000009 - Taylor Gordon, Concert Singer

Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (April 29, 1893 – May 5, 1971) was a singer and vaudeville performer associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1920s. He was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana and moved to New York City at the age of 17. His career faded after the 1920s, and in 1959 he retired to White Sulphur Springs, where he died in 1971. In addition to his singing career, Gordon is remembered today for his 1929 autobiography, Born to Be, which recounts his youth as an Afro-American in small-town Montana, and his experiences in 1920s Harlem.

000008 - Paul Aussaresses, French General Who Tortured Algerians

***

Paul Aussaresses (November 7, 1918 – December 4, 2013) was a French Army general, who fought during World War II, the First Indochina War and Algerian War. His actions during the Algerian War, and later defense of those actions, caused considerable controversy.

Aussaresses was a career Army intelligence officer with an excellent military record when he joined the Free French Forces in North Africa during the Second World War. In 1947, he was given command of the 11th Shock Battalion, a commando unit that was part of France's former external intelligence agency, the External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service, the SDECE (replaced by the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE)).

Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000, when in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he admitted and defended the use of torture during the Algerian war. He repeated the defense in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes, further arguing that torture ought to be used in the fight against Al-Qaeda, and again defended his use of torture during the Algerian War in a 2001 book, The Battle of the Casbah. In the aftermath of the controversy, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his army uniform and his Légion d'Honneur. Aussaresses remained defiant, he dismissed the latter act as hypocritical.

Aussaresses, recognizable by his eye patch, lost his left eye due to a botched cataract operation, not combat.

Aussaresses was born on November 7, 1918, just four days before the end of World War I, in Saint-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, Tarn department, in Languedoc. His father, Paul Aussaresses senior, was serving in the French military at the time of his son's birth because of the war.

In 1941, Aussaresses served a year as an officer cadet in Cherchell, Algeria. The next year, in 1942, he volunteered for the special services unit in France. He was a member of a Jedburgh team and a member of Team CHRYSLER which parachuted into France behind the German lines in August 1944. The Jedburghs worked clandestinely behind enemy lines to harness the local resistance and coordinate their activities with the wishes of the Allied Commanders. CHRYSLER deployed from Algeria via an American aircraft to work with the local French Resistance in Ariège. On September 1, 1946 he joined the 11th Choc Battalion and commanded the battalion from 1947 until 1948, when he was replaced by Yves Godard. Later, he served in the First Indochina War with the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment.

In 1955, he was transferred to Philippeville, Algeria, to be part of the 41st Parachute Demi-Brigade as an intelligence officer. He restarted his demi-brigade's intelligence unit, which had been disbanded during peacetime but was deemed necessary by the French Army who wanted to quell the insurgency of the 'Algerian rebels'. On August 20, 1955, the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front) staged an attack against the police of Philippeville. Aussaresses states that he had information about this attack well beforehand and therefore he was able to prevent much of the possible bloodshed. The members of the FLN had also forced many of the men, women and children of the countryside to march in front of them, without weapons, as human shields. Aussaresses reports that his battalion killed 134 of these men, women and children, and that hundreds more had been wounded. He reports that two men from his own side also died, and that around one hundred others had been wounded.

In the spring of 1956, Aussaresses attended a top-secret training camp in Salisbury, England for a one-month training to prepare for the battle at Suez Canal. He returned to Bône, Algeria in May 1956 to continue exercises with paratroopers on their way to the Suez Canal. On June 1, 1956, he received a spinal fracture from a parachuting exercise, which prevented him from participating in the Suez operation.

General Jacques Massu, who had noted Aussaresses' work against the insurrections in Philippeville, ordered Aussaresses to work under him in Algiers as an agent to control the FLN in Algiers. Aussaresses reported for duty in Algiers on January 8, 1957. He was the main executioner and intelligence collector under Jacques Massu during the Battle of Algiers. On January 28, he broke a city-wide strike organized by the FLN using repressive measures. Soldiers forcibly dragged all public utilities workers to their jobs. Store fronts were torn open so that the owners had to open the store for fear of being looted. Later in 1957, he ordered his men to hang Larbi Ben M'Hidi, an important member of the FLN, as if he had committed suicide. In a separate incident he ordered that an officer throw Ali Boumendjel, an influential Algerian attorney, from the 6th floor of the building he was held prisoner in, claiming that Boumendjel had committed suicide. France decreed that both deaths were suicides, but Aussaresses admitted both assassinations in 2000.

Aussaresses contends, in his book, that the French government insisted that the military in Algeria "liquidate the FLN as quickly as possible". Subsequently, historians debated whether or not this repression was government-backed or not. The French government has always claimed that it was not, but Aussaresses argues that the government insisted upon the harsh measures he took against Algerians - measures which included summary executions of thousands of people, hours of torture of prisoners, and violent strike-breaking.

Aussaresses was quite candid in his interview in Le Monde forty years later (May 3, 2001):

"Concerning the use of torture, it was tolerated, if not recommended. François Mitterrand, the Minister for Justice, had, indeed, an emissary with Massu in judge Jean Bérard, who covered for us and who had complete knowledge of what went on in the night."

Aussaresses justified the use of torture by saying how shocked he was by the FLN's massacre at the El Halia mine. He suggested that torture was a small but necessary evil that had to be used to defeat a much larger evil of terrorism. Aussaresses also claimed that he used these methods because it was a quick way to obtain information. He also defended its use by saying that the legal system was meant to deal with a peacetime France, not a counter insurgency war that the French army was faced with in Algeria.

