How A Gossip Column Provided An Opportunity

When the ultra-right wing New York Post's gossip column Page Six was actually on page 6, not page 12 or page 20, I saw an item that stated that the civil rights icon Andrew Young was running for mayor of Atlanta and was giving up his Los Angeles Times-syndicated opinion column. Since, it was reported, the paper was looking for replacement writers for the column, I immediately contacted the L. A. Times about their talent search. Soon after I was able to contribute three columns.

One of those columns was about homosexuality in the black community. The Oregon Journal in Portland published the article in August 1981 with the headline, "Gays Are Black, Too." The Times editor I submitted the article to begrudgingly sent it out, saying that Andrew Young would not have written about the subject. That was precisely why the column needed to be written. It gave attention to a segment of the black community that was stigmatized and rendered invisible and voiceless.

Unfortunately, Young's column was dropped by many newspapers because it was his opinions they were interested in publishing. To me, this attitude was short-sighted and foolish.  No one should expect one person to speak for all black people. You would've thought they would've been glad to have a multiplicity of black voices and perspectives on a variety of topics. I think it's a safe bet to say that some of those voices they weren't interested in hearing from might have been the next James Baldwin or the next Toni Morrison or the next Audre Lorde.

Anyway, this was the first, and only, time I ever got a job opportunity via a gossip column.

Three Must-Read Books About James Baldwin

There are three books about James Baldwin that are still on my Must-Read -Cover-To-Cover list. Two of them I never got a chance to finish.

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Baldwin's birth, a perfect time to begin reading them as a way to commemorate that significant event.

1. Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin by Herb Boyd (Atria Books, 2008).

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

3. The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola (Princeton University Press, 2019).

The Forgotten Black World War II Veterans

I had four uncles who were World War II vets. Three served in the army, one in the navy. They served at a time when the American military was racially segregated. (A group photo of Uncle John and his shipmates attests to that.)

One of my biggest regrets is that I neglected to interview my uncles about their wartime service when I had the chance. I remember the four of them sitting in Aunt Vickie and Uncle Lyn's living room on 148th Street in Harlem trading war memories. This would have been sometime in the mid-1970s, when I would have been in my twenties. I heard them talking but I showed no interest in what they were sharing. I didn't realize that what I was hearing was important family history. History that should have been recorded on paper and/or tape so the information could be passed down to future generations.

Now I have to hope to find documents like letters and telegrams among family papers that addressed those war years as well as family mementoes from that time. (Aunt Louise, for instance, saved Uncle John's navy uniform including his dark blue sailor's cap. I found these items at the bottom of an old steamer trunk in her bedroom.)

The New York Times, in its October 6, 2022 issue, ran a review of a book called Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking). The author is Matthew F. Delmont, a Dartmouth University historian.

I'm eager to read it, all 374 pages. This sorely needed book highlights the lives and accomplishments of those, one black World War II vet, himself included, described as "a forgotten group of people" relegated to the status of half Americans. I hope this book will be a step toward recognizing their role in preserving democracy in America.

Canadian Racism

Malcolm X once said that anything below the Canadian  border was the South, referring to the existence of white racism throughout the United States. That led other blacks to label the so-called "liberal" North as "Up South."

The "Up South" label could just as easily apply to Canada, a destination many fugitive slaves  headed for to gain freedom.

In Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells (Sutherland House Books, 2021), I learned that the Canadian-born film director (born in 1926),whose many films include In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, and The Hurricane, grew up in a Toronto neighborhood that was a five-minute walk from a Lake Ontario beach. At the beach, there was a sign Jewison would see that said, "NO JEWS, N******[NIGGERS], OR DOGS." The sign, writes Wells, a Canadian academic and journalist, was there to ensure that "the sight of a Black person or Jew" would not hinder the enjoyment of the beach by families seeking relief on a hot summer day. 

So despite being seen as a refuge for runaway slaves and a land that promotes racial tolerance and multiculturalism, Canada had its own struggles with racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.

Note: Despite his surname, Norman Jewison is not Jewish. He is a white Protestant of British ancestry.

George Stinney Was Executed By South Carolina At Age 14

This story has haunted me ever since I saw it mentioned on the front page of The West Side Spirit (June 10-16, 2021, "Eli's Final Chapter"). In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney, an African-American, was put to death by the State of South Carolina, writes Ben Krull, "accused of murdering two white girls, ages seven and 11." After what Krull calls a "slipshod one-day trial," Stinney was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair "based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence." The death sentence was carried out within three months, which did not give Stinney a chance for a retrial.

This case is the subject of a book by the late Eli Faber called The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South. Faber was a retired professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The book was published on June 25, 2021 by the University of South Carolina Press.

This is the first time I ever heard of a person so young going to the electric chair. It should come as no surprise that in a Southern state like South Carolina, the life of a black person, adult or child, had no value.

