The Long March

What the civil-rights movement looked like when it was still happening
by Nicholas Lemann

The New Yorker, February 10, 2003

The recent fall of a Senate majority leader for the crime of praising a centenarian colleague who had once been a leader of the segregationist movement made for an excellent demonstration of the marvelous, and misleading, clarity of historical retrospection. Everybody now knows, it seems, that the civil-rights movement was a good thing, and that its opponents were so patently wrong that, unless they are elaborately penitent, they can have no place in our public life. (At the same time, it would have been fine for Trent Lott to send off Strom Thurmond — whom everybody in Washington had long been treating as a lovable huggy-bear — with an encomium to his wonderfulness, as long as it didn't specifically mention the main cause with which he was associated.)

The rules of acceptable political behavior were not at all so clear at the time. In the South, when civil rights was still an open question only a brave few Democrats supported it, and one is hard pressed to think of any Republicans who did. In 1964, the Republican Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, ran as an opponent of mandatory school desegregation and of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which Congress had just passed. George H. W. Bush, campaigning for the Senate that year, came out against the Civil Rights Act. Ronald Reagan, then a popular conservative speaker preparing to run for governor of California, strongly opposed it. During the Lott affair, the commentator Charles Krauthammer, in a dump-Lott column in the Washington Post, wrote that neoconservatives like him "oppose affirmative action on grounds of colorblindness and in defense of the original vision of the civil rights movement: judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." As Krauthammer surely knows from firsthand experience, movements and their visions always look a lot simpler from the outside and after the fact. If the civil-rights movement were suddenly to reappear as it really was, political officeholders would no more be unanimously for it than they were at the time.

The event that Krauthammer was obliquely referring to by bringing up the content of character and the color of skin was the March on Washington in August, 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr., made his magnificent "I Have a Dream" speech, from which that line comes. The march was originally planned by the movement's radical wing, which was going to end the day by having the marchers move, en masse and unlawfully, into the hallways of the Capitol. A series of compromises brought the movement’s moderate wing (the N.A.A.C.P, the Urban League, and the United Automobile Workers, as well as King himself) on board. Still, the chief organizer was the former Communist and still socialist Bayard Rustin, who tided the event the "March for Jobs and Freedom" — and what he meant by "jobs and freedom" was a degree of state intervention in the economy that nobody would dare propose today. The long list of those who appeared onstage at the march included Bob Dylan, Walter Reuther, Roy Wilkins, Josephine Baker, Odetta, Marlon Brando, A. Philip Randolph, and Charlton Heston. By the time King spoke, much of the crowd had drifted away. The big behind-the-scenes drama centered on John Lewis, who was then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and is now a veteran congressman from Georgia. Lewis had drafted a speech that said, "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.... We shall pursue our own scorched-earth policy." Washington's Catholic archbishop refused to give the invocation unless Lewis toned it down, and finally, under heavy pressure from the organizers, he did. So even the era's most celebrated moment was not nearly as consensual as everybody now remembers.

The Library of America's new, two-volume anthology "Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963" (vol.1) and "Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973" (vol.2) is a useful corrective to the way memory has domesticated the movement. As one reads through a hundred and eighty-eight chronologically ordered articles, the movement's true messiness, radicalism, internal disorganization, high failure rate, and lack of internal agreement become manifest. These are absorbing volumes even if read straight through, and they make for a valuable reference work that will reward occasional dipping in. There are, inevitably, moments of hokey overwriting — "Once more down the old familiar highways into that passionately alive and violent country," Karl Fleming begins a piece in Newsweek, and he's soon on to days of smothering heat and nights of honeysuckle — but fewer than you'd expect. It helps that the Library of America's anonymous compilers have not taken the terms "reporting" and "journalism" literally: they have supplemented the newspaper stuff with lots of essays, memoirs, manifestos, and book excerpts, and without them the anthology wouldn't be nearly as good. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," James Baldwins "The Fire Next Time," the reminiscences of Lillian Smith and Anne Moody, John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me" — who would have wanted a definition of "reporting civil rights" so strict that it excluded them?

Many famous bylines — Joan Didion, David Halberstam, Tom Wicker, Hunter S. Thompson, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, John Hersey, Garry Wills, and Alice Walker, to name a few—appear in "Reporting Civil Rights," but it's a particular pleasure to read less well-known writers whose work, at least in these pages, is just as good or better. Journalists I didn't start reading until they were in the settled columnist-essayist phase of their careers — like Carl T. Rowan and Dan Wakefield — appear here as reporters on the scene. The Negro press, which was then vital and important, is well represented, with first-rate articles from the Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New York Amsterdam News, among others, and there is a lot of material that demonstrates what a loss it was when the big-format mass magazines Life, Look, Colliers, and The Saturday Evening Post went out of business. Among the specific attractions of the volumes are contributions by Louis E. Lomax, writing as a secret sharer about life inside the black establishment; Michael Thelwell, who performs a similar function for the radical student movement, and also writes beautifully; August Meier, who contributed a very smart essay on King, which, as a work of analysis, stands out in a collection that is naturally much stronger on dramatic firsthand description; and William Bradford Huie, the hot-blooded investigative reporter who bribed confessions out of the murderers of Emmett Till. The outstanding piece of investigative reporting is an hour-by-hour inside account of the integration of the University of Mississippi, in 1962. The authors, George B. Leonard, T. George Harris, and Christopher S. Wren, convey both the terrifying violence and danger of that event (for a while, it looked as if the segregationist mob would actually defeat the federal forces) and the duplicity of Governor Ross Barnett, who kept making and breaking deals with the Kennedy Administration while the situation in Oxford spun out of control.

What's most valuable about "Reporting Civil Rights" is that it provides a history of the civil-rights movement written by people who weren't allowed to peek ahead to the ending. All the complexity and contingency of the movement comes through; it becomes hard to argue that the movement was centrally about the kind of color-blind, meritocratic ideology implied by King's "content of our character" rhetoric. Even the name is misleading, because it implies that overturning the South’s Jim Crow laws was the one great, agreed-upon cause. As "Reporting Civil Rights" makes clear, there were several distinct elements within the movement: Old Lefties, including some Communists; New Lefties; labor unionists; black nationalists; church people; and liberal do-gooders. Hence the movement's many contending and sometimes conflicting goals, among them changes in the structure of Negro leadership (in particular, unseating the N.A.A.C.P. from its traditional position of dominance), a remaking of black consciousness, left-wing economic policies, better jobs and better housing for blacks, and black political power. Although the movement was biracial, and wouldn't have succeeded if it hadn't been, its white and black members generally had different views of what its main purpose was — the whites being much more likely to think of color blindness and integration as the goals, the blacks being more likely to think in terms of racial advancement. King made a point of befriending Malcolm X, who regularly said that he wasn't interested in civil rights or integration; and King's well-publicized association with Stokely Carmichael, of SNCC, didn't end when, in 1966, Carmichael unveiled the electrifying, polarizing, and implicitly non-nonviolent phrase "black power," during a march that featured them both. When the movement succeeded, it wasn't completely clear which element was winning, and that ambiguity survives today — it's why both sides in the affirmative-action fight, for example, can claim to be pursuing the true goals of the civil-rights movement.

The racial problem that makes the strongest impression in the pages of "Reporting Civil Rights" is not legal segregation (which many African-Americans didn't mind then and feel nostalgic about now) but something more basic: fear and a lack of dignity. It seems almost too obvious to mention that during Jim Crow black people in the South did not have reliable recourse to the legal system; even if most whites were benign, those who weren't could do anything they wanted to a Negro and get away with it. Violence within the black community usually went officially unpunished, so it, too, was relatively risk-free for the perpetrators. The corrosive terror of living with the constant possibility of unpunishable vigilantism comes across vividly in "Reporting Civil Rights." In 1942, Hugh Gloster, a professor of English at Morehouse College, was taken off a bus in Mississippi and beaten so badly that he had to be taken to the hospital — not a crime. In 1961, Herbert Lee, a Negro cotton farmer in Mississippi who had tried to register to vote, was shot in the head at point-blank range, in a public place in broad daylight, by a white state legislator — not a crime. This sort of low-grade, and sometimes not so low-grade, terrorism continued through the sixties. In Oxford in 1962, segregationist snipers fired freely on members of the National Guard. In Jackson in 1963, Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P., was gunned down in front of his house. The 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four girls came at the end of fifty anti-Negro bombings, all unsolved by the local authorities. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, three young civil-rights workers were murdered by the Klan, and their bodies buried in a dam, with the active support of the town's top law-enforcement officials. And these were cases involving respectable middle-class people, not the vulnerable black poor, who had it far worse. In "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," written just a few months before the "I Have a Dream" speech, King conveys this sense of indignity and exposure with remarkable power:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society . . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, never quite knowing what to expect next, and you are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

The problem that King is discussing here is, in some ways, a very old one: black people had never been treated the same as everybody else in America. But the period of waiting really dated back to Reconstruction. President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and Congress and the states passed the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) gave the freed slaves legal rights, and the Fifteenth (1870) gave them the right to vote. The former Confederacy accepted the Thirteenth Amendment, but though it voted for the others, it nullified them in practice. During Reconstruction, it became obvious that, especially in the deep South, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would be without effect unless federal troops came to the South and enforced them at gunpoint. Support for this died out quickly in the North and never existed in the South, and the last time it happened in post-bellum America was in January, 1875, in New Orleans and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Reconstruction ended formally, in 1877, on the explicit understanding that the federal government would no longer intervene militarily to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

This bargain that the South made with the nation as a whole — Thirteenth Amendment yes, Fourteenth and Fifteenth no — was durable to the point of seeming unchangeable. For much of the twentieth century, civil rights for Negroes weren't even on the liberal agenda. President Woodrow Wilson honored D. W. Griffith's pro-Klan "Birth of a Nation" with a White House screening. President Franklin Roosevelt, who was probably the most powerful liberal politician in American history, and whose wife was a crusader on the subject, did not attempt to dismantle segregation. The South was an essential element in the Democratic Party's coalition, after all; and the country as a whole was, at best, unused to thinking of segregation as a problem. So the civil-rights movement had to pursue a series of related projects: awakening the long-slumbering racial conscience of non-Southern white Americans; organizing the black South politically by nontraditional means (since most black Southerners were prohibited from voting); changing the consciousness of all of black America to be less accepting of the situation; and, critically important, persuading the federal government not just to endorse the movement's goals but to use its power to enforce them.

