Race

The enormous upheavals of the late 1960s–the war in Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations–sent the American punditocracy into a sustained and intense period of self-examination.  Writers and critics were sent out “on the road” (where Truth presumably was to be found) to survey the American scene, to take Americans’ emotional temperature.

Supernation at Peace and War

One of the most thoroughgoing of these editorial examinations was published in the venerable magazine The Atlantic in March 1968–journalist Dan Wakefield’s “Supernation at Peace and War.”  In fact, The Atlantic (as it was then calling itself on the cover, having dropped the century-old “Monthly”) devoted this ENTIRE issue to Wakefield’s peripatetic essay, which was then published in book form.  Wakefield was 35 at the time, and had already published several perceptive essays on the American scene, and would within a few years become a best-selling novelist (Going All the Way and Starting Over).  What an extraordinary assignment this young writer got in 1967!   “No one man can cover everything, but travel and capture as much as you can of America, its people, its moods, its troubles and disillusionments, its still bright and valid dreams, its many ways of life (and not a little death); portray what you can of the entire great, ingenious, rich and poverty-stinking, beautiful and beer-can glittery, generous and selfish, mixed-up and marching straight on to what? (a bigger and better destiny or the primeval asphalt swamp?), powerful yet impotent, clear-the-slums and kill-the-goddamn-grizzlies, pick-your-1968-Choice and take-your-chances kind of country this is.”

The two wars of the 1960s

Published early in the year–and thus missing events like Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election, the assassinations of King and RFK, and the violence at both national party nominating conventions–”Supernation” is perhaps more an artifact of 1967 than 1968.  And significantly the essay is dominated by issues of race and racial conflict on the one hand, and by the war in Vietnam on the other.  Wakefield writes perceptively: “The only declared war being fought by the United States is the War on Poverty.  The President declared it in 1964, and it continues to be waged.  Unlike the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty does not cost very much to fight.  Even so, it is not a popular war, and in fact is even less popular politically than the war in Vietnam, which must make it THE most unpopular war in the nation’s history. . . . Like the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty seems to have no end in sight, but in both cases the President keeps predicting victory.”

War games

There are many brilliant descriptions and stories in this long essay, but one of my favorites comes near the end.  Wakefield visits a “cordon and search mission” staged at a fake Vietnamese village staged at Fort Belvoir VA, outside Washington–thatch-roofed huts, idle peasants (soldiers and WACs in costume), fake artillery fire, clouds of smoke, and clearing out the “Vee-Cee” from fake tunnels.  All of this took place in front of an audience, in bleachers, of “several hundred young men in the khaki garb of the U.S. Army.”  At the end, after the “village” was “pacified,” Wakefield writes: “It seemed awfully simple, not only to me but to many of the men in the bleachers behind me.  Beneath the groans, there were loudly whispered comments like ‘ka-rist,’ and ’shee-it,’ and after one cynical snort, one soldier said, ‘Yeah, and then they lived happily ever after.’”

No Comments »

Forty-two years ago today, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, America was convulsed by grief and outrage, as well as violent rioting in more than 100 cities.  American newspapers and magazines brought out special issues in honor of Dr. King.  JET–the small-format magazine that was a fixture in African-American homes in the 1960s–published this commemorative issue on April 18.  Today, it’s a collector’s item.

The Weekly Negro News Magazine

JET was founded in 1951 as the “Weekly Negro News Magazine” and is still published today by the Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago, which is also behind Ebony, the glossier, LIFE-sized black magazine.  JET is tiny:  just 4×5 inches, smaller even than Readers’ Digest, to which it is sometimes compared.  It was meant to provide bite-sized news and entertainment.  There were always news items from the civil rights front, gossip columns, sports news, book reviews, and entertainment features–all focusing on black subjects.

The killing of a prince

This commemorative issue is filled with photographs, including an open-coffin photo of Dr. King, which was less widely published in white-owned magazines.  The two-week lag between the killing and this issue also allowed JET to cover the many riots in American cities– a “mutiny of Negro citizens,” as Simeon Booker, the story’s writer, called it:  ”No single crime had enraged black men and women as the wanton killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the black prince of peace.”  Booker noted that the “intensity and fury of rioters and looters . . . eluded the Negro middle class.”

The Easter connection

JET noted that “among the strange coincidences of Dr. King’s death is the fact that, like the Saviour Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln, he was killed at Eastertime.”

(Easter Sunday in 1968 was on April 14.)   As the photo caption of Jesus, Lincoln, and King said:  ”all died for a better world.”

