Legacies
Review by Chitown Kev
South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs
by Mary Ann Cain with a foreword by Haki Madhubuti
Northwestern University Press, 240 pp., $18.95 (paperback and e-book)
The Harlem Renaissance, that period of black artistic genius that occurred during the 1920’s, is rightly seen as a watershed moment in the history of Black cultural achievement in the United States. It’s authors (e.g. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston) artists (e.g. Romare Bearden), and intellectuals (e.g. Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois) are staples of Black and even Modernism studies syllabi in colleges and universities.
Standard timelines of Black cultural arts movements, as a rule, move straight from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 60’s. It is seldom recognized that while the Great Depression is usually marked as the end of the Harlem Renaissance (in spite of the fact that many of the best known works of Hughes, Hurston, and others occur after the Harlem Renaissance period), the Black arts and even Black cultural movements continued to flourish in other cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and even many cities west of the Mississippi River and that those lesser-known Black artistic movements equally a bridge to the Black Arts Movement of the 60’s and early 70’s,
Dr. Mary Ann Cain, a professor of English at Purdue University-Fort Wayne, is the author of South Side Venus: The Legacy of Margaret Burroughs; a biography of the Renaissance Woman of the Chicago Renaissance, Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, poet, artist, educator, political activist, and founder of the Ebony Museum (in her own home); a museum which was to later become the DuSable Museum of African American History.
South Side Venus is structured around a walk that Ms. Cain took with Mrs. Burroughs in the August 2003, a “hot, humid, quintessential Chicago afternoon,” beginning from Mrs. Burroughs home at 3806 S. Michigan Avenue through various Bronzeville cultural landmarks. Ms. Cain chronicles the journey of Burroughs and her family from Saint Rose, Louisiana to Chicago in 1922, during the first wave of The Great Migration; a migration that increased racial tensions in Chicago. She describes not only the rising tensions between blacks and whites but also among “the old settlers”; long-time African American residents of Chicago that “lived side by side with white neighbors with very little conflict” who often felt that “the newcomers undermined their own efforts to be seen as part of the urban North.” Early in her life, Margaret Burroughs believed that she had the responsibility to strive to do better and thrive; attitudes that she learned from her mother, Octavia Spencer (a teacher in rural Southern black schools, even though she only had an eighth-grade education). Burroughs’ mother and, eventually, Mary L. Ryan, a teacher, nurtured Burroughs interest in art from an early age.
Burroughs’ young adulthood in the arts world was overshadowed by the Great Depression which radically changed how Black artists produced their work and lived and altered their perception of themselves in a time when the funding of Black artists by white patrons dried up.
The Great Depression saw blacks shift their goals from cultivating influential white benefactors in hopes of persuading the general white population of black people’s humanity, to an inward gaze of developing identity, self-reliance, and self-defense in the face of white indifference and, at times, outright hatred and violence.
That “inward gaze” led to the development of community-based institutions like the South Side Community Art Center. That inward gaze also led to a fusion of artistic practice to the radical politics of the 1930’s and 40’s; a fusion that distinguishes the Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and foreshadows the artistic/political fusion of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s. That fusion of the personal and the artistic and the politically radical is best shown in South Side Venus by the prominence and significance of Burroughs wearing her natural hair, which she began wearing during a sabbatical year in Mexico in 1952; a sabbatical that was taken because of the close scrutiny that the Chicago Board of Education paid to her long-time admiration of Paul Robeson and her supposed ties to the Communist Party.
South Side Venus is a very good and well-informed first biography of a major American artist, writer and educator. It slightly suffers from the curse of most first biographies of major artists; a period of time and reflection, study, and a further unearthing of sources is usually necessary for a major artist of Burroughs’ caliber but Ms. Cain lays out a great road map for future biographers. I was also, at first, perturbed by the long walk with Burroughs which allows Ms. Cain to write herself and her life into the story in a way that seemed intrusive at first. But Cain makes good use of the the device when, for example, she allows herself to speculate on what the relationships that whites had with blacks that they did business with (Cain’s father had frequent business dealings with the southside black community even though the Cain family lived in a nearly all-white suburb). Black Arts Movement poet and publisher of Third World Press Haki Madhubuti also writes a reverential foreword to this book; a biography to the woman that mentored and inspired him.
[note to self: being that Third World Press is located on the South Side of Chicago, I should probably give myself a nudge (before Miss Denise gives me one of her famous nudges!) and write about Third World Press in this space at sometime in the future]
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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There were so many abnormalities during the Georgia election that many people questioned the validity of the results. There were numerous calls from black voters whose machines were misrecording their votes for some reason. Then, someone discovered a vulnerability in the secretary of state’s “My Voter” website that allowed anyone to have access to the entire voter registration database.
