Must-Read Books, 2023, Part 2

Here are a few more books I hope to read from cover to cover this year:

1. Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson (Plexus Publishing, 2002). (The basis for the television series.)

2. Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem by Wallace D. Best (New York University Press, 2017).

3. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II, 1941-1967: I Dream a World by Arnold Rampersad (Oxford University Press, 1988).

4. Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude, Jr. (Crown, 2020).

5. The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Class Blacks Angry? Why Should America Care? by Ellis Cose (HarperCollins, 1993).

6. The Devil in a Blue Dress: An Easy Rawlins Mystery by Walter Mosley (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 2002, paperback; originally published by Norton, 1990).

7.The Woman in the Window: A Novel by A. J. Finn (Morrow, 2018).

8. The Cold Millions: A Novel by Jess Walter (HarperCollins, 2020).

Books That Are On My "Must-Read" List, 2023

These are the books I hope to read from cover to cover this year:

1. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly (Morrow, 2016).

2. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem by Kevin McGruder (Columbia University Press, 2021).

3. Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by Francesca T. Royster (University of Texas Press, 2022).

4. And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2022).

5. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

6. The Sewing Circle: Hollywood's Greatest Secret: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women by Axel Madsen (Birch Lane Books, 1995).

7. The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call by Carl T. Rowan (Little, Brown, 1996).

8. Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America by Kevin Cook (Norton, 2014).

9. Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann (HarperCollins, 2014).

10. Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York by Elon Green (Celadon Books, 2021).

11. Harlem Shuffle: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2021).

12. The Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead (Anchor Books/Penguin Random House, 2021, paperback; originally published by Doubleday, 2016).

Editorialists Are Also Journalists

The following letter-to-the-editor was submitted via e-mail to the New York Daily News's "Voice of the People" on December 6, 2016. As far as I know the letter was never published.

Re: Voicer Mark Felcon (December 4, 2016) who thinks editorialists are not journalists. In fact, they are as much journalists as are reporters. They just have a different function. Reporters give us the who, what, where, when, why, and how of events. Editorial writers and columnists, on the other hand, analyze this data and try to make sense of it for readers, knowing there will always be room for disagreement. It is up to each reader, when reading the news and editorial pages, to apply some critical thinking to the process, and to gather enough information from a variety of sources before drawing a conclusion about an issue. Sincerely yours, Charles Michael Smith.

How I Became An "In The Life" Contributor

How I came to write about the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Richard Bruce Nugent for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life, is an interesting story.

Joe, who worked at a gay bookstore in Philadelphia called Giovanni's Room, wrote me a fan letter and sent it in care of the New York Native, a weekly gay paper that I wrote for in a freelance capacity in the early eighties.

The bookstore carried the Native which Joe told me he only read if it had an article in it by me. He was admittedly hungry for articles about other black gay men of which there was not that much, particularly in the gay press.

A short time later, Joe asked me to write an article about Bruce Nugent and gave me his phone number in Hoboken, New Jersey. Looking back, Joe probably got the number from Tom Wirth, Nugent's friend and literary executor, who reissued the controversial journal, Fire!!, that Nugent, Langston Hughes, and others put out in the 1920s.

Up to that point, I knew nothing about Nugent. But I took on the assignment and wrote an article in which I tried to put Nugent's life and career within a larger context of what was happening in Harlem and elsewhere, artistically and otherwise.

Years after In the Life came out, I discovered that I'd  been in error when I said that Bruce Nugent was the last living member of the Harlem Renaissance. He wasn't. Dorothy West, also a writer, was still alive when I interviewed him.

Blaming Long-Dead Architects For Creating Inaccessible Buildings

Alice L. Givan, an 80-year-old Brooklyn resident, wrote a letter-to-the-editor that was published in the New York Times (January 2, 2023) in response to an article on the paper's website about a 200-year-old Greenwich Village building that was demolished.

In her letter, Ms. Givan stated that she had "two points of view" on the matter. "I see beautiful, historic houses, and I feel dismay that one will be torn down." On the other hand, she "see[s] houses that are inaccessible" to the elderly and to "parents carrying children and groceries." 

She ends her letter by asking, "What were the architects who designed these houses thinking?"

Ms. Givan has made the mistake of projecting twenty-first century sensibilities, needs, and ways of doing things on to those who lived a century or more ago. When those "beautiful, historic houses" were built, the elderly more than likely lived with their family members who could assist them up and down the stairs and parents, particularly the well-to-do ones, could hire servants to handle the groceries and nannies to look after the children. Plus, there were deliverymen (presumably able-bodied) who brought the milk and butter, coal, blocks of ice, and other necessities to these residences.