What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?

The use of social media in support of Kelley Williams-Bolar recalls the spirit of the Greensboro sit-ins 51 years ago.

What if the Greensboro Four Had Twitter?
by Mark Anthony Neal | TheLoop21

February 1st marks the anniversary of what I like to refer to as one of the greatest days in American History. On that day in 1960, four young Black men—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond—all first year students at HBCU North Carolina A&T, sat at a Whites only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro, N.C.

This protest—formally known as a sit-in—began weeks of similar protests, that went viral throughout the American South in ways that mirror the functions of today’s social media. The Greensboro sit-ins are widely remembered as the moment of activism that gave renewed energy and vigor to a Civil Rights Movement that was sputtering after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The Greensboro Four, of course, did not have access to social media such as Twitter and Facebook, but nevertheless utilized what would have been the accessible technology of the days like land-lines and good-old fashion word of mouth. For those young folk, who would months after Greensboro, go on to create the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), under the watchful eye of Ella Jo Baker, understood technology, including television, as simply one of the tools they employed to make their case.

Civil Rights activists brilliantly exploited television cameras, helping to bring the marches in the streets straight into the living rooms of average Americans, whether they wanted to see it or not. Many activists from the era point to the role that televised footage of young Black Americans being hosed down and attacked by police dogs played in generating sympathy for a nation that had been largely indifferent.

The spirit of the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and the role that technology played during that time have been recalled in recent weeks with regards to the Georgia Prison Strike, the senseless conviction of Kelley Williams-Bolar, and the widespread protests taking place in Tunisia and Egypt.

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

February One: One of the Greatest Days in American History

Black Music Month Classics: Songs of the Sad Minstrel

BLACK MUSIC MONTH CLASSICS

Songs of the Sad Minstrel
by Mark Anthony Neal

There’s rarely a moment when John Smith aka Lil’ Jon flashes across the television screen that the “coon” meter lodged deep within my consciousness begins to vibrate. It’s not that Smith’s antics offend me—I’ve long argued that there’s often an untapped complexity attached to even the most lurid of stereotypical racial images, particularly those created by blacks themselves. Indeed Smith is part of a tradition that has produced Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry), Butterfly McQueen, Mantan Moreland, or any shuckin’ and jivin’ plantation “darky” that understood that their ability to sing and dance (or break tackles or finish line tapes) went a long way towards self-preservation. If such antics spared you the rod two centuries ago, it can surely earn you seven-figure salaries in this era of global digitized blackness.

Perhaps the truest genius of this tradition—call it blackface minstrelsy, the coon-show, samboisms—was Bert Williams. Almost a full century before hip-hop became sonic blackface, Williams donned the burnt cork and with partner George Walker became the most popular black performers in the United States. The recent release of a collection of recordings that Williams and Walker recorded from 1901-1909, allows us to again revisit the travails of the sad minstrel.

Williams was born in 1874 in the British West Indies of relative privilege. His family later moved to Florida, ultimately settling in Riverside, California, very far removed from the “plantation tales” that Walker and Williams would ultimately perform on Broadway. A natural mimic, Williams began to look for work in the traveling medicine shows (exhibitions where “quacks” sold ointments and the like) and it is there that he met Walker. As Walker wrote in 1906, “My experience with the quack doctors taught me…that white people are always interested in what they call ‘darky’ singing and dancing.”

What particularly caught the attention of Walker and Williams were the numbers of white minstrels, who “blackened up” often billing themselves as “coons”. Unable to compete with these white performers, Williams and Walker came up with a clever marketing scheme—they began to sell themselves as “Two Real Coons”. At their artistic peak in the late 1890s and early 1900s, Williams and Walker could claim to have mounted the first all-black musical on Broadway (1903’s In Dahomey) and an international following as the most popular purveyors of the dance the Cake Walk. After Walker’s death in 1909, Williams became the first black artist featured in the Ziegfeld Follies.