In an interview to Marie-Monique Robin, Aussaresses described the methods used, including the creation of death squads (escadrons de la mort), the term being created at this time.

Following Aussaresses' revelations, which suggested that torture had been ordered by the highest levels of the French state hierarchy, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Jacques Chirac (RPR) to indict Aussaresses for war crimes, declaring that, despite past amnesties, such crimes, which may also have been crimes against humanity, may not be amnestied. The Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, Human Rights League) filed a complaint against him for "apology of war crimes," as Paul Aussaresses justified the use of torture, claiming it had saved lives following the Necessity Defense [AKA: Choice of Evils] and/or the Self-Defense (although he did not explicitly use this expression). He was fined 7,500 Euros by the Tribunal de grande instance court of Paris, while Plon and Perrin, two editing houses who had published his book in which he defended the use of torture, were sentenced each to a 15,000 Euros fine. The judgment was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in April 2003. The Court of Cassation rejected the intercession in December 2004. The Court of Cassation declared in its judgment that "freedom to inform, which is the basis of freedom of expression" does not lead to "accompany the exposure of facts ... with commentaries justifying acts contrary to human dignity and universally reproved," "nor to glorify its author." Aussaresses had written in his book: "torture became necessary when emergency imposed itself."

Aussaresses had a successful military career after the war. Unlike many of his fellow officers, he did not choose to join the OAS militant group to continue the fight in Algeria after the French military began to withdraw their forces. In 1961, he was appointed as a military attaché of the French diplomatic mission in the United States, alongside ten veterans of the Algerian War formerly under his charge. In the United States, he also served at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, alongside the 10th Special Forces Group, a military unit that specialized in tactics of unconventional warfare. There he taught the "lessons" of the Battle of Algiers", which allegedly included counter-insurgency tactics, interrogation, and torture. According to Aussauresses, he specifically taught lessons from Colonel Trinquier's book on "subversive warfare" (Aussaresses had served under Trinquier in Algeria). The Americans' Vietnam era Phoenix Program was inspired by these American students of Aussaresses, after they had sent a copy of Trinquier's book to CIA agent Robert Komer.

Aussaresses relocated to Brazil in 1973 during the military dictatorship, where he maintained very close links with the military. According to General Manuel Contreras, former head of the Chilean DINA, Chilean officers trained in Brazil under Aussaresses' orders and advised the South American juntas on counter-insurrection warfare and the use of torture that was widely used against leftist opponents to the military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.

The character of Julien Boisfeuras in the novels The Centurions and The Praetorians by Jean Larteguy was according to Larteguy not based on anyone, but many believe that he was at least partially inspired by Aussaresses and Roger Trinquier.

^***

 

000007 - Countee Cullen, Poet

Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. (He pronounced his name "Coun-tay," not "Coun-tee.")

Countee Cullen was possibly born on May 30, although due to conflicting accounts of his early life, a general application of the year of his birth as 1903 is reasonable. He was either born in New York, Baltimore, Louisville, or Lexington, Kentucky, with his widow being convinced he was born in Lexington. Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. Mrs. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine. She died in 1918. No known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the local minister, and founder, of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.

Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. It is impossible to state with certainty how old Cullen was when he was adopted or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918. By 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen and eventually just Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, Cullen's adoption was never “official.” That is to say it was never consummated through proper state-agency channels. Indeed, it is difficult to know if Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any stage in his childhood.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black activist minister. He established his Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his arrival in New York City in 1902, and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem where he could boast of a membership of more than twenty-five hundred. Countee Cullen himself stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was “reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage,” and it is clear that his foster father was a particularly strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Frederick Cullen was a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was never remotely that in his life. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was also something of an effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl's clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism.) That Cullen was homosexual or of a decidedly ambiguous sexual nature may also be attributable to his foster father's contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homosexual.
At some point, Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx. He excelled academically at the school while emphasizing his skills at poetry and in oratorical contest. While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life”, a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”. At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, editor of the weekly newspaper, and elected vice-president of his graduating class. In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.

"Yet I do marvel"

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

“

”

"Yet I do marvel" (1925)

After graduating high school, Cullen entered New York University (NYU). In 1923, he won second prize in the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, with a poem entitled The Ballad of the Brown Girl. At about this time, some of his poetry was promulgated in the national periodicals Harper's, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry. The ensuing year he again placed second in the contest. He finally won it in 1925.

At New York University (1921–1925), Cullen wrote most of the poems for his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).

Cullen competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity. and came in second with To One Who Say Me Nay, while losing to Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues. Sometime thereafter, Cullen graduated from NYU as one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Cullen entered Harvard in 1925, to pursue a masters in English, about the same time his first collection of poems, Color, was published. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the influence of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet. Cullen's Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

“

”

From "Heritage"

This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless. {Although his 1929 poem "The Black Christ" took a racial theme, the lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.)

The Harlem Renaissance movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935). The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of Countee Cullen. This rather shy black youth, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write “white” verse—ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like—much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first African American to attempt to write such verse but he was first to do so with such extensive education and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet. Only two other black American poets before Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, the reinvention of the native-born African American as a being who can be assimilated while decidedly retaining something called “a racial self-consciousness,” then Cullen fit the bill. If “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” was the opening salvo in the making of Cullen's literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of “Shroud of Color” in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene.

