The Smithian

Amidst the hoopla surrounding the…movie ‘42’ and Jackie Robinson’s heroic integration of major league baseball in April, 1947, the media has all but forgotten Larry Doby’s integration of the American League less than three months later. Unlike Robinson who spent a year with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team, Doby moved directly from the Negro League Newark Eagles to the Cleveland Indians. In his first full season in 1948, Doby helped the Indians win the World Series, a feat that Robinson did not accomplish until 1955.

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…introduces a cast of historical characters rarely seen before: cultured, vain, imperfect, rich, and black, a family made up of eccentrics who defied social convention yet whose advantages could not protect them from segregation’s locked doors, a plague of early death, and the stigma of children born outside marriage.

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Throughout the history of American theater, the desire for a separate Black theater tradition has raised challenges and contradictions. Over the past decade, as many Black Theater institutions have stumbled and failed, revived and evolved, the question has arisen far too often, “Do we still need ethnically specific theaters?” Manifesto after manifesto has been written; critics, scholars and artists have debated; headlines have declaimed the question. Now at the new millennium for a new generation, we still wrestle with issues of cultural identity, political correctness, ethnic and gender politics all in an effort to correct the history of bigotry, oppression and segregation that has led generation after generation to this quandary in the first place.

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art: Negro Unit of the Works Progress Administration. Lafayette Theatre, New York, 1936

Philadelphia.

The Atlantic has a great photo retrospective on the end of World War 2. The story contains an image of Levittown, New York. Levittown was one of the country’s first planned suburban communities. It was also an ideal-typical example of how American Apartheid was created in suburbia. Non-whites, and other ethnic “undesirables” were explicitly prohibited from living in Levittown. These rules would be in place in similar communities all across America where they would be enforced by physical violence in the public sphere, and also by the law in the form of restrictive housing covenants. the Atlantic’s caption of the Levittown photo contains no such information. Images of the past when viewed in the present are a representation of reality. These realities tell us just as much about our present concerns as they do about the supposed “facts” of the past…

…In the past he’s backed states’ rights by referencing post-Civil War racial exclusion laws. He’s noted that he would have dissented had he been on the Supreme Court when it ruled unanimously for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. And then there was his dissent with the majority in a case just last year, Arizona v. United States, in which he argued against federal supremacy in immigration law…he favored Arizona’s having the right to control immigration based on what post-Civil War states of the former Confederacy did to restrict the movement of millions of blacks who had been held as slaves just a few years previously. Quite the precedent.

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…the first Mardi Gras celebration was held in Mobile, Alabama in 1703, 15 years before New Orleans was a city.  A 2008 documentary, The Order of Myths, chronicles the politics of the town’s Mardi Gras celebration today, which remains almost entirely segregated by race. The black and white communities throw two separate Mardi Gras celebrations…

more, plus clips, here.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who died this week at age eighty-seven, came to the public’s attention a decade ago, when she announced that she was the daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond. A media crush and a memoir followed, most playing up the seemingly obvious irony of a black woman fathered by the most recognizable segregationist in twentieth-century politics. Yet only in the most benign of readings could his behavior be understood as contradictory. For all his rhetoric about preserving racial purity, interracial sex was not contrary to Thurmond’s goals as a segregationist; on some level, it was entirely the point. His daughter’s tale stirred public controversy but its themes had been enshrined, if ignored, in the history, fiction, and lore of American racial history.

Stone opens her new book with what it felt like to be a paratrooper—the thrill and the fright of jumping out of an airplane, ready for battle. She proceeds to describe the many challenges that a group of black soldiers had to overcome to get to that point, including being relegated to service duties and segregated facilities.

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…Dramatic moments are captured in shifting perspectives; a whites-only beach is seen through a wide-angle lens, while faces behind bars and faces beaming in final victory are masterfully portrayed in close-up. A beautifully designed book that will resonate with children and the adults who wisely share it with them.

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First published in 1936, and revised and re-published for almost 30 years, it helped Black people travel across a hostile America.

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