What Williams and Walkers understood then and what so many black performers have come to realize since is that white mainstream interest in blackness is often predicated on their belief that what they are consuming is “authentic”, whether they are capable of discerning black authenticity or not. In the spirit of Mark Twain’s desire for the “real nigger show,” black artists have often found it financially lucrative to give white audiences the “real” that they so desire. Williams and Walker were no different. For example songs like “I Don’t Like the Face You Wear” and “The Phrenologist Coon”, which both appear on Bert Williams: The Early Years, 1901-1909, were written by Ernest Hogan. It was on the strength of his 1896 hit song (sold as sheet music) “All Coons Look Alike to Me” that Hogan became a popular writer of “coon songs”.



Whereas George Walker was just performing the coon, Bert Williams’s relationship to his characters was much more complicated. As a light-skinned black man, Williams resorted to blackening up to come off as a more convincing “coon.” As Camille F. Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America's First Black Star writes, “The blackface covered and effectively hid the real Williams, protecting him from having to be the persona he portrayed on the stage.” The real Williams often lamented that he couldn’t give his largely white audiences a more complex image of his characters—“the pathos as well as the fun.” This lament along with the lack of offers to do serious dramatic roles, were the pressures that squeezed the ambition and ultimately the life out of Williams, who died in 1922 at age 47.

William McFerrin Stowe, Jr. makes the point that Williams humanized the minstrel stereotype, creating a “significant modification within the acceptable structure of Negro stage characterization.” And this is what perhaps distinguishes Williams and a host others who toiled in America’s burgeoning culture industry of the early 2oth century—a desire to give complexity to the “shiftless darky.”

*Originally Published in January 2005

Born in the Bronx: The Cornell University Hip-Hop Conference

Cornell University Hosts Hip Hop Conference and Celebration

Celebrating Hip Hop History
October 31 - November 1, 2008

Afrika Bambaataa and other pioneers of hip hop will travel to Ithaca, N.Y., to speak at a two-day conference celebrating Cornell University Library’s acquisition of “Born in the Bronx: The Legacy and Evolution of Hip Hop,” a collection that documents the early days of hip hop with recordings, photographs, posters and more.

Events on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 will include music, performances and lectures by several of hip hop’s founders, and roundtable discussions led by prominent speakers from the hip hop and academic communities. Cornell University Library will host the event, which will highlight the one-of-a-kind historical materials.

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Conference Schedule

Thursday, October 30, 2008
Cornell Cinema, 7:00 p.m.

Wild Style with filmmaker Charlie Ahearn.
1983. USA. Directed by Charlie Ahearn. 1 hr 25 min. With Grand Master Caz, Cold Crush Brothers, Fantastic 5, Grand Master Flash

"Joyous, raucous, and explosive, Wild Style is the movie that made Hollywood wake up to hip-hop..." (Cinefamily). Many of the participants in the film will be on campus for Cornell's hip hop conference. Ahearn will also present Bongo Barbershop (2005, 8 mins), a return to the place where hip hop began. More information on hip hop film screenings at Cornell Cinema Oct. 24-30.

Friday, October 31, 2008
Bailey Hall, Cornell University

3:00 p.m. Welcoming Remarks

Johan Kugelberg, author and curator, editor of Born in the Bronx: A Visual Record of the Early Days of Hip Hop. Sean Eversley Bradwell, Assistant Professor, Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, Ithaca College.

Hip Hop Histories

Jeff Chang, hip hop historian and award-winning author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation and editor of the anthology Total Chaos: The Art & Aesthetics of Hip-Hop.

4:30 - 6:30 p.m. In the Beginning: A Conversation with Hip Hop's Pioneers

Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Caz, Grandwizzard Theodore, Roxanne Shante, Popmaster Fabel, Tony Tone, Pebblee Poo, Disco Wiz. Also: Images of the Bronx: Hip Hop Photographs by Joe Conzo. Please see participant biographies for more information. Registered participants at the conference have the opportunity to submit questions to the pioneers in advance. We encourage you to do so here. The moderator will take as many questions as time allows.