Cullen graduated from Harvard University with a masters degree in 1926. He then began work as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, "The Dark Tower", increased his literary reputation. Indeed, between high school and his graduation from Harvard, Cullen was the most popular black poet and virtually the most popular black literary figure in America. One of Cullen's poems and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A'Leila Walker—heiress of Madame C. J. Walker's hair-care products fortune and owner of a salon where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s—to name her salon “The Dark Tower”.

Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine's John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine's first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. He met Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual. At that time Yolande was involved romantically with a popular band leader. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen traveled back and forth between France and the United States.

Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Cullen was placed at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger black intellectuals who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who would not remarry until 1940.

It is rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman ("the handsomest man in Harlem"), was a significant factor in the divorce. The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. Van Vechten had used him as a character model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926).

It is very possible that the conflicted Cullen was in love with the homosexual Jackman, but Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, says there is no concrete proof that they ever were lovers, despite newspaper stories and gossip suggesting the contrary.

Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in various depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that the name of the Georgia accumulation be changed from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection in honor of his friend. When Jackman, himself, succumbed to cancer in 1961, the collection was renamed the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.

By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery - Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus. Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that The Black Christ, his longest and in many respects most complicated poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished.

As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But by 1930 Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932, appeared his only novel, One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life, he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City. (His most famous student at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was James Baldwin.) During this period, he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who perished in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. In the last years of his life, Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt his 1931 novel God Sends Sunday into St. Louis Woman (1946, published 1971) for the musical stage. Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in a poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. Cullen also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.

In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson, whom he had known for ten years.

Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.

The works of Countee Cullen include:

Poetry collections:

• Color Harper & brothers, 1925; [includes the poems "Incident," "Near White," "Heritage," and others], illustrations by Charles Cullen
• Tableau 1925
• Harlem Wine 1926
• Copper Sun, Harper & brothers, 1927
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl Harper & Brothers, 1927, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• The Black Christ and Other Poems, Harper & brothers, 1929, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• One way to heaven, Harper & brothers, 1932
• Any Human to Another (1934)
• The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
• On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947
• Gerald Lyn Early (ed). My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen Doubleday, 1991
• Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, Library of America, 2013

Prose:

• One Way to Heaven (1931)
• The Lost Zoo, Harper & Brothers, 1940; Modern Curriculum Press, 1991
• My Lives and How I Lost Them, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942

Drama:

• St. Louis Woman (1946)

*****

000006 - Ahmed Negm, Dissident Egyptian Poet

Ahmed Fouad Negm (Arabic: احمد فؤاد نجم‎) (b. May 22, 1929 – d. December 3, 2013), popularly known as el-Fagommi (الفاجومي), was an Egyptian vernacular poet.  Negm is well known for his work with Egyptian composer Sheikh Imam, as well as his patriotic and revolutionary Egyptian Arabic poetry. Negm has been regarded as "a bit of a folk hero in Egypt."

Ahmed Fouad Negm was born in Sharqia, Egypt, to a family of fellahin. His mother, Hanem Morsi Negm, was a housewife, and his father Mohammed Ezat Negm, a police officer. Negm was one of seventeen brothers. Like many poets and writers of his generation, he received his education at the religious Kutaab schools managed by El-Azhar.

When his father died, Ahmed went to live with his uncle Hussein in Zagazig,  but was placed in an orphanage in 1936 where he first met the famous singer Abdel Halim Hafez.  In 1945, at the age of 17, he left the orphanage and returned to his village to work as a shepherd. Later, he moved to Cairo to live with his brother who eventually kicked him out only to return to his village again to work in one of the English camps while helping with guerilla operations.

After the agreement between Egypt and Britain, the Egyptian National Workers’ Movement asked everyone in the English camps to quit their job. Negm was then appointed by the Egyptian government as a laborer in mechanical workshops. He was imprisoned for 3 years for counterfeiting form, during which he participated and won first place in a writing competition organized by the Supreme Council for the Arts. He then published his first collection “Pictures from Life and Prison” in vernacular Egyptian Arabic and became famous after Suhair El-Alamawi introduced his book while he was still in prison. After he was released, he was appointed as a clerk in the organization for Asian and African peoples. He also became a regular poet on Egyptian radio.

Negm lived in a small room on the rooftop of a house in the Boulaq el-Dakror neighborhood. When he met singer and composer Sheikh Imam in the Khosh Adam neighborhood, they became roommates and formed a famous signing duet. Negm was also imprisoned several times due to his political views, particularly his harsh criticism of Egyptian presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.

The residence of Ahmed Fouad Negm in the poorest neighborhoods of Cairo, Egypt, exposed him to the most talented professionals such as Sheikh Imam Issa, and impoverished poets and artists. It was Sheikh Imam in particular who compensated Negm for the earlier rejection by his orphanage-mate Abdel Halim Hafez.

In 1962, Negm was introduced to Sheikh Imam by a friend who believed that the two, poet Negm and composer Imam, could make a perfect duo. On the first occasion, Negm noticed that Imam took over an hour to tweak the strings of the Oud before starting his first demonstration to the new guest. Negm shouted "Allah" upon listening to Imam's singing and playing the Oud. The blind Sheikh was equally longing for inspiring words of the sort Negm had. That was the spark that lasted 30 years of concerted writing by Negm, composing by Imam, and singing by the two combined.

Negm was quick enough to sense that the blind Sheikh was a hidden treasure of Islamic literacy and music talent, and with his physical handicap, he could use the help of Negm's eyes and words. Hence, Negm proposed to stay in Imam's residence. As he recounted, his other rented room had property worth 6 Egyptian pounds, thus if he threw away the key for his other room, the landlord was required to take three months before breaking into the room and possessing its contents. Negm took the risk, abandoned his rented room with its contents and stuck with Sheikh Imam from 1962 throughout 1995.