“We are pointing a gun at our own heads”

King himself is quoted liberally throughout the issue– the “Dream” speech, and the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”   But among the longest pieces in the issue is a reprint of a column by Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko.  He notes that the FBI would certainly catch up eventually to the killer (James Earl Ray eluded capture for two months), but that “it doesn’t matter if they do or if they don’t.”  Because, as Royko bitterly wrote:  ”Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions. They took part, from all over the country, pouring words of hate into the ear of the assassin. . . . So we killed him.  Just as we killed Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.  No other country kills so many of its best people. . . . We have pointed a gun at own head and we are squeezing the trigger.”

No Comments »

A new production of the 1980s Broadway show Dreamgirls just opened at New York’s Apollo Theater, which reminded me of the great “girl group” whose story inspired the musical:  Diana Ross and the Supremes.  (See the Times review here: http://bit.ly/6KIrcw)

Exactly 41 years ago, on November 24, 1968, the single “Love Child” hit the top of the Billboard 100 pop chart, knocking off the year’s biggest hit, the Beatles’ “Hey, Jude.”  ”Love Child,” which the Supremes had debuted on the Ed Sullivan show at the end of September, was at the top for two weeks.  The album Love Child was released November 13, 1968, and topped out at Number 3 on the R&B chart.

The Supremes had hit something of a slump the year before, right around the time Florence Ballard was fired, Cindy Birdsong was hired, and the group was re-christened “Diana Ross and the Supremes,” to capitalize on the increasingly starry status of their lead singer. (Ironically, on “Love Child” and several other cuts on this album, neither Mary Wilson nor Cindy Birdsong is heard; the backup vocals were provided by a studio group.)  Well into 1968, the “new” Supremes were looking like they had lost that Motown magic that had brought them such a spectacular string of hits in the early 1960s.

“Love Child” was a concerted effort to turn things around with new producers (including Smokey Robinson), new writers, new orchestration, and an urgent, socially relevant message, seemingly torn from the very Detroit projects the Supremes had grown up in.  In the lyrics, a girl is begging her boyfriend not to pressure her to have sex, to avoid bringing another “love child” into the cruel world.  The girl (vocalized, of course, by Ross at her passionate best) was herself an illegitimate love-child, and grew up poor, wearing rags in an “old, cold, rundown tenement slum” (”Tenement slum!” echoes the back-up chorus).

The cover art also appears to be trying to signal a new, more serious message for the Supremes, once the epitome of sequined and sparkled show-biz glamour.  If the ladies don’t look entirely convincing as poor ghetto girls–even though Mary is barefoot and Diana is wearing torn blue-jean shorts–well, you can’t fault the art director from trying, at least.

2 Comments »

An inflammatory book of black rage

Eldridge Cleaver (1935-98) made one of the 20th century’s more unusual journeys through public life–youthful criminality and prison, radical politics, literary celebrity, presidential political campaigning, exile, born-again Christianity, conversion to Mormonism and then to conservative Republican politics, embarrassingly provocative clothing design.   American popular culture has seen its share its share of “one-book wonders,” and Cleaver fits the description.  Soul on Ice, some of which had been excerpted in Ramparts magazine (where the masses presumably had not seen it) was an extraordinary, inflammatory book of black rage, poured like gasoline on the fire of white anxiety and fear in the summer of 1968.

“A formidable analytical mind.”

White people, especially white intellectuals of the New Left, were looking for avatars to guide them through the dense thicket of black anger, for ways of knowing and thinking about black “demands” and expectations.  Here, suddenly, was the eloquent guide they were looking for.  The blurbs excerpted on the back of the book are, with one exception, by “literary” white people:  Geoffrey Wolff (praising Cleaver’s “moral energy”); Thomas Lask (”an exceptional volume”); Robert Coles (”He is full of Christian care, Christian grief and disappointment . . .”); and radical critic Maxwell Geismar, whose introduction to the book is quoted on the back:  ”Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing. . . .”    The sole black critic is Julian Mayfield, writing in The Nation:  ”Beautifully written by a man with a formidable analytical mind.”

“What does the Negro want?”

