Freedom Highway

Since Iris Morales visited us last week, I have been thinking about the particular power of art to promote change and social justice.  Ms. Morales clearly believes that art is a key part of any social movement.  It is not ancillary, but rather has its own unique and necessary role to play.  I think that we are often overly optimistic about the power of art to bring about social change.  However, I want to highlight a group that indisputably had an effect on a social justice movement: The Staple Singers.

The Staple Singers were composed of Roebuck “Pops” Staples and his children Mavis, Pervis, Cleotha, and Yvonne.  They initially performed as a gospel ensemble, but in 1963 Pops Staples met and befriended Martin Luther King Jr.  The Staple Singers began writing and performing “freedom songs” at civil rights marches and rallies.  Their 1965 song “Freedom Highway” was inspired by the famous march on Selma, Alabama.

What is most interesting to me about this song is that it takes a tragic and violent event and turns it into a reason for uplift and inspiration.  I think this gets at why the Staple Singers were such an important part of the civil rights movement, and why their music was so successful. Their music is affirmative, uplifting and inspiring rather than confrontational.  They were able to energize crowds and bring hope to an extremely difficult situation.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon

We in the museum world sometimes wonder if curators can change the world.  No one, however, asks that question about Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.  We know that she has and will continue to do so.  To read more about her life as a scholar, curator, activist, and musician, follow this link.

Her singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock, performed the piece, “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” to mark the first federal observance of the MLK holiday in 1986.  To read the lyrics–actually a poem by Sonia Sanchez–see below.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964

 

Dear Martin,
Great God, my Lord what a morning Martin!
The sun is rolling in from faraway places. I watch it reaching out, circling these bare trees like some reverent lover. I have been standing still listening to the morning, and I hear your voice crouched near hills, rising from the mountain tops, breaking the circle of dawn.
You would have been 58 today.
As I point my face toward a new decade, Martin, I want you to know that the country still crowds the spirit. I want you to know that we still hear your footsteps setting out on a road cemented with black bones. I want to know that the stuttering of guns could not stop your light from crashing against cathedrals chanting piety while hustling the world.
Great God, what a country… The decade after your death docked like a spaceship on a new planet. Voyagers all we were. We were the aliens walking up the 70′s, a holocaust people on the move looking out from dark eyes. We were youngbloods, spinning hip syllables while saluting death in a country neutral with pain.

And our children saw the mirage of plenty spilling from money mad sands.
And they ran toward the desert.
And the gods of sand made them immune to words that strengthen the breast.
And they became scavengers walking on the earth.
And you can see them playing. Hide-and-go-seek robbers. Native sons. Running on their knees. Reinventing slavery on asphalt. Peeling their umbilical cords for a gold chain.
And you can see them on Times Square, in NYC, Martin, selling their 11-, 12-year-old, 13-, 14-year-old bodies to suburban forefathers. And you can see them on Market Street in Philadelphia bobbing up bellywise, young fishes for old sharks.
And no cocks are crowing on those mean streets.
Great God, what a morning it’ll be someday Martin!
That decade fell like a stone on our eyes. Our movements. Rhythms. Loves. Books. Delivered us from the night, drove out the fears keeping some of us hoarse. New births knocking at the womb kept us walking.
We crossed the cities while a backlash of judges tried to turn us into moles with blackrobed words of reverse racism. But we knew. And our knowing was like a sister’s embrace. We crossed the land where famine was fed in public. Where black stomachs exploded on the world’s days while men embalmed their eyes and tongues in gold. But we knew. And our knowing squatted from memory.
Sitting on our past, we watch the new decade dawning. These are strange days, Martin, when the color of freedom becomes disco fever; when soap operas populate our Zulu braids; as the world turns to the conservative right and general hospitals are closing in black neighborhoods and the young and restless are drugged by early morning reefer butts. And houses tremble.
These are dangerous days, Martin, when cowboy-riding presidents corral Blacks (and others) in a common crown of thorns; when nuclear-toting generals recite an alphabet of blood; when multinational corporations assassinate ancient cultures while inaugurating new civilizations. Comeout comeout wherever you are.
Waiting to be born.
But, Martin, on this day, your 54th birthday–with all the reversals–we have learned that black is the beginning of everything.
it was black in the universe before the sun;
it was black in the mind before we opened our eyes;
it was black In the womb of our mother;
black is the beginning.
and if we are the beginning we will be forever. Martin. I have learned too that fear is not a black man or woman. Fear cannot disturb the length of those who struggle against material gains for self-aggrandizement. Fear cannot disturb the good of people who have moved to a meeting place where the pulse pounds out freedom and justice for the universe.

