Alan Lomax

by John Szwed

  Harry Belafonte had been working on a similar idea at the same time, some of which he presented on television when he substituted for Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show for a week. Since 1954 Belafonte had been assembling his own recorded history of black music, tracing it from Africa to the slave songs, and on to the music of country and city life. RCA backed the recordings, which featured performers such as Bessie Jones, Danny Barker, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Leon Bibb, and the Hall Johnson Choir, all of whom Lomax also had in mind. (Belafonte’s documentary did not appear until 2001, when Buddah Records issued The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music, a more genteel approach to black culture than Alan envisioned.)

  When Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4, 1968, violence broke out again in a number of cities, but especially in Washington, where block after block went up in flames and the anger and despair flowed right up to the steps of the White House. Vague threats of some kind of retribution were coming from those in barbershops and the seats of government alike. The Vietnam War dragged on toward no visible end, casualties were rising, and the decay and joblessness in many cities were unrelenting, despite the promises of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Alan’s own response was a mixture of New Deal solutions, sixties calls for self-determination, and populist stump speeches. In a letter to the New York Times, he argued that while the civil rights struggle was slowly gaining ground, cultural equality lagged behind, as black Americans were still being excluded from many of their own cultural resources. The knowledge of scholars of African American culture and history was not reaching schoolchildren, he said, and he called for the media to go beyond “a few token specials and Sunday afternoon shows.” He also sent copies of his letter to local politicians, asking them for further suggestions for encouraging and supporting black history and culture. “The American Negro has created the first international musical and dance forms which are popular in every country of the globe,” he reminded them, and his research on cantometrics was mentioned as support for the fact that Africa and African America shared many cultural elements.

  Such concerns were always part of his work, but now most of his attention was focused on these cultural disparities. He recalled the moment in Black Boy where Richard Wright describes the father as seen by his son as he is leaving to go north: “Standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands . . . we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality.” Alan wanted to somehow restore dignity, creativity, and respect to that image of the sharecropper.

  Shortly before his death, Reverend King had been aiming his final efforts at the economic structure of American society and the injustices that created it. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had developed plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, and King traveled the country assembling a “multiracial army of the poor” to march on Washington to pressure Congress to enact a bill of rights for lower-income Americans. It would be something of a middle ground between the extremes of rioting and begging for justice, as well as a visible movement that would draw in groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was becoming impatient with the pace of King’s strategies, and was edging away from nonviolence. The campaign would bring together in Washington several thousand people from across the country to demand a reform of the welfare system, a decent minimum wage, education that would improve their lives, more unemployment insurance, and better distribution of surplus foods among the rural poor. King made a point of involving leaders among Puerto Ricans, poor whites, American Indians, and Mexican Americans. SCLC decided to go ahead with his plans the month after his death and got approval to stage the demonstration. On Mother’s Day, May 12, Coretta Scott King led thousands of women into Washington. They were followed by workers who began constructing Resurrection City, hundreds of wooden shacks and tents on the fifteen acres of West Potomac Park between the Reflecting Pool and Independence Avenue, and from the Lincoln Memorial to 17th Street. Nine caravans of cars, airplanes, and trains set out for Washington from different parts of the country, stopping at various cities, picking up people along the way, until there were thousands brought to the site, far more than it could hold. Just after the city was populated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and his widow (who had been at the women’s march) had his funeral procession pass Resurrection City.

  Alan was brought into the planning for the project through the work he did with Guy Carawan and SNCC, and by the young singer of folk and gospel songs, Reverend Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, who had moved from King’s group to become a SNCC official. Lomax and Kirkpatrick—who had together also performed and recorded with Pete Seeger—sketched out a cultural program for the Washington project, much of it modeled on the Henry Wallace presidential campaign. There was to be a daily gathering of leaders and teachers who could unite the people and prepare them to go back to their homes and teach others. All the local groups sending people to Washington were asked to contribute some of their best singers and musicians. Song sheets were to be prepared with the most important civil rights songs—“We Shall Not Be Moved,” “We Shall Overcome,” “I Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” A theater group was to be developed along the lines of the farm workers’ Teatro Campesino in California. There would be weekly Sunday revival meetings, sports, dance groups, bands, and discussions. Each large gathering would begin and end with a song, and there would be a song for every speech. Singing games for children would be taught and then performed onstage. Older participants could be gathered together to talk about their past and the history of their people. All of it was to be documented on film and recordings.

  Ralph Rinzler committed the Newport Foundation to help support the music and children’s programs at Resurrection City, and then negotiated with the Smithsonian Institution to provide a stage and sound system. The list of performers chosen to appear from outside the camp included Bernice and Cordell Reagon, Guy Carawan, Dock Reese, Fanny Lou Hamer of the Freedom Democratic Party, the Sea Island Singers, and a dozen singing preachers. Once the city within a city was functioning, Lomax decided at the last minute that they also needed someone who could bring together the northern ghettos and the Deep South, and called Muddy Waters in Chicago. Alan liked the idea of his band, with its Mississippi Delta roots and its electrically driven message, echoing across the pond and into the Lincoln Memorial as they stood in the same place where Martin Luther King had once spoken and where Marian Anderson had sung. Waters agreed to come, and he and his band drove in from Chicago overnight. Alan found them the next morning asleep in a car near the stage.

