Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 621

Biography of Chicago Defender is Incredible Story of a Powerhouse Defender of Black Rights

Biography of Chicago Defender is Incredible Story of a Powerhouse Defender of Black Rights
by Todd Steven Burroughs | @ToddStevenBurr1| special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

A review of Ethan Michaeli's new book, The Defender: How The Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America: From the Age of Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Telling the "biography" of a Black newspaper, particularly a major one that served a national audience in its prime, has been seldom tried because it is a feat worthy of both Hercules and Job. The scanning of thousands of articles and pages were required, not to mention the juggling of hundreds of names, places and events.
But when the Black newspaper involved is spiritually embryoed by a speech by Frederick Douglass, and, once born, crosses over into historical territory that starts with Ida B. Wells-Barnett and ends almost a century later with a Chicago politician who becomes the first Black president of the United States, the story simply must be told.
Ethan Michaeli, a White Jewish man who was a former investigative reporter and copyeditor for the newspaper in the 1990s, thankfully, chose to be at the center of a perfect storm of historical circumstance of which to create this book. He had the enthusiastic support of the newspaper's historic owners and executives; the entire historical record of The Defender achieved and indexed in a major city library; autobiographies, biographies and memoirs, as well as select unpublished manuscripts and oral history interviews of several Defender staffers. He also accessed more than a score of well-researched histories of Chicago's Black communities.
The Defender book chronicles well the lives of its heroes: founder Robert S. Abbott; heir and Defender builder John Sengstacke; journalistic firebrand and civil rights activist Wells-Barnett, editor extraordinaire Louis Martin and the globe-trotting journalist Ethel Payne, the first lady of the Black Press. Geography and history collide and collude well here, with The Defender-the paper that jumpstarted the Great Migration-seen undoubtedly an essential part of a major city big enough to house the gangster Al Capone in the 1920s and Harold Washington, the man who ultimately became the city's first Black mayor in 1983.
The incredible scope of this book is only marred by several nitpicks and one major issue. For example, it is possible that many of the columns Michaeli describes by African-American luminaries such as Mary McLeod Bethune and W.E.B. Du Bois as Defender products were probably syndicated. Also, there is very little in this book about the Chicago-headquartered Nation of Islam or its national newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, a clear competitor to The Defender in the former's heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.
And where is any serious discussion of perhaps The Defender's most famous op-ed columnist, a journalist/poet/short story phenomenon named Langston Hughes and his famous and important fictional character, Jesse B. Semple? Hughes is only used to make one political point here, and then he's gone. The foremost problem: It's sadly clear-and perhaps inevitable, under the circumstances spelled out in the book's sub-title-that the real reason a major commercial publisher accepted this topic is to tell an "acceptable" Black liberal story of mainstream Black politics that leads to the happy ending of Barack Obama's moderate-at-best presidency.
The historic militancy of the Black press-particularly the often-contentious power The Defender wielded, a paper that fought against Marcus Garvey on one end and for martyred Black Panther Fred Hampton on the other, a paper that the Jim Crow South attempted to ban-is worth 10 Barack Obamas and (his aide) David Axelrods. It doesn't need Obama's clearly mandatory saga as a wrap-around.
Michaeli's outstanding achievement needs to be repeated by interested historians. Needed are similar massive century-spanning "biographies" of other Black periodicals that held significant power during Jim Crow and after, including: Ebony/Jet/Negro Digest/Black World; the Washington, D.C.-based NNPA News Service; The Pittsburgh Courier; The Afro-American newspaper chain, The New York Amsterdam News and The Norfolk (Va.) Journal and Guide. If these proposed books can be filled with currently locked-away documentation, if archives and personal-papers collections can be made ready and organized and newspapers properly microfilmed (and perhaps digitized), more extraordinary detail of Black America's 20th century political and social history, city by city, can be written from this perspective.
In this digital social media era in which seemingly every Black person in the world naively - and perhaps more than a little arrogantly - finds in the mirror an armchair advocacy journalist of 140 characters, this sweeping story of journalistic grit, courage and sacrifice is extremely important to tell. Defender journalists were risking their lives, fulltime for low pay, on the street, with the story. They shaped Black history on the run in print as well as conferring behind closed doors with Black America's leaders. Black newspapers like The Chicago Defender represented 20th century Black America at its very best-socially militant, personally engaged, and politically powerful.
And Black newspapers publicly exhibited the wisdom of how to use that power. This book is the story that Black Chicago and the Black press earned and deserved, through its gallons of historic ink, blood and sweat, all mixed in to politically form a century.
***
Todd Steven Burroughs, Ph.D. is a historian of 20th century Black media. He is also a former reporter, columnist and editor with the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service and a former freelance correspondent with the New Jersey edition of The Afro-American newspaper chain. An independent researcher and writer based in Newark, N.J., he is the author of "Son-Shine on Cracked Sidewalks," an audiobook on Amiri Baraka and Ras Baraka through the eyes of the 2014 Newark mayoral campaign. Burroughs is the co-editor, along with Jared Ball, of "A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable's Malcolm X" and the co-author, with Herb Boyd, of "Civil Rights: Yesterday & Today."

