125th Street Research Articles

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

I’m Free Because I’m a Fugitive—I’m a Fugitive Because I’m Not Free

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s

Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano

Reviewed by: Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean ed. by Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano Vanessa K. Valdés Ossa, Luisa Marcela, and Debbie Lee-DiStefano, editors. Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean. Lexington, 2019. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-1-498-58708-2. With Afro-Asian Connections in Latin America and the Caribbean, editors Luisa Marcela Ossa and Debbie Lee-DiStefano have provided us an admirable collection of innovative and forward-thinking scholarship that destabilizes and therefore enlivens the disciplines of Latin American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Asian Studies. As Lisa Yun reminds us in her introduction, global Afro-Asian studies began in 1955 with the Bandung Conference; yet it has been marginalized within studies about the Americas. The contributions of peoples of African and Asian descent to Latin American and Caribbean nations have long gone ignored within regional imaginaries; this volume goes a long way to correcting this systematic erasure. The editors divide the collection into three parts, “Identity and National Discourses,” “Contact Zones, Solidarity, and Syncretism,” and “Bodies, Genders, and Identities,” with three essays in each and an interlude by Kathleen López introducing each section. López explains that the essays in the first part “reinterpret concepts of mestizaje to emphasize Afro-Asian centrality to nation-building, influence in national cultural icons, and cross-racial and transnational solidarities” (3). With the first essay, “Afro and Chinese Depictions in Peruvian Social Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Debbie Lee-DiStefano reminds us that Black and Asian presence in the Americas stems from their common histories in having “served as a commodity of labor to be used at the behest of others who sought economic gain at their expense” (7). She goes on to examine José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928) to reveal how he privileges the indigenous over Black and Chinese populations in his proposal toward socioeconomic equity in the Peruvian nation. Mey-Yen Moriuchi convincingly argues for more scholarship emphasizing both the Asian and African heritages simultaneously of renowned Cuban artist Wifredo Lam in “Locating Chinese Culture and Aesthetics in the Art of Wifredo Lam.” In “Afro-Asian-Caribbean Connections in Transnational Circulation: The Harlem Ashram as Chronotope,” Malathi Iyengar calls our attention to a brownstone on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue as a critical site of South Asian, African American, and Puerto Rican political activism in the 1940s. The focus of the second section of the volume is representative cultural production resulting from Afro-Asian synthesis in the region. Examining four Japanese-Brazilian novels written in both Portuguese and Japanese within an almost sixty-year span, beginning in 1950, Zelideth María Rivas debunks the stereotype of Asian insularity within the Brazilian nation, focusing instead on representations of Afro-Asian intimacies and exchanges in “Merging the Transpacific with the Transatlantic: Afro-Asia in Japanese Brazilian Narratives.” Luisa Marcela Osso explores the parallel histories and fictionalized interactions of the Afro- and Sino-Cuban communities through the novels by Cristina García and Mayra Montero in “Parallels and Intersections: Afro-Chinese Relationships and Spiritual Connections in Monkey Hunting and Como un mensajero tuyo.” With her essay “Erased from Collective Memory: Dreadlocks Story Documentary Untangles the Hindu Legacy of Rastafari,” producer-director Linda Aïnouche reflects on the inspiration behind her 2014 documentary as well as highlights understudied influences of Hinduism on Rastafarianism in Jamaica. The third and final section interrogates stereotypes of the hypersexualized mulata and the non-sexual Asian male in the Caribbean. Dania Abreu-Torres’s “Body of Reconciliation: Aida [End Page 287] Petrinera Cheng’s Journey in Como un mensajero tuyo by Mayra Montero” contends that the portrait of the protagonist destabilizes the fetishized categorization of the mulata and is therefore suggestive of new renderings of gendered and racialized women within Cuban literature. In her essay “‘I Am Like One of those Women’: Chinese Masculinity as Feminist Writing Strategy in Three West Indian Novels,” Anne-Marie Lee-Loy puts forth that the effeminized representations of Asian masculinity in Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus (1994/Trinidad); Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999...