Since the election, Kemp has assumed his seat as governor. Abrams, a rising star in her party, gave the Democratic rebuttal to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. Everyone has moved on.
But since the election, a watchdog group has been quietly gathering data about Georgia’s 2018 election. They have filed court cases, taken affidavits and analyzed the statistics in an attempt to verify the veracity of Georgia’s election results.
Then something weird happened.
The nonprofit group, Coalition for Good Governance, discovered that approximately 127,000 Georgia voters simply did not have a recorded vote for lieutenant governor. Officials claimed that most of these voters simply left that part of their ballot blank. And for some reason, the “drop-off” (the difference between people who voted and people who skipped one race) was disproportionately Democrat.
They had never seen it before. The drop-off rate in Georgia was higher than almost any statewide office drop-off rate they had ever seen. So they gathered the best minds in the election data field from across country to try to figure out the mystery of Georgia’s disappearing votes. It seemed so random. Researchers researched, voting machine experts looked at the machines’ known vulnerabilities and professors ran analytics and statistical regressions. But no one could figure out the pattern.
And then, just for kicks, they decided to run a statistical analysis by race. And viola, they discovered that an incredibly disproportionate number of Georgia voters in majority black precincts didn’t record a vote for the second-highest office in the state. They found the anomaly was incredibly high in precincts where there were high percentages of black registered voters.
And here is the troubling part: According to the report from Coalition for Good Governance (CGG) and the experts who spoke with The Root, the undervote wasn’t concentrated in Democratic areas. It seemed to specifically happen in black neighborhoods. Even stranger, the black voters’ absentee mail ballots didn’t reflect the drop-off, only the people who voted on election day and people who voted on machines in early voting.
The CGG’s report notes:
The extreme undervote issue occurred at statistically significant levels in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties. However, the undervotes on voting machines are concentrated in precincts where African American voters make up the majority of the precincts’ registered voters. The rates of touchscreen machine–reported undervotes in such precincts in the Lt. Governor contest are far greater than the undervote rates in non–African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican. The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.
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There’s a long history of these musicians losing out in the award show’s major categories. Winning, it seems, requires fitting into a specific mold. The Atlantic: What It Takes for Black Artists to Win Big at the Grammys
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After a year of introspection—panels and listening forums on music industry inequity, diversity-increasing membership drives spearheaded by the Recording Academy’s Task Force on Diversity & Inclusion—there is widespread hope that the winners’ circle at this year’s Grammy Awards will be more reflective of the rich tapestry of voices that make up contemporary popular music. The 2019 show’s shortlists appear to be the result of successful activism, as the Recording Academy has implemented broader cultural mandates for inclusion. The “Big Four” General Field categories—Album, Song, and Record of the Year and Best New Artist—are full of women and artists of color from a wide array of genres. All told, half of the Record of the Year and Song of the Year nominees are black, and five out of the eight nominees for the headliner Album of the Year category are black as well. Women-led acts account for five of the eight nominations in each category for Song, Record, and Album of the Year, and for six of the eight noms in Best New Artist.
But upon closer examination of the black musicians, it becomes clear that their odds of winning may still be very long. This group, historically, is among the most-nominated in any given year, though General Field wins are few and far between. And the handful of black artists who have taken home General Field trophies often fit into a specific mold: They are perceived as individual auteurs, creators whose work stands alone, outside of the broader black mainstream. For black musicians to hoist a golden gramophone in one of these four categories, the Academy’s voters essentially have to be convinced that the work of these artists is excellent because of its singularity.
This sets up a fascinating contrast among many of the artists nominated in this year’s General Field, where more popular, straight-ahead hip-hop faces off against a trio of black concept albums from artists whose candidacies would seem to rely on a perception of holistic artistry. A win in a category like Album of the Year for the former—Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Drake’s Scorpion, or (God help us) Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys—would be a major surprise, indicative of the Grammys’ growing acceptance of hip-hop. Meanwhile, the newcomer H.E.R.’s self-titled debut, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist Dirty Computer, and the Kendrick Lamar–helmed soundtrack for Black Panther, all suggest broader narratives and themes. Monáe’s high-concept aesthetic (which includes an album cycle known as The Metropolis Saga) has been widely acclaimed, and Dirty Computer was accompanied by a nearly 50-minute “emotion picture” film. H.E.R’s identity was shrouded in secrecy upon the artist’s sparse, moody, album release, in part because the work is supposed to represent a metaphorical everywoman’s coming-of-age tale. And while Lamar is a household name, the Black Panther soundtrack is a more artistically- minded, conceptual project than his three previous releases (all of which have been nominated for Album of the Year, all of which have lost).
