Harlem Nocturne (27 page)

Zipp, Samuel.
Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

NOTES

Prologue

1.
Walt Whitman, “Manahattan,” in
Leaves of Grass
(New York: 1867).

2.
Ann Petry, “Harlem,”
Holiday
, April 1949, 84.

Introduction

1.
Martha Biondi,
To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6.

2.
Richard Rorty,
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43.

3.
Ibid., 3.

4.
Rorty distinguished between agents and spectators in the following way: “In the early decades of [the twentieth century], when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative.” This is in opposition to those who possess a “spirit of detached spectatorship, and the inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action.” Rorty,
Achieving Our Country
, 9, 11. Rorty is not without his critics. For our purposes, one of the most astute has been Eddie Glaude. Glaude chastised Rorty for evading “the more fundamental challenge that Baldwin's writings present to anyone willing to engage them: that America must confront the fraudulent nature of its life, that its avowals of virtue shield it from honestly confronting the darkness within its own soul.” For Glaude, too, much of the Reformist Left celebrated by Rorty failed to fully “work to diminish human suffering and make possible the conditions for human excellence,” because of “their equivocation in the face of white supremacy's insidious claims.” Eddie S. Glaude,
In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.

5.
Mary Helen Washington's description of the playwright Alice Childress also applies to Primus, in that she “concoct[ed] for herself, in true Popular Front fashion, a politics that was part Marxist, part black nationalist, part feminist, and part homegrown militancy.” Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine
Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in
Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States
, Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185.

6.
Biondi,
To Stand and Fight
, 13.

Chapter 1: Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom

1.
W. E. B. DuBois, “Close Ranks,”
The Crisis
16, no. 3 (1918): 111. See also W. E. B. Du Bois's editorial “Returning Soldiers,”
The Crisis
18 (1919): 13.

2.
Karen Tucer Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women During World War II,”
Journal of American History
69, no. 1 (1982): 82–97. The Fair Employment Practices Committee became the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1948, during the Truman administration.

3.
Quoted in Wil Haygood
, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 93.

4.
Pearl Primus, “African Dance,” reprinted in
African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
, Kariamu Welsh Asante, ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 3.

5.
Langston Hughes, “On Leaping and Shouting,” originally published in
Chicago Defender
, July 3, 1943; republished in
Langston Hughes and the
Chicago Defender:
Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture: 1942–1962
, Christopher C. Santis, ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 199.

6.
John Martin,
The Modern Dance
(New York: Dance Horizons, 1966; originally published in 1933), 12.

7.
See Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan, “The Metalanguage of Race,”
Signs
17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274.

8.
Helen Fitzgerald, “A Glimpse of a Rising Young Star,”
Daily Worker
, June 3, 1943, 7.

9.
VeVe Clark and Sara E. Johnson, eds.,
Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 347. Little has been written about Pearl Primus, and that which has been written tends to focus on this period—her emergence in the 1940s or accounts of her as a grand dame of African dance on the American stage toward the end of her career. When writing about this period, most scholars rightly focus on her involvement with the New Dance Group and her dances of social protest. This is also my interest here; however, I hope to show her dance life during this period in a more fully dimensional way. Most often scholars writing of Primus's interest in Africa imply that her involvement in leftist politics preceded her first trip to Africa in 1948. I argue that it was her interest in Africa that preceded both her involvement in modern dance and her leftist politics.

10.
See Robin D. G. Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robin D. G. Kelley,
Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
(New York: Free Press, 1996); Dayo F. Gore,
Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War
(New York: New York University Press, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie,
Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

11.
Beverly Anne Hillsman Barber, “Pearl Primus, in Search of Her Roots, 1943–1970” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1984), 13.

12.
Irma Watkins Owens,
Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

13.
“Coming to the United States,” n.d., Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm?migration=10&topic=5
.

14.
Pearl Primus Journals, August 1937, Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University, Box 1, Journal Correspondence.