“Cultural critic.”  ”Formidable mind.”  ”Moral energy.”  Unexpected praise for someone who writes (dated October 1965, in Folsom Prison):  ”I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist, that I have a Higher Uneducation.”   But Soul on Ice, with its short, punchy chapters and outrageous pronouncements that somehow also ring true (”That growing numbers of white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their insight but to the resilience of the human spirit”) was absolutely riveting to hordes of readers, both black and white.  For blacks, here was a new literary hero–articulate and learned, but speaking in a voice that “sounded like ‘right now.’”  For whites, Cleaver was a hip, edgy answer to that desperate Sixties question:  ”What does the Negro want?”   In some ways, especially in retrospect, Soul on Ice looks like the kitchen sink.  As perhaps befits the man who became the “Minister of Information” for the Black Panthers, Cleaver has something to say about everyone and everything: Baldwin and homosexuality (he’s against it), King, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, the United Nations, Elijah Muhammed, LBJ, FDR, JFK, Vietnam (”The black man’s interest lies in seeing a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of white supremacy”), Norman Mailer, Castro, Muhammed Ali, Stepin Fetchit, the New Left, beatniks and Ginsberg, World War II, colonialism, Frederick Douglass and the Civil War.  There’s even a strikingly astute riff on Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is “offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves.”  The book ends in a couple of chapters–I’m guessing most readers skipped these–that offer meandering and deeply misogynistic rantings about white women and black women.

A summertime 1968 bestseller

Soul on Ice was a sensational publishing phenomenon.  It showed up–in hardback–in the top ten of the New York Times Best Seller List (10th, to be exact) twice in late summer 1968–not a gigantic blockbuster, but still remarkable given its fellow occupants on the list (diet books, books about rich people and money, The Naked Ape).  It was in paperback–the version depicted here– that the book’s influence was most strongly felt.  Here, indeed, is a true icon of 1968:  the Black Man with Afro and furrowed brow, liberated from prison (in the background), posed with a clutch of white lilies, symbolizing . . . well, who knows?

2 Comments »

The music that people bought:  Billboard magazine at the end of 1968

Billboard is the perfect porthole through which to view the recorded music scene of the 1960s.  It is the magazine of the business of recording music, and thus most of the time they stayed focused on the business: the sales, the buzz, the bookings.  This, in short, is an industry rag–this is THE industry rag; like Variety for Broadway and theater, or Publisher’s Weekly for the book industry, critical discernment and historical distance are just not what they do.    There are no lengthy, reflective articles in Billboard, and no in-house critics.   “Reviews” are less than a paragraph and are always positive.   There is only this refreshing, single-minded focus on What People Are Buying.

“Lasting values”

Once a year, Billboard departed for a moment from this focus, with their “Artist of the Year” designation.  It’s worth quoting the whole statement:  ”Each year the editors of Billboard honor an artist who in their opinion has made the most significant contribution to popular music during the year.  The decision is not based solely on chart performances or record sales.  It also takes into account much more lasting values.”    Lasting values: portentous words from a magazine focused on immediate sales and airplay.

Jimi Hendrix: Artist of the Year

So it is with great interest, 1968-watchers,  that we turn our attention today to Billboard’s year-end issue, and its choice of the JHE as Artist of the Year:  ”1968 was the year of underground,the year of progressive rock, the year of blues rock, the year of Jimi Hendrix and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.  While Hendrix’s group first hit the U.S. in late 1967, it was 1968 before they became one of the most sought after acts in the business.”  This (unsigned) column continues: “Hendrix, 23, is a dynamic stage personality, and an exceptional blues singer and guitarist,” and his tour showed “he was second to none in appeal and excitement.”

“The black Elvis?”

Clearly, one does not turn to Billboard for incisive critical writing.  This one-page citation for Artist of the Year is virtually the only editorial content in the magazine.  But 1968 did belong to Hendrix.  His first U.S. tour in 1967 included the legendary performance at the Monterey Pop Festival– but also included a tour as an opening act for the Monkees, the fabricated teeny-pop TV band (about whom we’ll have more to say in future posts.)  By 1968, the mainstream media was also riding the wave.  TIME wrote about the JHE on April 5th: “Their music . . . is a whirlpool where currents of Negro blues and psychedelic rock meet, and it churns with all but overwhelming power from their nine amplifiers and 18 speakers.”  Michael Lydon wrote a piece headlined “The Black Elvis?” for the New York Times on Feb. 25, 1968, and here, at least, we get some critical idea of the JHE power, although the notion that Hendrix could have been thought of as  ”the black Elvis” seems oddly off-base.  But Lydon writes that that was already the way Hendrix was seen in England, noting, however that: “In America, James Brown is, but only for Negroes; could Hendrix become that for American whites? The title, rich in potential imagery, is a mantle waiting to be bestowed.”  He writes about the Hendrix performance style, in language that probably barely made it past Times censors: “He played flicking his gleaming white Gibson between his legs and propelling it out of his groin with a nimble grind of his hips.  Bending his head over the strings, he plucked with his teeth as if eating them, occasionally pulling away to take deep breaths.  Falling back and lying almost prone, he pumped the guitar neck as it stood high on his belly.”