In the early hours of 3 December 2013, Negm died at the age of 84 in Cairo.  

In 2007, Negm was chosen by the United Nations Poverty Action as Ambassador of the poor.

Ahmed Fouad Negm won the 2013 Prince Claus Award for ‘Unwavering Integrity’.

000005 - Nelson Mandela, South Africa's Liberator

Nelson Mandela, in full Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, byname Madiba (b. July 18, 1918 - d. December 5, 2013), black nationalist and first black president of South Africa (1994–99). His negotiations in the early 1990s with South African President F.W. de Klerk helped end the country’s apartheid system of racial segregation and ushered in a peaceful transition to majority rule. Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1993 for their efforts.

The son of Chief Henry Mandela of the Madiba clan of the Xhosa-speaking Tembu people, Nelson Mandela renounced his claim to the chieftainship to become a lawyer. He attended South African Native College (later the University of Fort Hare) and studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand.  He later passed the qualification exam to become a lawyer. In 1944, he joined the African National Congress (ANC), a black-liberation group, and became a leader of its Youth League. That same year he met and married Evelyn Ntoko Mase. Mandela subsequently held other ANC leadership positions, through which he helped revitalize the organization and oppose the apartheid policies of the ruling National Party.

In 1952, in Johannesburg with fellow ANC leader Oliver Tambo, Mandela established South Africa’s first black law practice, specializing in cases resulting from the post-1948 apartheid legislation. Also that year, Mandela played an important role in launching a campaign of defiance against South Africa’s pass laws, which required nonwhites to carry documents (known as passes, pass books, or reference books) authorizing their presence in areas that the government deemed “restricted” (i.e., generally reserved for the white population). He traveled throughout the country as part of the campaign, trying to build support for nonviolent means of protest against the discriminatory laws. In 1955, he was involved in drafting the Freedom Charter, a document calling for nonracial social democracy in South Africa. His anti-apartheid activism made him a frequent target of the authorities. In March 1956, he was banned (severely restricted in travel, association, and speech), and in December he was arrested with more than 100 other people on charges of treason that were designed to harass anti-apartheid activists. Mandela went on trial that same year and eventually was acquitted in 1961. During the extended court proceedings, he divorced his first wife and married Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela (Winnie Madikizela-Mandela).
 

After the massacre of unarmed black South Africans by police forces at Sharpeville in 1960 and the subsequent banning of the ANC, Mandela abandoned his non-violent stance and began advocating acts of sabotage against the South African regime. He went underground (during which time he became known as the Black Pimpernel for his ability to evade capture) and was one of the founders of Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the military wing of the ANC. In 1962 he went to Algeria for training in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, returning to South Africa later that year. On August 5, shortly after his return, Mandela was arrested at a road block in Natal.  He was subsequently sentenced to five years in prison.

In October 1963, the imprisoned Mandela and several other men were tried for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy in the infamous Rivonia Trial, named after a fashionable suburb of Johannesburg where raiding police had discovered quantities of arms and equipment at the headquarters of the underground Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela’s speech from the dock, in which he admitted the truth of some of the charges made against him, was a classic defense of liberty and defiance of tyranny. (His speech garnered international attention and acclaim and was published later that year as I Am Prepared to Die.) On June 12, 1964, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, narrowly escaping the death penalty.

From 1964 to 1982 Mandela was incarcerated at Robben Island Prison, off Cape Town. He was subsequently kept at the maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison until 1988, when, after being treated for tuberculosis, he was transferred to Victor Verster Prison near Paarl. The South African government periodically made conditional offers of freedom to Mandela, most notably in 1976, on the condition that he recognize the newly independent—and highly controversial—status of the Transkei Bantustan and agree to reside there. An offer made in 1985 required that he renounce the use of violence. Mandela refused both offers, the second on the premise that only free men were able to engage in such negotiations and, as a prisoner, he was not a free man.

Throughout his incarceration, Mandela retained wide support among South Africa’s black population, and his imprisonment became a cause célèbre among the international community that condemned apartheid. As South Africa’s political situation deteriorated after 1983, and particularly after 1988, he was engaged by ministers of President P.W. Botha’s government in exploratory negotiations.  He met with Botha’s successor, de Klerk, in December 1989.

On February 11, 1990, the South African government under President de Klerk released Mandela from prison. Shortly after his release, Mandela was chosen deputy president of the ANC.  He became president of the party in July 1991. Mandela led the ANC in negotiations with de Klerk to end apartheid and bring about a peaceful transition to non-racial democracy in South Africa.

In April 1994, the Mandela led ANC won South Africa’s first elections by universal suffrage, and on May 10 Mandela was sworn in as president of the country’s first multi-ethnic government. He established in 1995 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which investigated human rights violations under apartheid, and he introduced housing, education, and economic development initiatives designed to improve the living standards of the country’s black population. In 1996, he oversaw the enactment of a new democratic constitution. Mandela resigned his post with the ANC in December 1997, transferring leadership of the party to his designated successor, Thabo Mbeki. Mandela and Madikizela-Mandela had divorced in 1996, and in 1998 Mandela married Graca Machel, the widow of Samora Machel, the former Mozambican president and leader of Frelimo.