The anthology's first document is A. Philip Randolph's call, in 1941, for a march on Washington "for jobs and equal participation in national defense" (Franklin Roosevelt, through persuasion and concession, forestalled the march), and following it are a number of pieces demonstrating that attempts to erase informal "color lines" in the housing and job markets, Negro voter-registration efforts in the South, and the refusal of blacks to sit in the back of the bus all predated what we now think of as the beginning of the civil-rights movement. The struggle was necessarily waged on many fronts, and one of the most important was the press; in fact, as "Reporting Civil Rights" reminds us, much of the press was effectively part of the movement, and an indispensable part. One reason that the Montgomery bus boycott was a breakthrough was that it made Martin Luther King the movement's first true media star. King was shockingly young and oratorically spectacular, and the national press — in particular, Time and Life — conferred a celebrity status on him that it had never given A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, or any of the movement's earlier leaders. King and his advisers had a genius for generating publicity that engaged the sympathies of liberal whites in the North. It wasn't just the strategy of nonviolence and the rhetoric of hope and redemption that made King successful; it was the staging of events in order to play to the national audience. King's local attempts to achieve broad-gauge progress for blacks failed repeatedly in Northern cities like Chicago and Cleveland; in Southern towns like Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida; and even, arguably, in the movement's sacred sites, like Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma. But King was great at losing the battle while winning the war — in August Meier's phrase, at producing "local failure and national victory." The ongoing real-life morality play he mounted — in which civil-rights heroes contended with white-resistance villains like Bull Connor, Jim Clark, and George Wallace — profoundly affected events in Washington. The real fruit of the Birmingham campaign was the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the real fruit of the Selma campaign the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The movement's success depended upon a ricochet effect among the various power centers of American society, and the press was only one of them. Thurgood Marshall and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund began filing lawsuits against segregated educational institutions back in the thirties. The Second World War subjected Northern black soldiers to Southern segregation (both in the military, which maintained segregated units throughout the war, and in the civilian world, when they were on leave) and gave Southern black soldiers a taste of life outside the Jim Crow system, and this, thanks in part to publicity in the Negro press, inflamed black public opinion. These wartime sentiments produced federal anti-discrimination executive orders signed by Roosevelt and Harry Truman. They helped spur the very early interstate bus rides by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. The Brown decision helped inspire the Montgomery movement. The Montgomery movement's success and the attendant publicity contributed to President Eisenhower's decision to send federal troops to Little Rock. And so on. This kind of multilayered, cross-jurisdictional activity was necessary because the opposition to the movement was a lot more powerful and sophisticated than the gap-toothed Klansmen and corpulent small-town sheriffs who were its public foils. The Brown cases, for example, pitted Marshall against, among others, a former Secretary of State, James F Byrnes, and a former Democratic Presidential nominee, John W. Davis; our current Chief Justice, then a Supreme Court law clerk, wrote a memorandum to his boss laying out a justification for a dissent from the unanimous decision.

Reporting Civil Rights" has a few lacunae (where's Gunnar Myrdal?), but the most important absence is of material hostile to the civil-rights movement. Having made the decision not to limit themselves to journalism per se, the editors had the opportunity to give us some flavor of the conversation among the movements adversaries, as they do so well for the conversation among its allies. But the ideological range of the pieces runs from journalistic-neutral to left; by my count, there are only two contributions from conservatives, Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem — And Ours," and Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers," and neither of those writers was so identified at the time that he published his article. Only one piece in "Reporting Civil Rights," a long, overwrought excerpt from a 1956 book by Robert Penn Warren called "Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South," gets across the feeling of the respectable white sentiment that I grew up around in Louisiana — opposed to civil rights, but with a paternalism that was deeply convinced of its own benevolence and painful honesty about the race problem, and deeply embarrassed by the lynchings and snarling mobs that were what the North knew of segregationism. (If only the movement had been more patient, the patrician white South thought, it wouldn't have brought such creatures crawling out of the swamp.) It’s true that, as several contributions say in passing, a good deal of the written case against civil rights took the form of crude mimeographs and newsletters, but there were also publications, like the Dan Smoot Report and the John Birch Society's American Opinion, that were hardly less mainstream than, on the left, the Southern Patriot or Ramparts, which did make the cut for "Reporting Civil Rights" — and there was the entirely presentable work of James J. Kilpatrick, then the editorial-page editor of the Richmond News Leader, and soon to be a familiar Washington columnist and television personality. Here's a passage from his 1962 book "The Southern Case for School Segregation":

Manifestly, the resistance to a coerced racial "equality" is wide and deep. Why is this so? The answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro race, as a race, has not earned equality. And as I have attempted to argue earlier, it is a feeble and evasive response to accuse the white critic, in making that flat statement, of emulating the child who shot his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan. The failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or willing to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own destiny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this.

The white South’s argument against the civil-rights movement always had at least three elements: in addition to the racial one that Kilpatrick was making, there was the idea that the movement was a Trojan horse filled with Communists and other radicals who wanted to change society wholesale, and there was opposition to the use of federal power to overturn local customs. You almost never see sentiments like Kirkpatricks in print anymore, and the radical left no longer presents a plausible danger, but hostility toward the federal government is a far more important element in American conservatism today than it was during the civil-rights movement. At a time when the movement begins to seem safe, neutral, and inarguable, it's worth recalling that coercive federal power really was crucial to its success. The civil-rights revolution reestablished the principle that the federal government would, after nearly a century's retreat, again assume responsibility for enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the South. In Congress, the bitterest fights about civil-rights legislation were always over the question of federal enforcement power, which, for the South, was the most objectionable aspect. The 1957 Civil Rights Act is relatively little remembered because the enforcement provisions were stripped out before Congress passed it; the 1964 act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were landmarks, and finally made the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments real in the South, precisely because they provided for federal enforcement. Federal troops were present at one milestone event after another during the movement's heyday — indeed, their arrival was the milestone. You have to wonder how, in a country that has become far more suspicious of the federal government, they'd be received today.

The glory days of the civil-rights movement came to an end in the summer of 1965. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which signalled the progression of black Southerners from an oppressed caste to an interest group; on August 11th, in Los Angeles, the Watts riot—vividly and terrifyingly described in several pieces in "Reporting Civil Rights" — broke out. The riot lasted most of a week and left thirty-four people dead, in addition to destroying much of a large black neighborhood and much of white America's store of racial good will. After Watts, the bulk of the material in "Reporting Civil Rights" is a dispiriting succession of riots, murders (including King's), unsuccessful campaigns, renunciations of nonviolence, factionalism, and black-white fights. (In 1966, John Lewis, the firebrand of the March on Washington, was ousted from SNCC for being too moderate.) But the summer of 1965 wasn't so obvious a turning point within the movement at the time as it now appears to have been, and the anthology makes it clear why not. Nearly everything about the movement was improvised and almost accidental. The two shimmering peaks of King's career were the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, which ended in a speech arguably even more dramatic and better than "I Have a Dream" — the one delivered from the steps of the Alabama state capitol, with a refrain of "How long? Not long." But King had originally planned to skip the Selma-to-Montgomery march; only when the situation escalated did he realize that he had made a mistake and rush to the scene. Given that none of the important organizations in the civil-rights movement thought that its purpose was limited to achieving "civil rights," the movement couldn't declare victory after the Voting Rights Act and go home; instead, for all its successes, it had to endure the pain of failure, a sense of what had not yet been achieved.

Even now, it would be a mistake to think that civil rights belongs to the realm of settled opinion, requiring of us only the kind of easy, post-facto approval that Trent Lott managed to bungle. The Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in a monumental case on affirmative action in university admissions. The institutional defendant is the University of Michigan, but the case is the culmination of a string of conservative anti-affirmative-action activities that began in 1995 with something called the California Civil Rights Initiative, which used King as its patron saint until it became clear that King had actually been a supporter of affirmative action. Although I didn't notice a single reference to affirmative action, pro or con, in the nearly nineteen hundred pages of "Reporting Civil Rights," the Michigan case is really an organic continuation of the events described in these books. Beginning in the forties, at least part of the civil-rights movement devoted itself primarily to demanding more and better jobs for Negroes outside the segregated South. When these efforts were successful, the usual result was proto-affirmative-action policies by state fair-employment commissions, under which the ordinary job qualifications would be set aside so that Negroes could be hired. The spectre of such programs haunted the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the act contained an amendment prohibiting them. But, once it became law, the act quickly led to the establishment of federal affirmative-action programs, and no civil-rights organization, across a wide ideological range, seems to have objected.

The movement began with a struggle for political change without the benefit of either votes or public opinion, and it became expert at using the courts and regulatory agencies to get results that lacked popular support. It's doubtful whether a plebiscite would have approved affirmative action in the first place. But history rolls onward: today one can't run for national office as a Democrat without declaring support for affirmative action, as Senator Joseph Lieberman demonstrated when, on being nominated for Vice-President, he renounced his previous doubt; even President Bush has made a point of avoiding a frontal assault on affirmative action — for example, declining to ask the Supreme Court to use the Michigan cases as the occasion simply to ban the use of race in college admissions. Big social issues of this sort are always in contention. "Reporting Civil Rights" is really a chronicle of one long season in America's ongoing political battles over race. A major legacy of the civil-rights movement is that those battles are far less intense and destructive now than they were during the period covered in the anthology. But they are by no means over.

