8. “Glenn Beck: Obama Is a Racist.” CBS News Web site. July 29, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/glenn-beck-obama-is-a-racist/.
9. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9.
10. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), RosettaBooks e-book edition (2005), 15.
Part One: A New Culture, 1963–1979
Chapter One
Rainbow Power: Morrie Turner and the Kids
A Note on Interviews
For this book I conducted dozens of personal interviews. In instances where a quote is not accompanied by a footnote, it comes from a personal interview.
1. Franklin’s father was serving in the war. But Schulz never really developed the Franklin character, perhaps stung by Black criticism that Franklin (at least in the black-and-white dailies) did not look much different from Pigpen. In 1977, he admitted to an interviewer, “I think it would be wrong for me to attempt to do racial humor because what do I know about what it is like to be black?”
Mort Walker also consulted with Turner before introducing Lt. Jack Flap in 1970. Walker was a Nixonite but clearly loved Flap’s character. In Flap’s very first appearance in October 1970, the goateed, Afroed, fist-pumpingly proud officer yelled at Sarge, “How come there’s no Blacks in this honkie outfit?!” It reportedly remains one of Colin Powell’s favorite comic strips of all time. Walker says he immediately lost ten to fifteen newspapers with that strip.
2. Christopher P. Lehman, The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 1, 3–4.
3. The shaved head was the mark of a lice-prone ghetto child.
4. Outcault’s later strip Pore Lil Mose, starring a Black country boy come to the big city, simply made plain the debt early comics owed to minstrelsy.
5. Herriman’s biraciality—his birth to Creole New Orleans parents was confirmed twenty-five years after his death—has recently caused a reassessment of his entire corpus of work. It became a cause célèbre when Ishmael Reed dedicated his classic 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo to “George Herriman, Afro-American, who created Krazy Kat.” The last word on the topic could be Jeet Heer’s essay “The Kolors of Krazy Kat” in Krazy and Ignatz: The Complete Full-Page Comic Strips, 1935–1936 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005), 8.
6. For a fascinating genealogy of how the name “Mose” passed from signifying “a particular type of rough, rowdy, and often dandified urban white youth,” “an American urban hero,” to becoming the domesticated blackface husband to Aunt Jemima, see David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1991), 99–100.
7. In 2009 Niall Ferguson launched a blogworthy dustup when he compared Obama to Felix the Cat, saying, “Felix was not only black. He was very very lucky.” When some called him on it, Ferguson got none other than Henry Louis Gates Jr. to clear him of racial wrongdoing. Gates wrote, “Felix’s blackness, like Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color … You are safe on this one.” But cartoon historians might point Gates and Ferguson to such late-1920s and −1930s cartoons as Uncle Tom’s Crabbin’ or Mickey’s Mellerdrammer, just two examples of the ways blackface design and blackface minstrelsy easily fed each other.
8. Henry T. Sampson’s survey That’s Enough, Folks! Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900–1960 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998) summarizes hundreds of examples, including the most famous of them, Warner Bros.’ so-called Censored Eleven. Many of the most offensive cartoons of this era have been suppressed since the late 1960s. Their presence remains controversial, as evidenced in a 2008 YouTube controversy in which many of the Censored Eleven cartoons were removed from the site. A large underground market has developed among animation enthusiasts for bootlegged copies of these cartoons and hundreds more like them. Some call their inaccessibility censorship and blame a regime of multiculturalist corporate political correctness. Others collect them like some do racist toys, as reminders of how times have changed. The NAACP’s position was “that the cartoons are despicable. We encourage the films’ owners to maintain them as they are—that is, locked away in their vaults.”
9. Lehman argues in The Colored Cartoon that jazz was key to both characters. Mickey’s famous first sound appearance in Steamboat Willie (1928) was set to a tune based on the minstrel song “Zip Coon.” He also argues that Tex Avery infused Bugs with a Black aesthetic of folktale trickster moxie and urban bebop cool.
10. Characters of color did still appear in the adventure comics, mostly as bumbling sidekicks, primitive enemies, or both. In this sense, they often followed the European comics, such as Hergé’s Tintin series, informed by an imperialist imagination. Milton Caniff’s invention of the salacious hapa-Chinese pirate leader the Dragon Lady for Terry and the Pirates took race-typing in a different direction.
11. The rise of the Asian American movement was still three years into the future as well.
12. In that regard Campbell was following in a tradition that had dated back to eighteenth-century Black painters like Joshua Johnson and Robert Duncanson.
13. In a May 1970 strip for Negro Digest, Turner had a white man at the beach hearing the same words from a conch shell!
14. Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday), 1.
15. Caniff’s creation George Webster Confucius was a quintessentially American invention, the Yellow Kid made yellow. In his work for Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, Caniff was not allowed by his syndicates to identify the Japanese antagonists as anything but “the invaders.” This ended when World War II kicked in. Caniff then did a strip for an armed forces training manual that has become a minor Internet sensation. It meant to clue the boys into how to tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese soldiers, and it was called How to Spot a Jap.
