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NY Sunday Times Book Review September 20, 2013
Red and Black
By NELSON GEORGE
HARLEM NOCTURNE
Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II
By Farah Jasmine Griffin
Illustrated. 242 pp. Basic Civitas. $26.99.
In the national consciousness, Harlem has usually been defined by two
eras: the artistic and cultural explosion of the 1920s, known as the
Harlem Renaissance, and the drug-fueled devastation that began in the
1950s and peaked in the late ’80s. The Harlem Renaissance has been well
documented by its poets, novelists and essayists, as well as by a legion
of scholars in the decades since. The long, depressing ghetto years were
recounted most eloquently by James Baldwin, and by lesser mortals like
sociologists, memoirists, politicians, Hollywood screenwriters and
rappers. Today’s whiter Harlem of multimillion-dollar brownstones and
flashy eateries is already the subject of books, blogs and innumerable
magazine travel articles.
In her book “Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics
During World War II,” Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor at Columbia
University, delves into a largely underexplored aspect of Harlem’s rich
history: the years just before, during and immediately after World War
II, a period of optimism, creativity and turmoil. Moreover, Griffin uses
the lives of three female artists — the choreographer and dancer Pearl
Primus, the writer Ann Petry and the composer and pianist Mary Lou
Williams — as signposts through an era, in a work that paints the
“greatest generation” in a much less flattering light than do the usual
jingoistic accounts.
Griffin’s narrative encompasses the war and the second great migration
of blacks to the North from the South. She also highlights two movements
that will be less familiar to contemporary readers: the Double V, or
Double Victory, campaign, in which “black Americans fought . . .
overseas for their country but also to be recognized as citizens at
home”; and the Popular Front initiative, conceived by the Communist
Party in response to “the economic crisis of the Great Depression and
the rise of fascism.”
“For black people,” Griffin writes of Double V, “the war provided an
opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality. . . . Black
Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the
reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and
civil rights organizations.”
The Popular Front, meanwhile, “focused on culture as an especially
important forum for educating and mobilizing audiences in support of an
antifascist agenda.” Although by 1939 its official end had come, the
idea of it “would continue throughout the war years. Without Popular
Front venues like Café Society, or publications such as PM, a leftist
newspaper, it is doubtful that Petry, Primus and Williams could have met
with such success.”
Griffin argues that her three main subjects “consistently confronted the
darkness of our nation’s soul. They were critical of white supremacy and
the excess of American capitalism. Yet, their art and their activism
also denoted a firm belief in the transformative nature of social change.”
None of these women were native New Yorkers. Primus was born in Trinidad
and, as a child, relocated with her family to the city, where she was
exposed to Afro-Caribbean dance, the innovations of Martha Graham and
the sweaty swing style popular at the Savoy Ballroom.
As an adult, Primus fused these movements with her own impressive
physicality. Her ability to leap majestically high made her popular, and
John Martin, the New York Times dance critic, praised her “tremendous
inward power,” “fine dramatic sense” and “superb technique.” Of the
three women in Griffin’s narrative, Primus was the most progressive
politically, joining the Communist Party when it was still one of the
few organized white movements to challenge Jim Crow and the violence
that fed it. The F.B.I. opened a file on her in 1944.
Petry was never a Communist but was published in Popular Front
periodicals and served as “women’s editor,” columnist and features
editor at the Harlem newspaper The People’s Voice, a left-leaning
enterprise published by Adam Clayton Powell, the pastor and New York
City councilman. Born and raised in Connecticut by an established
middle-class New England family, the bookish Petry moved to Harlem with
her husband, George, in 1938. With George inducted into the Army in
1943, Petry spent most of the war years on her own, writing, organizing,
walking through Harlem and contemplating the constrained world of
working-class black women. This reflection resulted in the 1946 novel
“The Street,” about a single woman’s struggle to raise her son in
Harlem. It sold more than 1.5 million copies, a first for a black woman.
(Petry went on to publish two additional novels.)
The most complex of Griffin’s subjects is Mary Lou Williams, whose life
was filled with music, mentoring, lovers, gambling, politics and
religious questing. A prodigy born in the Jim Crow South, Williams was a
seasoned musician when she moved to Harlem’s Sugar Hill section in 1943,
an area home to W. E. B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington and other luminaries.
Her apartment quickly became a salon where integrated groups gathered to
talk politics, listen to music and gamble (her taste for cards dented
her bank account).
Williams became one of the rare older jazz musicians to embrace the
emerging bebop generation, counting Dizzy Gillespie, Tadd Dameron, Hank
Jones and Bud Powell among her friends. She was a regular at Minton’s
Playhouse, Harlem’s late-night bebop laboratory. And she both nurtured
bebop’s young players and was inspired by their ambition. Her extended
composition “The Zodiac Suite,” an answer to Ellington’s “Black, Brown
and Beige,” merging classical and jazz idioms, debuted at Town Hall on
Dec. 31, 1945.
Both Williams and Primus performed regularly at Café Society, and its
owner, Barney Josephson, is an important supporting character in “Harlem
Nocturne” — his club was a place of both political agitation and
employment. Another figure who factors prominently is Benjamin J. Davis
Jr., the Communist activist who succeeded Powell as Harlem’s city
councilman, in 1943, only to be convicted, six years later, of
conspiring to overthrow the United States government (under the Smith
Act, a dubious tool of those determined to cleanse the country of “red
infiltration”).
Though solidly researched and full of fascinating information, “Harlem
Nocturne” is written in workmanlike prose that serves the narrative but
doesn’t elevate the material. Griffin sometimes strains to connect her
three subjects to larger historical forces. Yet the book is a valuable
study of a neighborhood whose evolution still offers a window into the
black experience in America. It is also a heartfelt tribute to three
remarkable artists who “were not willing to forget or wholly forgive
America’s historical transgressions,” but who were devoted, Griffin
writes, paraphrasing James Baldwin, “to helping this nation ‘achieve’
itself.”
Nelson George’s latest book, a history of television’s “Soul Train,”
will be published next year.
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