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SHERYL MCCARTHY: Hello. I'm Sheryl McCarthy of the
City University of New York. Welcome to One to One.
Each week we address issues of timely and
timeless concern with newsmakers and the
journalists who report on them, with artists,
writers, scientists, educators, activists,
social scientists, government and non-profit
leaders. We speak with each one-to-one. We've all
heard about the Harlem Renaissance, that period
of literary and intellectual flowering
that took place in the 20s and 30s and led to a new
level of race consciousness that reach
well beyond Harlem. In her new book, Farah Jasmine
Griffin, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature and African American Studies at
Columbia University, writes about yet another
period of artist ferment that was coupled with
social and political activism in Harlem, the
1940s, and about three extraordinary women --
dancer Pearl Primus, writer Anne Petry, and
jazz musician Mary Lou Williams -- who personified
it. Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists of Progressive
Politics During World War II has just been published
by Basic Civitas Books, a member of the Perseus
Books group. Welcome.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Thank you.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: So why write about these three women?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Well, they're all very interesting,
in some ways they all embody the time,
they cross various art forms
and I think they have a lot to teach us
about their time and, perhaps, about ours, too.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now, after the Harlem Renaissance,
Harlem was hit very hard by the
Depression. What was happening in the 1940s that
led to this second period of artistic creativity in Harlem?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: I think a few things were
happening in Harlem during the 1940s.
First of all, World War II came along
and that impacted the entire country and Harlem
certainly was no less so. There was a new migration
of Black peoples from the American South and from
the Caribbean as well as people from the Spanish
speaking Caribbean, so you get a burst of new energy
as a result of that migration. I think that
those two factors -- the War, the new population
coming out of the Depression -- led to a new kind of
ferment for political activism and also artistic expression.
So it's a very exciting place in the early 1940s.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: One of the things that's
a result of the War, the men were
gone, the women had entre into a whole array of jobs
and activity that they had not had before.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Absolutely. Women were
taking over jobs that had been done by men because
most of the men were gone. Someone like Anne Petry,
the writer, can get into a seminar, a very
competitive writing seminar at Columbia and
there are no men in the seminar because they're
all at war. So that does free up some space for
women, whether it's in the factory or the newsroom.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now, Primus as born in Trinidad
and her family moved to New York and ultimately to
Harlem when she was a child. Petry was from
Connecticut and moved to Harlem as a young woman
because she married a man from New York. And
Williams settled there after years of being on
the road as a musician. What was the lure of New
York City and what was the lure of Harlem?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Well, by the 1940s, Harlem is
already legendary as a kind of global Black
capital and that largely comes about as a result of
the Harlem Renaissance, the new *** Movement of
the 1920s, so it's already this mythical place. I
think for artists, like the ones that I write
about, New York is just a place of constant
inspiration and stimulation, a place that
provides them audiences and venues and publication
opportunities. So both Harlem and the city in
which it's situated were very attractive to all three women.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Were Primus' parents,
were they working class or middle class?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: I think they probably were
working class who worked their way into the middle
class, became property owners. The family
eventually would buy property in Bedford
Stuyvesant, which is another creative Black
enclave in Brooklyn. So we see a movement into the
middle class. She's college-educated, going
onto graduate school during the time that I write about her.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Right. She attended
Hunter College High School, which was a
prestigious school for girls at the time.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Exactly.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: And got a
degree from Hunter and, after holding a number of
jobs, odd jobs including wartime jobs -- a riveter,
a welder, a switchboard operator -- she got a scholarship to the
New Dance Group School. What was the New Dance Group?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: It was a group of dancers
and choreographers that had been
founded in the 1930s that try to link a social
consciousness to modern dance, a modern dance
aesthetic with a political sensibility. And they were
not yet -- they were one of the only places where you
could take dance classes that were integrated,
where Black students and White students could take
dance classes. So Pearl got this scholarship and
began her dance career there at the New Dance Group.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: She debuted in 1943 at the
92nd Street Y. Got a glowing review from John --
was it John Martin?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Yes.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Of the New York Times and was on her way.
What was it about her dancing that was so distinctive?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Well I think if you
read contemporary accounts of her dancing,
it's her athleticism that's also coupled with a
sense of grace, a sense of grace, a sense of beauty.
She was known for her leaps. She could leap five
feet in the air. She had been a track and field
star at Hunter College. So she combines those two
things and presents something unique to the concert stage.
Both athleticism and grace --
and then she has kind of a narrative sensibility.