The Child in the Electric Chair deserves to be read. It also deserves to be adapted into a major motion picture, showing the cruelty, injustice, and bloodthirstiness of the Jim Crow South. This book should give advocates of the death penalty an opportunity to reconsider its use and to acknowledge the barbarism of the death penalty.

Cops Who Support Derek Chauvin Are Chauvinists

Derek Chauvin, the white former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd by pressing his knee on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, cutting off his air supply, lived up to his surname.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Second Edition, 2004) defines the word "chauvinism" as "prejudice against or lack of consideration for those of a different sex, class, nationality, culture, etc."

It was stated by a black police official on a radio broadcast that there are police officers across the country who side with Chauvin and believe he did the right thing. Those officers should be called Chauvinists.

Hollywood Honesty

From among some old newspaper and magazine clippings, I came across this quote that appeared in a brief news item in TV Guide (December 10, 1988) about actor Scott Valentine, who was a cast member of NBC's Family Ties.

In the article he stated that "Men run the studios and the networks, and that makes it easy to be a white male in this world."

More than thirty years later, people in Hollywood are still talking about the lack of racial and gender diversity, especially behind the camera and in the executive suites.

Books On Race And Racism

In light of all the discussions on television, radio, in the print media, and online regarding racism, white privilege, social inequality, police brutality toward people of color, etc., I picked out the following six books from my bookshelves that I plan to read. It is my hope that they will be food for thought on race and race relations.

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

2. Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor (Rutgers University Press, 2005).

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

4. Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement by Simeon Booker with Carol McCabe Booker (University Press of Mississippi, 2013).

5. The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South by Alex Heard (HarperCollins, 2010).

6. Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime by Ron Stallworth (Flatiron Books, 2018). Originally published in 2014 by Police and Fire Publishing. The book was the basis for Spike Lee's film.

An Anti-Racist Song From The 1950s

Carmen McRae recorded a beautiful tune in 1958 called "Georgia Rose" (found on the CD, Carmen McRae's Finest Hour on the Verve label).There's a line in it that goes "Don't be blue, 'cause you're black, Georgia Rose." The tune, written by Jimmy Flynn, Harry Rosenthal, and Alexander Sullivan,  was very bold for its time with its anti-racist, black is beautiful message. I mentioned this song in a blog post in 2012. It would be useful if someone, maybe me, wrote an article or a book about the origin of the song.

An Imminent Race War In America?

So much has been written and said in the national news media about Trump's racism;white nationalists in Charlottesville,Virginia; and white supremacy that I'm motivated to read The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-Up Call by the late journalist Carl T. Rowan (1925-2000), published in 1996 by Little, Brown, to see how prophetic it is.

After reading the book, I hope I will be motivated enough to write about it in an essay/review.

Dress Codes Are Not Fashion Fascism

The following is an unpublished letter-to-the-editor that was sent via e-mail to the New York Daily News as well as amNew York, a free daily newspaper.

Voice of the People

New York Daily News

450 West 33rd Street

New York, NY 10001

October 21, 2005

To the Editor:

Re: NBA dress code. To call Commissioner Stern's decision racist or, as [sportswriter] Filip Bondy termed it, an act of "fashion fascism," is utterly ridiculous. What's wrong with looking your best? How can that be interpreted as "attacking cultures," as one of the athletes described it? What is cultured about wearing pants so low that one's underwear shows?

If Joe Louis, Martin Luther King, Nat "King" Cole, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Duke Ellington, and other African-American luminaries had dressed as slovenly and thuggish as some of today's millionaire athletes, no one would have taken them seriously. In fact, the black community would have been ashamed of them for looking like someone's unmade bed.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Michael Smith

The Return of "Native Son" (On Screen)

Another screen version of Richard Wright's 1940 best seller, Native Son, is scheduled for release, per Entertainment Weekly ( Fall Movie Preview, Special Double Issue, August 17/24, 2018). It stars newcomer KiKi Layne, who presumably plays Bigger Thomas's girlfriend Bessie and Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), who presumably plays Bigger. No other information about the production was provided.

Previous versions came out in 1986 and 1950. The latter version starred Richard Wright himself as Bigger Thomas. (Clips from that film appeared in a public television documentary about Wright.)

Of the 1986 version, Leonard Maltin's 2006 Movie Guide called it "an OK melodrama" and criticized its "deliberate alterations and softening of some of the novel's key plot points and themes." (Oprah Winfrey appears as Bigger's mother.)

The new film will probably be more graphic in its depiction of Bigger's accidental killing of Mary Dalton, the daughter of his white employer and the subsequent disposal of her body in the basement furnace.

Dumb Donald And King James

There is an old saying, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Well, Donald Trump, our 45th president, decided to throw stones at basketball star LeBron James (called King James by his fans) via Twitter.