This Is How We Lost to the White Man

The audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 2008 Atlantic Monthly

Last summer, in Detroit’s St. Paul Church of God in Christ, I watched Bill Cosby summon his inner Malcolm X. It was a hot July evening. Cosby was speaking to an audience of black men dressed in everything from Enyce T-shirts or polos to blazers and ties. Some were there with their sons. Some were there in wheelchairs. The audience was packed tight, rows of folding chairs extended beyond the wooden pews to capture the overflow. But the chairs were not enough, and late arrivals stood against the long shotgun walls, or out in the small lobby, where they hoped to catch a snatch of Cosby’s oratory. Clutching a cordless mic, Cosby paced the front of the church, shifting between prepared remarks and comic ad-libs. A row of old black men, community elders, sat behind him, nodding and grunting throaty affirmations. The rest of the church was in full call-and-response mode, punctuating Cosby’s punch lines with laughter, applause, or cries of “Teach, black man! Teach!”

He began with the story of a black girl who’d risen to become valedictorian of his old high school, despite having been abandoned by her father. “She spoke to the graduating class and her speech started like this,” Cosby said. “‘I was 5 years old. It was Saturday and I stood looking out the window, waiting for him.’ She never said what helped turn her around. She never mentioned her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother.”
“Understand me,” Cosby said, his face contorted and clenched like a fist. “Men? Men? Men! Where are you, men?”
Audience: “Right here!”

Cosby had come to Detroit aiming to grab the city’s black men by their collars and shake them out of the torpor that has left so many of them—like so many of their peers across the country—undereducated, over-incarcerated, and underrepresented in the ranks of active fathers. No women were in the audience. No reporters were allowed, for fear that their presence might frighten off fathers behind on their child-support payments. But I was there, trading on race, gender, and a promise not to interview any of the allegedly skittish participants.
“Men, if you want to win, we can win,” Cosby said. “We are not a pitiful race of people. We are a bright race, who can move with the best. But we are in a new time, where people are behaving in abnormal ways and calling it normal … When they used to come into our neighborhoods, we put the kids in the basement, grabbed a rifle, and said, ‘By any means necessary.’ “I don’t want to talk about hatred of these people,” he continued. “I’m talking about a time when we protected our women and protected our children. Now I got people in wheelchairs, paralyzed. A little girl in Camden, jumping rope, shot through the mouth. Grandmother saw it out the window. And people are waiting around for Jesus to come, when Jesus is already within you.”

Cosby was wearing his standard uniform—dark sunglasses, loafers, a sweat suit emblazoned with the seal of an institution of higher learning. That night it was the University of Massachusetts, where he’d gotten his doctorate in education 30 years ago. He was preaching from the book of black self-reliance, a gospel that he has spent the past four years carrying across the country in a series of events that he bills as “call-outs.” “My problem,” Cosby told the audience, “is I’m tired of losing to white people. When I say I don’t care about white people, I mean let them say what they want to say. What can they say to me that’s worse than what their grandfather said?”
From Birmingham to Cleveland and Baltimore, at churches and colleges, Cosby has been telling thousands of black Americans that racism in America is omnipresent but that it can’t be an excuse to stop striving. As Cosby sees it, the antidote to racism is not rallies, protests, or pleas, but strong families and communities. Instead of focusing on some abstract notion of equality, he argues, blacks need to cleanse their culture, embrace personal responsibility, and reclaim the traditions that fortified them in the past. Driving Cosby’s tough talk about values and responsibility is a vision starkly different from Martin Luther King’s gauzy, all-inclusive dream: it’s an America of competing powers, and a black America that is no longer content to be the weakest of the lot.

It’s heady stuff, especially coming from the man white America remembers as a sitcom star and affable pitchman for E. F. Hutton, Kodak, and Jell-O Pudding Pops. And Cosby’s race-based crusade is particularly jarring now. Across the country, as black politics has become more professionalized, the rhetoric of race is giving way to the rhetoric of standards and results. Newark’s young Ivy League–educated mayor, Cory Booker, ran for office promising competence and crime reduction, as did Washington’s mayor, Adrian Fenty. Indeed, we are now enjoying a moment of national self-congratulation over racial progress, with a black man running for president as the very realization of King’s dream. Barack Obama defied efforts by the Clinton campaign to pigeonhole him as a “black” candidate, casting himself instead as the symbol of a society that has moved beyond lazy categories of race.

Black America does not entirely share the euphoria, though. The civil-rights generation is exiting the American stage—not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate. In that climate, Cosby’s gospel of discipline, moral reform, and self-reliance offers a way out—a promise that one need not cure America of its original sin in order to succeed. Racism may not be extinguished, but it can be beaten.

Has Dr. Huxtable, the head of one of America’s most beloved television households, seen the truth: that the dream of integration should never supplant the pursuit of self-respect; that blacks should worry more about judging themselves and less about whether whites are judging them on the content of their character? Or has he lost his mind?

From the moment he registered in the American popular consciousness, as the Oxford-educated Alexander Scott in the NBC adventure series I Spy, Cosby proffered the idea of an America that transcended race. The series, which started in 1965, was the first weekly show to feature an African American in a lead role, but it rarely factored race into dialogue or plots. Race was also mostly inconspicuous in Cosby’s performances as a hugely popular stand-up comedian. “I don’t spend my hours worrying how to slip a social message into my act,” Cosby told Playboy in 1969. He also said that he didn’t “have time to sit around and worry whether all the black people of the world make it because of me. I have my own gig to worry about.” His crowning artistic and commercial achievement—The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992—was seemingly a monument to that understated sensibility.

In fact, blackness was never absent from the show or from Bill Cosby. Plots involved black artists like Stevie Wonder or Dizzy Gillespie. The Huxtables’ home was decorated with the works of black artists like Annie Lee, and the show featured black theater veterans such as Roscoe Lee Brown and Moses Gunn. Behind the scenes, Cosby hired the Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint to make sure that the show never trafficked in stereotypes and that it depicted blacks in a dignified light. Picking up Cosby’s fixation on education, Poussaint had writers insert references to black schools. “If the script mentioned Oberlin, Texas Tech, or Yale, we’d circle it and tell them to mention a black college,” Poussaint told me in a phone interview last year. “I remember going to work the next day and white people saying, ‘What’s the school called Morehouse?’” In 1985, Cosby riled NBC by placing an anti-apartheid sign in his Huxtable son’s bedroom. The network wanted no part of the debate. “There may be two sides to apartheid in Archie Bunker’s house,” the Toronto Star quoted Cosby as saying. “But it’s impossible that the Huxtables would be on any side but one. That sign will stay on that door. And I’ve told NBC that if they still want it down, or if they try to edit it out, there will be no show.” The sign stayed.

Offstage, Cosby’s philanthropy won him support among the civil-rights crowd. He made his biggest splash in 1988, when he and his wife gave $20 million to Spelman College, the largest individual donation ever given to a black college. “Two million would have been fantastic; 20 million, to use the language of the hip-hop generation, was off the chain,” says Johnnetta Cole, who was then president of Spelman. Race again came to the fore in 1997, when Cosby’s son was randomly shot and killed while fixing a flat on a Los Angeles freeway. His wife wrote an op-ed in USA Today arguing that white racism lay behind her son’s death. “All African-Americans, regardless of their educational and economic accomplishments, have been and are at risk in America simply because of their skin colors,” she wrote. “Most people know that facing the truth brings about healing and growth. When is America going to face its historical and current racial realities so it can be what it says it is?”

The column caused a minor row, but most of white America took little notice. To them, Cosby was still America’s Dad. But those close to Cosby were not surprised. Cosby was an avowed race man, who, like much of his generation, had come to feel that black America had lost its way. The crisis of absentee fathers, the rise of black-on-black crime, and the spread of hip-hop all led Cosby to believe that, after the achievements of the 1960s, the black community was committing cultural suicide.

His anger and frustration erupted into public view during an NAACP awards ceremony in Washington in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. At that moment, the shades of mortality and irrelevance seemed to be drawing over the civil-rights generation. Its matriarchs, Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, would be dead within two years. The NAACP’s membership rolls had been shrinking; within months, its president, Kweisi Mfume, would resign (it was later revealed that he was under investigation by the NAACP for sexual harassment and nepotism—allegations that he denied). Other movement leaders were drifting into self-parody: Al Sharpton would soon be hosting a reality show and, a year later, would be doing ads for a predatory loan company; Sharpton and Jesse Jackson had recently asked MGM to issue an apology for the hit movie Barbershop.

That night, Cosby was one of the last honorees to take the podium. He began by noting that although civil-rights activists had opened the door for black America, young people today, instead of stepping through, were stepping backward. “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband,” he told the crowd. “No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father of the unmarried child.” There was cheering as Cosby went on. Perhaps sensing that he had the crowd, he grew looser. “The lower-economic and lower-middle-economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” he told the audience.

Cosby disparaged activists who charge the criminal-justice system with racism. “These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake,” Cosby said. “Then we all run out and are outraged: ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, ‘If you get caught with it, you’re going to embarrass your mother.’”

Then he attacked African American naming traditions, and the style of dress among young blacks: “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people. They are showing you what’s wrong … What part of Africa did this come from? We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans. They don’t know a damned thing about Africa— with names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed, and all that crap, and all of them are in jail.” About then, people began to walk out of the auditorium and cluster in the lobby. There was still cheering, but some guests milled around and wondered what had happened. Some thought old age had gotten the best of Cosby. The mood was one of shock.