Achille Mbembe: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality

'Achille Mbembe, political scientist and philosopher, speaks on the 20th century Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (Martinique) as part of a 2-day workshop featuring collaborative reading, rendering of recent research, and mapping of new directions in the study of anticolonial/critical/ comparative psychiatries from two of the greatest minds: Frantz Fanon and Louis Mars (Haiti), who have never been studied in tandem, even though both engaged with mental health through the lens of racial alienation, anthropological encounters, colonial pathologies, and pan-African intertextuality with continental philosophy.' -- +Duke Franklin Humanities Institute  

13th Century Economics Will Fail The Digital Economy

According to Douglas Rushkoff, digital companies like Google are "using a 13th century corporate operating system to run digitally enabled businesses. What I'm arguing is that 13th century model is obsolete. It was based on going to South America and enslaving people and taking their precious metals. It doesn't work for a digital economy. It doesn't work for an economy where people are buying and selling and trading and making videos and exchanging value." --  +Big Think 

Nigeria Projected to be Largest Free Digital TV Platform Globally

'Nigeria has been projected to be the largest free digital television platform globally with an estimated 30 million TV households. This comes ahead of the completion of the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting expected to happen in June 2017, Nigerian Television Authority reports.' -- +africanews  

Am I Black Enough For You? The Legacy of Billy Paul by Mark Anthony Neal

Am I Black Enough For You? The Legacy of Billy Paulby Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
There is just something soulful about the name Billy Paul, the stage persona of Paul Williams, the veteran Jazz and Soul vocal stylist, who recently transitioned at age 81.  For many, Billy Paul conjures memories of one of the great pop ballads on the 1970s, his 1972 chart topping single “Me & Mrs. Jones,” which became the first number one single for the fledgling Philadelphia International Records (PIR), and the only pop hit of Paul’s career.  History unfairly remembers Paul as a one-hit wonder, though he was the very foundation of the iconic Philly Sound of the 1970s, bridging the region’s jazz traditions with the burgeoning aspirational Soul and Dance music that producers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff became most recognizable for.
Billy Paul was 37 years-old when “Me & Mrs Jones” was released. With the song’s success, many referred to Paul as an “overnight” sensation, but the Philadelphia native’s first recordings were done in the 1950s and for brief moment in the 1960s he was a member of Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes.   Paul, in fact,  recorded two albums with Gamble and Huff, including Live at the Cadillac Club (1969) on the Gamble label and later Ebony Woman (1970).
As classic as “Me & Mrs Jones” was, what made Billy Paul memorable was a signature vocal style that nimbly caressed notes in an era when so many of his male peers were punching notes as if making some emphatic statement about Black masculinity.  Paul’s  distinctive vocal style  was premised on his ability to sing naturally in a higher vocal register, as opposed to male peers  who sang in a falsetto to reach those high notes.  Paul noted that his emotive style was largely influenced by Black women singers such as Nancy Wilson, Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, though he also mentioned Billy Stewart and Jimmy Scott as inspirations.  “I developed my own phrasing, especially from female singers because they could sing high range without falsetto” Paul  told the Bay State Banner in 1978.
But Paul also recalled conversations with John Coltrane when both were cutting their teeth in the Philadelphia Jazz scene in the 1950s: "So in my case, that meant singing like a horn player. I'd always been a John Coltrane fan--he was from Philly; you know, and he told me once he wanted to be a singer and that's why he played the way he did. Well, I sang the way he blew after what he said, and I knew it was right."
When Gamble and Huff were tapped by Clive Davis and CBS records to create a Black boutique label to compete with Motown and Stax, the duo often leaned on talent that were known entities and who had some seasoning in the industry.  Paul, Harold Melvin and The Bluenotes, and The O’Jays, who logged the first Gold singles for the new label, were all longtime veterans of the industry, who had worked on various Gamble and Huff label ventures prior to the launch of Philadelphia International Records (PIR).