Mandela did not seek a second term as South African president and was succeeded by Mbeki in 1999. After leaving office Mandela retired from active politics but maintained a strong international presence as an advocate of peace, reconciliation, and social justice, often through the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, established in 1999. He was a founding member of the Elders, a group of international leaders established in 2007 for the promotion of conflict resolution and problem solving throughout the world. In 2008, Mandela was feted with several celebrations in South Africa, Great Britain, and other countries in honor of his 90th birthday.  Mandela Day, observed on Mandela’s birthday, was created to honor his legacy by promoting community service around the world. It was first observed on July 18, 2009, and was sponsored primarily by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the 46664 initiative (the foundation’s HIV/AIDS global awareness and prevention campaign); later that year the United Nations declared that the day would be observed annually as Nelson Mandela International Day.

Mandela’s writings and speeches were collected in I Am Prepared to Die (1964; rev. ed. 1986), No Easy Walk to Freedom (1965; updated ed. 2002), The Struggle Is My Life (1978; rev. ed. 1990), and In His Own Words (2003). His autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, was published in 1994.

000004 - T. J. Jemison, Baton Rouge Bus Boycott Leader

Theodore Judson Jemison (August 1, 1918 – November 15, 2013), better known as T. J. Jemison, was the president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. from 1982 to 1994. It is the largest African-American religious organization. He oversaw the construction of the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee, the headquarters of his convention.

In 1953, while minister of a large church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jemison helped lead the first civil rights boycott of segregated seating in public bus service. The organization of free rides, coordinated by churches, was a model used later in 1955-1956 by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama.  Jemison was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. 

In 2003, the 50th anniversary of the Baton Rouge bus boycott was honored with three days of events in the city. These were organized by a young resident born two decades after the action

T. J. Jemison was born in 1918 in Selma, Alabama where his father, the Reverend David V. Jemison, was the pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church. He came from a family of prominent ministers and strong churchgoing women. He attended local segregated public schools.

Jemison earned a bachelor's degree from Alabama State University, a historically black college in the state capital of Montgomery, where he joined Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He earned a divinity degree at Virginia Union University in the capital city of Richmond, Virginia, to prepare for the ministry. He later did graduate study at New York University in New York City.

In 1949, Jemison was first called as a minister by Mt. Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. There he worked chiefly on internal church matters, overseeing construction and continued fundraising of a new church building. At the time, his father was serving as President of the National Baptist Convention, the association of African-American Baptist churches established in 1895.

Within a few years, Jemison became involved in an early civil rights action. In 1950, the city had ended black-owned buses, requiring all residents to use its monopoly system, which enforced segregated seating. It was racially segregated by law; in practice, black citizens had to sit at the back half of the bus or stand, even if seats in the front "white" section were empty. Jemison said later he was struck by "watching buses pass by his church and seeing black people standing in the aisles, not allowed by law to sit down in seats reserved for whites. 'I thought that was just out of order, that was just cruel'." 

Making up 80 percent of the passengers on the system, African Americans were fed up with standing on buses while "white" seats remained empty, particularly after the company had raised fares from ten to fifteen cents in January 1953. Rev. Jemison took up the issue with the Baton Rouge City Council.  He testified on February 11, 1953 against the fare increase and asked for an end of the practice of reserving so many seats for whites. The city council met that demand, without abolishing segregation per se. They passed Ordinance 222, which established a first come-first served system: it allowed black passengers to board the bus from the back and take any empty seats available, while white passengers boarded from the front. In actuality though, the white drivers largely ignored the ordinance and continued to pressure blacks to sit in the rear of the buses.

When bus drivers harassed those black passengers who sought to sit in empty seats reserved for whites, Jemison tested the law on June 13, 1953, when he sat in a front seat of a bus. The next day the bus company suspended two bus drivers for not complying with the city ordinance. The drivers' union responded by striking for four days. That strike ended on June 18, 1953 when state Attorney General Fred S. LeBlanc declared the city ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the state's compulsory segregation laws.

Reverend Jemison set up a free-ride network, coordinated by the churches, to compensate for the lack of public transit. This was its signature action for the boycott, which was also adopted for later use. "While the Baton Rouge boycott lasted only two weeks, it set protest standards, and is growing in recognition as a precedent-setting event in the history of the modern American civil rights movement."

With most of the black bus riders refusing to ride, by the third day the buses were almost entirely empty. The boycott lasted eight days, as Reverend Jemison called it off after successful negotiations between black leaders and the city council. The following day, the city council passed an ordinance under which the first-come, first-served, seating system of back-to-front and front-to-back was reinstated. In addition, they set aside the first two seats on any bus for white passengers and the back bench for black passengers, while allowing anyone to sit on any of the rows in the middle. To comply with state segregation laws, blacks and whites were prohibited from sitting next to each other within this arrangement. Jemision's model of boycotting in Baton Rouge was adopted in 1955 by organizers of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote, Jemison's "painstaking description of the Baton Rouge experience proved invaluable."

While a number of boycotters wanted to continue the action to attack segregation directly, the majority approved the compromise.

Jemison was elected as president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc.,  the largest black religious organization, in 1982 and served until 1994. His best-known achievement of his tenure as president of the National Baptist Convention was the construction of the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee. It is a headquarters for the Convention. He publicly opposed the nomination of Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. He also objected to American intervention in the Gulf War.

Toward the end of his term as convention president, Jemison faced criticism because of his support for the boxer Mike Tyson, who was convicted in a rape case against a black woman. He was strongly criticized both by church members and observers.