“There Is NoNewBlack Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

“There Is No<i>New</i>Black Panther Party”: The Panther-Like Formations and the Black Power Resurgence of the 1990s

B&lt;span class="small-caps"&gt;ook&lt;/span&gt;/M&lt;span class="small-caps"&gt;edia&lt;/span&gt; R&lt;span class="small-caps"&gt;eviews&lt;/span&gt;

The Handy African American History Answer Book, by Jessie Carney Smith. Canton, OH: Visible Ink Press, 2014, 432 pp., $21.95, paperback.This unique Q/A book gathers more than 700 stories, events, expressions, facts, and things everyone should know about the African American history and popular culture. The author, Dr. Jessie Carney Smith, is professor and librarian at Fisk University in Nashville. The author of numerous scholarly works and contributor for many encyclopedias, this is her fourth book about African American culture with this publisher.This Handy African American History Answer Book juxtaposes questions and answers, but most topics will probably be unknown to readers, even for those familiar with African American studies. In that sense, this rigorous book is not firstly made for quizzes or guessing games among friends, rather for studying and discovering the many dimensions of cross-cultural and race studies with the U.S. context.The 14 sections are thematically organized, highlighting the important dimensions of African American life and contribution in Arts, Business, Civil Rights, Education, plus ten other fields. However, this vast repertoire is not meant to just praise the many achievements by noted African Americans in various domains; its strength is to aptly explain the often hidden dimensions of everyday African American life over the past five centuries. Since one finds an average of two questions in about every page, answers are not too short but rather detailed and nuanced. More importantly, this guide also provides timely explanations about the symbolic significance of events or places that general dictionaries cannot easily contextualize. For example, the entry about the Apollo Theater in Harlem indicates that it was not just a building located on 125th Street in New York City, adding that It was one of the first theaters in the nation to feature Black artists and to be available to other minorities (p. 32).The fifth section on Education contains a great diversity of topics and many good surprises. For example, what is referred to as the Rock Nine were the nine heroic Black students who in the context of school desegregation during 1957 dared to integrate the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and thereby proved their courageous self-restraint in the face of extreme provocation and peril (p. 124). Elsewhere, after the question Who was the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard University? we find a praising presentation of educator and author W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), who received his Ph.D. in history in 1895. Almost three decades later, the first three African American women to ever earn a doctoral degree have graduated in 1921. But the first Black student to ever graduate (at any level) from the University of Alabama was Vivian Malone Jones, in 1965. Sadly, Jessie Carney Smith adds that Miss Malone Jones and a Black colleague had to be escorted by the National Guard to register (p. 117). And that was only half a century ago.Further on, one learns that the first public school for Blacks opened in 1870 in Virginia. …

Can Public Health Professionals Restore Joy in America’s Cities?

Can Public Health Professionals Restore Joy in America’s Cities? Affiliation Nicholas Freudenberg DrPHNicholas Freudenberg is with the City University of New York School of Public Health and Health Policy, New York, NY.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Nicholas Freudenberg, DrPH, 55 West 125th Street, New York, NY 10027 (e-mail: Nick.[email protected]cuny.edu). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303110 Accepted: January 20, 2016 Published Online: March 09, 2016

“Matchstick: A Meditation on Harlem”