Now is the changing of the tides, Martin. You forecast it where leaves dance on the wings of man. Martin. Listen. On this your 54th birthday, listen and you will hear the earth delivering up curfews to the missionaries and the assassins. Listen. And you will hear the tribal songs:

Ayeee       Ayooooo       Ayeee
Ayeee       Ayooooo       Ayeee

Malcolm…       Ke wa rona*
Robeson…       Ke wa rona
Lumumba…      Ke wa rona
Fannie Lou…       Ke wa rona
Garvey…       Ke wa rona
Johnbrown…       Ke wa rona
Tubman…       Ke wa rona
Mandela…       Ke wa rona
(free Mandela,
free Mandela!)
Assata…       Ke wa rona

As we go with you to the sun,
as we walk in the dawn, turn our eyes
Eastward and let the prophecy come true
and let the prophecy come true.
Great God, Martin, what a morning, it will be!

*he is ours

Sweet Honey in the Rock, 2006

Happy Mother’s Day?

In honor of Mother’s Day, I wanted to discuss something that has irked me since reading Bread Givers and something that each reading has almost unilaterally reinforced. For a while now, authors have touched upon racial and ethnic stereotypes of motherhood. While as demeaning as those stereotypes are, the authors have recognized (but often skirted around) a larger truth, a more troubling truth—that of the mother-blame game.

Why do we tend to blame the mothers, our mothers?

For instance, in Jacobsen’s Roots Too, he pairs Jewish identity and sexuality through the lens of psychoanalysis of the Jewish mother. Using Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Jacobsen charts what it meant to come to terms with “Jewishness” and that it often began retrospectively, looking back and blaming the Jewish mother. This stereotypical Jewish mother, the overbearing, nagging, and suffocating woman, became so feared that she remained “the most powerful negative icon for a rising generation of Jewish feminists.”[1] This idea is also found later in the book. The domineering Irish mother is present, so, too, is the self-sacrificing, possessive Italian mother. Even if no formal complaint is brought against them, the reader draws their own conclusions based on the stereotypical descriptions provided.[2]

Yet, this concept is not new nor is it ethnic/race specific. In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, Jones recounts how the Moynihan report on The Negro Family adversely affected opinions of Black mothers. Attacking these Black matriarchs, Moynihan concluded that the tendency for overbearing, emasculating Black mothers was destroying what was left of the Black family. Even those fathers who abandoned their families were excused because of this “type” of Black women.[3] Add the welfare queen and single mother stereotype and Black women receive a toxic mix.

There is also the White stereotype of motherhood, documented in Personal Politics by Sara Evans. A tranquil, fountain of nourishment, the White mother was stereotyped as self-sacrificing, naturally-gifted mother who would not only raise good Americans but also look good doing so. She was the ultimate bored housewife.[4] As further readings and our discussions suggested, these stereotypes were the exception rather than the rule. But, I think it is striking that each culture adapted this “bad mother” stereotype and, while making it their own, shared remarkable similarities. All were emasculating, domineering, self-sacrificing, toxically nurturing, identity suffocating smothering, and impeccably flawed mothers. In the end, the root cause for all problems were on the shoulders of the mothers.

I do not mean to trivialize the “daddy problem” or suggest that it does not exist—I simply am going off what the readings provide which are purely problems of motherhood. In the readings, even when fathers are deemed irresponsible and absentee, it is because his wife, the mother, made him that way.[5] These phenomenons go further than needing to blame someone or blame a woman; it is as if it has become a multicultural mainstay and tradition to hold mothers completely culpable for the ills of their society.

Why is the need to blame mothers so persuasive throughout cultures? Why does the mother receive all of our blame, all of our ire? Is it purely because of gender reasons or are there larger, shared connections that span the spectrum of class and race?

---

[1] Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Harvard University Press, 2008), 154.

[2] Ibid., 139 and 146.

[3] Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (Basic Books, 2009), 258-60.

[4] Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left (Vintage, 1980), 14.

[5] Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 260.

History with a Banjo

Class, Race, and Gender opened this semester to the toe tapping soundtrack of Ken Burns’ documentary Unforgivable Blackness. In fact, throughout the semester, music has been a constant accompaniment to our readings, from the spirituals written about by W.E.B. Dubois to the dancing in Junot Diaz’s story, “Fiesta 1980.”  Every age, region, and culture has a musical story, and as I read David Hollinger’s “National Culture and Communities of Descent,” I began to hear music in my head.

