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Transcripts from
Harlem Speaks

August 25, 2005 • Herb Boyd

GREG THOMAS: One had to do with this connection between writers, black American writers in particular, and the Left; and also about jazz and the Midwest. What makes the Midwest such a fertile area for the development of jazz?

HERB BOYD: Ok. First question. When you look at the. And certainly in my life, it's been true. I had about four or five things that I just had to do as a kid. I had to have my music; I had to have my literature; I had to have my sports. (they laugh) Had to have my sports, 'cause at one time, I thought that I would have a shot at the Detroit Tigers, you know? I was really... Couldn't hit the curve ball, that was one of the problems, you know. But I've had baseball on my mind, continues to be on my mind; I love baseball a lot. Basketball too, track, what have you. So sports had to be there. I had to have my music, my literature, sports. And then eventually would come in the politics, the whole activism. And I was surrounded by a lot of young people who taught me. I know when the whole civil rights movement was going down, I was- worked in the military at the beginning of it, you know. Of course, many people look at now, with the Emmett Till situation out there, as his death, his murder being a catalyst for the civil rights movement. Of course, you cannot forget or ignore Brown versus Board of Education, as well as the- three months after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parks, you know, in Montgomery. So there's kind of a connection there. The point being is that, you know, you look at the example of my life, 'cause I got involved in writing... I guess I always had the James Baldwin thing happening in my life. I just- I used to carry in my back pocket all the time, if I could get it in there, you know, one of his small books, like No Name in the Street, Nobody Knows My Name, and particularly the essays, in which he talked about Harlem. So Harlem- those are the first images I had of Harlem. And always with Harlem was connected with the Harlem Renaissance. So those writers, you know, there was a proliferation of their works all across the country, so invariably, you ran into them in some anthology.

(Thomas: Mm-hm)

So, like, Ann Petry, for example, and reading The Street, again, it put me in touch with, like, 116th Street. I could visualize, you know, exactly what that was, you know? And one day I was gonna go there and see for myself-although it was pretty wretched scene, as she painted it. But it had a certain kind of musical vitality, listening as(?) she talked about the nightclubs and everything. And that would be true later on, as I read the- you know, Chester Himes. You know, you read, like, his books, Cotton Comes to Harlem, or Pink Toes, or (inaudible).

THOMAS: (Over Boyd) They turned it into a move. Right, right.

BOYD: Well, yeah, so right. A Rage in Harlem, also.

THOMAS: Mm-hm.

BOYD: So those kind of books, again, began to give me that contextual thing, the connection with that community. So you always had these writers out there. And if you look at Ellison; and Wright, to some extent; Baldwin; Frank Yerby; Willard Motley-all of these writers, you know, who were coming just in post-World War One- between World War One and World War II- certainly, during the Depression-when you had these writers out there who did not have any form of employment. So many of them were picked up, Loren, by the WPA,

(Schoenberg: Mm-hm)

the Works Progress Administration. And they were part of the Federal Writers' Project. So that has to be seen as germinal, as seminal, in terms of who were these writers who were connected with the Federal Writers' Program? Many of them were on the Left. They were coming out of the socialist and the communist movements in this country. I think- I spent a lotta time with Gordon Parks. And Gordon was a part of the Civilian Conservation Corps. That's the CCC camps that they had, you know, during the Depression, and also provided work for a number of itinerant laborers and everything. So Gordon Parks ended up going there and to just hear him(?), in his book, A Choice of Weapons, he talks about that experience. So again, you know, Gordon- I wouldn't necessarily say he was on the Left as much as some of the others, because he had no political affiliation(?) (inaudible) but he had this capacity of moving around and being in touch with all of these other artists out there. And you cannot ignore Jacob Lawrence, we can't ignore Romare Bearden, some of the painters and the- certainly, the poets, too. We cannot forget the poets, and the playwrights that were doing... I think of the life of Canada Lee, again; or Paul Robeson.

THOMAS: There's a new book about Canada Lee out.