Not counting guest appearances, a black musician hasn’t won Album of the Year since Herbie Hancock in 2008. Alicia Keys, Luther Vandross, and Beyoncé won for Song of the Year, in 2002, 2004, and 2010 respectively, and these are the only wins for black artists in the category since 1996. Similarly, Ray Charles’s Record of the Year win in 2005 has been the only one for a black artist within the past 23 years. Contemporary hip-hop’s heavy hitters are almost always nominated across these Big Four categories, but again the wins are sparse. This phenomenon—one that I’ve called a “glass ceiling on black art”—suggests that high visibility on nomination lists has historically produced insufficient results for these musicians.
And when black artists do break through that ceiling, their auteurist bonafides are what carry them to the podium. Consider the list of black Album, Song, and Record of the Year winners since the turn of the century: Lauryn Hill (Album of the Year, 1999), Keys (Song of the Year, 2002), Vandross (Song of the Year, 2004), Charles (Record and Album of the Year, 2005), OutKast (Album of the Year, 2004), Hancock (Album of the Year, 2008), and Beyoncé (Song of the Year, 2010). (Yes, that’s really it). All of these artists (save Beyoncé) stand outside the mainstream hip-hop/R&B footprint. Keys was a child-prodigy whose classical piano training set her apart. Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was two individual creators making crossover statements, anchored by the omnipresence of “Hey Ya!” Hill’s Miseducation was a neo-soul concept album that drew its name from a book that advocated autodidacticism. Vandross, Charles, and Hancock all won in their twilight years far after their creative peaks; the latter won for, of all things, a record of jazz covers of Joni Mitchell songs. (And even still, a comprehensive aesthetic statement wasn’t enough for Beyoncé's Lemonade to beat out Adele’s 25 in 2017, a result that is even more annoying given this history.)
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Back in 2000, Diallo Shabazz was surprised to see himself on the cover of the University of Wisconsin admissions booklet. But there he was, cheering in the stands at a football game he never attended, just behind a group of white students.
Some employees in the marketing department had decided to photoshop his face into the image; this, they thought, was a great way to project a diverse image to prospective students.
The decision might seem innocuous to many — a clumsy but well-intentioned attempt by a university to promote diversity. But according to Nancy Leong, a law professor at the University of Denver who focuses on civil rights and discrimination, it happens all the time. And it breeds even more racial resentment in society.
In 2013, Leong wrote a lengthy article in the Harvard Law Review in which she labeled this practice “racial capitalism”: the use of nonwhite people by corporations and institutions to make money or boost their brand.
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Mable Lee, the jazz dancer and singer, died at the age of 97 on Thursday.
A source close to EBONY and award-winning artist/educator Gwendolyn Black confirmed the news of Lee’s passing.
“It is with a heavy heart to announce the transition of our beloved Mable Lee. Mable passed away earlier this evening,” Black shared on Facebook. “She is now at rest among the other dance greats and leaves us with a profound LEGACY, JOY, and LAUGHTER! RIP Dear Angel. FOREVER IN OUR HEARTS AND MIND!!!”
Lee was revered for her “million-dollar legs.” In the 1940s, she appeared in more than 100 soundies, three-minute musical 16mm films, and earned the title of Queen of the Soundies, according to the American Tap Dance Foundation.
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Africa’s regional institutions do not lack ambition. The African Union’s master plan promises a rich, peaceful continent criss-crossed by high-speed trains. Eventually. Its target is 2063, a date well past the likely retirement date of all the bigwigs who signed the plan.
The East African Community (eac), by contrast, has no time to waste. It wants to form a single currency by 2024. At a recent summit, heads of state discussed drafting an east African constitution, with the ultimate goal of political federation. The eac is the most successful of Africa’s regional blocs. Since its revival in 2000 it has established a customs union and the rudiments of a common market. But its leaders are getting ahead of themselves: deepening rifts have put the project in jeopardy.
Four of its six members (Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and South Sudan) are led by ex-rebels, some with competing interests in the Congolese borderlands to the west. The recent summit was postponed twice because Burundi, which has fallen out with Rwanda, refused to attend. That quarrel goes beyond mere words. In 2015 Pierre Nkurunziza, the Burundian president, fought off a coup. His government accuses Rwanda of backing it. In 2016 un experts reported that Burundian refugees were being recruited to fight against their home government. In December the same experts said that arms and men were also flowing through Burundi to undermine Rwanda.
Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, is also on bad terms with Yoweri Museveni, his Ugandan counterpart. The rift is personal. Mr Museveni fought his way to power in the 1980s with the help of Rwandan refugees; Mr Kagame, who grew up in a Ugandan refugee camp, was his military intelligence chief. Later, as presidents, the former comrades launched two wars in Congo, then fell out over the loot. By 2000 their soldiers were firing at each other, 600km from home.
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