If  the success of “Me & Mrs. Jones” was a surprise to the industry, it was not one to Gamble and Huff, who had long known Paul to be an agile and adept interpreter of jazz and pop standards, as borne out of the songs that appear on those early albums where Paul covers Sinatra’s “That’s Life”, the iconic “Somewhere” from West Side Story, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” ‘Proud Mary”--evocative of neither the Creedence original or Ike & Tina Turner hit--and what might be a definitive cover of Nina Simone’s signature “Feeling Free” that I can’t imagine, Gregory Porter didn’t have in his collection when he recorded the track on his debut Water (2010).
As Paul told the Los Angeles Sentinel in 1973, “They know me, they know what I do best” and what Paul did best was reinterpret an expanded American songbook, that included Lennon and McCartney, Carole King, Jimmy Webb and Bernie Taupin, alongside Bunny Sigler, Dexter Wansel, and Gamble and Huff, who penned “Me & Mrs. Jones” with Cary Gilbert.  Billy Paul was never intended to drive the Soul Train, as it were, but rather be the steady album producer that would help Gamble and Huff attract and maintain a mature Black audience, who might not have been interested in staying too late at the discothèque, because they had other business to handle--and still had to make it to church or their jobs in the morning.
While 360 Degrees of Billy Paul,  Harold Melvin & Blue Notes and The O'Jays Back Stabbers were the albums that established Philadelphia International Records as a brand of significance, the very first album released by the label was Paul’s Going East (1971), which remains an obscure classic.  On the album Paul offers  jazz covers of Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” and Eugene McDaniels’s  “Compared to What?,” and a simply beautiful rendition of Jimmy Webb’s “This Is Your Life,”; Paul closes the album with the Gamble and Huff ballad “Love Buddies” -- surely for the Gown and Sexy -- and Rodgers and Hart’s “There a Small Hotel.”  
Going East is introduced by vocalist Nancy Wilson, who appears in a photo with Paul on the back of the album jacket, providing a very real indication of who Paul’s audience was; Wilson recorded close to 70 albums between 1959 and 2006, largely filled with interpretations of the American Songbook, producing only two singles that broke into the top-20. Wilson remains a beloved vocalist amongst certain generations of Black and White audiences, and this was for the most part Billy Paul’s trajectory, save the accident of “Me & Mrs. Jones.”
The quandary of Paul’s sudden success was initially confronted when Gamble and Huff chose “Am I Black Enough For You?” as the follow-up single to “Me & Mrs. Jones,” which rather famously stalled at #73 on the pop charts.  As John A. Jackson writes in his fine social history of Philly Soul, the song was “a defiant paean to black pride and resolve” adding that “the relentless refrain of the song’s title ‘Am I Black Enough for You?’ would not endear itself to the massive white audience that awaited Billy Paul’s next release.” (A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul).
With “Am I Black Enough for You,” Billy Paul embodied what would be the on-going tension at Philadelphia International Records, that of being able to sell records to a broad mainstream audience, while still articulating Gamble and Huff’s calls for Black progress and self-determination -- how to shake asses like Motown and commit publicly to Social Justice in a manner like Al Bell’s iteration of Stax. Where The O’Jays somehow found that middle ground -- Ship Ahoy, their follow-up to Backstabbers included “For the Love of Money,” one of the best known dance tracks of the period, as the album’s title gave a knowing nod to the Transatlantic Slave Trade -- Paul would never again be a viable crossover artist.  None of Paul’s albums would chart higher than  #88 and only one of his singles would even hit the top-10 on the R&B charts.  Yet, more than any artist on the label, Billy Paul would be the primary vehicle for Gamble and Huff’s most strident--and controversial--political messages.
