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What would America be like without 60 years of Black contributions?
Ebony, Nov, 2005 by Michael Eric Dyson
OVER the last 60 years, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks and Toni Morrison have reshaped American literature with their protean gifts. Richard Pryor's unruly comic genius spliced rage into social commentary and brought America face-to-face with its darker brother. Alvin Ailey's dance troupe--especially in the sweep of Judith Jamison's limbs--won appreciation for the grace of Black movement. Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle spiced opera with the pathos and charm of the Black voice. Muhammad Ali's fists and mouth--both in the boxing ring and in the public arena--hammered home Black courage. Like Jackie Robinson before him--who broke the color barrier in baseball and integrated American sports, and Michael Jordan after him, whose will to fly raised the bar on athletic style and standards--Ali's physical skill symbolized Black humanity.
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All of these figures, and many more Blacks besides, have transformed our society through their love affair with excellence. Without their contributions, the U.S. would not look the same, sound the same, or struggle in the same way to fulfill its promise of opportunity and justice for all.
Black artists have profoundly changed what and how America sees--in the images that flare on the canvas as well as those that flicker on the large and small screen. Gordon Parks peeked through photographic and cinematic lenses to record the travail and triumph of Black life. Black artists used Abstract Expressionism and social protest--and brushes, pens, invented materials and found objects--to fashion the textures and colors of a new Black humanity that challenged racial stereotypes. Our humanity shines in Romare Bearden's collage, Jazz: (N.Y.) Savoy-1930s, which treats the most majestic music Black folk have created, and in Elizabeth Catlett's Sharecropper, a portrait of a Black woman that conjures strength and elicits sympathy. It is glimpsed as well in Bettye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, a feisty revision of the Black mammy myth, and in Kara Walker's black-cut paper silhouettes, including Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), which play with racial stereotypes to undercut them.
Black artists also took to stage and screen to portray the contradictory forces that define Black existence, and America's too. Sidney Poitier's elegant body of work--his turn as Virgil Tibbs in In The Heat of the Night still resonates with a splendid mix of fury and dignity--combated the negative Black image in Hollywood. The work of Spike Lee a generation later--especially his provocative morality tale Do The Right Thing and his magnum opus, Malcolm X, the greatest Black biopic ever made--opened up Black film. It cleared the way for John Singleton's poignant urban drama Boyz N The Hood, which enflamed the American psyche with the suffering of young Black males, and Kasi Lemmons' sublime ebony Greek drama, Eve's Bayou, which added shades of complexity to Black identity.
Without Poitier, and the talented and troubled Dorothy Dandridge, there would be no Denzel Washington or Halle Berry. Their sensuality and grace-and their irreverence as well--singe the silver screen. On the small screen, Bill Cosby almost single-handedly changed how Blacks are seen. His cerebral Alexander Scott character on I Spy shattered television's race barrier in the '60s and was neither a lackey nor a buffoon. Cosby's gentle patriarch on the The Cosby Show 20 years later revived the sit-com and made him "America's Dad"--a title that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. And Oprah's first-name familiarity suggests how she used the medium to build an unprecedented media empire that has given her a bigger and longer presence in White homes than any Black figure ever.
The sound of America is sweeter, more soulful, and more sorrowful because of Black artists. In the mid-'40s, the country blues migrated north when Muddy Waters boarded a train from Clarksdale, Miss., to Chicago, making it the center of urban blues. The music's irony and tragicomedy, and its humor, too, floods the plaintive cries of Howlin' Wolf, the weeping guitar of B.B. King, the salty wails of Koko Taylor, and the artful hawks of the otherwise smooth Bobby Blue Bland--who lifted his signature warble from the Rev. C.L. Franklin, one of the great innovators of sacred sound. Their craft testifies to how blues artists ministered to Negroes seeking consolation for the griefs of ghetto existence.
Jazz, too, shifted radically in its sound. While big band swing music had dominated the idiom, bebop emerged in the mid-'40s as Charlie Parker--and after him, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, Bud Powell, Don Byas and Ben Webster--experimented with chord progressions, faster tempos, higher notes and more dissonant tones. With bebop, jazz went from dance music to an art form to be listened to. Armstrong and Ellington remained the music's greatest performer and composer, respectively; and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan brilliantly explored the American songbook after Billie Holiday's death.