After what has come to be known as “the Pound Cake speech”—it has its own Wikipedia entry—Cosby came under attack from various quarters of the black establishment. The playwright August Wilson commented, “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” One of the gala’s hosts, Ted Shaw, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, called his comments “a harsh attack on poor black people in particular.” Dubbing Cosby an “Afristocrat in Winter,” the Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson came out with a book, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, that took issue with Cosby’s bleak assessment of black progress and belittled his transformation from vanilla humorist to social critic and moral arbiter. “While Cosby took full advantage of the civil rights struggle,” argued Dyson, “he resolutely denied it a seat at his artistic table.”

But Cosby’s rhetoric played well in black barbershops, churches, and backyard barbecues, where a unique brand of conservatism still runs strong. Outsiders may have heard haranguing in Cosby’s language and tone. But much of black America heard instead the possibility of changing their communities without having to wait on the consciences and attention spans of policy makers who might not have their interests at heart. Shortly after Cosby took his Pound Cake message on the road, I wrote an article denouncing him as an elitist. When my father, a former Black Panther, read it, he upbraided me for attacking what he saw as a message of black empowerment. Cosby’s argument has resonated with the black mainstream for just that reason.

The split between Cosby and critics such as Dyson mirrors not only America’s broader conservative/liberal split but black America’s own historic intellectual divide. Cosby’s most obvious antecedent is Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the 20th century, Washington married a defense of the white South with a call for black self-reliance and became the most prominent black leader of his day. He argued that southern whites should be given time to adjust to emancipation; in the meantime, blacks should advance themselves not by voting and running for office but by working, and ultimately owning, the land.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the integrationist model for the Dysons of our day, saw Washington as an apologist for white racism and thought that his willingness to sacrifice the black vote was heretical. History ultimately rendered half of Washington’s argument moot. His famous Atlanta Compromise—in which he endorsed segregation as a temporary means of making peace with southerners—was answered by lynchings, land theft, and general racial terrorism. But Washington’s appeal to black self-sufficiency endured.

After Washington’s death, in 1915, the black conservative tradition he had fathered found a permanent and natural home in the emerging ideology of Black Nationalism. Marcus Garvey, its patron saint, turned the Atlanta Compromise on its head, implicitly endorsing segregation not as an olive branch to whites but as a statement of black supremacy. Black Nationalists scorned the Du Boisian integrationists as stooges or traitors, content to beg for help from people who hated them.

Garvey argued that blacks had rendered themselves unworthy of the white man’s respect. “The greatest stumbling block in the way of progress in the race has invariably come from within the race itself,” wrote Garvey. “The monkey wrench of destruction as thrown into the cog of Negro Progress, is not thrown so much by the outsider as by the very fellow who is in our fold, and who should be the first to grease the wheel of progress rather than seeking to impede.” Decades later, Malcolm X echoed that sentiment, faulting blacks for failing to take charge of their destinies. “The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community,” Malcolm said. “But you will let anybody come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate. No, you’re out of your mind.”

Black conservatives like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, have at times allied themselves with black liberals. But in general, they have upheld a core of beliefs laid out by Garvey almost a century ago: a skepticism of (white) government as a mediating force in the “Negro problem,” a strong belief in the singular will of black people, and a fixation on a supposedly glorious black past.

Those beliefs also animate Come On People, the manifesto that Cosby and Poussaint published last fall. Although it does not totally dismiss government programs, the book mostly advocates solutions from within as a cure for black America’s dismal vital statistics. “Once we find our bearings,” they write, “we can move forward, as we have always done, on the path from victims to victors.” Come On People is heavy on black pride (“no group of people has had the impact on the culture of the whole world that African Americans have had, and much of that impact has been for the good”), and heavier on the idea of the Great Fall—the theory, in this case, that post–Jim Crow blacks have lost touch with the cultural traditions that enabled them to persevere through centuries of oppression.

“For all the woes of segregation, there were some good things to come out of it,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “One was that it forced us to take care of ourselves. When restaurants, laundries, hotels, theaters, groceries, and clothing stores were segregated, black people opened and ran their own. Black life insurance companies and banks thrived, as well as black funeral homes … Such successes provided jobs and strength to black economic well-being. They also gave black people that gratifying sense of an interdependent community.” Although the authors take pains to put some distance between themselves and the Nation of Islam, they approvingly quote one of its ministers who spoke at a call-out in Compton, California: “I went to Koreatown today and I met with the Korean merchants,” the minister told the crowd. “I love them. You know why? They got a place called what? Koreatown. When I left them, I went to Chinatown. They got a place called what? Chinatown. Where is your town?”

The notion of the Great Fall, and the attendant theory that segregation gave rise to some “good things,” are the stock-in-trade of what Christopher Alan Bracey, a law professor at Washington University, calls (in his book, Saviors or Sellouts) the “organic” black conservative tradition: conservatives who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention, but whose black-nationalist leanings make them anathema to the Heritage Foundation and Rush Limbaugh. When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him. This is the audience that flocks to Cosby: culturally conservative black Americans who are convinced that integration, and to some extent the entire liberal dream, robbed them of their natural defenses.

“There are things that we did not see coming,” Cosby told me over lunch in Manhattan last year. “Like, you could see the Klan, but because these things were not on a horse, because there was no white sheet, and the people doing the deed were not white, we saw things in the light of family and forgiveness … We didn’t pay attention to the dropout rate. We didn’t pay attention to the fathers, to the self-esteem of our boys.”

Given the state of black America, it is hard to quarrel with that analysis. Blacks are 13 percent of the population, yet black men account for 49 percent of America’s murder victims and 41 percent of the prison population. The teen birth rate for blacks is 63 per 1,000, more than double the rate for whites. In 2005, black families had the lowest median income of any ethnic group measured by the Census, making only 61 percent of the median income of white families.

Most troubling is a recent study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which concluded that the rate at which blacks born into the middle class in the 1960s backslid into poverty or near-poverty (45 percent) was three times that of whites—suggesting that the advances of even some of the most successful cohorts of black America remain tenuous at best. Another Pew survey, released last November, found that blacks were “less upbeat about the state of black progress now than at any time since 1983.”

The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress.

In May 2004, just one day before Cosby’s Pound Cake speech, The New York Times visited Louisville, Kentucky, once ground zero in the fight to integrate schools. But TheTimes found that sides had switched, and that black parents were more interested in educational progress than in racial parity. “Integration? What was it good for?” one parent asked. “They were just setting up our babies to fail.”

In response to these perceived failures, many black activists have turned their efforts inward. Geoffrey Canada’s ambitious Harlem Children’s Zone project pushes black students to change their study habits and improve their home life. In cities like Baltimore and New York, community groups are focusing on turning black men into active fathers. In Philadelphia last October, thousands of black men packed the Liacouras Center, pledging to patrol their neighborhoods and help combat the rising murder rate. When Cosby came to St. Paul Church in Detroit, one local judge got up and urged Cosby and other black celebrities to donate more money to advance the cause. “I didn’t fly out here to write a check,” Cosby retorted. “I’m not writing a check in Houston, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Leave these athletes alone. All you know is Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jackson. Forget about a check … This is how we lost to the white man. ‘Judge said Bill Cosby is gonna write a check, but until then … ’”

Instead of waiting for handouts or outside help, Cosby argues, disadvantaged blacks should start by purging their own culture of noxious elements like gangsta rap, a favorite target. “What do record producers think when they churn out that gangsta rap with antisocial, women-hating messages?,” Cosby and Poussaint ask in their book. “Do they think that black male youth won’t act out what they have repeated since they were old enough to listen?” Cosby’s rhetoric on culture echoes—and amplifies—a swelling strain of black opinion: last November’s Pew study reported that 71 percent of blacks feel that rap is a bad influence.

The strain of black conservatism that Cosby evokes has also surfaced in the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Early on, some commentators speculated that Obama’s Cosby-esque appeals to personal responsibility would cost him black votes. But if his admonishments for black kids to turn off the PlayStation and for black fathers to do their jobs did him any damage, it was not reflected at the polls. In fact, this sort of rhetoric amounts to something of a racial double play, allowing Obama and Cosby to cater both to culturally conservative blacks and to whites who are convinced that black America is a bastion of decadence. (Curiously, Cosby is noncommittal verging on prickly when it comes to Obama. When Larry King asked him whether he supported Obama, he bristled: “Do you ask white people this question? … I want to know why this fellow especially is brought up in such a special way. How many Americans in the media really take him seriously, or do they look at him like some prize brown baby?” The exchange ended with Cosby professing admiration for Dennis Kucinich. Months later, he rebuffed my requests for his views on Obama’s candidacy.)

The shift in focus from white racism to black culture is not as new as some social commentators make it out to be. Standing in St. Paul Church on that July evening listening to Cosby, I remembered the last time The Street felt like this: in the summer of 1994, after Louis Farrakhan announced the Million Man March. Farrakhan barnstormed the country holding “men only” meetings (but much larger). I saw him in my native Baltimore, while home from Howard University on vacation. The march itself was cathartic. I walked with four or five other black men, and all along the way black women stood on porches or out on the street, shouting, clapping, cheering. For us, Farrakhan’s opinions on the Jews mostly seemed beside the point; what stuck was the chance to assert our humanity and our manhood by marching on the Mall, and not acting like we were all fresh out of San Quentin. We lived in the shadow of the ’80s crack era. So many of us had been jailed or were on our way. So many of us were fathers in biology only. We believed ourselves disgraced and clung to the march as a public statement: the time had come to grow up.

