Tag: black culture

Race in America, late summer, 1963

“We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast….”

NBC News did a very interesting thing last month: it rebroadcast the August 25, 1963 episode of the news panel program Meet the Press, 50 years after the original broadcast. You can read the transcript at the site as well. The guests were Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, and Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were speaking three days before the massive March on Washington.

What I found fascinating is that there are two overriding themes in the questioning. One comes in the first question from Lawrence E. Spivak, “permanent member of the MEET THE PRESS panel,” and future moderator of the program: “Mr. Wilkins, there are a great many people, as I am sure you know, who believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting. What do you see as the effect on the just cause of the Negro if you do have incidents, if you do have any rioting?” Love the use of the word “militant.”

Of course, the march was peaceful, as Wilkins suggested would be the case, even larger than Wilkins’ upper estimation of up to 190,000 participants, and with a great number of them white people.

I found this concern particularly interesting in terms of current MTP host David Gregory’s description of the times: “The previous months of 1963 were tumultuous ones in the civil rights movement.

“King was jailed in April, images of brutality were widely publicized as police turned fire hoses and attack dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, and the NAACP ‘s Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson Mississippi in June.”

The other emphasis was based on this question to Dr. King: “We often hear it said here that while the Negro drive for equality is a justifiable movement, in the last year the Negroes have been pushing too hard and too fast…. There has been concern about the sit-ins, about some of the incidents that have happened in connection with them. Do you find any substantial reaction among white people to this effect, or does it affect you in any way in the conduct of your movement ?”

I always found this notion that fairness coming “too fast” laughable, given, as Dr. King noted that black people at the time had “waited for well-now 345 years for our basic constitutional and God-given rights.” I remember that national polls into at least the 1980s suggested that white people thought the black people were moving too quickly towards equality, a view not shared by black people.

Less than a month after the “I Have a Dream” speech, four black girls were killed in their Birmingham church, as Arthur noted. I was pleased that President Obama signed legislation posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. But I was saddened to discover that the body of Addie Mae Collins had gone missing, probably in the first five years after her death.

I found it ironic that the panelists on that 1963 segment of MTP talked about violence BY blacks when violence TO blacks was so often the reality in the day.

Fortunately, we live in post-racial America in 2013, where the selection of a Miss America of Asian Indian descent was universally cheered. OK, NOT so universally cheered. At least we can be comforted (?) by the fact that if she had eligible to be competing for Miss India, she probably wouldn’t have even made it to the finals.

E is for Esso

Esso stations, unusual in franchising to African Americans, were a popular place to pick up a Green Book.

 

When I was growing up, as often as not, we got our gas from the Esso station. Esso (“S-O”) “is derived from the initials of the pre-1911 Standard Oil.” I didn’t remember this, but I read that it became the focus of so “much litigation and regulatory restriction in the United States [that in] 1972, it was largely replaced in the U.S. by the Exxon brand… while Esso remained widely used elsewhere.” Ironic, since the Exxon brand name has been forever tainted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, not to mention purposefully manufacturing uncertainty on climate change.

Whereas Esso had quite a positive image, at least with many people of my father’s generation. For there was a time in the United States when many African-American travelers were uncertain where “they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor…or go out at night…without [experiencing] humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome.”

In 1936, a “Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green” [no relation] developed “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide …abbreviated, simply, as the ‘Green Book.’ Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America, it was invisible, and by 1964 [when the Civil Rights Act was passed], when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history…

“The 15,000 copies Green eventually printed each year were sold as a marketing tool not just to black-owned businesses but to the white marketplace, implying that it made good economic sense to take advantage of the growing affluence and mobility of African Americans. Esso stations, unusual in franchising to African Americans, were a popular place to pick one up.”

So I have a soft spot in my heart for Esso; not so much for its successor, ExxonMobil.

Classic commercials, likely from the 1950s:
Esso extra commercial
Esso Happy Motoring commercial ….Aye Right!! – targeting the UK

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

Black girls’ hair

In Whoopi Goldberg’s Broadway Show from the mid-1980s, she wore a yellow shirt or sweater over her head, and talked about her being a kid pretending to have long, luxurious blonde hair.

That first week of the London Olympics 2012, when I wasn’t watching, the primary storyline apparently was about Gabby Douglas’ great accomplishments in the Olympics. And her hair. Yawn.

As long as I’ve been alive, how black girls and women wear their hair has been “an issue” with someone. Processed or natural – “proves” how “black” someone really was, at least when I was growing up. Dyed or not – hey, do they “want to be white”?