Approaching the end of his tenure (a result of term limits), Jemison selected Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson as his successor, but Richardson was defeated by Dr. Henry Lyons at the 1994 convention.

Jemison filed a lawsuit to try to overturn the result. Eventually, through the appeals process, the election of Dr. Lyons was upheld. Jemison individually, as well as a co-plaintiff and their counsel, was ordered to pay $150,000 in punitive damages. By a later court order, Jemison and his co-plaintiff were required to pay the other side's attorney fees. The court found that Jemison had concocted evidence to justify the suit.

Jemison died in Baton Rouge at the age of ninety-five. His body lay in repose at the Louisiana State Capitol on November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Services were conducted on November 23 by the Reverend Dr. Rene F. Brown, formerly of Topeka, Kansas, and Jemison's successor pastor at Mt. Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge.

Two Jewish Republican officeholders spoke at the funeral.  Lieutenant Governor Jay Dardenne said that despite national prominence, Jemison's most important role ... was as shepherd of this flock and this church." Attorney General Buddy Caldwell at the ceremony quoted Psalms 37:27: "the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord." He likened Jemison's life to the Statue of Liberty: He "gave us a torch to light the way."

United States Representative Cedric Richmond, a Democrat from Louisiana's 2nd congressional district, based in New Orleans, described himself and other African-American legislators as "direct beneficiaries of the hard work, commitment, and courage of Dr. Jemison." Reading a statement of United States President Barack H. Obama, Richmond described Jemison as "part of the generation that challenged the conscience of our nation and moved us toward justice and equality for all."

Interment followed in Green Oaks Memorial Park in Baton Rouge.

From June 19 to  June 21, 2003, the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott and its participants were honored with a community forum and three days of events.  Organizers were Marc Sternberg, a 30-year-old resident, Southern University, Louisiana State University, and major organizations. Sternberg said, "Before Dr. King had a dream, before Rosa kept her seat, and before Montgomery took a stand, Baton Rouge played its part."

In 2007, Mt. Zion First Baptist Church established the annual T. J. Jemison Race Relations Award in his honor. It was first awarded that year to Jesse Bankston, a long-term Democratic politician in Baton Rouge.

A00003 - Walter White's Rope and Faggot

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 – March 21, 1955) was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for almost a quarter of a century and directed a broad program of legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist. He graduated in 1916 from Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), a historically black college.

In 1918, he joined the small national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York at the invitation of James Weldon Johnson. He acted as Johnson's assistant national secretary and traveled to the South to investigate. White later succeeded Johnson as the head of the NAACP, leading the organization from 1931 to 1955.

White oversaw the plans and organizational structure of the fight against public segregation. He worked with President Truman on desegregating the armed forces after the Second World War and gave him a draft for the Executive Order to implement this. Under White's leadership, the NAACP set up the Legal Defense Fund, which raised numerous legal challenges to segregation and disfranchisement, and achieved many successes. Among these was the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which determined that segregated education was inherently unequal. White also quintupled NAACP membership to nearly 500,000.

Through his cultural interests and his close friendships with white literary power brokers Carl Van Vechten and Alfred A. Knopf, White was one of the founders of the "New Negro" cultural flowering. Popularly known as the "Harlem Renaissance", the period was one of intense literary and artistic production. Harlem became the center of black American intellectual and artistic life. It attracted creative people from across the nation, as did New York City in general.

White was the author of critically acclaimed novels: Fire in the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). His non-fiction book Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1929) was a study of lynching. Additional books were A Rising Wind (1945), his autobiography A Man Called White (1948), and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Unfinished at his death was Blackjack, a novel on Harlem life and the career of an African-American boxer.

***

With regards to Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, in 1926, Walter White, assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, broke the story of a horrific lynching in Aiken, South Carolina, in which three African Americans were murdered while more than one thousand spectators watched. Because of his light complexion, blonde hair, and blue eyes, White, an African American, was able to investigate first-hand more than forty lynchings and eight race riots.

Following the lynchings in Aiken, White took a leave of absence from the NAACP and, with help from a Guggenheim grant, spent a year in France writing Rope and Faggot. Ironically subtitled “A Biography of Judge Lynch,” Rope and Faggot is a compelling example of partisan scholarship and is based on White’s first-hand investigations. It was first published in 1929.

Rope and Faggot debunked the “big lie” that lynching punished black men for raping white women and it provided White with an opportunity to deliver a penetrating critique of the southern culture that nourished this form of blood sport. White marshaled statistics demonstrating that accusations of rape or attempted rape accounted for less than 30 percent of all lynchings. Despite the emphasis on sexual issues in instances of lynching, White insisted that the fury and sadism with which white mobs attacked their victims stemmed primarily from a desire to keep blacks in their place and control the black labor force. Some of the strongest sections of Rope and Faggot deal with White’s analysis of the economic and cultural foundations of lynching.

A00002 - Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry

Wallace Henry Thurman (b. August 16, 1902, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. - d. December 22, 1934, New York, New York), was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license.

Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree.

While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.

In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.

He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.

Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.

During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.

In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position.

Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had one child together.

Thurman died in 1934 at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.

Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.

Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.

Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.

***

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by the American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was considered ground breaking for its exploration of colorism and racial discrimination within the black community, where lighter skin was often favored, especially for women.

The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Morgan in her journey to college at UCLA, and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Morgan's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life.