“Matchstick: A Meditation on Harlem” Audrey E. Kerr This piece was written to speak to the function of intersectionality in negotiating a geographical space—in this case, Harlem. Given the history of issues of race, class, gender and “red lining,” I wanted to use my observation of a specific moment, tied to a racialized incident, to demonstrate the difficulty in maintaining traditional moral and social positions—such as “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.” It was interesting to me, for example, that the protest described below was on a Sunday morning, a time when black folks traditionally would not take to the streets and in a space that would even be considered (for some) profane. The “sacred,” therefore, is called into question, albeit in the name of justice. Beyond this episode being “what I saw,” I am interested in thinking about the position from which I saw it, and the reality that Harlem, as a character, continues to hold her own sticky position. “A tree can make 10,000 matchsticks… But a matchstick can burn down 10,000 trees.” — Anonymous There is a rally going on in protest of the Trayvon Martin verdict on 125th Street and Morningside Avenue, right in front of the MM Beauty Supply Shop, which is open for business on Sundays. Clients attempt to pass in and out, but protestors are blocking the entrance as if it is Zimmerman's home, garnishing sloppily written signs duct taped onto splintering sticks. The protestors are all women, and white, and long‐haired, and mostly heavy‐set; they are outraged. They hold declarative signs—penned with blood red markers—in the faces of elderly, black church ladies, who are wearing bedazzled white hats, opaque stockings and neatly pressed, pleated white skirts. One of the white ladies is wearing a gay pride button and I imagine that Trayvon's opinion of gays may have been similar to his suspicion of “creepy ass crackers.” But that's a profane thought on such a sacred occasion. There is a tight‐fisted, brown‐skinned woman trying to get into the MM Beauty Supply Shop, but her path is block from every direction by the protesting white women. When did all of these folks occupy Harlem anyway, and stake a claim, and name a protest, and drive a point home on Sunday morning? And wasn't Trayvon right—that it is creepy to not be able to buy hair in your own neighborhood because someone decides to transgress and clog up entrances? Because, the truth is, we all have a Trayvon, and we may even have an attitude that ours didn't make the news. Black, male bus drivers honk their support of the white women as they drive by. One white woman gives a driver the black power sign. A little, black‐skinned boy brushes past a white lady and knocks her raggedy sign to the ground. The duct tape peels away and the sign falls from the stick. Her brows furrow and her mouth turns downward. She throws her hands up like, “what the…” If you squint, he could look like Trayvon. He looks at her fretfully and keeps riding. I get on the bus. A baby is crying. A woman in an elaborate orange hat moves directly across from the baby, leans forward, and stares at it. Its cry simmers, then softens, then stops. She smiles and moves back to her original seat. I'll be damned, I think, looking at her. A shaman. There's all kinds of magic in Harlem. It can be tricky: playing with matches that know how to strike on their own. © 2013 Association for Religion and Intellectual Life

"Something Like a Harlem Renaissance West": Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street Literature: Interviews with Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of self-published street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop literature) has exploded among African American readers. Starting with the publication of titles such as Teri Woods’s True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), Vickie M. Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (2001), and Nikki Turner’s A Hustler’s Wife (2003), street literature has emerged as a driving force in the African American publishing industry. Dozens of independent imprints, each publishing several books per year, sprang up virtually overnight, and now thousands of street literature novels compete for the attention of an ever-growing black readership. Some of the more influential independent publishers of this new genre include Urban Books, Teri Woods Publishing, and Stringer’s Triple Crown Publications, though new publishing houses arrive on the scene each year. Triple Crown Publications is probably the most successful of these new publishing houses, having sold more than a million books between its founding in 2001 and 2006. As a further indication of street literature’s growing power in the marketplace, mainstream trade publishers (including Ballantine Books, Simon and Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press) have begun offering six-figure, multiple-book deals to some of the biggest names in the business, including K’wan Foye, Shannon Holmes, and Turner. These books can be purchased at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, at book vendor tables along 125th Street in Harlem, and in state and federal penitentiaries across the country. Street literature is particularly popular in American cities with large black populations, including New York, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, and Atlanta. At a moment when the

Bengali Harlem and the lost histories of South Asian America

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women. As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat

Make It Funky: Fela Kuti, James Brown and the Invention of Afrobeat Alexander Stewart (bio) Evoking the image of ships and black sailors navigating the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s heuristic stresses dynamic cultural exchange among diverse populations of the African diaspora and the mother continent itself—the “black Atlantic.” Gilroy argues for the central role of black musical expression in producing a “distinctive counterculture of modernity” on a basis of shared oppression, common goals, and hybrid cultures (Gilroy, 1993, 36). While the perspective of black Americans’ discovery and cultivation of African cultures and sensibilities (both historical and imagined) is more familiar to those on this side of the Atlantic, this process also figured importantly on the African continent. During the early postcolonial years, the interest of African Americans in discovering their African roots stimulated a similar impulse in some Africans. Describing the epiphany brought on by his 1969 trip to the United States, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the originator of the jazz, funk, and soul-infused genre Afrobeat, recalled: It was incredible how my head was turned. Everything fell into place, man. . . . For the first time, I saw the essence of blackism [black nationalism]. It’s crazy; in the United States people think the black-power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don’t realize they’re the ones who’ve got it over there. Why we were even ashamed to go around in national [End Page 99] dress until we saw pictures of blacks wearing dashikis on 125th Street. (Darnton, 1977, 6) In West African popular music an important shift occurred as many musicians looked less to Europe and, by extension, its former colonies in the Caribbean, and began to draw inspiration from African American cultures in the United States. This essay examines Fela’s seemingly paradoxical adoption and assimilation of American funk grooves and musical practices in his quest to further Africanize his music, and his transformation from British-trained Nigerian jazz trumpeter to black-nationalist countercultural dissident icon. From Palmwine and Highlife to Afrobeat and Beyond With its proximity to maritime commerce and overland trade routes connected to North Africa and the continent’s interior, West Africa has long been a cultural crossroads and nexus of musical development. As noted by Waterman, the interwar years were a particularly fertile period for “the growth of pan-West African urban musical traditions [as] traders attempting to extend their networks, sailors manning the large vessels operated by European lines, . . . and other Africans in search of employment” moved back and forth among colonial entrepôts (Waterman, 1990, 48). Since its introduction by Europeans in the late 1800s, the guitar figured importantly in many of these traditions. The most widespread and influential of these guitar-based genres, palmwine music, swept the region during the 1920s and 1930s. Eponymous with the intoxicating beverage whose consumption it accompanied (and that often was used as a form of payment to the musicians), palmwine was most often heard at informal gatherings among the urban lower classes. Accompanying themselves with guitars and percussion tapped on beer bottles or kerosene cans, singers frequently touched on contemporary political issues and social commentary. In contrast, the other most widespread genre, highlife, as its name implies, was more associated with the musical tastes of the upper classes and social elite. Performed at important events such as weddings, funerals, and holidays, highlife ensembles combined European band instruments and harmonic structures with distinctly African practices such as praise singing. Highlife’s appeal was broadened by its origins in Ghana, the first African nation to gain independence (1957). Under the leadership of the charismatic prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s political and cultural influence was strong throughout the region during the postcolonial period. Nigeria, with 150 million people, the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa, became independent in 1960. As in most of the continent, its borders were drawn during the 1885 Berlin Conference with little regard to different ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups, and these internal divisions were exploited by the European powers to maintain control. Nigeria includes over 250 ethnic groups, with the four largest the predominantly Muslim Hausa and [End Page 100...

Narrating Muslim Masculinities: The Fruit of Islam and the Quest for Black Redemption

Narrating Muslim Masculinities: The Fruit of Islam and the Quest for Black Redemption Zain Abdullah (bio) Introduction On April 26, 1957, Harlem braced itself for another race riot.1 The Fruit of Islam (FOI) stood stern, as divine soldiers, rank upon rank, facing the 28th Police Precinct. Pacing behind them was a sizable crowd of five hundred, which quickly swelled to five thousand (Lomax, 1963, p. 33; DeCaro, 1996, p. 113).2 The Police had given the command for “all available cops” to respond (Hicks, 1957, p. 32). But this was the FOI’s second time that night at the 123rd Street Police Station. On the first occasion, the FOI, or the “Fruit,” received calls that their “brother” had been viciously attacked by police officers. A woman had even rushed to their Salaam Restaurant on 116th to alert them. In less than thirty minutes, a contingent of about fifty Black men from the Fruit stood in military formation outside the station.3 Hinton X lay in great pain on a prison floor, bleeding from multiple head lacerations, a concussion, and a subdural hemorrhage, or blood clot on the brain.4 He found himself severely battered, after witnessing an outright police assault of a Black resident at 125th Street, when he yelled out, “You’re not in Alabama—this is New York” (ibid., pp. 1, 32). This statement nearly cost him his life. With Malcolm X in the lead, they had followed the ambulance up to Harlem Hospital. The public had never seen the spectacle of able-bodied, well-dressed, stern-faced, and orderly Black men marching in ranks up a main thoroughfare [End Page 141] like Lenox Avenue. The mere sight pulled residents out of stores, cafes, and taverns, adding hundreds more to their near fifteen block procession. “Harlem’s black people,” Malcolm X argued, “were long since sick and tired of police brutality. And they never had seen any organization of black men take a firm stand as we were” (1999, p. 239). After brief treatment, Hinton X was remanded into police custody and sent back to his cell. The Fruit followed, but this time they crossed over 125th Street, garnering an even larger crowd at the station (Marable, 2011, p. 128). The incident occurred at around 10 pm.5 By 2:30 am, the Fruit still stood disciplined—awaiting orders in “a solid line a half block long” (Hicks, 1957, p. 32). Their orderly presence both amazed and worried police officials, who monitored the FOI and the growing multitude from inside the station. Malcolm soon emerged from the precinct and gave a one-hand signal. Within minutes, the Fruit uniformly dispersed, followed by the massive crowd standing behind them. “No one man,” one policeman remarked, “should have that much power” (ibid.).6 The Hinton X affair gave the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the FOI much more visibility. Prior to this, their organization was virtually unknown, and their membership amounted to just a few hundred. “For white New Yorkers,” Peter Goldman observed, “those who heard of the confrontation at all, it was a chilling glimpse of a world we didn’t know existed; a world of unblinking, unforgiving black men and women who weren’t afraid of our police or our guns or death itself ” (1973, p. 59). Blacks, however, were redeemed. The Fruit that night infused the community with a new sense of empowerment. The next Sunday and during the following weeks, thousands passed through Temple doors, and their membership routinely expanded. While the NOI or the Nation offered “a gospel of black redemption,” it was the job of the Fruit to embody that message for the masses.7 The men of the FOI, particularly in the early days of the 1960s, were charged with the stewardship of a new Black nation. In essence, their main task was to represent the core values of the Nation of Islam. And they were expected to protect these sacred principles from outside invaders and internal corruption with their life, if necessary. Rather than emerging from the society’s upper crust, many were “people nobody wanted”—the downtrodden, drug addicted, or former convicts others dismissed (Goldman, 1973, p. 59). And both...