15.
Ibid.

16.
Ibid.

17.
Barber, “Pearl Primus.”

18.
Lorraine B. Diehl,
Over Here! New York City During World War II
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 170; Maureen Honey, ed.,
Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 35. “Arsenal of democracy” is the phrase used by Franklin D. Roosevelt to describe the role of the United States in providing the United Kingdom with military supplies to help defeat Germany.

19.
Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 158.

20.
Ibid., 117.

21.
Richard C. Green, “Upstaging the Primitive: Pearl Primus” and “The Negro Problem in American Dance,” in
Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance
, Thomas F. DeFrantz, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

22.
John Martin, “The Dance: Five Artists,”
New York Times
, February 21, 1943.

23.
John Martin, “The Dance Laurel Award No. 2,”
New York Times
, August 1, 1943.

24.
Susan Manning,
Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 167. As Manning has noted, “for Martin, Dunham fulfilled the potential of Negro dance, while Primus merged themes that were racially authentic like Dunham's Negro dance, with themes that were individually expressive, like modern dance.”

25.
“Con Deleighbor, Katherine Dunham vs. Pearl Primus: Styles and Purposes in Negro Folk Dancing,”
Amsterdam News
, February 12, 1944, 11A.

26.
Interview conducted with Katherine Dunham, African American Music Collection, Haven Hall, University of Michigan,
www.umich.edu/~afroammu/standifer/dunham.html
.

27.
David W. Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,”
Journal of American History
84, no. 4 (1998): 1384–1406.

28.
Unpublished interview with Elsa Wren, 1982, Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University, 5 (“Wren interview” hereafter); Barney Josephson and Terry Trilling-Josephson,
Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 170–171.

29.
Ibid.

30.
Wren interview.

31.
“Little Primitive,”
Time
, August 25, 1947; “Genuine Africa,”
Time
, May 21, 1951.

32.
Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz,
The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 31–33.

33.
Susannah Walker,
Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 180; Phyl Garland, “The Natural Look: Many Negro Women Reject White Standards of Beauty,”
Ebony
, June 1966, 143.

34.
Wren interview, 5.

35.
Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 158.

36.
“John Cage: Database of Works,” n.d., John Cage Trust,
http://www.johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Works.cfm
.

37.
Lewis Allan was a penname; Allan's real name was Abel Meeropol.

38.
“Pearl Primus: Artistic Summary,” n.d., Dance Language Institute Archive,
www.mamboso.net/primus/summary_3.html
.

39.
“Negro Women with White Husbands,”
Jet
, February 21, 1952; see also
Jet
, February 14, 1952, 11. For the date of Primus's marriage to Borde, see Schwartz and Schwartz,
The Dance Claimed Me
, 269.

40.
Daily Worker
, September 28, 1944; quoted in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) File No. 100–61887, September 1944, Report by William A. Costello, 22.

41.
Margaret Lloyd,
The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance
(Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007), 247.

42.
Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 106.

43.
See Lloyd,
Borzoi Book of Modern Dance
.

44.
Wren interview, 9.

45.
Author interview with Esther Cooper Jackson, June 20, 2011.

46.
Pamphlet, “National Integrity and Security Make Negro Youth of the South Assets of Democracy,” James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson Papers, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, Box 6, Folder 29 (“Jackson Papers” hereafter).

47.
Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe
, 207; Jackson Papers, Correspondence, Pearl Primus to James Jackson, July 8, 1946, Box 14, Folder 5.

48.
FBI File No. 100–61887.

49.
Ibid.

50.
FBI File No. 100–332915, May 30, 1945.

51.
Lloyd,
Borzoi Book of Modern Dance
, 271.

52.
Donald McKayle,
Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 23.

53.
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, conversation with Peggy and Murray Schwartz, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, May 24, 2012.

54.
Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 176–177. Barber describes Primus's technique in the following manner:

       
1.
  
A distinctive carriage of the torso, use of the feet, and isolation of specific body parts

       
2.
  
Forward lean of the body toward the earth

       
3.
  
Forward inclination toward the earth

       
4.
  
Feet contacting the floor fully to resemble caressing of the earth