16. In 1980, Bronx activists protested the Paul Newman vehicle Fort Apache, The Bronx over its depictions of Blacks and Puerto Ricans, the start of a decade of protests against Hollywood representations. See Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (New York: Picador, 2005), 145.
17. Jerry Craft, creator of Mama’s Boyz, posted the cartoons at http://www.mamasboyz.com/news/protest.html along with a passionate essay on why he joined the protest.
18. “But Is It Racist?”, post by Karisue Wyson, February 8, 2008, Washington Post Writers Group Blog, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20101009101901/http://postwritersgroup.com/BlogArchives/200802.html.
Chapter Two
After Jericho: The Struggle Against Invisibility
1. Martin Luther King Jr., “Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott,” December 20, 1956, speech delivered in Montgomery, AL, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/statement_on_ending_the_bus_boycott/.
2. Jet, March 17, 1955, 33.
3. Martin Luther King Jr. “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” January 1 1957, speech delivered at NAACP Emancipation Day, Washington, DC, Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol4/1-Jan-1957_FacingtheChallenge.pdf.
4. Martin Luther King Jr., “Desegregation and the Future,” December 15, 1956 speech delivered at the Annual Luncheon of the National Committee for Rural Schools, New York, NY. From the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Birth of a New Age, Volume III, December 1955–December 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 475, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol3/15-Dec-1956_DesegregationAndTheFuture.pdf.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Elsa Honig Fine, The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 154.
10. Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 185.
11. Ralph Ellison, “If the Twain
Shall Meet,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 567.
12. Ralph Ellison, “Chant of Saints: The Art of Romare Bearden.” The Massachusetts Review 18:4 (1977), 674, 675, 678; first published in 1968.
13. Patton, African-American Art, 197. In 1970, she would be arrested and jailed for her participation in “The People’s Flag Show.” The charge was “desecrating the flag.” See Faith Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 181–86.
14. Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 167.
15. Ibid., 167.
16. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 79.
17. Ibid., 202. See also Richard Nixon, “What Has Happened to America?”, Reader’s Digest, October 1967, http://college.cengage.com/history/ayers_primary_sources/nixon_1967.htm.
18. James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy: It’s All in the Charts,” New York Times Magazine, May 17, 1970.
19. Ibid.
20. E. W. Kenworthy, “Nixon: A Tightrope in the South,” New York Times, September 29, 1968.
21. Perlstein, Nixonland, 341.
22. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 130.
23. Ibid., 141.
24. H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York: P.G. Putnam’s Sons, 1994), 53.
25. Thomas A. Johnson, “Negro Leaders See Bias in Call of Nixon for ‘Law and Order,’” New York Times, August 13, 1968, 27.
26. E. W. Kenworthy, “Nixon Strategy in South: Humphrey Attack on Wallace Causes G.O.P. Nominee to Shift His Tactics,” New York Times, October 5, 1968, 20.
27. Lawrence’s presence was important: his Migration series had been purchased jointly by the MOMA and the Phillips Collection in 1941, and he became the first Black artist to have his works bought and exhibited in the MOMA.
28. Ringgold, We Flew Over the Bridge, 167.
29. Its reputation would be resuscitated a generation later by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
30. Most photos and slides were from the collection of James Van Der Zee.
31. Grace Glueck, “The Total Involvement of Thomas Hoving,” New York Times Magazine, December 8, 1968.
32. Ibid.
33. “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27:5 (January 1969) 246. http://resources.metmuseum.org/resources/metpublications/pdf/The_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art_Bulletin_v_27_no_5_January_1969.pdf.
34. Before the exhibition closed, Hoving faced controversies over a catalog essay by a Black high school student some thought was anti-Semitic, and a vandal carving letters into a Rembrandt painting. It culminated for Hoving with a full-fledged trustee revolt.
35. “The Shame of the Art World,” manifesto printed in East Village Other, February 14, 1969, reprinted in Art Workers’ Coalition, Documents: Open Hearing, originally published in 1969, reprinted by Editorial Doble J, 2010, 19–21.
36. In a statement signed by the United Black Artists Committee, Lloyd and Ringgold demanded that the wing be created within eighteen months, that MOMA acquire at least one hundred works of Black artists, create a Black artist advisory board, and mount special exhibitions, including ones of African art and Bearden’s work. The list of signers included Bearden, Oscar Brown Jr., Ossie Davis, and eighteen others. See United Black Artists Committee and other Black Artists, letter of “Students and Artists United for a Martin Luther King Jr. Study Center for Black Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,” n.d., 1969, courtesy of the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives.
37. Grace Glueck, “Negroes’ Art Is What’s In Just Now,” New York Times, February 27, 1969, D34.
38. Sharon F. Patton, “The Search for Identity, 1950–1987,” in African-American Artists 1880–1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, in association with the University of Washington Press, 1989), 100.
39. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 269.
Chapter Three
“The Real Thing”: Lifestyling and Its Discontents
1. Bill Backer, The Care and Feeding of Ideas (New York: Crown, 1993), 5.
2. Ibid., 251.
3. Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 50.
4. Ibid, 54. See also Tristan Donovan, Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), 80.
5. E. J. Kahn, “The Universal Drink III: A Matter of Syllables,” New Yorker, February 28, 1959, 56.
6. E. J. Kahn, “The Universal Drink IV: An Innocent Friendship,” New Yorker, March 7, 1959, 64.
7. Tedlow, New and Improved, 101.
8. For more about Pepsi’s pioneering efforts to reach Black consumers after World War II, see The Real Pepsi Challenge, Stephanie Capparell (New York: Free Press, 2008).
9. Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 253, 266. The battle heated up once again in the mid-sixties when Pepsi hired a Black vice president of corporate planning, prompting KKK-led protests. Pepsi responded with a “Fight the Klan, Drink Pepsi” campaign. See also Donovan, Fizz, 164.
10. Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, 266.
11. Ibid.
12. Ebony, November 1959, 15.
13. Ebony, November 1959, 167.
14. Bob Stoddard, Pepsi: 100 Years (Santa Monica, CA: General Publishing Group, 1997), 133.
15. Ebony, February 1960, 24.
16. Stoddard, Pepsi: 100 Years, 141.
17. “New Faces: Sommers Is Icumen On,” Time, December 15, 1961.
18. Backer, Care and Feeding of Ideas, 238.
19. Stanley C. Hollander, Was There a Pepsi Generation before Pepsi Discovered It? Youth-based Segmentation in Marketing (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1992).
20. John Paul Freeman, “The Real Thing: ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘Cultural’ Appeals in Television Advertising for Coca-Cola, 1969–1976,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986, 14. Emphasis added.
21. Backer, Care and Feeding of Ideas, 271.
22. Frederick L. Allen, Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-known Product in the World (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 322. During the next decade Bryant would become notorious for her antigay activism.
23. Freeman, “The Real Thing,” 113.
24. Allen, Secret Formula, 353–54.
25. This is detailed in Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, 293–97, 370–71.
26. Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola, 301.
27. Freeman, “The Real Thing,” 175–79.
28. Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 69.
29. Freeman, “The Real Thing,” 220.
30. For its part, BBDO went on to design Nixon’s silent-majority campaign.
31. Backer, Care and Feeding of Ideas, 7.
32. Ibid., 8.
Chapter Four
Every Man an Artist, Every Artist a Priest: The Invention of Multiculturalism
1. Ishmael Reed, “Ishmael Reed on the Miltonian Origin of the Other,” East Village: The Local Blog, January 28, 2012, http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/ishmael-reed-on-the-revolutionary-satanic-origin-of-the-other/.
2. Shamoon Zahir, “An Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Callaloo 17:4 (Autumn 1994), 1136.
3. Ishmael Reed, “An Interview with Franklin Sirmans,” in NeoHoodoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (Yale University Press, 2008), 77.
4. Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New Yo
rk: St. Martin’s Griffin), 175-77.
5. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 174.
6. Alan Lomax, “Appeal for Cultural Equity,” Journal of Communication 27:2 (Spring 1977), 137.
7. See her story “The Apprentice” in The Seabirds Are Still Alive (New York: Random House, 1977), her foreword in Cherrile Moraga and Gloria Anzaldula, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings of Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981). Also, “At a writers’ conference at Howard University sponsored by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities in April of 1976, Sister Toni Cade Bambara said: ‘The responsibility of a writer representing an oppressed people is to make revolution irresistible.’” John Oliver Killens, “Lorraine Hansberry: On Time!”, in Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country, ed. Esther Cooper Jackson and Constance Pohl (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 335, originally published in 1979.
8. Ray Riegert, “Ishmael Reed Hoo-Doos the Cultural Nazis,” Berkeley Barb, December 12–18, 1977, 8–9.
9. Malcolm X, “A Message to the Grassroots,” speech delivered in Detroit, MI, November 10, 1963, http://xroads.virginia.edu/∼public/civilrights/a0147.html.
10. Ishmael Reed, “Integration or Cultural Exchange?,” Yardbird Reader 5 (1976), 3.
11. Riegert, “Ishmael Reed Hoo-Doos the Cultural Nazis,” 8–9.
Chapter Five
Color Theory: Race Trouble in the Avant-Garde
1. “Trudie Grace and Irving Sandler,” interviewed by Joan Rosenbaum, in Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith, eds., 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years (New York: Artists Space, 1998), 21.
2. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 275.
3. A few years later, he sang “I’m Against It” on their album Road to Ruin, which could be called the Ramones’s manifesto. Technically it leans right. In reality it calls for nothing. Politics wasn’t the point.
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