Chester Himes, Frantz Fanon and the Literary Decolonization of Harlem

The existing scholarship on African American novelist Chester Bomar Himes and Martinican postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon offers concrete, but sporadic indications that each was acquainted with t...

A “Reconcepted Am”: Language, Nature, and Collectivity in Sun Ra and Henry Dumas

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)At least according to a certain critical mythology, the Black Arts Movement begins about a month after Malcolm X is shot in February 1965 and LeRoi Jones changes his name to Amiri Baraka and moves uptown from the interracial, hipster Greenwich Village scene to Harlem to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS). In his Autobiography (1984), Baraka describes a triumphal march into Harlem, a moment that has come to serve as a sort of symbolic origin of the movement:One of our first official actions was a parade across 125th Street. With Sun Ra and his Myth-Science Arkestra leading it . . . [w]e marched down the street holding William White's newly designed Black Arts flag. ... A small group of sometimes comically arrogant black daring to raise the question of art and politics and revolution, black revolution!1Part performance art, part ticker tape, part revolution, this scene stages a complex set of questions, both historical and theoretical, with which the broader Black Arts Movement and its later critics would struggle. While the nationalist trappings of William White's flag, the vision of marching in the streets, and the revolutionary rhetoric all frame the parade as a watershed historical event, Baraka's account still leaves open, as a question, just how one gets from art to revolution, just what sort of revolution this is, and just how something like Sun Ra's mythscience could either substitute for or effect systemic political and economic change.If, in Baraka's account, the 125th Street parade places Sun Ra at the center of a scene that is at once national, communal, and revolutionary, an oddly similar scene at the end of Henry Dumas's story of (written ca. 1966-68; first published 2003) imagines a parade of sorts that does, indeed, effect a near-total social, economic, military, and political revolution. Only recently discovered but probably written in the couple years between the parade and Dumas's death in 1968, the story relates the cosmic birth of the prophet Sunra, as well as his travels in various allegorically named lands among the people and their oppressors, the After a period of exile and wandering, the story ends with Sunra's discovery of an ebony that inaugurates the story's revolutionary climax in which the horn summons the painted together to march on, and destroy, the Wofpeople. In its broadest strokes, the story seems to be a near hagiography (and sometimes even ham-fisted allegory) of Dumas's friend and sometimes-mentor, writing Sun Ra as the beleaguered prophet he often claimed to be. However, in the nearness of the story's climax to the mythology of the 125th Street parade, Metagenesis serves as a sort of origin myth for the scene Baraka places at the symbolic center of the period of radical black artistic production that would follow, and the story likewise evokes an apocalyptic take on Black Arts' combination of historical, aesthetic, and militant desires. At the story's end, Sunra blows his horn, and[a]ll over the land, from north to south, the painted - too hot to get near now - began to march. . . . Machines died in the air. An electric power plant reversed its power and the plant electrocuted and melted everything in range of it for ten miles. The ice mountain melted and the freezelines dissolved. Icelands faded, and panic went through the Wofpack. But it was too late. Sunra took panic itself and drove it into them.2In Dumas's story, the perhaps watershed, certainly vanguardist, but nevertheless quite local event described by Baraka becomes an apocalyptic myth of total revolution in which Sun Ra's aesthetics not only catalyze the spontaneous constitution of a and a movement but also arm the people, accomplishing, in one blow, a total dissolution of economic, military, and governmental structures of power. …