Black conservatives have been dipping into this well of lost black honor since the turn of the 20th century. On the one hand, vintage black nationalists have harked back to a golden age of black Africa, where mighty empires sprawled and everyone was a king. Meanwhile, populist black conservatives like Cosby point to pre-1968 black America as an era when blacks were united in the struggle: men were men, and a girl who got pregnant without getting married would find herself bundled off to Grandpa’s farm.

What both visions share is a sense that black culture in its present form is bastardized and pathological. What they also share is a foundation in myth. Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.

Indeed, a century ago, the black brain trust was pushing the same rhetoric that Cosby is pushing today. It was concerned that slavery had essentially destroyed the black family and was obsessed with seemingly the same issues—crime, wanton sexuality, and general moral turpitude—that Cosby claims are recent developments. “The early effort of middle-class blacks to respond to segregation was, aside from a political agenda, focused on a social-reform agenda,” says Khalil G. Muhammad, a professor of American history at Indiana University. “The National Association of Colored Women, Du Bois in The Philadelphia Negro, all shared a sense of anxiety that African Americans were not presenting their best selves to the world. There was the sense that they were committing crimes and needed to keep their sexuality in check.” Adds William Jelani Cobb, a professor of American history at Spelman College: “The same kind of people who were advocating for social reform were denigrating people because they didn’t play piano. They often saw themselves as reluctant caretakers of the less enlightened.”

In particular, Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history. As early as the 1930s, sociologists were concerned that black men were falling behind black women. In his classic study, The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939, E. Franklin Frazier argued that urbanization was undermining the ability of men to provide for their families. In 1965—at the height of the civil-rights movement—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s milestone report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” picked up the same theme.

At times, Cosby seems willfully blind to the parallels between his arguments and those made in the presumably glorious past. Consider his problems with rap. How could an avowed jazz fanatic be oblivious to the similar plaints once sparked by the music of his youth? “The tired longshoreman, the porter, the housemaid and the poor elevator boy in search of recreation, seeking in jazz the tonic for weary nerves and muscles,” wrote the lay historian J. A. Rogers, “are only too apt to find the bootlegger, the gambler and the demi-monde who have come there for victims and to escape the eyes of the police.”

Beyond the apocryphal notion that black culture was once a fount of virtue, there’s still the charge that culture is indeed the problem. But to reach that conclusion, you’d have to stand on some rickety legs. The hip-hop argument, again, is particularly creaky. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard social scientist, has highlighted that an increase in hip-hop’s popularity during the early 1990s corresponded with a declining amount of time spent reading among black kids. But gangsta rap can be correlated with other phenomena, too—many of them positive. During the 1990s, as gangsta rap exploded, teen pregnancy and the murder rate among black men declined. Should we give the blue ribbon in citizenship to Dr. Dre?

“I don’t know how to measure culture. I don’t know how to test its effects, and I’m not sure anyone else does,” says the Georgetown economist Harry Holzer. “There’s a liberal story that limited opportunities, and barriers, lead to employment problems and criminal records, but then there’s another story that has to do with norms, behaviors, and oppositional culture. You can’t prove the latter statistically, but it still might be true.” Holzer thinks that both arguments contain truth and that one doesn’t preclude the other. Fair enough. Suffice it to say, though, that the evidence supporting structural inequality is compelling. In 2001, a researcher sent out black and white job applicants in Milwaukee, randomly assigning them a criminal record. The researcher concluded that a white man with a criminal record had about the same chance of getting a job as a black man without one. Three years later, researchers produced the same results in New York under more-rigorous conditions.

The accepted wisdom is that such studies are a comfort to black people, allowing them to wallow in their misery. In fact, the opposite is true—the liberal notion that blacks are still, after a century of struggle, victims of pervasive discrimination is the ultimate collective buzz-kill. It effectively means that African Americans must, on some level, accept that their children will be “less than” until some point in the future when white racism miraculously abates. That’s not the sort of future that any black person eagerly awaits, nor does it make for particularly motivating talking points.

Last summer, I watched Cosby give a moving commencement speech to a group of Connecticut inmates who’d just received their GEDs. Before the speech, at eight in the morning, Cosby quizzed correctional officials on the conditions and characteristics of their inmate population. I wished, then, that my 7-year-old son could have seen Cosby there, to take in the same basic message that I endeavor to serve him every day—that manhood means more than virility and strut, that it calls for discipline and dutiful stewardship. That the ultimate fate of black people lies in their own hands, not in the hands of their antagonists. That as an African American, he has a duty to his family, his community, and his ancestors.

If Cosby’s call-outs simply ended at that—a personal and communal creed—there’d be little to oppose. But Cosby often pits the rhetoric of personal responsibility against the legitimate claims of American citizens for their rights. He chides activists for pushing to reform the criminal-justice system, despite solid evidence that the criminal-justice system needs reform. His historical amnesia—his assertion that many of the problems that pervade black America are of a recent vintage—is simply wrong, as is his contention that today’s young African Americans are somehow weaker, that they’ve dropped the ball. And for all its positive energy, his language of uplift has its limitations. After the Million Man March, black men embraced a sense of hope and promise. We were supposed to return to our communities and families inspired by a new feeling of responsibility. Yet here we are again, almost 15 years later, with seemingly little tangible change. I’d take my son to see Bill Cosby, to hear his message, to revel in its promise and optimism. But afterward, he and I would have a very long talk.

On the day last summer when Cosby met me for lunch in the West Village, it was raining, as it had been all week, and New York was experiencing a record-cold August. Cosby had just come from Max Roach’s funeral and was dressed in a natty three-piece suit. Despite the weather, the occasion, and the oddly empty dining room, Cosby was energized. He had spent the previous day in Philadelphia, where he spoke to a group in a housing project, met with state health officials, and participated in a community march against crime. Grassroots black activists in his hometown were embracing his call. He planned, over the coming year, to continue his call-outs and release a hip-hop album. (He has also noted, however, that there won’t be any profanity on it.)

Cosby was feeling warm and nostalgic. He asked why I had not brought my son, and I instantly regretted dropping him off at my partner’s workplace for a couple of hours. He talked about breaking his shoulder playing school football, after his grandfather had tried to get him to quit. “Granddad Cosby got on the trolley and came over to the apartment,” he recalled. “I was so embarrassed. I was laid out on the sofa. He was talking to my parents, and I was waiting for the moment when he would say, ‘See, I told you, Junior.’ He came back and reached in his pocket and gave me a quarter. He said, ‘Go to the corner and get some ice cream. It has calcium in it.’”

Much pop psychology has been devoted to Cosby’s transformation into such a high-octane, high-profile activist. His nemesis Dyson says that Cosby, in his later years, is following in the dishonorable tradition of upper-class African Americans who denounce their less fortunate brethren. Others have suggested more-sinister motivations—that Cosby is covering for his own alleged transgressions. (In 2006, Cosby settled a civil lawsuit filed by a woman who claimed that he had sexually assaulted her; other women have come forward with similar allegations that have not gone to court.) But the depth of his commitment would seem to belie such suspicions, and in any case, they do not seem to have affected his hold on his audience: in the November Pew survey, 85 percent of all African American respondents considered him a “good influence” on the black community, above Obama (76 percent) and second only to Oprah Winfrey (87 percent).

Part of what drives Cosby’s activism, and reinforces his message, is the rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred. As the comedian Chris Rock put it in one of his infamous routines, “Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people … It’s like a civil war going on with black people, and it’s two sides—there’s black people and there’s niggas, and niggas have got to go … Boy, I wish they’d let me join the Ku Klux Klan. Shit, I’d do a drive-by from here to Brooklyn.” (Rock stopped performing the routine when he noticed that his white fans were laughing a little too hard.) Liberalism, with its pat logic and focus on structural inequities, offers no balm for this sort of raw pain. Like the people he preaches to, Cosby has grown tired of hanging his head.

This disquiet spans generations, but it is most acute among those of the civil-rights era. “I don’t know a better term than angst,” says Johnnetta Cole. “I refuse to categorize every young African American with the same language, but there are some ‘young’uns’—and some of us who are not ‘young’uns’—who must turn around and look at where we are, because where we’re headed isn’t pretty.” Like many of the stars of the civil-rights movement, Cole has gifts that go beyond social activism. She rose out of the segregated South and went to college at age 15, eventually earning a bachelor’s from Oberlin and a doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern. That same sort of dynamism exists today among many younger blacks, but what troubles the older generation is that their energy seems directed at other pursuits besides social uplift.

Cosby is fond of saying that sacrifices of the ’60s weren’t made so that rappers and young people could repeatedly use the word nigger. But that’s exactly why they were made. After all, chief among all individual rights awarded Americans is the right to be mediocre, crass, and juvenile—in other words, the right to be human. But Cosby is aiming for something superhuman—twice as good, as the elders used to say—and his homily to a hazy black past seems like an effort to redeem something more than the present.

When people hear Bill Cosby’s message, many assume that he is the product of the sort of family he’s promoting—two caring parents, a stable home life, a working father. In fact, like many of the men he admonishes, Cosby was born into a troubled home. He was raised by his mother because his father, who joined the Navy, abandoned the family when Cosby was a child. Speaking to me of his youth, Cosby said, “People told me I was bright, but nobody stayed on me. My mother was too busy trying to feed and clothe us.” He was smart enough to be admitted to Central High School, a magnet school in Philadelphia, but transferred and then dropped out in 10th grade and followed his father into the service.

But the twists and turns of that reality seem secondary to the tidier, more appealing world that Cosby is trying to create. Toward the end of our lunch, in a long, rambling monologue, Cosby told me, “If you looked at me and said, ‘Why is he doing this? Why right now?,’ you could probably say, ‘He’s having a resurgence of his childhood.’ What do I need if I am a child today? I need people to guide me. I need the possibility of change. I need people to stop saying I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. They say that’s a myth. But these other people have their mythical stories—why can’t we have our own?”