James, a staunch critic of Trump and his policies, said, in an interview with CNN's Don Lemon, "We are in a position in America where this race thing has taken over. ...I believe our president is trying to divide us."

The Tweeter-in-Chief responded by saying that "Lebron [sic] James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn't easy to do."

Trump has received much criticism in the media for again attacking the intelligence of African-Americans.

However, according to journalist Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, there have been several  people inside the Trump Administration who've questioned Trump's intelligence.

"There was now a fair amount of back-of-the-classroom giggling about who had called Trump what," reported Wolff. "For [Treasury secretary] Steve Mnuchin and [former Chief of Staff] Reince Priebus, he was an 'idiot.' For [Chief Economics Advisor] Gary Cohn, he was 'dumb as shit.' For [National Security Advisor] H. R. McMaster, he was a 'dope.' The list went on." (See page 304.)

Those attitudes among people in the Trump White House should make LeBron James smile and say to himself, "Look who's calling me and others dumb."

A Meditation On Black Male Sexuality

Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America by Scott Poulson-Bryant, Doubleday, 224 pages, illustrated.

"Hangature" is a new word that you'll learn from Scott Poulson-Bryant's second book, Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America. It's one of those words you know only a gay man could have coined. (Actually, Poulson-Bryant admits to having learned it from a friend, "a self-described 'dick connoisseur.'") The author defines it as "the amount of ability a dick had to hang." In other words, it's all about the size. For men, playing "[t]he penis-size  game" transforms the penis into "a measuring stick of self-worth, of capabilities and fallibilities, of winning and losing."

Put in that context, the penis symbolizes masculine power in all  its manifestations--social, political, economic, physical, and of course, sexual. And since men for the most part have dominated the world, they get to conquer lands and people, build empires, construct the biggest and tallest skyscrapers (the ultimate phallic symbols), and make the rules. Those men who don't measure up are considered weak and get trampled upon and marginalized.

Even in the 21st century, things haven't changed all that much when it comes to the penis's symbolic power in the minds of men. And the black penis in particular: throughout Poulson-Bryant's travels and life experiences, he's noticed that "a  black man's dick is something the whole world finds interesting." Using historical and cultural examples as well as personal anecdotes (his nickname at Brown University was "Scott-Pulsing Giant" because he wrote a homoerotic tell-all article for a campus magazine about himself and others called "The Big Phallacy" that dealt with penis size), he examines the preconceptions and myths about the "big dick-ness" of black males.

He traces the roots of these myths to the colonial days of the United States when the enslaved black man was "considered a cultural savage, a religious heathen, and a  social inferior." The inferiority of the black male was of course constructed as a way to justify the slave system, while the notion that the black man had a "desire to conquer pristine Southern white womanhood" was concocted to ease the guilty consciences of white slave masters who routinely forced themselves on their female slaves. In their minds, the black man, out of revenge, would do the same thing to white women if given half a chance. So the myth of "big dick-ness" was invented to control the sexuality of the black male by casting him as a "sexual terrorist" or a sexual Svengali, and by putting him in league with Satan himself. (It was the "strange fruit" that Billie Holiday would later sing about--hanging from a  Southern tree.)

Poulson-Bryant, an openly gay pop-culture journalist who's written for the Village Voice, Essence, and The New York Times, and is the senior editor of America magazine, discusses the black penis from a variety of vantage points, including the film and porn industries and the hypermasculine hip-hop culture. Many of his chapters have titles that include a double entendre, such as "How's It Hanging in Hollywood?," "The Long  and the Short of It," and  "That's the Way the Balls Bounce."

Hung is a treatise not only on the black penis and black male sexual prowess and self-image, but also on how black men in America measure up when it comes to political, economic, and cultural power in a white-dominated society. Clearly, there are elements of both fear and envy in this comparison. The big black dick is an invention of white men, writes Poulson-Bryant. "How awful it must be to have invented the big black dick, then to have to spend so much time ensuring that it doesn't overshadow one's own sense of self-worth, that it doesn't somehow destroy your own stature." Although there are black men who proudly embrace the stereotype and unconsciously aid in their own oppression, there are others, like Poulson-Bryant's friend Simon, a successful Wall Street professional, who sees his ten-inch penis as a burden. "As hung as he is, he feels un-hung when it becomes the center of his definition as a man."

Gay men, like their straight counterparts, have been influenced by the myth of the big black dick. Unfortunately, there aren't all that many stories about gay men included here, despite the presence of the "homothug" in hip-hop culture, defined as "the gay or bisexual black dude who has no problem reconciling his homo-ness with his hip-hop-ness." Another disappointment is the chapter on the porn industry, "Pass the Remote," which includes no discussion of its gay and bisexual branches, where the myth of the big black dick also reigns supreme.