  Another of the projects on which he and Reverend Kirkpatrick worked was the Mule Train, the only caravan coming to Washington that would not use mechanized vehicles to get there—a plan that was bound to attract media attention and onlookers along the way. Over a hundred people set off from Marks, Mississippi, on May 13, and it took them over a month to travel five hundred miles through Alabama to Georgia. Rain, inexperience with wagons and mules, hostile whites, and equally hostile law officers all worked against them. When they reached Atlanta the carts, mules, and passengers were loaded onto a train to Alexandria, Virginia; they crossed the bridge into Washington on June 19, arriving just days before the closing of Resurrection City.

  In the aftermath, many in the movement and the press thought they had not accomplished many of their original goals. Alan, on the other hand, believed he now saw more clearly what would be needed and what he could contribute. He was thinking of a way to present the findings of his research and their implications in a practical and entertaining way that would go beyond the usual tracing of black culture to slavery and its aftermath. He wanted to put black tradition in a more positive perspective, stressing its achievements and global influence and presenting information that could not be found in any history or geography book:

  Like all
other humanists during the last five years, we have tried to make a contribution to the resolution of the black crisis in America. Since our style study can pick out social norms in the most evocative of culture’s communications and regions of culture, it is possible for us to translate these findings of social science directly into educational material for wide audiences, both literate and non-literate.... We can offer the same level of fact, of perspective and of healing self-knowledge to other neglected cultural traditions, such as that of the North American Indians. In this way we feel that cantometrics can, on the one hand, become a dependable tool for the social scientist and, on the other, play a therapeutic and educational role in the social theatre.

  In a report on his work to NIMH he openly tied his new ideas for research to the political turmoil around them:

  The Black Identity Project was conceived in the spring of 1968 as an answer to an urgent information and education problem in the United States. Blacks were being told and were feeling that they had a separate black tradition, but the range, nature and scope of this tradition was left pretty much undefined. Education in “blackness” in the popular terms that reach the people was a pastiche of many disparate elements—the glories of the West African kingdoms, the politics of the Black Muslims, the teaching of Swahili, the agonies of slavery, the struggle for liberation, the story of successful black Americans and the development of jazz and the blues. Little or nothing was being said about the mainstream of black history as found in the studies of ethnologists, archaeologists, and folklorists. The remarkable unity and integrity of African culture, the story of its spread across the world of the African continent and its almost total survival in the New World was not known to the general black public.

  Even before Resurrection City was abandoned, Alan approached the Ford Foundation about supporting a series of projects concerning black culture and identity. He also contacted the J. Walter Thompson Agency, the influential advertising firm, about turning the research materials he was developing into public service radio messages, comic books, pamphlets, children’s toys, and television programs. It could all be done, he thought, in three to six months. Faced with the possibility of another long, hot summer of protests and demonstrations, both groups agreed to support him. Ford gave him $50,000 to develop the project, and the Thompson people said they would help him prepare scripts and approach their own clients about underwriting his ideas. Lomax put together an advisory group that included John Henrik Clarke, the historian and editor of Freedomways; Raoul Abdul, a concert and opera singer who had been Langston Hughes’s secretary; and Alan’s cantometrics staff. Reverend Kirkpatrick planned to approach Holiness churches to bring the large body of fundamentalists into the black progressive movement.

  Problems soon arose. The advertising agency did not come through with the help Alan expected, and the media people wanted more money than was available. Characteristically Alan said he would do it himself, and in a big way. Books and pamphlets were to be written and edited, some of which would be distributed through the National Committee of Negro Churchmen; a film would show the contribution of African Americans to world dance and would be shown on television; a book on black cultural style in America would be written. But the first task was to develop what Alan called the Black Encyclopedia of the Air: twenty-eight public service spots for radio, each a little over a minute in length, to be narrated by Jack Walker, a popular radio DJ. Some of the spots would relate historical facts unfamiliar to most people (stories about black explorers, liberators, cowboys, inventors, and medical researchers), but most concerned music and stylistic features of African and African American life (large choruses in Africa, the early invention of polyphony by the Pygmies and Bushmen, the African roots of the blues and of Ray Charles’s music). Some of the spots made daring sonic links, matching up West African hunting songs with the blues, or comparing Ethiopian military bands to avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler’s group. The overall point was to show that there were continuities between African and African American culture that were distinctive and had survived the brutal facts of American history.

  Alan wrote the scripts for the spots, had them recorded on a twelve-inch LP record, and sent them out free to four hundred radio stations that served minority communities. News releases were mailed to African American newspapers and entertainment trade magazines. The series was popular wherever it was aired, and stations asked for more and longer versions. Requests for copies of the record came in from prisons, schools, hospitals, National Educational Radio, Jet magazine, and the National Council of Churches.