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, published this month.

note from 'Wanted'

It is a choice that each of us must face:
to remain ordinary, pathetic, beat down,
coasting through a miserable existence like sheep herded by fate.
Or you can take control of your own destiny.

Across the Universe

Words are flowing out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass they slip away
across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting through my open mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva

The Marsh in Winter

by Timothy Walsh

If you stand and listen,
you will hear the voice.
Reeds sharp as rapiers rasp the wind.
Frost creaks in the trees.
Sunlight, ice-bright, falls from the sky.
Scattered cedars and junipers loom like shadows.
Sheathed in ice, a willow droops heavily
across the path.
Driven snow packs the creviced bark of cottonwoods.
Once-hidden bird nests now plainly marked
by a white cap of snow...

Out on the marsh, blue water shows through shifting ice.
Tall brown reeds, slim as dancers, bend in the breeze.
A hundred thousand cattails, each one lit
by the low-angled light of westering sun,
each brown seed head blazing
like the head of a saint.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raodk45/2305850330/

Bessie Smith - The Complete Columbia Recordings Vol.1

by Chris Albertson

      People whose job it is to turn a performer's name into a household word are—by the very nature of their task —given to exaggeration. They tend to wrap their clients in superlatives that have long been rendered meaningless by overuse, and, more often than not, the puffery is just that. There are of course always exceptions, and Bessie Smith is a case in point. Naming her "Queen of the Blues" was obviously a promotional ploy, but later when the pro­motional buildup escalated and she became "Empress," no one objected. Both appellations happen to have been eminently fitting, and even true royalty concurred. 'The Prince of Wales was showing us around," singer-dancer Mae Barnes once told me, recalling an early thirties visit to Windsor Castle, "and we came to a huge portrait of Queen Mary. 'What a regal woman,' I said. He nodded and said 'Yes, I believe there are only two truly regal women in this world, my mother and Bessie Smith.'"
      "Bessie was a queen," said Ruby Walker, her niece by marriage. "I mean, the people looked up to her and wor­shipped her like she was a queen. You know, she would walk into a room or out on a stage and people couldn't help but notice her—she was that kind of woman, a strong, beautiful woman with a personality as big as a house. No hanging around in the corner, not Bessie! She'd let you know she was there, and she didn't have to open her mouth to do it."
      Of course, Bessie took her commanding presence with her to the grave, but her artistry—captured on one 17-minute film and 160 3-minute recordings—has made her immortal. For decades, Bessie also lived on in the memories of those who knew her and heard her perform, but they are a dwindling number as this century draws to a close. "I don't ever remember any artist in my long, long years who could evoke the response from her listeners that Bessie Smith did,' said the late Frank Schiffman, who owned Harlem's Lafayette and Apollo theatres when Bessie was a headliner there. "Whatever pathos there is in the world, whatever sadness she had, was brought out in her singing—and the audience knew it and responded to it." Band leader Sy Oliver remembered seeing Bessie "hypnotize" and "walk" a member of the audience during a Baltimore engagement: "That man was completely mesmerized by Bessie's singing, and as she slowly walked backwards, looking straight at him, he followed." Drum­mer Zutty Singleton, who played for Bessie in New Orleans, likened her performances to sermons. "She could do that kind of thing," he said, "because her songs were like church hymns—they kinda grabbed you tight." New Orleans guitarist Danny Barker concurred: "If you had any church background, like people who came from the South, as I did, you would recognize a similarity be­tween what she was doing and what those preachers and evangelists from there did, and how they moved people. She could bring about mass hypnotism."
      Bessie's absorbing style also profoundly influenced other singers—not only the blues ladies of her day but, indeed, generations of vocalists that followed, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin. She was in her day what Aretha Franklin is in ours: that one singer whose combination of musical skill, artistic honesty and good taste separates her from all others. It is no wonder that Aretha, the undis­puted Queen of Soul, sees a great deal of herself in the Empress of the Blues. When Bessie began recording, there were no microphones, just an ominous, cone-shaped horn; it did not capture every nuance of a perform­ance, but there was a raw honesty about what it did preserve, and it never flattered. Today's advanced, elec­tronic recording equipment can not only enhance a sing­er's voice, it can be downright deceitful and create the appearance of talent where none exists. But not even the most sophisticated recording equipment can fake that special something which gives performances by Bessie Smith, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson—and a handful of other singers, like Carlos Gardel and Edith Piaf—their enduring quality. Hype may have given Bessie her "title," but it is her true artistry—captured primitively, by today's standards—that lets her continue to leave her mark on soul divas and cabaret crooners as we approach a new century.
      Bessie rose to become the highest-paid black entertainer of her day with earnings totaling $2,000 a week. That is a mere pittance by today's standards, but it was considered a small fortune in the twenties, especially in the netherworld black show business, which Bessie em­braced. And, although she had to pay the show's salaries and expenses out of that money, the amount she could claim as personal profit was a staggering one for a woman who grew up in abject poverty.
      Bessie was born on April 15, probably in 1894, the daughter of William and Laura Smith. Her father was a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher who died before Bessie was old enough to remember him, and before she was ten, she had also lost mother and a brother. To Viola, the oldest sister—whom a stranger in the night had left carrying a baby girl of her own—fell the burden of raising and caring for the remaining family. Their home was a one-room wooden shack on Charles Street in the Blue Goose Hollow section of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bessie would later describe it as a "ramshackle cabin" where rats outnumbered the Smith family. Bitter and old beyond her years, Viola worked hard, taking in laundry, which she boiled atop an outdoor coal stove, and when she wasn't washing, she was cooking. Clarence, the oldest male member of the family, did his best to help by taking what­ever odd jobs he could find, but he had the not uncommon urge to explore the world beyond Chattanooga. In 1904, when a small traveling troupe came to town and pre­sented Clarence with his first opportunity to leave home, he seized it. Always the clown, Clarence had long shown an interest in theatre, and his enthusiasm had rubbed off on Bessie, who was only nine when she entered the Ivory Theatre's weekly amateur contest. Seeing her favorite brother leave town as a master of ceremonies made her all the more determined to one day follow in his footsteps. "Bessie probably wouldn't have been in show business if it hadn't been for Clarence," Ruby Smith observed in a se­ries of 1971 interviews. "She and Clarence often laughed about how he inspired her to go out and dance on the sidewalks, and how Viola didn't like it. I guess she liked the money, though."
      Bessie was now attending the West Main Street School, but she often spent her late afternoons and weekends per­forming in the streets, accompanied on guitar by another brother, Andrew. They were most frequently seen around Ninth Street, a stretch along which the city's black night life centered, but sometimes they stayed in their own neighborhood, in front of the White Elephant Saloon on Thirteenth and Elm. The saloon's patrons were good to the Smith children, their generosity heightened by the establishment's offerings.
     Will Johnson, a friend of Andrew's, still remembered the duo in 1974. "She used to sing 'Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home?,'" he said, "and whenever someone threw a fat coin her way, she'd say something like That's right, Charlie, give to the church.' I always thought she had more talent as a performer—you know, dancing and clowning—than as a singer, at least in those days I don't remember being particularly impressed with her voice. She sure knew how to shake money loose from a pocket, though."
      In 1912, Clarence returned to Chattanooga with the Moses Stokes company, to put on a few shows at a Ninth Street storefront theatre. He arranged to have the troupe's managers, Lonnie and Cora Fisher, give Bessie an audi­tion, which she passed. Thus it was that Bessie Smith launched her professional career as a dancer with the Moses Stokes troupe, and not—as some writers once had us believe—after being kidnapped and dumped, screaming and kicking, out of a burlap bag by henchmen of singer Ma Rainey. That colorful story is nothing more, but Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was on the scene when Bessie left Chattanooga, for she was the Stokes troupe's resident vocalist.
      About eight years older than Bessie, Ma Rainey, a portly woman with an oddly charming gold-toothed smile, was the first known female blues singer. "We [women] weren't singing blues in those days," recalled Ida Cox, one of the great classic blues singers, who in 1911 escaped from Cedartown, Georgia, with a show. "My first song that I sang in public was ‘Put Your Arms Around Me.'" Alberta Hunter, who performed in lowly Chicago dives at that time, recalled that her repertoire consisted of such popular material as "Where The River Shannon Flows" and "All Night Long," adding that these songs "were about as far removed from jazz as 'God Bless America.'" Ma Rainey, on the other hand, was singing blues; not in the vaudeville style that women would later adopt, but in the less pol­ished, earthier manner of male blues minstrels who then roamed the South's streets and back roads.
      It has been suggested that Ma Rainey was Bessie's men­tor, the person from whom she learned everything she knew, but Bessie's style contradicts that theory, as do the recollections of people who heard her sing in those formative years. "[Ma Rainey] may have taught her a few dance steps, or showed her how to walk onstage," said the late character actor Leigh Whipper, who first heard Bessie in 1913, when he managed Atlanta's "81" Theatre, "but Bessie was born with that voice and she had a style of her own when I first heard her in Atlanta. She was just a teen­ager, and she obviously didn't know she was the artist she was. She didn't know how to dress, she just sang in her street clothes, but she was such a natural that she could wreck anybody's show. She only made ten dollars a week, but people would throw money on the stage, and the stagehands would pick up about three or four dollars for her after every performance, especially when she sang the 'Weary Blues'—that was her big number."
      Ma Rainey probably helped to groom Bessie for life on the road, and she may have introduced her to the blues, but there is general agreement among those who experi­enced her performances that Bessie had her own style by 1913. Revered gospel composer and former Ma Rainey accompanist Thomas A. Dorsey sold soft drinks at Atlanta's "81" Theatre when Bessie first ventured out on her own. "It was about 1913 or 1914," he recalled some fifty years later, "and Bessie was already a star in her own right, but she really got her start there at the '81,' and I don't recall Ma Rainey ever having taken credit for helping her."
      The "81" Theatre served Bessie as a home base while she traveled with such popular troupes as Pete Werley's Florida Blossoms and the Silas Green show, often in as a chorine. She was in the chorus line of one of his shows when Irvin C. Miller—one of the following decade's most powerful black producers—first saw her. "She was a natu­ral singer, even then," he recalled in a 1970 interview, "but we stressed beauty in the chorus line, and Bessie did not meet my standards as far as looks were concerned. I told the manager to get rid of her, which he did." It was Bessie's dark complexion that disturbed Miller—it contradicted his motto: "Glorifying the Brownskin Girl."
      As her reputation grew on the southern circuit, Bessie began to move north. She was a veteran trouper by 1921, when she took up residence in Philadelphia. Around that time, a three-minute performance sent a very strong sig­nal to the burgeoning record industry: Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues." Ms. Smith was a black pop singer from Cincinnati who had a sweet, rather ordi­nary voice and a complexion Irvin C. Miller would have approved of. She had made two sides previously, but "Crazy Blues" was different: it was the first record by a black singer to register large sales, and it was a vocal blues tune. It all added up to a new market, so record companies, big and small, formed so-called "race record" divisions, and began scrambling to sign up blues-singing ladies. What they got, for the most part, were more pop singers like Mamie Smith, but now the accompani­ments became hot, and so—with musicians like Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, James P. Johnson, and Johnny Dodds supplying backgrounds—even the dreariest of singers made interesting records.
      Since no earlier recordings have ever turned up, there is every reason to believe that Bessie's February 16, 1923 Columbia session was her first, and one must wonder why someone didn't whisk her into a studio sooner; after all, "Crazy Blues" was two years old by then. Still, two puz­zling items from 1921 raise some questions as to whether or not Bessie made her recording debut that year: one is a Philadelphia Tribune advertisement for the week begin­ning May 16; it lists Bessie's name in big headliner letters, followed by "Hits on Columbia Records and her 5 Jazzoway Dandies." The other is a mysterious item buried in the entertainment pages of the Chicago Defender's February 12 issue:

"One of the greatest of all 'blues' singers is Miss Bessie Smith, who is at present making records, with the aid of six jazz musicians, for the Emerson record company. The first release will be made about Mar. 10. Bessie Smith is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee."

      Collectors would pay a small fortune for any pre-1923 Bessie Smith sides, were they to turn up, but, at this point, no one expects to find such treasures.
      The Columbia recordings are quite a different matter, but just how Bessie came to the label is not known for certain—several people have taken credit for "discovering" her, and several stories of how that came about circu­lated for several decades. The most publicized version originated with Frank Walker, Bessie's producer, who in 1923 was appointed the head of Columbia's race records division. He said that he had heard Bessie perform in a small Selma, Alabama, dive around 1917, and that he sent for her. "I don't think there could have been more than fifty people up North who had heard about Bessie Smith when I sent Clarence Williams down South to get her," he said. "I told Clarence about the Smith girl and said, This is what you've got to do. Go down there and find her and bring her back up here.'" Two weeks earlier, Williams had, in fact, brought Bessie to an OKeh Records audition in New York, where she cut a test side, but after interrupt­ing a take with a "Hold it, I gotta spit!" she was turned down for being "too rough." The truth is that Frank Walker knew full well that Bessie lived in Philadelphia. "When Mr. Walker came into Columbia, he asked me to get that Bessie Smith I had been talking about," Williams told an interviewer. "I said that those others had said that her voice was too rough. 'You just get her here,' he told me, 'bring her back up here.'" Incidentally, Bessie had also au­ditioned for Thomas Edison, who simply entered a "NG" next to her name in the studio log.
      While living in Philadelphia and performing nightly at Horan's cabaret, Bessie met a semi-illiterate night watch­man named Jack Gee, whom she would later marry. From Gee came a story more plausible than any other. "Charlie Carson had a little record shop at 518 South Street," he recalled in 1971, "and he used to hang out at Horan's. He loved to hear Bessie sing and he used to tell her how she was better than Mamie, who was about the hottest thing going at the time. That's why he told Clarence [Williams] to take her to Mr. Walker. I think he was hot on her getting a recording deal because he knew she was better than all the rest of them girls." Indeed she was, and, out of all these stories there rises one indisputable fact: on February 15, 1923, Clarence Williams brought Bessie Smith to a Columbia studio where he accompanied her in a performance of two songs, neither of which were deemed to be of releasable quality. No masters survive, so we don't know whether these sides were rejected for artistic or technical reasons. Walker described her on that day: "She looked about 17, tall and fat and scared to death, just awful!" Others recall that Bessie was still fairly slim in 1923, and photographs bear this out. If she was "scared to death," she had clearly overcome her fright by the following day when she again faced the ominous recording horn and sang three songs, including the coupling that would com­prise her first release: "Gulf Coast Blues" and "Down Hearted Blues."
      The debut record was an overwhelming success, due largely to Bessie's gripping delivery of "Down Hearted Blues," a song with whose message many of her listeners could identify. Accompanied by Williams—whose playing seems restricted to the notes on the sheet music—she is in top form, delivering the story of woe with a masterly blend of pathos and defiance. "I don't believe anything that had to do with singing could make that woman nervous or scared," said Ruby Smith when she heard Walker's description of Bessie. "In fact, it took an awful lot, period, to make Bessie scared, and singing was one thing she knew no one could beat her at."
     Walker did not wait to see how well the first release would do. He signed Bessie to a one-year contract, calling for a minimum of 12 "usable" sides, and had her back in the studio for four sessions in April. Eight selections were recorded, including "Baby Won't You Please Come Home"—which is not a blues, but became a part of the traditional jazz repertoire—and the gloriously spunky "Tain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do." Clarence Williams took composer credit for both these songs, but he was known to claim more tunes as his own than he actually wrote. ASCAP lists as co-composers Robert Graham Prince and Porter Grainger, others name only Grainger (who later became Bessie's musical director) and Everett Robbins. Establishing the rightful ownership of "Tain't Nobody's Bizness" became an issue when its inclusion in the 1973 film Lady Sings The Blues gave it renewed popularity. Williams again provides minimal, somewhat pedestrian accompaniments, but Bessie overcomes them with her eventful delivery and unwavering authority.
      It was around this time that Bessie discovered a bit of skullduggery on the part of Clarence Williams: he had led her to believe that she was under contract to Columbia, but she was actually signed up with him, and he was quietly pocketing half of her recording fee. Incensed, she and Jack Gee, her intended, paid a surprise visit to Williams' office. "They tell me Clarence crawled under his desk when he saw how mad they were," said Jack's niece, Ruby, "but Bessie and Jack got what they wanted." What they wanted was a voided contract, making Bessie free to sign with Columbia—which she promptly did.
      Bessie's first record shipped to Columbia's dealers on June 7,1923, and she marked the day by marrying Jack in a quiet Philadelphia ceremony. It was the beginning of a tempestuous, roller-coaster relationship, a union of two strong-willed people, neither of whom was comfortable with the other's lifestyle. Bessie breathed show business at this point, and Jack was essentially a meat-and-potatoes homebody who never learned to accept the open-mindedness required for survival in the entertainment world. "Jack was too conservative," said Ruby. "He wasn't in Bessie's life at all; he never understood show business, but he liked the money—that's the only reason he put up with it." From the very start, show business interfered with Bessie's marriage; with the new record on the market, she and Jack had to forego a honeymoon. Instead, Bessie em­barked on a tour arranged by Walker—who now functioned as both her manager and record producer— and Jack remained at his job in Philadelphia.
      Soon she would be known for her elaborate shows, but Bessie traveled light on her first theatrical trek as Columbia Records' "Queen of the Blues." All she brought with her was pianist Irving Johns, a rather plain set of costumes, and a simple canvas backdrop on which was painted the stark silhouette of magnolia trees against an orange sky and an incongruous full moon. It was to be a brief tour, a test run, but Walker played it safe by making the first stop Atlanta's "'81" Theatre, where success was almost guaranteed by Bessie's built-in following. Still, the turnout and enthusiasm went far beyond anybody's ex­pectations, and Bessie was asked to give a special mid­night performance for whites only. Only the most popular black artists were asked to put on a show for white audi­ences, and they did so gladly, because both ticket prices and salaries were increased on such occasions. From Atlanta, Bessie moved to the Frolic Theatre, in Birming­ham, where she broke all previous attendance records. A widely published contemporary newspaper account gives us some idea of her popularity:

"Streets blocked, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds were unable to gain entrance to this performance...Bessie Smith with Irvin Johns at the piano before their own special drop opened full stage with 'Nobody's Bizness if I Do,' with the 'Gulf Coast Blues' following, which received heavy applause, leaving the house in a riot."

      The writer, Billy Chambers, was less pleased with a bit of merchandising that took place between acts:

"'Buzzin' Harris [another performer] an­nounced the 'Gulf Coast Blues' for sale and went down into the audience to sell copies. This, we think, is nonprofessional at this or any other performance, as the lady's reputa­tion should sell the songs at every music house in the city."