But who sold more records?

Strictly in terms of sales, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was nowhere near the top of the heap in 1968.  Known for their albums (four were hot-sellers in 1968) and their explosive live performances, the JHE was not even among the Top 100 Singles Artists for the year– a list that included the Troggs (84), Big Brother and the Holding Company (99), Vanilla Fudge (67), Elvis Presley (56), Bobby Vinton (46), the Cowsills (20th), and Archie Bell and the Drells (”from Houston, Texas,” number 11).  Number One was Aretha Franklin, who had eight singles in the charts that year.  (Why was Aretha passed over for “artist of the year”?  The sales of her albums and singles, in both the overall categories and the R&B category, were astounding.)  Jimi wasn’t even on the list for “Top Male Artists,” a list topped by James Brown, Otis Redding, and Bobby Goldsboro (1, 2, and 3).  The only “best-seller” list that Jimi Hendrix appeared on, in fact, was “Top Album Artists,” where they were 10th, right behind the Beatles (7th), the Doors (8th), and the Monkees (9th).  Who was at the top of that list, in 1968, that “revolutionary” year?  Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, followed hard by comedian Bill Cosby, folkies Simon & Garfunkel, and country-crossover artist Glen Campbell.

1968 had an amazing “soundtrack.”    Any memories of performances or “transformational” moments?  Did you actually SEE the legendary Hendrix, or do we all just THINK we saw him perform?

1 Comment »

One of the most famous covers of the 1960s:  the spectacular Naomi Sims appears on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal.

In November 1968, Ladies’ Home Journal-- ”The Magazine Women Believe In”–featured  the first black “cover girl” in the history of this long-lived and influential magazine, the first, actually, on any “mainstream” (i.e., white) women’s magazine.  The cover was in the news very recently, illustrating the New York Times obituary for Sims who died August 1, 2009, at the age of 61.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/fashion/04sims.html?_r=1

When she appeared on this cover in 1968, Sims was not an unknown: she had appeared the year before on the cover of a Times fashion supplement, and by the next year was seen nationwide in an AT&T ad campaign on television and in print.  But still, the LHJ cover was big news, coming toward the end of a turbulent year in American race relations. The Journal had been the most prestigious women’s mag since the turn of the 20th century, far outpacing rivals McCall’s, Redbook, and Women’s Day, if not in circulation then certainly in cultural significance and influence.

A complete woman

And it’s a great cover shot:  She’s wearing a crocheted outfit–very much of the moment, but something that “even a beginner could finish in eight hours.”   Sims’ dark skin is amply revealed, and her long (5′10″) body is curled up and perfectly fitting into the rectangular outline of the cover:  ”This is a complete woman,” the photo seems to say: “Black is Beautiful.”  She was 21 years old.

More than just a pretty face

The LHJ editors knew what they were doing when they hired her.  She was not going to be just a mannequin for that crocheted ouftit, assigned the usual mute role for cover girls.  No, this was a Culturally Significant Moment, and the editors gave her not only the cover but a huge spread inside, and an “exclusive interview” with editor Diana Lurie.  The interview begins slowly, cruising around details about what’s it’s really like being a model, then it gets to the elephant in the room:  race.  ”My mother felt that the Negro was inferior, and she lived in poor white neighborhood [in Pittsburgh].  In kindergarten, I can remember being the only Negro in an all-white school. . . I get questions all the time about being Negro.  I hate having to be made aware and always having to use my brain about being Negro.  After Martin Luther King’s assassination, somebody said, ‘Now you’re really going to work, baby.’ . . . Beauty does surpass prejudice at a point, yet sometimes the effort people are making to assimilate us seems contrived.”

Stereotypes don’t go away overnight

If Sims’ cover appearance was history-making, the rest of the magazine seemed still to be treading the water of racial stereotypes.   African Americans appear in exactly two other places in the entire 200-page issue, both of them advertisements: An ad for Samsonite, in which a black luggage porter is helping a white damsel-in-distress at JFK Terminal; and an ad for Calgonite dishwasher detergent with the caption “The prettiest dishes in America use Calgonite,” and 34 headshots of apparently “average” pretty American women (the “dishes” of the caption, one assumes), four of whom, remarkably, are black.