Hollinger introduces in his article the idea of “the will to descend” which he describes as “the claiming, on behalf of a particular descent-community, of contributions to civilization the value of which is already recognized in a social arena well beyond the particular descent-community on behalf of which genetic ownership of those contributions is being asserted.”[1]  This concept is similar to a idea that inspires the work of one of my favorite current musical acts, The Carolina Chocolate Drops.  The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a trio of young black musicians who explore the folk music of the Piedmont region through the use of traditional instruments such as the banjo, fiddle, jugs, kazoos, and bones.  In an interview with Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air in 2010, they explained how their music is shaped by the West African phrase Sankofa.  Sankofa is a proverb which means “go back and fetch it and bring it forward.” [2]  The title track from their most recent album which was released this spring is called “Genuine Negro Jig,” and the story behind it captures both the idea of Sankofa and “the will to descend.”  In the video below the band explains the history of the song at a live show in Chicago.

As you can see, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are interested not only in preserving the heritage of black string music, but also acknowledgement of the presence of black musicians in the work of Dan Emmitt, the white father of the minstrel show.  While I have not read the book they reference, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Families Claim to the Confederate Anthem, it seems to be a credible example of Hollinger’s idea of “the will to descend.”  What better symbol for the African American community to claim than the politically charged song of the south.  Hopefully the future will see more communities of descent become interested in the rich musical heritage of the United States.

[1] David Hollinger, “National Culture and Communities of Descent,” in The Challenge of American History: 319.

[2]Audio Transcript, “Carolina Chocolate Drops: Tradition From Jug to Kazoo,” Fresh Air March 1, 2010.

The Other Protest

While the 1968 feminist protest of the Miss America Pageant took over the Atlantic City boardwalk, another protest was taking place around the corner.  As the feminists protested against the objectification of women in the Miss America Pageant, the first Black Miss America contest was held to protest the exclusion of women of color from the Miss America Pageant.  That these two events took place at the same time highlights the difficult position of black women at the intersection of the civil rights movement and the feminist movement.

From its start in 1921, the Miss America Pageant had not been kind to women of color.  The first appearance of black women on the Miss America Stage was in 1923 when they appeared as slaves in a musical number.[1]  In 1941, the first woman of color, a Native American named Milfauny Shunatona took part in the contest.  However, it would be another 30 years until another Native American participated.[2]  Through the 1960s pageant contestants were still required to fill out biological data sheets tracing their ancestry.  Miss America, it seemed, had to be white.

In response to this racial discrimination the first Black Miss America Contest was organized to coincide with the 1968 Miss America contest.  Contestants in the Black Miss America Pageant paraded down the boardwalk past the protesting feminists and the official pageant venue and continued to their own meeting place.[3]

Miss Black America Contest 1968 pbs.com

Perhaps due to the pressure from this protest and simultaneous feminist protest, in 1970 the first black woman, Lencola Sullivan, participated in the official Miss America Pageant.  Its hard to say which protest made a bigger impact, but both protests shed light on problems facing women, black and white, in the 1960s.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/missamerica/peopleevents/e_inclusion.html

[2]ibid.

[3] http://www.missblackamerica.com/beginning.html

Does the Good of the Many Outweigh the Good of the One?- Dr. Spock

Ok, I know starting this post with a reference to Star Trek is a bit risky, but I think Dr. Spock actually raises a wonderfully valid concept for this week’s topic. Women in the civil rights movement, particularly black women were faced with this conundrum on a regular basis. The civil rights movement was focused on gaining racial equality, and in that struggle women were instrumental in bringing that dream to fruition, often, some say, at the cost of their own goals for woman’s liberation. Stories of women putting aside their agenda for the good of the civil rights movement can be seen throughout the records of activists groups and rallies. The stories of women like Ella Baker, who saw “no place… to come into a leadership role” and felt that “harmony within the movement received higher priority than personal ambition” [1], show that there were feelings of separateness between the movements for some women. Yet other like Sandra Baxter and Marjorie Lansing found that “black women have come to see themselves as a special interest group fighting to overcome the twin barriers of racial and sexual discrimination.” [2]For these women the two movements were linked with sexism and racism being inseparable forces of prejudice one did not have to weigh the good of the one against the good of the many, they were inseparably linked. [3]

Pauli Murray born in Baltimore and raised in Durham, North Carolina, fought both racial and gender inequalities all her life. She is most notably remembered for her attempt to enter North Carolina’s all-white university which gained national news. Her attempt, though unsuccessful, gained the support of the NAACP and created a lifelong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Though unable to gain entry to the North Carolina school, she was admitted to Howard University and then University of California to become a civil rights lawyer. She was also accepted to Harvard Law School but when her gender was discovered the invitation was revoked.