Albert Murray's Magical Youth

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's a short walk from 125th Street subway station to Harlem home of Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch's literary father man whom Henry Louis Gates Jr. dubbed King of Cats in New Yorker a few years ago. Murray, a student with Ralph Ellison at Tuskegee in 1930s later Ellison's sparring partner for decades (their long-running cultural dialogue was published in 2000 as Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison Albert Murray), began publishing novels after he retired from Air Force in 1962. may be best known for his trilogy Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996), but his critical writings include South to a Very Old Place (1972) From Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure American Identity (2001), as well as countless articles. I was calling on him in my research for a documentary on Federal Writers' Project, his early friendship with Ellison. As I covered blocks I mentally retraced my phone calls with Murray, searching for some encouragement. Found none. was generally indifferent to questions about his friend's early days on Federal Writers' Project. Murray wasn't interested in politics and all that bullshit, he warned. But he was gracious enough to welcome a visit. I lowered my expectations kept walking. The apartment building dominated an otherwise patchy block. I signed in at desk took elevator up. Mrs. Murray let me in graciously before letting herself out to go to market. Their apartment was packed to transom with books artwork, including a striking collection of African art Romare Bearden prints of Ellington Ulysses. What dominated place, though, was spectacular south-facing window, wide as living room, its down-island vista of all Manhattan. Murray moved slowly used a walker, occasionally he rambled. But at ninety, his mind was agile. Out of nowhere, he launched into a discourse on Booker T. Washington's philosophy for Tuskegee, outlining the talented tenth idea, taking it back to Frederick Douglass, then forward to his own essay in From Briarpatch File, award he received as a notable Alabama writer. Not black writer! Alabama writer. was proud of that. gave an impersonation of Washington (Yes, Lord made Earth, but Dutch made Holland) laughed. said that Washington's point, missed by many of his detractors, was that blacks should work to secure their own property economic base. Murray remained uninterested in my list of questions. Emergency relief work on FDR's New Deal was too ideological for an artist, he said. Murray is famously allergic to labels, especially label of black writer, resents political baggage. knew Ellison not as a black writer, but as an artist intellect beyond categories, beyond simple views of race--like multiracial characters in Ellison's unfinished second novel, published posthumously in 2000 as Juneteenth this year as Three Days Before Shooting. Everybody's related in United States, see? Murray said. Everybody is part white part black ... Those abstractions [white black] get you around But epic literature of thing will deal with metaphors that help you to cope with complexity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When I asked about 1930s more generally, he directed me to a photo album across room. That's Tuskegee, 1939, he said, pointing to a photo of him in a suit, looking flash. That's way I dressed. The suit was from the swankiest store in Atlanta, a four-hour drive away. Long before Murray met Ellison to discuss books, he first noticed older boy because of his style. He was a junior when I was a freshman, Murray told me. Ellison had worked briefly at a haberdashery in Oklahoma City, which is what attracted me to him. …

A Miracle on 125th Street?