In large part, I’m less upset by it than just sick of it. When the Daughter was about three, we were figuring out the best way to deal with her hair. At some point, we were experimenting with letting her hair go natural. Several black people I saw – who I didn’t even know, BTW – acted as though we were committing child abuse. “Hey, what are you DOING to that child?” Or “You get her to a stylist – NOW!” And these were some of the more reportable responses.

Back in 2009, Chris Rock made a movie called Good Hair which addressed his own daughter’s frustration with her “bad” hair.

Do you recall that poor white teacher in NYC who lost her job for READING the acclaimed children’s book called ‘Nappy Hair’ to mostly black and Hispanic third-graders “after parents complained and threatened her”? Sheer silliness.

I have, on LP, Whoopi Goldberg’s Broadway Show from the mid-1980s. She wore a yellow shirt or sweater over her head, and talked about her being a kid pretending to have long, luxurious blonde hair, just like she was “supposed” to have.

Seriously, I wish there was a moratorium on hearing about black females’ hair, especially by other people, but I’m not counting on it.

Oscar Micheaux, Pioneering Black Film Director

Micheaux should be celebrated for forging new ground, and providing early roles to some of the finest black talent of the day.

Much of this info is from Rotten Tomatoes:

Oscar Micheaux (January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was the first major African-American feature filmmaker, the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the twentieth century, and the most prominent producer of race films. He directed the first black film (The Homesteader, from 1918, now lost, based upon his own novel) and he was the first black person to direct a sound film (The Exile, from 1931). “His work was a corrective to the prevailing stereotypes of blacks that were rampant in Hollywood at the time. However, his films are not particularly remembered for their quality, and contemporary critics find his treatment of working-class African Americans to be problematic. Still, Micheaux should be celebrated for forging new ground, and providing early roles to some of the finest black talent of the day (like the great Paul Robeson, playing a duel role in 1925’s Body and Soul).” Having seen one or two of his films, I’d definitely agree with this assessment.

More about Oscar Micheaux here and here. Watch this four-minute tribute video, then go to YouTube and type in the name of Oscar Micheaux.
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And on a completely different subject: People with Blogger blogs – PLEASE (I’m begging here) turn off WORD VERIFICATION…it takes too long trying to spell out weird words and most times I have no clue what the letters are – which means I have to type in words more than once. There are even pictures showing you how.

Slavery by Another Name PBS documentary

When you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human.

My wife and I got a babysitter last Friday night so we could take the bus – MUCH easier than trying to find parking at the uptown UAlbany campus – and watch Slavery by Another Name, “a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation.” Though the film will be premiering on PBS, Monday, February 13 at 9pm ET / 8pm CT (check local listings), the real draw of viewing it early on a bigger screen was to be able to see the director of the film, Shelia Curran Bernard, and the writer of the book upon which the film was based, Douglas Blackmon, who I had seen before.

Narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, “The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality.

It was a system in which men, often guilty of no crime at all, were arrested, compelled to work without pay, repeatedly bought and sold, and coerced to do the bidding of masters. Tolerated by both the North and South, forced labor lasted well into the 20th century.” The movie notes the failure of the federal government, both after Reconstruction, and again in the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt, to stem the tide of forced labor.

As both the SBAN book and the movie made clear, the peonage system was, in many ways, far worse than the slavery before the Civil War. If one had slaves, one needed to protect one’s economic investment by providing some measure of food, clothing, and shelter. If one were a business, such as US Steel, leasing convicts, one could work someone nearly to death, or sometimes fatally, and then go lease someone else.

The speakers had no prepared comments but were just doing a question and answer period. Anyone who’s seen a Q&A knows that the quality of questions is all over the place. One person wanted to know why we never heard these stories before. Blackmon noted that the further away we are from it in history, the easier it is to look at it. In any case, there will be classroom material available to talk about this previously unknown, shameful part of the American postbellum past.

A question that intrigued me was, basically, how people could be so cruel to each other. The speakers noted that when you create a class of “the other”, not just racially, but as “the criminal”, even if it were based on a vague, trumped-up charge of vagrancy, it made it easier to think of people as less than human. This tied to another question about the new Jim Crow laws, which continue to incarcerate black people in disproportionate numbers; the speakers referred to Michelle Alexander’s book and other sources for further reference.

I must admit to laughing at a recent comment from the blog of SamuraiFrog “It’s Black History Month. So if you’re one of those complete idiots going on Facebook and whining about how having a Black History Month is racism against white people, please pick up a history book. And hit yourself in the head with it. Repeatedly. Until you black out.” The fact that THIS story has largely been missing from the history books makes the continued investigation of the lost black history, a/k/a American history, still relevant.

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