Part 1 Emma Lou

Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl with dark skin, and she suffers from it. Her mother and her family have lighter skin (it shows European ancestry in her family history). Emma Lou learned that her father, who left the mother and daughter soon after she was born, was a dark-skinned black man, and she appears to have taken after him. Her mother's family members comment on Emma Lou's color, thinking it will reduce her appeal for marriage. Her family help the girl try to lighten her skin with commercially available creams and bleaching, but are unsuccessful. Morgan wishes that she had been born a boy, as her mother said, "a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment."

The only "Negro pupil in the entire school," Emma feels conspicuous at graduation in their white robes. Her Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California (USC). He says she can find other black students for friends, and encourages her to study education and move to the South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise "encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town." Emma Lou’s maternal grandmother was closely associated with the "blue veins", those blacks who had skin light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought that Emma Lou could find a better life in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about.

At USC, Morgan intends to meet the "right" crowd among other Negro students. On registration day, she happens to meet Hazel Mason, another black girl, but decides when she speaks that she is lower class and the wrong sort. Other girls are pleasant enough, but never invited Emma Lou into their circle or sorority. Hazel drops out of school and Grace Giles becomes Emma Lou’s friend. One day Grace says the sorority only took light-skinned, wealthy girls.

By summer, Emma Lou felt more trapped by her skin. She began to notice that black leaders tended to have light skin or were married to women with light skin. At a picnic, she meets Weldon Taylor, a young black man. Although darker than her ideal, he attracts her. By the end of the night, she thought she was in love. Over the next two weeks, she is thrilled to be with Taylor, for "his presence and his love making."

However, Weldon traveled from town to town, finding work and a new girl each time. He was leaving Boise to become a Pullman porter but, Emma Lou took his departure as due to her color, and associated it with any setback. Two years later after graduation, she decides to move to New York City and Harlem.

Part 2 Harlem

Emma Lou goes to Harlem, where she soon meets John, a young man she decides is "too dark." She goes to an employment agency, seeking work as a stenographer. Lacking job experience, she encounters difficulties and pads her account of her skills. Sent to a real estate office for an interview, after she arrives, they tell her they have someone else in mind. After returning to the agency, Emma Lou was invited to lunch by its manager, Mrs. Blake. She was "warmed toward any suggestion of friendliness" and excited to have the chance "to make a welcome contact."

Mrs. Blake tells her about work prospects, saying that black business men had certain images for the women they hired; they wanted them pretty and light skinned. She suggests that Emma Lou go to Columbia Teacher's College to complete training for a job in the public school system. After lunch, Emma Lou began to walk along Seventh Avenue. While stopping to check her reflection, she noticed a few young black men walking by. One said to another, "There’s a girl for you ‘Fats.’" Fats replied, "Man, you know I don’t haul no coal."

Part 3 Alva

Determined to stay in New York, Emma Lou finds a job as a maid to Arline Strange, an actress "in an alleged melodrama about Negro life in Harlem." She thinks all the characters are caricatures. Arline and her brother from Chicago take Emma Lou to her first cabaret one night, where he makes her a drink from his hip flask. Emma Lou was entranced by the people dancing, and is invited by Alva, a man from another table. When the lights go up, he returns her to sit with Arline and her brother. The next morning, Alva and his roommate Braxton discuss the previous evening; agreeing that Alva did Emma Lou a favor in dancing with her.

Intrigued by the cabaret, Emma Lou talks to the stage director about being in the dance chorus. He tells her plainly the girls are chosen in part for appearance, and notes they all have lighter skin than hers. She decides to look for a new place to live, hoping to meet "the right sort of people."
One evening she goes to a casino, where she recognizes Alva. After a while she approaches him and asks if he remembers her. He politely acts as if he does, and talks and dances with her, even giving her his phone number. She calls him a couple of times before they make plans. Braxton is critical of Alva's seeing her, but he thinks, "She’s just as good as the rest, and you know what they say, ‘The Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.’"

Part 4 Rent Party

Alva generally did not take Emma Lou to parties or dances, as he didn't want his friends to meet her. He finally decides to take her to a "rent party." Usually he would take Geraldine, a woman with lighter skin, to more events where his friends were present. Used to manipulating young women for money, Alva liked Geraldine for herself. Emma Lou was very excited about the party, and worried that she would encounter more discrimination. Once there, they happened on to a conversation revolving around race: the differences between being a mulatto and a Negro, and individuals who are prejudiced or "color struck." Alva's group went on to rent party, where Emma Lou had more to drink than usual.

The next morning, her landlady told her she had to leave, as she wasn't meeting her boarding house's respectable standards. Emma Lou had consumed enough alcohol to warrant a visit from her land lady the next morning. Emma Lou thought more about Alva, who seemed kinder than others in her life, but she was aware of his manipulation.

Alva was having his own trouble with Braxton, who had no job and did not pay rent. He finally moved out, but Alva did not want Emma Lou to move in. One night the couple went to a theatre show, which included jokes about skin color. Emma Lou said to Alva, "You’re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted."

One night, after an argument with Emma Lou, Alva returned to his room to find Geraldine sleeping in his bed. She told him she was pregnant with his child.

Part 5 Pyrrhic Victory

Two years later, Emma Lou works as a personal maid, more of a companion, to Clere Sloane, a retired actress. Clere is married to Campbell Kitchen, a white writer very interested in Harlem. He encouraged the young woman to seek more education in order to achieve economic independence. She often still feels out of place, with few friends. She decides to try to see Alva, although they had stopped seeing each other. As Geraldine answers the door, Emma Lou leaves without speaking to him.