BOYD: Yes. There's a new book out there, yes. Mona Smith has done wonderful job on that, and... Canada Lee, for those of you who don't know, is a very, very fine actor. Not too long ago, there was a film on the... What was it? I think it was Turner Classic Movies. Lifeboat. And this is one of- Canada Lee is a black man on the boat. And this is just a riveting situation, in terms of, like, who's gonna survive here, you know? And the ingenuity... Canada Lee was sometimes given some deplorable scripts. But he transcended these scripts. And (inaudible) of black actors going back- Rex Ingram is another very fine actor. But he was given these here lemons, but they made lemonade (inaudible), you know. Stepin Fetchit, even, to some extent. Although, you know, you have to consider the limitations. You know, what Hollywood, what the whole publishing industry at that time. Like, how many writers are out there? So you had- Wright, Ellison and Baldwin, they were kinda like the pinnacle, the three(?)... Where were black women writers at that time? You know? We had had a history, going all the way back to Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, you know; Pauline Hopkins, you know; going all the way back to the turn of the century writers, where we had a number of black women writers who expressed themselves. (inaudible voice) So that later on, when Ann Petry comes along, she's at the same period, but she didn't get any kind of recognition whatsoever. And of course, you know, Dorothy West; you know, Zora Neale Hurston, you can't forget her and Their Eyes Were Watching God. But this is all in nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-five, nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-six. So I think that black writers got a lot of play at that time because they were writing these big novels, and they had a lot of social realism embedded there. Richard Wright in particular. I mean, Native Son, when it came out, I mean, it rocked this nation. And that's, what? 1939, 1940. So you had Native Son out there, and later, he would come out with Black Boy, which would be kind of the- well, one is the fictional and the other is the non-fictional aspects, and how he brought these things together. He begins to personify the Leftist writer, and eventually, push it right out of this country. About 1946, 1947, he's living in Paris. You know, so he had suffered- a number of African-American writers who had fled this country as early as the 1920s. When you talk about Sidney Bechet, when you talk about Josephine Baker. You know, by 1925, Josephine Baker is the toast of Paree. You know, she's at the Folies Bergere, she's doing it over there. And you have these jazz musicians, who are in and around her. So they began to represent, to some extent, this continuance, you know, of this direct expression that you could not do here. Paul Robeson had to go abroad. He had to go abroad. There was no way he'd get the kinda work here that he wanted. So back(?) to like, sojourn in London and express himself on the stage there, he gets this here international reputation. So again, you have the Left in the theater. With Langston Hughes out there, Langston was always, you know, somewhere involved in one of these political formations. I think of the CRC; talk about this whole Civil Rights Conference; this William Patterson, who later wrote the book, you know, We Charge Genocide. So these are- Louise Thompson, who was connected with Langston Hughes, and went to Russia in the 1920s, 1922, when all these African-Americans when to Russia to make this film, you know, on the African-American experience, only to be told by the Russians, "We know more about it than you do." So- which is absolutely, ironically crazy, you know, that they could any more about our experience than we do. But anyway, the whole project flip-flopped and never flew.

So you had these Left writers out here who represent for me the whole nucleus that later on, you have other- the more popular commercial aspects, or the commodification. And then later on, into the 19- civil rights movement, it extended opportunities for writers and everything. But I think the Left... Louis Burnham, I think of Louis Burnham. People who were writing for- a number of the publications of John Henrik Clarke. Just read Harold Cruse's book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. And there you can get a full gallery, a litany of the writers who were, in some extent, involved in- beginning as early as the turn of the century, with DuBois and Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, you know, right on down into nineteen-hundred-and-thirties, with a number of these writers who were coming out of the Communist Party and the socialist movement, who were part of magazines like Masses and Masses and Mainstream, who, by the nineteen-hundred-and-forties then, you know... Just like, Stretch Johnson was a very important individual, Howard "Stretch" Johnson. And Stretch Johnson, he was just a really unique individual, because again, I mean, talk about people straddling these worlds. Here was someone who, by day, organized for the Communist Party; and by night, he was dancing in front of Duke Ellington band at the Cotton Club. So this is in the 1920s, you know. And all these broadcasts was coming on NBC at that time. So he(?) broadcast from the Cotton Club with the Duke Ellington band there, and out front would be Stretch Johnson and his two sisters. So that's what he's doing by night. But in the daytime, he's living right up there where we live, on 146th Street, between St. Nicholas and Convent. He lived right in that neighborhood, and was organizing members of the Communist Party at that time, to show his versatility in working both from a political and a cultural standpoint, you know. So that was very. That's kind of like a nice connection and transition. Of course, a number of them did it, but not as well as Stretch. Stretch was remarkable.