as "an attractive piece" -- "an attractive woman".

Angela must come to grips with her colored and white racial heritage, as well as with her femininity (stereotypically seen as sweetness), before she achieves psychological wholeness. Although African-American women were typed in popular song as “a little brown sugar" or a “jellyroll,” Angela had to cease thinking of herself as a purveyor of feminine sweetness for sale, and instead step into new roles with inherent value.

The novel’s plot and characters include many autobiographical elements. When Fauset’s mother died, her father remarried a white woman. In Fauset’s actual family, as in the novel, some members of the family could roam at will throughout Philadelphia, while others were prohibited from public places such as hospitals, restaurants, and stores by widely accepted Jim Crow policies. Other autobiographical elements include growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, being the only African-American student in a white school, and discovering Philadelphia’s racist policies for hiring public school teachers (a black teacher could not teach white students). Fauset, like her main characters, moved to Harlem during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance (in 1919) and heard W. E. B. Du Bois (in the novel he is named Van Meier) speak.

The novel’s plot concerns two sisters, Virginia and Angela Murray, who grow up in Philadelphia in a home rich with African American culture.  Angela, like her mother Mattie, is light skinned and able to “pass” in white society, while Virginia and her father Junius’s darker complexion places them on the other side of the color line. Virginia grows up refusing to bow to racist pressures; rather she accepts who she is. Angela, on the other hand, tries repeatedly to gain acceptance by assuming a white mask, but each time it seems that success and friendship are hers, her ethnicity is exposed and she is stripped of everything she cares about.

The deaths of her parents and the racism of Philadelphia society cause Angela to leave for New York City, where she decides to fully hide her African-American heritage. She gains acceptance in an elite artistic circle perhaps inspired by the 1920s Greenwich Village avant-garde. She begins a romantic relationship with Roger, a young white man who seems to move among New York’s Four Hundred -- the City's social elite.  Their relationship, however, is based in several deceptions. In one of the novel’s most important scenes, Angela’s sister is newly arrived at Pennsylvania Station from Philadelphia. Angela, who has come to the station to meet her sister, sees her lover. Aware that his racism will cause him to reject her, she brushes by her darker-complected sister, leaving her standing alone in the crowd. Angela’s and Roger’s deceptions of each other and of themselves lie also in their use of each other for personal gain: Angela seeks Roger’s financial comfort; Roger seeks the convenience of sex without having to introduce his new find to his father, whose deep concern is for his future daughter-in-law’s pedigree. Roger’s abandonment of Angela, the unmasking, to Angela, of his solely sexual intentions, and the mistreatment of Miss Powell, a young artist of African-American heritage, lead Angela to reveal her racial heritage and lose her standing with several of her acquaintances. However, true friends and her sister urge her to travel to Paris to become an artist, and Anthony, a fellow art school classmate of mixed heritage who watched his father die under the hands of a racist mob in the South, declares his love for Angela. It seems at the end, Anthony and Angela may come to terms with America’s racist past and their own brighter future.

The subtitle of the book, A Novel without a Moral, can be understood as follows: once Angela leaves Philadelphia for New York and a traditional African-American home for life on her own, her morality is no longer clearly defined for her. The “moral to the story” is slowly created for the reader and for the main characters as Angela learns and understands the life lessons that New York affords her.

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