There seems to be something about improvements in student achievement inspires the word, On May 7, 2009, New York Times columnist David Brooks penned the latest, Harlem Miracle. The marvel was that, in 2008, 8th graders at the Harlem Promise Academy had scored higher in mathematics than the New York City average for white students. The Promise Academy had eliminated the black-white achievement gap. A miracle. Or, at the very least, a refutation, in Brooks' eyes, of the establishment claims schools alone can't do it all: Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue schools alone can't produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued school-based approaches can produce big results. Reformers believe in excuses and the Promise Academy proves them right. Or does it? Out-of-School Issues First, consider some of the broader issues work against the production of education miracles in poor neighborhoods. David Berliner has summarized research on a number of what he calls out-of-school factors affect in-school performance. In all instances, the factors fall most heavily on poor families. Poor kids get off to a bad start because their mothers don't get adequate prenatal care and are more likely to compromise the fetal environment with a variety of brain-damaging drugs. They are more likely to have low birth weight children (LBW). Modern medicine has increased the numbers of all LBW children who live. ... But these children have many more cognitive and behavioral problems--problems schools (generally public schools) must accommodate (2009, p. 9). poor children lack access to health care and, consequently, children have many more undiagnosed visual, auditory, and dental problems. These can lead, respectively, to reading problems, apparent lack of attention in the classroom, and an inability to concentrate. Hungry kids don't learn well, and Berliner reports food insecurity (the usual euphemism) is 3.4 times higher in households below the official poverty rate, 2.7 times higher in households headed by women, and twice as high in black and Hispanic households as in white (p. 15). Schools have meal programs to offset this problem, but as Linda Perlstein reported in Tested (2007), Many children in poverty are given bottles of sugar water as infants or Oodles of Noodles broth, Froot Loops as toddlers and by the time they show up at school, they're often overweight, undernourished, and plagued with rotting teeth (p. 64). Perlstein describes kids who arrived at school with sodas from McDonald's and laughed when she asked them if they had to drink milk at home. Poor people's air is likely to be more polluted, notes Berliner. Most heavily trafficked roads don't run through wealthy areas, which might account for the epidemics of asthma in some poor neighborhoods. Poor people are much more likely to live near medical incinerators, municipal waste incinerators, and coalfired power plants. They are, therefore, more susceptible to deposits of mercury, which causes brain and nerve damage in fetuses and young children. More common is the problem of lead. It is now understood, writes Berliner, that there is no safe level of lead in the human body and lead at any level has an impact on IQ (p. 21). An extensive and devastating analysis of the impact of lead--and the government's refusal to pay sufficient attention to it--has been conducted by Michael Martin of the Arizona School Boards Association (2009). Berliner reports violence and stress are more likely to occur in poor families and in black and Latino families. Too often, these children show higher rates of aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety, decreased social competence, and diminished academic performance. …

Marcy S. Sacks.Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.:Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.(Politics and Culture in Modern America.)

Recent scholarship on black urbanization has moved from the Great Migration to postwar deindustrialization, but this book looks back to the formative stage between the 1880s and 1910s. As the federal government retreated from Reconstruction, black southerners moved north and west, especially as the more liberal states passed equal protection legislation. Migrants weighed factors of white violence and Jim Crow, and the potential for prosperity and pleasure. Also, in this pre–World War I phase, the so-called “talented tenth” migration sought dignity and education in traditionally black urban destinations. According to Marcy S. Sacks, whatever their expectations, in New York City most “black people labored in unskilled jobs, and many lived in poverty” (p. 5). They continuously moved in the metropolis to escape violence or harassment, settling above 125th Street, “nearly the only area in which black Manhattanites could easily reside” (p. 85). Seth Scheiner's pioneering monograph on the same topic, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (1965), consciously departed from the orthodoxy of “reading works that look at the Negro only in relation to white society” (p. vii). While Sacks focuses on the “internal workings of urban black populations,” she also analyzes the response of white New Yorkers to the newcomers, what she sees as a kind of racism “subtler than in the South” (p. 32).

Harlem Song (review)

Heady civic ambitions are behind Wolfe's newest theatrical enterprise. The musical extravaganza Harlem Song looks to catalyze an ongoing economic revitalization by luring investments, resources, and [End Page 343] audiences to Harlem's 125th Street area. (An official Harlem Song Concierge can even facilitate transportation, sightseeing, dining, and post-performance arrangements for visitors.) Yet as it courts the attentions of the entire New York region, Wolfe's production also speaks directly to Harlem about Harlem: using the faces, imagery, words, and rhythms from its streets. Its multimedia theatrical collage revisits a century of Harlem history by interspersing photos, film footage, and personal testimonials within an assortment of song-and-dance sketches. The work is equal parts history lesson, musical retrospective, neighborhood love letter, light-hearted caricature, and local pep rally—offering an engaging and witty portrait of Harlem's past and a hopeful challenge for its future.