And finally, how many people, I wonder, in 1968 noticed the stunning, almost perverse, contrast presented by the BACK cover of this historic issue of Ladies’ Home Journal?  Here it is, without comment.

1 Comment »

Any single edition of a magazine or a newspaper is, self-evidently, a kind of undifferentiated anthology of events and attitudes of its particular day.  Jarring juxtapositions are to be expected.  But rarely have I found an “coincidence”(?) like the one in the July 1968 Esquire that I just wrote about yesterday.  The cover and the cover article (an interview with James Baldwin) are about the sharp polarities between black and white in America. It’s hard to imagine another mass-market magazine of its day — or even any magazine or newspaper today– publishing something as bitter and pointed and extended as the comments by Baldwin in this piece.  Yet, less than 10 pages later there appears an article “A Whiter Shade of Black,” by Lawrence Lasker, which documents the work of one Dr. Robert Stolar of Washington, D.C., a dermatologist who claimed to be able to Negroes into white people, at least those with the pigmentation disorder of vitiligo.  He’s quoted:  ”I don’t just turn anybody white.  I guess two hundred Negroes have asked me to do it for them, but I usually don’t take them unless they have vitiligo. . . I wish I could take them all, but I just can’t. . . If it were easy to do, to turn white, I think a large number of Negroes would do it.  Black skin is their badge, and they suffer for it.”

2 Comments »

THE COVER: Esquire magazine, July 1968.  ”James Baldwin tells us all how to cool it this summer.”

“The long, hot summer.”  Americans heard a lot about that as the summer months approached in 1968, and it filled them with dread.  By 1968, just the word “summer” was conjuring not just beaches and vacations and re-runs on TV, but also what were almost universally known as “race riots,”  events that today, with more circumspection, we call “urban rebellions.”  Large swaths of Los Angeles were devastated in summer 1965; much of Newark and Detroit (and Buffalo, and Milwaukee, and Minneapolis) went up in flames in summer 1967.    Experts who might be called meteorological criminologists were coming forth with pronouncements about the “temperature-humidity crime index,” a bogus predictor of violence and lawlessness that added a layer of “science” to the accumulating lists of causes of civil disturbance.

As it turned out, by the time the summer of 1968 rolled around, urban America had already been convulsed by the serious, destructive riots that occurred in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in early April.  Still, the fears of “worse to come” were there when the editors at Esquire planned the issue that would appear at the height of the summer.  The now-legendary art director George Lois conceived this brilliant photo shoot to announce the magazine’s editorial coup of nailing an interview with no less a light than James Baldwin about what to expect in the summer of 1968.

Seven young black men–anonymous, black-jacketed, smoking, staring at the camera–are assembled in an ice warehouse.  George Lois and photographer Carl Fischer pressed these men (actors? models? guys pulled in off the street?) into a single role, one with a long history in American popular culture–the Black Man who Terrifies White People.   Cool.  Insolent.  Arrogant.  Tightly wound.  ”Powderkegs,” each of them.  Still, the photograph manages to control them:  they are inside; trapped, in a way, in a space that could pass for a prison; like animals or carcasses in a meat locker; isolated from each other, not part of a larger group.  Not part of a community at all: no women, no children.  Just black male-ness, an immense threat to white American males, overwhelmingly the readership of Esquire, “The Magazine for Men,” as it says just above the head of the black guy on the far right.

James Baldwin’s 1962 book The Fire Next Time had been widely noted for its disturbing warnings about the “cosmic vengeance” that black America was soon to wreak on white America, a prediction that seemed to come to pass a few years (summers) later.  Esquire, which had first published Baldwin in 1961, returned to him at “a time of fresh tragedy”:  his typically contentious, take-no-prisoners interview was conducted just two days after the King’s funeral, when several American cities were still burning.   Baldwin had famously said a few years earlier, when asked in general terms about “the Negro problem,” that: “It’s not the Negro problem, it’s the white problem. I’m only black because you think you’re white.”  His long interview here bears up extremely well, even 40+ years on.  Calming the waters, cooling the heated situation?  No, neither.  Baldwin’s eloquent, two-fisted answers probably left few people reassured about the summer of ‘68:  ”When you, in the person of your President, assure me that you will not tolerate any more violence, you may think that frightens me.  People don’t get frightened when they hear that, they get mad.  And whereas you’re afraid to die, I’m not.”

No Comments »