Alva and Geraldine struggled with the problem of their boy, who was born disfigured. Sometimes they wished he was dead, as he seemed to have brought trouble. Alva had become alcoholic and wasted money. Geraldine worked and saved, planning to escape.

Having moved to the Y.W.C.A., Emma Lou had found some new friends. She also was studying teaching. Her friend Gwendolyn Johnson tried to make Emma Lou feel better about her appearance, but she still struggled with it. She continued to work.

Emma Lou started seeing Benson Brown, a light-skinned man described as a "yaller nigger." His appearance seemed reason enough to see him.

Emma Lou learned that Geraldine had abandoned Alva and their son. She went to him, and this time he welcomed her to his place, to care for Alva, Jr. After six months, Emma Lou begins teaching at a Harlem public school. She helped the boy to get along, but her relationship with Alva was uneasy. At the school, Emma Lou wore a lot of make-up to disguise her dark skin, but her colleagues teased her for it. Her economic independence did not totally free her.

Deciding to leave Alva and his son, Emma Lou returns to the YWCA, and calls Benson. He announces that he and Gwendolyn had been dating. They are marrying and invite her to the wedding.
Emma Lou realizes she has spent her life running. She ran away from Boise to get away from the color prejudice. Then she left Los Angeles for similar reasons. But she decide she is not running away again. She knows there are many people like her, and she has to accept herself.

***

Wallace Thurman's first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, took its title from an old folk saying, "the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice." It is an autobiographical satire whose neurotic, dark-skinned protagonist, Emma Lou Morgan, internalizes biases against dark complexioned people after a mid-western upbringing by colorstruck relatives mimicking racist societal values. Like Thurman, Emma Lou goes to the University of Southern California and then to Harlem. But unlike Thurman, who was primarily drawn to the artistic renaissance blooming there, Emma Lou hopes Harlem will enable her to finally escape the harsh intraracial prejudice that is exacerbated by her sex and egocentrism.

Among the mundane settings of Harlem tenement buildings, employment agencies, public dance halls, rent parties, cabarets, and movie houses, Emma Lou has numerous opportunities to overcome her obsession with color and class consciousness. She is, indeed, discriminated against by both African Americans and European Americans, but not to the degree that she believes.

In a crowded one-room apartment filled with liquor gorging intellectuals resembling Langston Hughes (Tony Crews), Zora Neale Hurston (Cora Thurston), and Richard Bruce Nugent (Paul), and Thurman himself (Truman) explains intra-racial discrimination by examining the parasitic nature of humankind. He argues that "people have to feel superior to something ... [other than] domestic animals or steel machines. ...It is much more pleasing to pick some individual or group ... on the same plane.' Thus, Thurman suggests that COTWs who ostracize darker skinned African Americans merely follow a hierarchy of discrimination set by materially powerful European American people. Truman's anatomy of racism, however, is ignored by Emma Lou.

The Blacker the Berry received reviews that, while mixed, praised Thurman for his ironic depiction of original settings, characters, and themes then considered off limits for African American literary examination. Many others also criticize Thurman for emphasizing the seamier side of Harlem life.

However, Thurman was never pleased with The Blacker the Berry, and his caricature of the female protagonist, Emma Lou, shows why. Emma Lou behaves unlike traditional African American females who tend to revise rather than accept the values of both African American and European American men. After she is repeatedly degraded by light skinned Alva, Emma Lou's spiritual liberation begins only when she acknowledges the Thurmanian and Emersonian ideal that salvation rests with the individual, first expressed (in the book) by the European American Campbell Kitchen (Carl Van Vechten). In a literary context, Thurman becomes trapped in the alien body of Emma Lou and does not have the creative imagination to break her racial fixation by summoning up a female perspective. Instead, Emma Lou trades an obsession with skin color for one that is viewed by a patriarchal society as being even more perverse.

A00001 - Frank Wess, Basie Band Saxophonist and Flutist

_________________________________________________________________

Frank Wellington Wess (January 4, 1922 – October 30, 2013) was an American jazz saxophonist and flautist. 

Wess was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a school principal father and a schoolteacher mother. He began with classical music training and played in Oklahoma in high school. He later switched to jazz upon moving to Washington, D. C., and by nineteen was working with Big Bands. His career was interrupted during World War II although he did play with a military band during the period. After leaving the military, he joined Billy Eckstine's orchestra.  He returned to Washington, D. C. a few years afterwards and received a degree in flute at the city's Modern School Of Music. From 1953 on, he joined Count Basie's band, playing flute and tenor sax. He reverted to alto sax in the late 1950s, and left Basie's band in 1964. From 1959 to 1964 he won Down Beat's critic poll for flute.

He was a member of Clark Terry's big band from 1967 into the 1970s and played in the New York Jazz Quartet (with Roland Hanna).  He also did a variety of work for TV. In 1968 Wess contributed to the landmark album The Jazz Composer's Orchestra. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Wess worked with Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, Buck Clayton, Benny Carter, Billy Taylor, Harry Edison, Mel Torme, Ernestine Anderson, Louie Bellson, John Pizzarelli, Howard Alden, Dick Hyman, Jane Jarvis, Frank Vignola and was a featured member of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra.   In the 2000s, Wess released two albums with Hank Jones. In 2007, Wess was named an NEA Jazz Master by the United States National Endowment for the Arts.  

Frank Wess died from a heart attack related to kidney failure on October 30, 2013.