William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America

The artist William Pope.L, who teaches at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, has been producing some of the most original visual and performing in America for many years. But it was not until the Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts overturned the recommendations of the NEA's own advisory panel to support this publication and the exhibition it accompanies that Pope.L became the subject of feature articles in the nation's major newspapers. Pope.L became a cause celebre as a result of the scandal, but he deserved to be known long before that. His work is humane, accessible, profound, and humorous; it is also deeply challenging and self-aware. It is neither an accident nor a joke that his business card reads Friendliest Black Artist in America.Many of Pope.L's pieces take place on the street. He has eaten and regurgitated copies of The Wall Street Journal, tied himself to a bank door and handed out money (a sort of reverse panhandler), crawled up the Bowery wearing a business suit, and walked down 125th Street in Harlem wearing a 12-foot white cardboard phallus. Although he frequently deals with racial issues, his work confounds preconceptions of what black art should be.This book, which accompanies a nationally touring exhibition of Pope.L's work, explores his impact on American and culture. It contains sections on practices, body, performance, dialogue, consumption, and a selection of the artist's writings and a chronology. The essays are by Mark H. C. Bessire, Suzanne Preston Blier, C. Carr, Geoffrey Hendricks, Stuart Horodner, Lowery Stokes Sims, Kristine Stiles, and Martha Wilson.

Jaguar: A Story of Africans in America (review)

Stoller, Paul. Jaguar: A Story of Africans in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 213 pp. Novels written by third world authors have long been used in anthropology classrooms as a kind of native anthropology because they provide a rich and immediate sense of worlds that, while fictional, are also compellingly real. Ethnography, while factual, has often proven to be much less compelling, particularly to broad audiences beyond anthropology itself. Paul Stoller's recent book jaguar is a novel written by an American anthropologist about West Africans in New York and in Niger and one cannot help but feel, when reading it, that much of his intended audience is that large group of people who have found traditional ethnographies too dry (and therefore boring) and so have missed out on the insights anthropology offers. His is an effort to draw readers into worlds they probably know little about, except in passing, and to make those worlds exciting and accessible not by exoticizing them, but by making them real. Idrissa and his wife Khadija are both successful traders, he in New York's Harlem, and she in Niger. Theirs is a marriage ruled by the pressures of a global and transnational economy, and throughout the novel's several-year course, their only contact is through the money orders Idrissa sends his wife, the occasional letter, and later, weekly phone calls. The worlds of Harlem and Niger are closely observed and described in detail that bespeaks Stoller's intimate experience with the raucous and demanding life of street vendors, whether on 125th street or in urban Niamy. He takes us into the spartan tenement rooms where West African street vendors live, with clothes hanging on nails stuck into crumbling plaster walls and toilets down the hall; traditional Songhay family compounds, with their separate huts for wives and husbands; the enclosure of Arabic Muslims living in Niger where women in Purdah do not speak to male guests. The title Jaguar refers to traders from west Africa; Idrissa considers himself a modern Jaguar, and arriving in New York he quickly falls into camaraderie with a group of French and Songhay-speaking jaguars like himself. His wife Khadija, independent and resourceful, is left behind to live in Idrissa's natal compound. She is unwelcome there, because she is of common birth, while Idrissa's family is of noble lineage. Considering most kinds of work beneath them, most of the 50 persons in the compound depend heavily on the infusions of money Idrissa sends from New York. They also depend heavily on Khadija's ability to manage most of the domestic chores, including the daily cooking and shopping for the compound's residents. Over the course of the novel, Khadija becomes increasingly powerful on her own as a trader, and comes to consider herself a female Jaguar. The writing is relatively unadorned and dominated by short sentences. This style evokes the external expression rather than internal dialogue that, as Stoller explains in his author's note, is the way social selves are constructed in the part of Africa he knows best (p.211), and such sentences seem closer to spoken rather than written language; the writing has the rhythm of speech, although not quite the form (and purposefully so). There is no doubt of Stoller's fluency in English, but the writing style has the effect of making the text seem slightly foreign, and helps readers feel more directly the perceptions and experience of Idrissa as he encounters New York, Chicago, McDonald's, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. …

Hard Times on 125th Street: Harlem's Poor Confront Welfare Reform

Drawing on fieldwork in Harlem at the onset of welfare reform, I argue in this article for both a social structural and a cultural approach to the study of poor families facing the consequences of this historic policy change. Ethnographic understanding of household organization, kinship networks, reciprocal dependencies, intergenerational relations, migration, and gender must be brought to bear if we are to chart the responses of the poor to welfare reform. Meaning and perceived intentions must be central if we are to grasp how the targets of policy change understand the new economic and bureaucratic circumstances of their lives. These themes are illustrated by drawing on accounts of several households in Harlem—African American and Latino—in order to explore how both structural and cultural forces may shape responses to welfare reform, [welfare reform, poverty, household organization, working poor]