She tells stories through her dance,
the dances that she choreographs. I think all
three of those things come together to make her very
unique and interesting to John Martin.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now it was at Café Society,
the legendary Greenwich Village nightclub,
that she found an ongoing venue. Tell us about Café Society.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Certainly.
Café Society had been founded by a man named Barney Josephson.
Again, it was one of the few night spots
in New York City that was integrated.
Where you didn't just have Black artists performing for
White audiences, you had Black and White people in
the audience together. You would find all kinds of
artists, activists, intellectuals in the
audience. Billie Holiday became famous there and
sang Strange Fruit there for the first time. Lena
Horne, Hazel Scott, Art Tatum, a number of Black
artists and White artists had their debuts there.
Barney Josephson was very supportive of them and
also encouraged not only their artistic growth but
a political sensibility as well.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now Anne Petry was another college-educated
Black woman, grew up in Connecticut in a middle
class family, rebelled against working in her
family's pharmacy and escaped by marrying a New
Yorker and moving to Harlem. She landed
eventually at the People's Voice, a newspaper that
was owned by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. What kind of
place was the People's Voice?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: The People's Voice prided itself on
being a little bit different from the
Amsterdam News in that it was more radical,
politically radical. I like to think of it as
this place that was very intellectually and
politically exciting. It had a combination of
people who ranged politically from
Communists to Liberals. The photographers Morgan and
Marvin Smith worked there. It was just a very interesting
and exciting new place for young intellectuals to try
their voice out in ways that were different from an
old standard newspaper like the Amsterdam News.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now Petry wrote articles,
features and a society column as well.
But it was a short story of hers that was published
in the Crisis Magazine, a publication of the NAACP,
that launched her career. She was noticed by editors
at Houghton Mifflin who gave her fellowship to
write and the product of that was her novel, The
Street, which came out in 1946 and sold 1.5 million
copies. What was it about Petry's writing do you
think that captured the public imagination?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Her writing is much like
New York itself. It's quick paced, it's fast, it's
very much a page turner. But Lutie the character,
the protagonist of the novel, is like no one we'd
ever seen. We hadn't seen a working class single
Black mother, a woman of great dignity who has
great aspirations as the main character of an
American novel. So she's new to American readers I
think. At that time, in the 40s, there is a
readership that's interested in issues of
race, what they would call race relations at the
time. We usually see that from the perspective of
men. Petry gives it to us from the perspective of a woman.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Right, and she was really
in the social realism tradition of Richard Wright.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Absolutely.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Ordinary people and their
aspirations and struggles.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Right.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: One event that influenced
her writing was the Harlem Riot of 1943, sparked off
by the rumor that a Black veteran had been shot and
killed by a New York City cop which led to rioting
that destroyed a lot of property and left six
Black people dead. What was the impact of that
riot on Harlem and on your subjects?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: I think the impact on Harlem was a
real sense that in spite of the optimism of the
moment that there were real genuine concerns that
people had around police brutality, around the
treatment of Black soldiers all over the
country, around poor housing stock that was
available to them, many kinds of social issues. So
it was a really explosive moment. It impacted it
economically because after the riot some of the
businesses didn't open, some of the people who had
patronized much of the night life no longer
patronized it. Petry herself would leave Harlem
shortly after the riots and move to the Bronx.
Mary Lou Williams, my third subject, stays after
it. But I think it affects all of them and certainly
affects the imaginative work that Petry does, so
she writes a short story about it.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: About it, right. When Mary Lou Williams
moved to Harlem in 1943 -- and 1943 seemed to be a pivotal, a
big year for all of them -- she was already an
established musical star. She had been born to a
very poor family in Atlanta. They migrated to
Pittsburgh when she was a small child. In Pittsburgh
she was a musical prodigy who got her start, like a
lot of Black musicians and entertainers, on the
traveling circuit. She traveled with these
various bands around the country. Then after a
decade of travel she found an apartment on Hamilton
Terrace in Harlem, which brought her a kind of
stability, you said. Café Society played a big role
in her life as well, right?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Yes, it did. Barney Josephson hired her
as well in Café Society. So this is after a decade
of being on the road constantly with the
territory band in the Andy Kirk Orchestra, she not
only has an apartment and a home that she can settle
in, she has a place where she's in residence. That's
her place and it gives her time to stretch out and
explore. So some of her first long form
compositions begin to come together while she's
playing at Café Society because it gives her
stability for the production of her art.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: And she actually became, she moved to
the uptown Café Society and
was really a star of that venue, right?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Very much so.
