PUBLICATION:
Cross Section
PLOT:
Man’s son, a soldier, is executed in Georgia, and he takes part in Harlem Race Riot of 1943.
INSPIRATION:
Harlem Race Riot of 1943; Amsterdam News story about executed soldier in Georgia
YEAR:
1947
TITLE:
“Solo on the Drums”
PUBLICATION:
’47: The Magazine of the Year (Oct.)
PLOT:
Love gone wrong inspires jazz drum solo.
YEAR:
1947
TITLE:
Country Place
PUBLICATION:
Houghton Mifflin
PLOT:
Storm in New England town leads to melodrama.
INSPIRATION:
Hurricane of 1938
YEAR:
1953
TITLE:
The Narrows
PUBLICATION:
Houghton Mifflin
PLOT:
Interracial romance leads to murder in a small New England town.
SOURCES AND SUGGESTED READING
ARCHIVAL SOURCES
Ann Petry
The Ann Petry Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University
Ann Petry Portrait Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
The James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson Papers, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University
The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University
Pearl Primus
The Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University Libraries
The Pearl Primus Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
Mary Lou Williams
The Mary Lou Williams Collection, Institute for Jazz Studies, Rutgers University
Mary Lou Williams Portrait Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
Performing Arts Research Collections, Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, New York Public Library
OTHER SOURCES AND SUGGESTED READING
Adams, George R. “Riot as Ritual: Ann Petry’s ‘In Darkness and Confusion.’” Negro American Literature Forum 6, no. 2 (1972): 54–60.
Allara, Pamela. Pictures of People: Alice Neel’s American Portrait Gallery. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1998.
Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
Bambara, Toni Cade, and Eleanor W. Traylor. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Washington Square Press, 2005.
Barber, Beverly Anne Hillsman. Pearl Primus, in Search of Her Roots: 1943–1970. PhD diss., Florida State University, 1984.
Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Brailey, Muriel Wright. Necessary Knocking: The Short Fiction of Ann Petry. PhD diss., Miami University, 1996.
Brandt, Nat. Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Clark, Veve A., and Sara E. Johnson. Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership. New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 2005.
Dahl, Linda. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
Diehl, Lorraine B. Over Here! New York City During World War II. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.
DuBois, W. E. B. “Close Ranks.” The Crisis 16, no. 3 (1918).
———. “Returning Soldiers.” The Crisis 18 (1919).
Ervin, Hazel Arnett. Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993.
Estrada, Ric, and Sigrid Estrada. “3 Leading Negro Artists, and How They Feel About Dance in the Community: 1. Eleo Pomare. 2. Arthur Mitchell. 3. Pearl Primus.” Dance 42, no. 11 (1968).
Evans, Stephanie Y. Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.
Fledderus, France. The Function of Oral Tradition in Mary Lou’s Mass by Mary Lou Williams. Master’s thesis, University of North Texas, 1996.
Foulkes, Julia L. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Fullilove, Mindy. Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. New York: One World Books Trade / Ballantine, 2005.
Glaude, Eddie S. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Glover, Jean Ruth. Pearl Primus: Cross-Cultural Pioneer of American Dance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
Gore, Dayo. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Gregory, Steven. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: New Press, 1995.
Harvey, David. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Haygood, Wil. King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
———. Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson. New York: Knopf, 2009.
Hendricks, Obery. The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. New York: Doubleday, 2006.
Hoban, Phoebe. Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
Holladay, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Honey, Maureen. Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
Horne, Gerald. Black Liberation / Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.
———. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1991.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present, 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Josephson, Barney, and Terry Trilling-Josephson. Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Kelley, Robin. Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. New York: Free Press, 2009.
Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
———. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Kernodle, Tammy L. Anything You Are Shows Up in Your Music: Mary Lou Williams and the Sanctification of Jazz. PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1997.
———. Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.
Kraut, Anthea. Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Kufrin, Joan. Uncommon Women: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sarah Caldwell, Julie Harris, Mary McCarthy, Alice Neel, Roberta Peters, Maria Tallchief, Mary Lou Williams, Eugenia Zukerman. Piscataway, NJ: New Century, 1981.
Lieberman, Robbie, and Clarence Yang. Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: Another Side of the Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Lipsitz, George. Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Litwack, Leon F. How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Lloyd, Margaret. The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007.
Lubin, Alex. Revising the Blueprint: Ann Petry and the Literary Left. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Mallozzi, Vincent M. “Behind the Lens, Continuing a Legacy.” New York Times, January 11, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/nyregion/11photog.html?emc=eta1.
Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Mary Lou Williams Trio. Roll ’Em: The World Jam Session, 1944—Complete. Solo Art, 1999.
McKay, Claude. Harlem: Negro Metropolis. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968.