Murray was prolifically active in the campaign to end inequality. A member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) she was a proponent of Gandhi’s non-violence movement and believed that the tactic could be adopted in America for the civil rights cause. Her association with Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall and Phillip Randolph put her on a black list with Cornell University, who saw her affiliations to be too radical, and thus in the McCarthy era unsuitable for employment. [4]

Along with her attempts to break down social, political and racial boundaries she was an active proponent for women’s rights. In 1963 she wrote to Philip Randolph that she was “increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grass-roots level of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.” [5] In 1977 she became the first African American women to be an Episcopal priest. Her efforts to fight inequality saw no gender boundaries and her example has prompted the creation of a Durham based program to promote understanding in the community. The Pauli Murray Project is hosted by the Duke Human Rights Center and provides opportunities for community members to share their stories and hopes to collect those stories for the community on this site. There is no denying that to many, the civil rights movement was separate from women’s lib, but for women like Pauli Murray race and gender discrimination were one battle. Murray found a way to fight both battles, where the needs of the many coincided with the needs of the one.

[1] Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 282.
[2] Ibid 276
[3] Ibid 274
[4] Duke Human Rights Center, “Pauli Murray Project”, http://paulimurrayproject.org/.
[5] Duke Human Rights Center, “Pauli Murray Project”, http://paulimurrayproject.org/.

Symbols of Success

November 1959 cover of Ebony

In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, Jacqueline Jones briefly contrasted the treatment of women’s work in Ebony, the “nation’s largest-circulation black magazine,” to that in Life, its white counterpart.  [1]  Jones asserted that while both magazines spoke to traditional, middle class values, Ebony promoted black civil rights and emphasized “intelligence and diversity in women,” while Life confined women to the home through its “unidimensional image of women’s work.” [2]

November 16, 1959 cover of Life

This description and the lack of supporting images left me curious about the actual content of each magazine.  Did it hold up to Jones’ analysis?  Luckily, complete copies of both are available on Google Books.  While there’s great content in both issues, I chose to compare just the advertisements from the November 1959 issue of Ebony to the November 16, 1959 issue of Life. [3] (Since Life was published weekly and Ebony monthly, I chose the Life issue from the middle of the month).   Even just the ads in these particular issues upheld Jones’ assertion of Ebony as a more progressive and leftist magazine that encouraged black women to work.

Advertisements in Ebony urged women to seek job training and become a “symbol of success” while ads in Life placed women safely within the domestic sphere.  An ad placed at the very beginning of this issue of Ebony encouraged women to “Enjoy steady pay every day as a nurse!” and sign up for a “home study course” whose completion would guarantee $65 per week. [4]  Although the ad is for a teaching program, it still promotes work outside of both the home and the service industry, and this training implies getting an education in a certain skill.

A Life ad for Farberware cookware, in contrast, stated that, “A woman’s life, it would seem, is fraught with the problems of raising children to maturity, husbands to affluence, and omelets to perfection.” [5]  The word choice of “fraught” suggested that these tasks were so important, so time and energy consuming, that all proper women needn’t bother with anything else.  A woman was failing in her duty as a woman if she neglected these things.  Another Life ad for the Hartford Insurance Group enforced this vision, declared that “Hartford’s weekly check kept us going all through my husband’s slow, costly recovery” – it was better for the wife to support her family through remaining home to care for her husband than joining the workforce to earn an extra income. [6]

Ebony did also run an ad for Aladdin Vacuum Bottles that read “Smart Wife, Hot Lunch, Happy Husband!”, but the inclusion of ads promoting women at work offered a more nuanced image of black women than was presented for white women in Life.  [7]

Most telling, Ebony ran advertisements featuring whites as well as blacks, although never together.  One ad for Martin’s V. V. O. depicted a clearly Scottish man with a wispy, white fairy in the background, images completely separate from 1950s black culture.  Life‘s ads did not picture a single African American, even in service positions.  It’s as though they don’t exist.  This discrepancy contributes to Ebony‘s progressiveness and highlights Jones’ assertion that blacks had “created a culture shaped by values that were not necessarily shared by the people with whom they were struggling to become equal,” of which the differences between the ads in Ebony and Life clearly illustrate. [8]

Liberating or Eyebrow-Raising?