She was absolutely a star. I think she was a
star amongst many Black music lovers when she
moved to New York because it's big news when she gets here.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: She a pianists primarily.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Right, primarily a pianist,
an arranger, a composer, had done arrangements
for Duke Ellington. But when she
gets to Café Society that's really when her
star explodes. She gets a weekly radio show here in
New York, she gets various kinds of contracts and all
kinds of things begin to open for her.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: We're going to take a short break, then
we'll be back with more with Farah Jasmine
Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Welcome back to One to One.
I'm Sheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York
and I'm talking with Farah Griffin,
the author of Harlem Nocturne. There are
a lot of musicians, there are a lot of jazz
musicians, what was it about Mary Lou Williams' music?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: I think that Mary Lou
was unique in that she played through almost
every style development in the 20th century.
You could hear stride piano in her playing, boogie-woogie
in her playing, bebop in her playing and even later
in her career when music took a turn toward the
avant garde, she could play that music as well.
One could listen to her and hear a whole history
of jazz piano in her playing. In addition to
her playing, she did these extraordinary
compositions, each of them very textured and unique,
different from the other. She arranged for people
like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, certainly
making her very unique amongst women. I can't
think - maybe Melba Liston later on. So I think that
combination -- composer, arranger and incredible
player -- made her in the top echelon of jazz musicians.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Now, she became a kind of mentor
to the bebop musicians who were coming along and
her Harlem apartment was a musical salon for them?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Yes. It was a musical salon.
Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell
would come and play on her piano
and try out some of their compositions, play them for her.
She would critique their compositions.
She's work with them on them.
It wasn't only musicians,
it was writers and artists who would come to that
Hamilton Terrace apartment. She liked
creating that kind of atmosphere where creative
people could come together and just be in community together.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: You write that all three
women -- Primus, Petry and Williams -- use their art
as a social and political statement about how
African Americans were being treated at the time.
Would you describe them as activists?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: I certainly would describe them
as activists, some more so than others. I think Pearl
Primus and Anne Petry fit our definitions of
activists and that they were very much engaged in
political organizing and political organizations.
Petry helped to create and found an organization for
women, for Harlem housewives. So I think
they fit a definition of activism that we have.
Mary Lou Williams later on, after the Harlem
riots, she takes a break from playing every night
at Café Society, she looks around and she becomes an
activist too because she wants to know what can she
do to better her community. She tries to
fight against segregation. She tries to work within
the school system. So all of them were activists. They
didn't see a separation between being artists and activists.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: All three women
had a lot of interactions with Communists --
Petry at the People's Voice where it
seemed like most of the staff were Communists,
Primus and Williams at Café Society and in other circles
they were a part of. Were they Communists themselves?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: The only one who
was a member of the Communist Party is Pearl Primus.
She was actually a member of the Party.
Petry never was a member and made very clear that
though she associated with Communists she didn't
always agree with the tenants of Communism.
Mary Lou Williams was not affiliated with the Party
at all. I think that it's not so surprising that
they were surrounded by Communists because it
wasn't as big as a taboo. It would become a taboo
later in the decade. But by the early 40s,
even Adam Clayton Powell is receiving the endorsement
of Communism. By the late 40s he kind of purges all
the Communists from the People's Voice.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: In 1944 Primus embarked on a tour of the
South in search of material for her dance.
She even disguised herself as a field worker so she
could really find out what was going on in the field.
She visited the sharecroppers' churches.
How did her Southern tour influence her dancing?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: It influenced the actual movements,
the kind of movement vocabulary that
she brought back, the way that people might get
happy in a church, the way an arm might fly over
their head as they're bringing it down to chop
cotton. All of these movements she brought back
with her and so you actually can see them in
the choreography. It influenced the way that
she told stories. She danced to Strange Fruit,
the song made famous by Billie Holiday.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Which is about a lynching.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Which is about a lynching. And she goes
there and one of the things that is interesting
is that she encounters both Black and White
southerners and she realizes that things are
much more complex than her sense as a Northerner
these are the bad people, these are the good people.
So she makes that dance, she says that she creates
that dance not around the Black person who was
lynched, but around a White woman who had been a
member of the mob and witnessed it. So we get
that woman's humanity and how it affects her. So I
think that trip -- later her trips to Africa would
do this for her -- but that trip was one of the first
ones that really influenced her sense of
bringing together her political sensibilities
and her artistic sensibility.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Primus was always overshadowed by
Katherine Dunham, another Black dancer. I guess the only other
major Black modern dancer of that time. Why was that?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Well I think Dunham,
she had her own company for a longer
and more sustained time. She had her own school.