6:30 - 8:30 p.m. Dinner option for conference attendees

Robert Purcell Community Center (RPCC) Marketplace Eatery
Three amateur DJs from Cornell University and the region showcase their styles!
$10 Admission includes dinner at award-winning buffet including The Mongolian Grille, Ancho's Latino Cuisine, and more.

8:30 - 11:00 p.m. Music by Hip hop pioneers and others

Pioneers of hip hop culture will demonstrate old school D.J., M.C., b-boy/b-girl styles, with special appearance by DJ.J.Rocc.

Saturday, November 1
Alice Statler Auditorium, Cornell University

9:15 - 11:00 a.m. New Hip Hop Scholarship

Scholars, faculty and students present recent research on hip hop.

11:00 - 12:30 p.m. Teaching Hip Hop: A Lecture and Discussion

Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture at Duke University, "Teach the Bourgeois and Rock the Boulevard: Hip-Hop and the Academy."

12:30 - 2:00 p.m. Break

2:00 - 3:30 p.m. Hip Hop Futures: A Lecture and Discussion

Tricia Rose, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University. Author of the influential and groundbreaking book, "Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America" will speak about the future of hip hop and share ideas from her forthcoming book: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (Basic Books, December 2008).

Walton Muyumba on Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia

from studio-walton muyumba

Hypermasculinity, Whiteness, and Racial Paranoia
by Walton Muyumba

Recently the late author, Norman Mailer came to mind as I sat considering the machinations of whiteness and masculinity in American life. In 2003 Mailer, one of America's most famous white men and "white Negroes," predicted our current national condition of manifold social, political and economic decline in his acerbic essay "The White Man Unburdened." Though many of his critiques of African Americans and women foundered as dubious (if not plain wrong), Mailer was always a reliable critic of white American masculinity.

In an effort to analyze our wanton and exuberant Iraq war-lust, Mailer points to our craven desire for manipulated and televised displays of dominance as a major factor for the drive to the military invasion of Baghdad. But behind what Mailer calls the "Advertising Science"'s trumpeting the war was a "minor but significant" effort to charge the enthusiasm of white American men, raising them again to the top of the national social order. Understanding that conservative white men had taken "a daily drubbing" from feminists and the women's movement, while also losing their stake in major professional sports to black male genius, Tiger included, Bush, Mailer argues, played to their addiction to victory by using "sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag" in order to develop "many psychic connections with the military." According to Mailer, what Bush has always counted on is that "if we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology," because, at least, "we knew we were likely to be good at [war]."

Read the Full Essay

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Walton Muyumba is a writer, critic, and university professor living in Dallas, Texas

Wanted! Smart Negroes

From CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Critical Noir: Wanted! Smart Negroes
By Mark Anthony Neal

Washington PostNewsweek Interactive recently launched the interactive site The Root. Ostensibly a partnership with Henry Louis "Skip" Gates to promote the latest incarnation of his black "celebrity DNA" project, the site features a virtual cavalcade (literally) of smart Negroes. We can thank our man Barack for this.

With the Illinois Senator confounding pundit expectations about the legitimacy of his candidacy and the perceived capacity for non-blacks to support his campaign, there's suddenly a need for highly articulate Negroes, who are actually armed with some quantitative and qualitative data. So unlike the Don Imus, Michael Richards or even the Jena 6 controversies--where the clear desire seemed to be to create spectacles around racist transgressions and Negroes who love to agitate--the Barack moment actually demands some sophisticated political analysis (read: Civil Rights Leaders need not apply). For example, in recent weeks political scientists such as Melissa Harris Lacewell and Paula McClain have weighed in thoughtfully on the issues of race, gender and white supremacy with regards to the barbed exchanges between the Clinton and Obama camps, in venues as diverse as Democracy Now! and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees. Such opportunities did not consistently exist prior to the Barack moment.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com