After last weeks class, in which we debated whether or not the artists of the late 20^th and early 21^st century were continuing on a message of empowerment and action found in the Blues, I thought the most recent news involving Erykah Badu were particularly poignant.

For those who aren’t familiar with the situation, Badu recently filmed a music video in her hometown of Dallas. The video, to the song of “Window Seat,” has Badu stripping off her clothes as she walks down a street. When she gets to Dallas’s Dealey Plaza, the location that has become most associated with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, she feigns being shot and lies down naked in front of that infamous grassy knoll.

The songs lyrics are about a woman wanting a “window seat” out of town, but unable to leave because she is desperately in love with someone who she can’t seem to let go. The video tells a different story entirely. Badu walks down the street and strips (with reactions from the public ranging from oblivious to open gawking) before being shot. Blue blood pours out of her head at the end, the blood spelling the words “group think.”

A spoken passage is recited as she is lying on the sidewalk and has, what I believe, to the be true meaning of the song (or at least, the justification of the video):

They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another. They feel most comfortable in groups; less guilt to swallow. They are us; this is what we have become, afraid to respect the individual. A single person within our circumstance can move one to change, to love herself, to evolve. [1]

However, I believe the message of the song has been completely overridden by the media publicity and subsequent decency charges brought against Badu. She defended her actions, saying that it was a protest video, that people are afraid to liberate themselves. The choice of location was intention because Badu maintains that it “tied it [the location of the J.F.K. assassination] in a way that compared the assassination to the character assassination one would go through after showing his or her self completely.” [2]

What do you think? Given our recent discussion in class involving the media, production, and subsequent value of the message these artists are willing to portray, do you think that Badu’s video is a publicity stunt? Has Badu, a respected artist, traded in her “message” for a spot on the evening news? Does it matter how an artists gains publicity, as long as we agree with their message? Do you think people are upset because she stripped naked in public or that she did it at the sight of the J.F.K assassination? What were Badu’s true motives in this video? Do you get anything out of this video? Did you get the impression that people are afraid to liberate themselves? Does this video and song become less effective because of the media surrounding it?

[1] Badu, Erykah. “Window Seat.” Lyrics. New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh). Universal Motown. 2010.

[2] Daily Mail. 2010. American singer Erykah Badu escapes police rap after stripping naked video at spot where JFK was assassinated, April 1.

“Cuz if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it”

In reading Angela Davis’s fascinating account of female empowerment through blues in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, I had to wonder…what is the current state of African American, female-driven songs? After doing a little research, which by no means is inclusive or in any way scientific (i.e. these are songs I remember), I came to see some stark parallels and divergences between the female Blues powerhouses of the early twentieth century and the female musical artists of the 1990s-2000s.

For instance, the standards in which female African American artists operate are relatively the same as it was for “Ma,” Bessie, and Billy. There is still a “marketability” and “standard” in which is in heavy consideration when these artists, whether they pen the song or not, create their lyrics. There is also an added pressure of image and where these artists fall into an acceptable degree of White conformability, which this post won’t get into but should nevertheless also be taken into consideration. However, what Davis says about women of the Blues breaking down and creating their own form of gender identity—one that was unabashedly sexual and critical of accepted female spheres—still rings true today. I find that it is no less apparent than within a selection of songs by modern artists Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys, and Beyoncé Knowles.

Wait! But, what about Erykah Badu? Missy Elliott? Mary J. Blige? India.Arie? Girl groups T.L.C. and Destiny’s Child? All worthy, all considered, and all fall within the scope of what I’m trying to do here. However, for the sake of brevity and succinctness I am using Hill, Keys, and Knowles songs to frame and expand upon the new decade of female empowerment songs.

Lauryn Hill’s album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, was produced in 1998.  One of the most successful songs off the album, “Doo Wop (That Thing),” directly translates Davis’s observation that many Blues songs were in an advice format for other women. [1]  Here, Hill sings about how females need to better respect themselves because, “Girls you know you better watch out/Some guys, some guys are only about/That thing, that thing, that thing,” alluding to (and explicitly in other parts of the song) the sexuality that men and women choose to portray.  She pleads:

“Girlfriend, let me break it down for you again
You know I only say it ’cause I’m truly genuine
Don’t be a hardrock when you’re really a gem
Babygirl, respect is just a minimum” [2]

The lyrics show a communication style that breeds a familiarity and camaraderie, showing that Hill belongs to this “community of women” and therefore is authoritative in her guidance. [3]  The video is even more interesting as it directly compares a 1968 scene of what Hill sings about with a then contemporary 1998 scene.