Indeed, one of the most poignant tracks on 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, “I’m Just a Prisoner,” which anticipates the Prison Industrial Complex and the “New Jim Crow,” highlights  the on-going strategy to package Paul’s albums with what became the label’s mantra “The Message is in the Music.”  With songs like the “War of the Gods,” the ten-minute long title track to the followup to 360 Degrees of Billy Paul,  “Black Wonders of the World,” (Got My Head on Straight, 1974) which aggregates two centuries of Black American history over the course of eight minutes, or Paul’s 1976 cover of Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Let ‘Em In,” which opens with a sample from Malcolm X’s “hoodwinked” speech, and surely must be the first pop recording to feature the leader’s voice, the message becomes a prominent feature of Billy Paul albums.  As Paul reflected around the time of the release of War of the Gods, “Whites have always been into albums...but now Blacks are into albums…It’s been like that...especially after Marvin Gaye came out with What’s Going On.” (Chicago Defender, 1973).
As such the highlight of Billy Paul’s career at Philadelphia International Records was When Love is New (1975).  Side one of the album which features dance tracks that celebrate the power of Black community (“People Power”), implores the United States to live up to its ideals on the eve of the Bicentennial (“America (We Need the Light)”), and highlights the influence Black consumer spending (“Let the Dollar Circulate”).   Yet ironically, it was the album’s second side, filled with stellar ballads like “I Want Cha’ Baby” and the timeless “When Love is New” that generated the most controversy.  The three-song suite of the second side was closed by “Let’s Make a Baby,” a stepper number, that a few skittish Black radio stations were ambivalent about playing because of its so-called “obscene” title and theme.  The song’s messaging was part of Gamble and Huff’s on-going push for stable, patriarchal Black families, as Gamble wrote on the back jacket of When Love is New, “Let’s keep making babies so we can have a great, beautiful, righteous, meek, but strong nation.” Never before has an anti-Choice message been rendered so soulfully.
By the time Paul released First Class (1979),  his final album for  PIR, the label itself was only a shadow of what it represented during its peak between 1973-1976.  Paul recorded a few more albums for majors through the 1980s, and continued to tour throughout his life, releasing several live recordings on his own label.  Paul was introspective about his career, even in the closing moments of his time at PIR.  As he prepared for the recording of First Class, he told the Bay State Banner “You pay dues for not sounding like everybody else, but then what good is being a star? What happens when your life as a star is over?...the bottom line is your musicianship if you want to survive, so I shape my singing around how I feel about the music."
Billy Paul might have taken one for the team, in the aftermath of “Me & Mrs Jones,” but his contributions to the tradition of vibrant and sophisticated Soul music will be a reminder that not all sacrifices are for naught.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities. Neal is the host of the weekly podcast Left of Black, produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center and the Center for Arts, Digital Culture & Entrepreneurship at Duke University, where Neal is Professor of African-American Studies and English.

Practically Speaking: Black Women's Expo & the Underserved Consumer Base of Black Women

'In this installment of Practically Speaking, host Audra Wilson talks to founder Merry Green about the roots of the Black Women's Expo, as well as the underserved consumer base of Black Women.' -- Vocalo

#TheSpin: Beyonce's #Lemonade + Harriett's $20 + the Death of a Purple Prince

On this episode of #TheSpin host Esther Armah talks with Professor Blair LM Kelley and DJ Scholar Lynnee Denise about Beyonce's #Lemonade, the proposed $20 Bill bearing Harriet Tubman's image and the sudden death of Prince Rogers Nelson.  

Visually Speaking: Deborah Willis on Framing Beauty in African-American Visual Culture

'An exploration led by professor Cheryl Finley on the impact that Dr. Deborah Willis has had on Black photography and visual archival studies.' -- +Schomburg Center  

Mixing #Lemonade--James Blake: "Wilhelm Scream"

Sonics and Visual for "The Wilhelm Scream" from #Lemonade Collaborator James Blake.

Mixing #Lemonade--Khalil Joseph: "Until The Quiet Comes" + Flying Lotus

A Short Film for Flying Lotus's "Until the Quiet Comes" from director and #Lemonade Collaborator Khalil Joseph.