McKayle, Donald. Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Morgan, Stacy I. Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1950–1953. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
Mullen, Bill V. Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Mullen, Bill V., and James Smethurst, eds. Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Neel, Alice, Ann Tempkin, Susan Rosenberg, and Richard Flood. Alice Neel. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000.
Neel, Alice, and Amy Young. Alice Neel: Black and White. New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 2002.
Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930. Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
Ottley, Roi. New World A-Coming. New York: Arno Press, 1968.
Pearl Primus and Her Company. New York: Paul Lovett, 1950.
Perpener, John. African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Petry, Ann. Miss Muriel and Other Stories. New York: Dafina, 2008.
———. The Street: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Petry, Elisabeth. At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Prevots, Naima. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1999.
Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Rosen, Bernice. New Dance Group: Movement for a Change. London: Routledge, 2000.
Schwartz, Peggy, and Murray Schwartz. The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
Scott, William B., and Peter M. Rutkoff. New York Modern: The Arts and the City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Smith, Morgan, and Marvin Smith. Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
Sorell, Walter. The Dance Has Many Faces. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1992.
Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.
Stowe, David W. “The Politics of Cafe Society.” Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998): 1384–1406.
Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
———. Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
Tucker, Sherrie. Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.
Wald, Alan M. Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996.
Wenig, Adele R. Pearl Primus: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources from 1943 to 1975. Oakland, CA: Wenadance Unlimited, 1983.
West, Cornel. Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism. New York: Penguin, 2005.
White, Deborah Gray. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Williams, Mary Lou, Al Louis, and Jack Parker. The Zodiac Suite. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways, 1995.
Wilson, Mark K., and Ann Petry. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry. The New England Connection.” Melus 15, no. 2 (1988): 71–84.
Wren, Elsa. Unpublished interview with Pearl Primus, 1982. Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University.
Wright, Patricia. The Prime of Miss Pearl Primus. Amherst, MA: Contact, 1985.
X, Malcolm, and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. London: Penguin, 2001.
Zipp, Samuel. Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
NOTES
Prologue
1. Walt Whitman, “Manahattan,” in Leaves of Grass (New York: 1867).
2. Ann Petry, “Harlem,” Holiday, April 1949, 84.
Introduction
1. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6.
2. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Rorty distinguished between agents and spectators in the following way: “In the early decades of [the twentieth century], when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country’s history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative.” This is in opposition to those who possess a “spirit of detached spectatorship, and the inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action.” Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 9, 11. Rorty is not without his critics. For our purposes, one of the most astute has been Eddie Glaude. Glaude chastised Rorty for evading “the more fundamental challenge that Baldwin’s writings present to anyone willing to engage them: that America must confront the fraudulent nature of its life, that its avowals of virtue shield it from honestly confronting the darkness within its own soul.” For Glaude, too, much of the Reformist Left celebrated by Rorty failed to fully “work to diminish human suffering and make possible the conditions for human excellence,” because of “their equivocation in the face of white supremacy’s insidious claims.” Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.
5. Mary Helen Washington’s description of the playwright Alice Childress also applies to Primus, in that she “concoct[ed] for herself, in true Popular Front fashion, a politics that was part Marxist, part black nationalist, pa
rt feminist, and part homegrown militancy.” Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185.
6. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 13.
Chapter 1: Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom
1. W. E. B. DuBois, “Close Ranks,” The Crisis 16, no. 3 (1918): 111. See also W. E. B. Du Bois’s editorial “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis 18 (1919): 13.
2. Karen Tucer Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women During World War II,” Journal of American History 69, no. 1 (1982): 82–97. The Fair Employment Practices Committee became the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1948, during the Truman administration.
3. Quoted in Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 93.
4. Pearl Primus, “African Dance,” reprinted in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Kariamu Welsh Asante, ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 3.
5. Langston Hughes, “On Leaping and Shouting,” originally published in Chicago Defender, July 3, 1943; republished in Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture: 1942–1962, Christopher C. Santis, ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 199.
6. John Martin, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1966; originally published in 1933), 12.
7. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan, “The Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274.
8. Helen Fitzgerald, “A Glimpse of a Rising Young Star,” Daily Worker, June 3, 1943, 7.
9. VeVe Clark and Sara E. Johnson, eds., Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 347. Little has been written about Pearl Primus, and that which has been written tends to focus on this period—her emergence in the 1940s or accounts of her as a grand dame of African dance on the American stage toward the end of her career. When writing about this period, most scholars rightly focus on her involvement with the New Dance Group and her dances of social protest. This is also my interest here; however, I hope to show her dance life during this period in a more fully dimensional way. Most often scholars writing of Primus’s interest in Africa imply that her involvement in leftist politics preceded her first trip to Africa in 1948. I argue that it was her interest in Africa that preceded both her involvement in modern dance and her leftist politics.
Harlem Nocturne Page 18