      Note that Chambers named only "Gulf Coast Blues," which was considered to be the B-side of "Down Hearted Blues." Of course, one can't sell one side of a record with­out the other, and the coupling did extremely well, nearly 800,000 copies sold in its first six months of release. Many years later, Walker indicated that "Down Hearted Blues" was the selling side, attributing its success to a line from the lyrics: "...there was one line in the blues that did it. It was the first time it was used and it made that record a hit. It was 'Got the world in a jug, got the stopper in my hand.'" As Walker well knew, the song had already become a big hit in a version by its composer, Alberta Hunter, who had written him a letter just a few months earlier, suggesting that he record an instrumental version of the tune with King Oliver's band. Less than a month before he recorded Bessie, Walker wrote back that he was interested in re­cording Alberta, not Oliver, adding "we will try to see what can be worked out of the 'Down Hearted Blues' for you."
      The first tour was a short one, but now the waters had been tested and it was clear that Bessie Smith would be a real asset to Columbia Records. She recorded six more sides in June, this time accompanied by Fletcher Henderson, who was a far better pianist than Williams, and soon would also make his mark as a great band leader and arranger. On the new sides, Bessie's voice seems fuller, and more commanding; the improved accompaniments undoubtedly helped, and if Bessie needed self-assurance, she must have found it in the royal reception given her on the June tour, which clearly established her as the star of Columbia's growing race records roster.
      That roster now included Clara Smith —no relation— a fine singer who lent her somewhat thinner voice to the kinds of material Bessie sang, and often recorded with the same musicians. However, Walker wisely made sure that, as long as both women were signed to the label, they never duplicated each other's material. If Bessie—who refused to share a stage with another blues singer-resented Clara's signing to the label, she could find comfort in the fact that her fee was twice that of Clara's, and in the preferential treatment given her by Columbia's pro­motion department. As the blues fever caught on, and more and more women vied for the spotlight, titles were freely given; Clara was dubbed "Queen of the Moaners," and when Ma Rainey's label, Paramount Records, began advertising its new star, Ida Cox, as "Queen of the Blues," Columbia simply promoted Bessie to "Empress of the Blues."
      As if to quell rumors of an unfriendly rivalry between his two reigning blues queens, Walker united them on October 4, 1923 for the first of two recording dates. The session marked Bessie's fifteenth Columbia date, and Clara's eleventh. Bessie already had enough clout to refuse such a union, but she never felt threatened by Clara's singing; if anything, the duets underline Bessie's superior artistry. "I think Bessie knew she didn't have anything to worry about as long as they were together on a record," said Ruby, "but I guess she wouldn't have been too happy about being seen with her onstage, because Clara was much thinner and prettier than Bessie." Although a certain amount of professional competition surely existed between them, Bessie and Clara actually enjoyed a cor­dial relationship, at least until 1925, when a fist fight abruptly ended it. Their first joint session produced two duets, "Far Away Blues" and "I'm Going Back To My Used To Be," with Henderson at the piano. Neither selection captures the singers at their best, but these duets have a prepossessing quality that transcends their historical value.
      At the time of the initial Smith duets, Bessie could look back on a spectacularly successful summer on the road. Jack, bitten by his wife's success—not to mention her commanding weekly salary—quit his job and made a surprise appearance at Atlanta's "81" Theatre. Bessie was de­lighted to see him, but whatever endearing qualities she found in him were lost on the rest of the troupe. At first, he was more or less a fish out of water, a hanger-on, but the income generated by Bessie's show made him put away many of the prejudices he harbored against entertainers and heighten somewhat the low tolerance he had for their free-spirited lifestyle. He even began to identify himself as the show's manager, a role which Bessie's brother, Clarence, and a nephew, T.J. Hill, actually filled. "Bessie let Jack think he was managing the show," recalled Ruby, who herself had come aboard as a chorine, "but it was really a joke. He used to come to rehearsals and fine the girls if their legs didn't go up high enough, or if they missed a step—can you imagine? Later on, he started to gamble with the kids, just so he could win back some of the money Bessie paid them. She let him get away with all that, but it got so that the whole show hated Jack." On at least two occasions, Jack actually stepped in and—by sheer intimidation and stubbornness, not to mention a bit of greed—secured for Bessie a higher fee than had been offered, but he more often made a fool of himself. "Jack couldn't even manage himself," said Maud Smith, Clarence's wife. "He would always have signs saying 'Jack Gee presents Bessie Smith,' and he would call himself a manager, but he couldn't even sell a ticket. He could count money, and he could ask for money, but that's about it."
      In a singular act of generosity, Jack had pawned his night watchman's uniform and pocket watch to buy Bessie a suitably fashionable dress for her Columbia audition, but now it was Bessie's turn to give. "She bought him everything he had on," said Ruby. "Expensive suits, a gold watch, even a Cadillac—and she was always giving him money, so you better believe it, he got that dress back many times over. It wasn't much of a dress, anyway, because it was cheap, and Jack had no taste."
      Bessie lavished gifts on Jack, and she bought herself expensive costumes and fur coats, but she continued to live rather modestly. The Gee's took an apartment in Philadelphia, a place to stop between tours. "There was noth­ing special about it," Ruby recalled, "no fancy furniture or anything like that, just big easy chairs, a sofa, and lamps and tables with pictures and statues and things—Bessie never went in for no fancy stuff around the house, even when she made all that money, because she just wasn't there that much."
      As 1923 drew to a close, Bessie's professional life started to settle into a routine that had her touring extensively, performing for the first time in such places as Detroit and Cleveland, and regularly popping back to New York to make records. Her Columbia contract called for a minimum of 12 sides annually, but that obligation was already fulfilled by mid-June. The blues craze was still raging, but Bessie and her contemporaries sometimes left their 12-bar tales of woe to dip into Tin Pan Alley's less soulful fare. Eleven days after making the duets with Clara Smith, Bessie recorded a couple of non-blues: "Whoa, Tillie, Take Your Time," and "My Sweetie Went Away." The former is a double-entendre vaudeville number, the latter a pop hit of the day; then, on the following day, she came down to earth with a glorious delivery of "Any Woman's Blues," a tune which Ida Cox had already recorded with its com­poser, pianist Lovie Austin. Bessie's version is a study in perfect timing and restraint, the kind of laid-back ap­proach that most New Yorkers found downright somnifer­ous. Band leader Sam Wooding was only exaggerating a little bit when he claimed to have visited the rest room at Small's Paradise without missing a single line of a Bessie Smith song. The accompanist is again Fletcher Hender­son, but Columbia's log reveals an intriguing bit of infor­mation: there were three takes of "Any Woman's Blues," and the first two—which remain unissued and, in fact, lost —also featured 19-year-old Coleman Hawkins.
      Recording alternate takes was a matter of routine and not necessarily an indication of flawed performance. Often, there were equipment failures: a lathe slowed down by cold weather, or a dull batch of wax. The waxy discs from which metal masters were molded could only be played back once, then they had to be scraped clean for reuse; thus there was no way to tell if a recording was satisfactory until it had been mastered and a test pressing made. For this reason, it behooved one to make alternates. The handful of Bessie's alternate takes that did survive tell us that she pretty much locked in her performances—if there is a noticeable difference between takes, it is in the instrumental accompaniments. Collectors, of course, want to find every scrap of sound, but the "Any Woman's Blues" rejects are particularly sought-after because of Hawkins' presence. A few months later, when Bessie made her first electrically recorded sides, Hawkins was again on hand, and this time the sides were released, but there is barely a hint of his presence.
      Reed player Don Redman, who would become one of Harlem's most popular band leaders in the following decade, frequently teamed up with Fletcher Henderson to accompany Bessie on records. In this set, we hear his clarinet on "Chicago Bound Blues," "Mistreating Daddy," "Haunted House Blues," and "Eavesdropper's Blues," four sides that are typical of Bessie's early output, but don't do his talent justice. The following year, there would be dramatic improvement in Bessie's accompaniments and, for that matter, in recording technology.
      Bessie was paid a higher fee for recording than most artists, including many white performers, but it was still a paltry sum of $200 per usable side, and there were no royalties. Records, however, provided an indirect income. Today, top artists can realize vast sums of money from sales of their recordings, relying on television and radio exposure for promotion. In Bessie's day, television was still somebody's futuristic fantasy, and radio was a totally new medium that had yet to discover records as broadcast material. This made phonograph records the most powerful promotional tool. Every major city now had its "race re­cords" shops, and if yours didn't, or you lived in a rural area, you simply ordered the latest Bessie sides by mail. Recordings and glowing write-ups in such black weekly newspapers as the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, and Pittsburgh Courier paved the way for Bessie as she toured.
      Bessie made several live radio appearances. Unfortunately, stations had no means of recording such perform­ances in those days, so we must rely on newspaper reviews to tell us how she sounded. The Defenders Atlanta correspondent caught a broadcast made during a 1923 booking at the Beale Street Palace, in Memphis: "The spirit of the Old South came up from Beale Street at 11 o'clock last night to give the world a concert of Negro folk songs that will be remembered by WMC as long as a midnight frolic is broadcast from the roof of the Commercial Appeal. Bessie Smith, known from coast to coast as a singer of blues that are really blue, gave the air some currents that it will not forget as long as a cloud is left in the sky, and Memphis has its Beale Street.
      "The star of the frolic greeted the atmosphere with T'ain't Nobody's Business but My Own,' which she gave with unction and a rich Negro accent. Accompanied by Irvin Johns, her pianist, she followed with 'Beale Street Mama.' Singers have come and gone with that number, but it remained for Bessie to sing it before its possibilities were fathomed.
      "Perhaps the greatest hit Bessie registered last night for WMC was 'Outside Of That He's All Right With Me.' She repeated the number upon the request of a large number, who tele­phoned to the studio and wired from the Memphis territory ..While the orchestra built up an excellent background for the enter­tainment, Bessie carried the evening with her 'blues.'" It is a measure of Bessie's popularity that she was car­ried by WMC, the radio station of a white newspaper, the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
      As she rang in the new year, Bessie had every reason to celebrate. Her marriage was still a happy one, Columbia couldn't record enough of her, and it was clear that the magic which so strongly appealed to her followers in Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis worked equally well on audiences in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.