Despite these shortcomings, Hung, a small book about a very complex subject, succeeds in covering its topic as well as offering insightful commentary on the arduous journey over the "hills and valleys" of the American cultural and psychological landscape that black men have had to negotiate for the last 400 years. All of this is done in an entertaining, humorous, and forthright manner.


This article was originally published in the Gay & Lesbian Review, January/February 2006.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin's Heir?

One writer on the Internet has called Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of the bestselling memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), The New James Baldwin (TNJB). A lot of critics think he is, too. The trouble with this label is that it tends to pigeonhole a black writer, especially one who writes nonfiction. And since Baldwin wrote mainly about race and race relations in America, and was a firebrand on those issues, the TNJB label says to Coates, a gifted writer, that he should write about race and only race.

There are, however, some black writers like Stephen L. Carter, Malcolm Gladwell, and Hilton Als who have thankfully managed to sidestep this situation to a large extent. Black writers should not be discouraged from writing about race when it is necessary but no one should expect them to be One Note Johnnys.

 Global warming, nuclear proliferation, and other important issues affect black writers as well and these are subjects they should be invited to participate in discussing.

John Hope Franklin, for instance, wrote about black history but he also cultivated orchids in his spare time. How many journalists interviewed him in depth about this hobby? None, it's safe to bet.

 I wanted to interview Gordon Parks, the noted photojournalist, film director, and autobiographer. And to get away from the racial angle, I suggested to a USA Today editor an interview with Parks exploring his views on aging. The idea was shot down. I regret not pursuing it anyway.

 It's the 21st century and black people have other things on their minds besides racism, discrimination, and what white people think of them.

Three Milestone Events To Revisit

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, and the 30th anniversary of the police killing of the 17-year-old Harlem honor student Edmund Perry, a case which became the subject of a nonfiction book and a 1991 TV movie called Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story. This would be a good time to commemorate these events by reading books written about them.

 Two books I own and plan to read are Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness by Robert Conot (Bantam, 1967), which is about the Watts Riots and Best Intentions: The Education and Killing of Edmund Perry by journalist Robert Sam Anson (Random House, 1987).

 The Chicago Tribune called Conot's book "something Capote's will never be--a work of potentially historic importance." The reviewer was probably talking about Truman Capote's crime classic, In Cold Blood.

A Church Hides Behind The Word "Homo"

The illuminated message board outside the Atlah Church on Lenox Avenue and 123rd Street in Harlem had this pronouncement: "Say goodbye to black barber shops, churches and funeral homes to make way for homo gentrifier restaurants and condos." The frequent use of the word "homo" in the church's many messages over the past couple of years is code for "white people." Not wanting to be labeled racist, the church hides behind the homophobic slur because being anti-gay can be seen as following the teaching of the Bible.

"John Bull's Nigger": One Black Man's View Of Other Blacks

One book I would like to read, although it will probably turn my stomach as I turn the pages, is John Bull's Nigger by Dillibe Onyeama, published in 1974. From the way the book is described in the August 1974 issue of the British publication CRC Journal, it contains the rantings of a self-hating black man.

"Mr. Onyeama's high principles and experience of living in Britain," reported the CRC Journal, "lead him to conclude that the black man is '...more of an animal--only marginally human.'"

Furthermore, Onyeama, who was born in the part of Nigeria then known as Biafra, saw black people as being "Dirty! Stupid! Inferior to the white man."

John Bull's Nigger was seen as so inflammatory and hateful that, according to the CRC Journal, it "has been referred to Sir Robert Mark, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, for investigation under Section 6 of the 1965 Race Relations Act, for allegedly inciting racial hatred."

I looked the book up on Amazon. There are four hardcover copies available for $22.57 each. I may check with the Strand, a used-books store in New York City, to see if they have any copies in stock.

If the author, forty years later, is still alive, it would be interesting to talk with him to see if his "very decided views on black people" has changed or remained the same.

James Baldwin, Author And Intellectual

In 1975, I took a 15-week magazine writing course at Hunter College's Midtown Branch, located on Lexington Avenue in the East 50s, in Manhattan. The instructor was an elderly woman named Camille Davied (pronounced Dah-vee-ay), whose late husband had been an editor at Reader's Digest. (I was the only person of color in the class.) My memory is a bit hazy about how James Baldwin's name got mentioned. Perhaps I wrote a class assignment that referenced him. Anyway, I do remember saying to her that Baldwin was an intellectual. She immediately and emphatically denied that he was. It was probably hard for her, a white person, to acknowledge that a black man could be that cerebral. Maybe the things that he wrote and said about American race relations touched a nerve, making her uncomfortable and self-conscious.

Had I known as much about Baldwin then as I do now, I would have pointed out to her that if Baldwin had not been an intellectual, his essays would never have appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary, and other intellectual journals in the 1950s.