Black Media Reporting on Theater, Dance, and Jazz Clubs in Canada: From Shuffle along to Rockhead’s Paradise

Canada has a history of de facto Jim Crow (1911–1954). It also has a historical Black press that is intimately connected to Black America through transnational conversations, and diasporic migration. This article argues that Canada’s Black newspapers played a pivotal role in promoting Black performance during a time when they were scarcely covered in the dominant media. Drawing on news coverage from the 1920s through 1950s of black dance, musicals, and jazz clubs this article examines three case studies: Shuffle Along (1921–1924), the first all- Black Broadway musical to appear at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater, Alberta-born dancer Len Gibson (1926–2008), who revolutionized modern dance in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Montreal jazz club Rockhead’s Paradise (1928–1980), a pivotal site in the city’s Little Burgundy, a Black neighborhood that thrived in the 1930s through 1950s. The authors argue that when Black people were excluded from and/or derogatorily portrayed in the dominant media, Canada’s Black press celebrated collective achievement by authenticating Black performance. By incorporating Canada’s Black Press into conversations about Jim Crow and performance, we gain a deeper understanding of Black creative output and resistance during the period.

Advising the Race

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.

“Tan Yanks” and Black Korea

This chapter analyzes cinematic and journalistic depictions of the Korean War that centered on the role played by African American soldiers serving in integrated combat units. Heroic depictions of “Tan Yanks” in both the mainstream press and black newspapers highlighted the usefulness of an integrated military to the global ideological battle against Communism, especially in terms of winning “the hearts and minds” of the formerly colonized. This chapter demonstrates how the Korean War facilitated the articulation of an early version of the ideology that Melanie McAllister has termed “military multiculturalism,” which is evident in two Hollywood films from the 1950s: Pork Chop Hill (1959) and All the Young Men (1960). This chapter also addresses two strains of Orientalism that also surfaced on the pages of black newspapers: the first expressed an Afro-Asian sense of racial solidarity and intimacy with the Korean people as a nonwhite nation that had suffered under a Japanese colonialism that had been supported by US and European powers prior to World War II; the second took shape as a fascination with amorous relationships that had formed between black servicemen and Japanese female civilians prior to and during the Korean War and the interracial desires they embodied.

Bearing Witness While Black

Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book reveals how smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered black activists to create their own news outlets, continuing a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. It identifies three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people—slavery, lynching, and police brutality—and the journalism documenting their atrocities, generating a genealogy showing how slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the abolitionist movement; black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and civil rights movements; and smartphones of today powered the anti–police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, the book shows, is formidable and forever evolving. The text is informed by the author’s activism. Personal accounts of her teaching and her own experiences of police brutality are woven into the book to share how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices to speak up from the margins. Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly recounts the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press during the interwar years. The concluding chapter also briefly discusses the Black Press’s coverage and representations of sexuality during World War II through the Civil Rights Movement. National attention on African Americans’ struggles for civil rights inspired black newspapers to strike a more staid approach to covering news. Sex scandals, lurid crime stories, and homosexuality did not fit the picture of “respectable negroes” deserving of full citizenship. In the post-civil rights era, black newspaper circulation took a precipitous fall. Finally, the closing chapter offers a way to think about contemporary black news media by suggesting that discussions of sexuality have migrated to social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter.

Down by the Riverside

Notebook 1 argues for the centrality of movement to Richard Wright’s lesser-known novella “Down by the Riverside,” which is inspired by the labor conflicts of the Delta and the 1927 flood. An analysis of Wright’s fiction and historical documents reveals how labor conditions limited economic solidarity among the indebted. However, the flood also reveals the critical consciousness that evolved among the indebted who eventually became refugees in the relief camps. Despite the tragic story Wright tells, he offers readers a glimpse of the Event, wherein fear and guilt are broken and no longer paralyze the oppressed into inaction. Notebook 1 not only attends to the brilliance of Wright’s fiction before Native Son. It also goes beyond Wright’s story to show the debates that developed in Black newspapers over the proper objectives and strategies for reconstructing the Delta after the flood, which echoes the sabotaged need for Reconstruction decades after the Civil War.

A History of the Resilience of Black Girls

Nazera Sadiq Wright. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.Black girls have a history of resilience. Nazera Sadiq Wright, in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), analyzes accounts of the experiences of black girls from what she refers to as “youthful” girlhood to the conscious or “prematurely knowing” (44) age of 18. Setting out to recover overlooked accounts of black girlhood during the nineteenth century, a tumultuous epoch of transition for the black community, Wright uses contemporaneous literary and visual texts such as black newspapers, novels, poetry, and journals to reconstruct this lost narrative. By engaging in a close reading of these texts, in which black people, emerging from slavery, communicated with each other about personal and community goals, Wright examines the ways in which the instruction of black girls operated in between the lines of literature to convey codes of conduct to the black community. She argues that with the emergence of literature written by and for black women, the role of the black girl morphed from docile homemaker to resilient heroine for herself and her people. In discussing this more complex role, Wright does not deny that black girls were vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and hurt, but does point to a more nuanced experience. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an intervention into the African American literary canon, filling in many of the gaps in the lost history of black girlhood, making it an essential text for those “who care” (22) about black girls as they engage in the process of rewriting and redeeming the narratives of an often-forgotten population.

Constructing Cab Calloway

Cab Calloway was of the most popular jazz musicians of the 1930s and 1940s whose legacy today is complicated by his repertoire of novelty songs with references to minstrelsy, his residency at a segregated Harlem cabaret, the Cotton Club, and his marketing to white audiences by manager Irving Mills. Calloway’s sound and persona—commercial, racialized, theatrical—did not square with an emergent art discourse around jazz during the 1930s. Hit songs like “Minnie the Moocher” (1931), with its dark, minor sound world, exaggerated depictions of seedy Harlem nightlife, and cultivated use of local slang, catapulted Calloway to success and stardom while erasing him from a burgeoning narrative that defined jazz as an autonomous, high-art tradition. Drawing on an elaborate press manual prepared by Mills, Calloway’s reception in historical black newspapers, and musical analysis of recordings of “Minnie” and other lesser-known Calloway numbers, this article examines the music, marketing and reception of Calloway during his Cotton Club residency (1931–34, with sporadic appearances thereafter) to illuminate the contemporary valences of an important interwar performer. Rather than hearing Calloway’s music in terms dictated by jazz’s post-war art discourse, the article strives to locate his songs in their original time and place, and seeks to understand Calloway’s significance by exploring the construction of his public persona. The application of a lens of historical particularity reveals that Calloway’s “novelty” songs acted as powerful articulations of contemporary black life during a pivotal period of Harlem culture.