  By November Alan and Raoul Abdul had also compiled an anthology of what they called “black soul poetry.” Titled 3000 Years of Black Poetry, it was dedicated to Langston Hughes, who had died the previous year. It included verse and song lyrics from a wide range of African peoples: modern African poets like Senghor, Diop, Okara, and Soyinka; texts from ancient and modern Egypt and the Moorish world; black poets of Europe and South America; Creoles of Louisiana and the West Indies; folk poetry from the United States; and a large sampling of American poets and writers from Phyllis Wheatley to Sterling Brown, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Ted Jones, Nikki Giovanni, and Martin Luther King Jr. It was a well-chosen and representative collection, and nothing like it had been presented before. But Alan had a greater goal in mind than merely assembling an anthology: he wanted to use what he had learned in cantometrics and phonotactics to identify the poetic principles that characterized all these poets of Africa and the black diaspora. But without having the means to enclose actual recordings in the book to serve as illustrations, he was forced to try to express these stylistic features in words that did not fully convey what he heard in that poetry and speech. Collecting and publishing texts was no longer enough for him. Being forced to write about the spoken word was frustrating: “It was as if we were back in Bishop Percy’s time on the Scots-English border.”

  Cultural issues continued to surface in the late 1960s and early 1970s as another dimension of the civil rights struggle, both as a way of understanding the differences between social groups and as part of the battle for the right of an ethnic group to celebrate its own cultural heritage. If there ever was an apt time for a folklorist or a social scientist to communicate the meaning and importance of culture to the public or to build research projects around these ideas, it was now. But it was one thing for such ideas to be presented by a person of color; when whites spoke of behaviors that had powerful meanings within the black community but were a source of misunderstanding between races, it became tricky at best, and might be decried as racist, especially by the black middle class.

  Yet Alan was not to be dissuaded by what he saw as petty politics by those who did not necessarily have the black masses’ best interests at heart. In his search for funding he turned to the National Institute of Mental Health’s Center for the Study of Urban and Metropolitan Problems, asking them to help him produce a series of small books on the cultural histories of all American ethnic groups, including those from northern and southern Europe. Though the civil rights movement was the focus of his concern, he felt that the solution to the country’s internal crisis lay in some form of multicultural awareness, a process of making all peoples aware of their histories, and creating pride in what America had achieved with its cultural mix. At a moment when some on the left were stressing areas of black cultural and moral superiority, a position that Alan had partially embraced in the past, he now vowed that he wanted no part of a solution that came at the expense of other people’s cultural achievements. All Americans had been nurtured within a shared history, albeit an unequal and often violent one.

  Lomax proposed a series of two-day conferences that would feature talks by experts on each ethnic group, followed by long discussions, with court stenographers transcribing the proceedings so that chapters could be written and a text created and edited on the spot. They would develop handbooks of the resources of and possibilities for each culture, combined with lists of the be
st books, articles, recordings, and films, with recommendations for setting up local training programs. Alan had in mind overcoming the bias in the education system that favored northern European cultural heritage, and the corresponding failure to see the importance of the black oral heritage and folkways:

  The present generation are the creators of a rich folk tradition that is virtually unknown to their children. That is the generation that produced jazz, the blues, and the popular American dances, but also the folkways, the legends, the web of tradition that lies behind this better known material [that] was largely undocumented and unknown. The value, the life styles, and the lore of this parent generation must be understood and appreciated by white and black alike before any true resolution of the present urban conflict can healthfully take place. At the present moment, in spite of strong interest in black culture, the generation that contributed so much to the building of America is being treated as if what it represents is something to be ashamed of.

  In his passion for the cultural history of black America, Lomax appointed himself a watchdog of the arts. He was sometimes offended by young white writers and folksingers who declared themselves one-person archives of black song (those that Amiri Baraka called “keepers of yesterday’s blues”) and who performed them awkwardly and near to what Lomax regarded as minstrelsy: “Too much tar brush!” When the National Association of Jazz Educators began publication of a journal in 1970 and Alan was asked to be a contributor, he wrote the editor accusing him of continuing the white tradition of taking jazz from blacks and using it as their own. There was not a black face, name, or reference in the issue of the magazine he read: “I hope Jelly Roll and Bunk Johnson and King Oliver haunt you.”

  He took any number of public issues seriously, often becoming active in political campaigns, as when he and Margaret Mead were asked to help Hubert Humphrey improve his speaking style during the presidential race in 1968. Alan continued to oppose the war in Vietnam, going to demonstrations and writing letters to members of Congress and major newspapers urging an end to it. He and Johnny Faulk hosted a fund-raiser for Students for a Democratic Society, and he testified at the hearings of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare when the committee was considering placing a newly proposed American Folklore Foundation within the Smithsonian.