She was able to do things -- she started dancing much
earlier than Pearl did and so she was able to
institutionalize herself in ways that Pearl Primus
did not at the same time -- Pearl Primus would do it
much later on. Also she was in Hollywood movies.
She was very glamorous. She fit a certain beauty
standard of the day so she was not only an amazing
dancer and choreographer, she was also able to
garner a more popular audience because she did
nightclubs and she did the movies. She's in Stormy
Weather. So I think that all of those factors came into play.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Okay.
Now when bebop began to overtake swing and Williams found
it eventually harder to find work, she took a
European tour and she also tried to organize an
interracial concert in Atlanta.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Right. So before she left for Europe she
tried to -- she had been born in Atlanta and she
tried to organize an interracial tour of women
musicians to really desegregate parts of the
place of her birth. It did not work. She tried to
garner support. It didn't work, but that was
something that she thought music could actually bring
people together and by bringing them together
break down some of these artificial barriers that
have been placed. But that didn't work, so eventually
she left and she went to Europe. She toured through
England and France before coming back to New York.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Did Primus, Petry and
Williams know each other?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Primus and Williams
knew each other through Café Society.
They even worked together dancing and
writing music together and they knew each other for years.
You can find in their archives photographs
that they autographed to each other.
Petry seems not to have known them or I haven't found
any evidence. I keep thinking that I'll find evidence at
some point that she knew them as well,
but I have yet to find evidence that she knew
either of the other two women.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Petry -- Harlem
was never really recovered from the riots, correct?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: It did not. it would have new
generation would come and it would take on a new
energy, but certainly not during the period about
which I write. It takes quite some time before we
see a sense of recovery for Harlem.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: And the end of the War led to a
contraction of -- what was the impact?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: So interesting things happened.
On the one hand, many of the fights that people waged
during the War to desegregate even a
residentially desegregated place like New York meant
that when other areas of the city opened up those
people who were able left Harlem and moved to places
like the Bronx or to Queens. Mary Lou Williams never left.
Then we get, by 1949 we get things like the
Urban Renewal Acts which build projects that
had not existed before in Harlem. So the landscape
begins to change a little bit after the War. It
brings many pluses but I think the community also suffers some.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: After the war
was when Harlem began to take on more of the
aspects of the urban slum, right?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: It certainly, that's the way that
it was talked about. Petry even talks about it.
She says in one of her final pieces about Harlem, she says
'Harlem is a ghetto.' For what that means, where
people are segregated. It becomes a way of thinking
about managing Harlem as a set of urban problems.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: So Petry and her husband move back
to Connecticut where she continued writing. Primus
moved to Bedford Stuyvesant where she
eventually got a PhD in Dance and became a
college, university professor. You said that
she had a gambling problem for a while but was...
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Mary Lou Williams did, yeah.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: I'm sorry, Mary Lou Williams. I don't want
to get the wrong one. But she continued to perform,
played concerts for public schools, cared for
musicians who had substance abuse problems
and actually played at Carnegie Hall in the 70s.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Right.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: She was the one that stayed in Harlem,
Mary Lou Williams, right?
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Mary Lou
stayed in Harlem even after -- in the 70s she got
a job -- one of the first jazz musicians to get a
job at a university- at Duke University. So she
bought a house in Durham but she kept that
apartment in Hamilton Terrace. She always came back to Harlem.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Okay, we've got about a minute and
a half for you to sum up the legacies of these three women.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Oh, they left us many legacies.
The Black women writers who explode in the 70s can look to
Anne Petry as a foremother, creating a way
for them. Mary Lou Williams, not just for
women jazz musicians, I think for all jazz
musicians, has been a kind of role model, but
particularly for people like Jerry Allen. For the
Black dancers and choreographers like Alvin
Ailey, Ron K. Brown, the women of Urban Bushwomen,
all follow in the footsteps of Pearl Primus.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: Very interesting. I learned a
lot about these three women who I had heard
about but did not know as much about.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN: Well thank you
for taking the time to read the book.
SHERYL MCCARTHY: I'm afraid we're out of time,
but I'd like to thank Farah Griffin for joining us today.
Harlem Nocturne has just been published by Basic Civitas
Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
For the City University of New York
and One to One, I'm Sheryl McCarthy.
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