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.

Urban Book Maven Is Fourteen Years Old

I've thoroughly enjoyed writing this blog, which began fourteen years ago this month. It has allowed me the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, in any way that I wanted. And, fortunately, I never had to concern myself about any gatekeepers.

I look forward to writing the blog for a few more years.

A Food Fight In Court

I have a bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce in my kitchen cupboard. So when I saw an item in Harper's magazine (January 2023 issue) quoting a class-action lawsuit against the product's manufacturer, the T.W. Garner Food Company, based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I became very interested in what the lawsuit was about.

The lawsuit, filed in September, stated that "A hot sauce is labeled 'Texas' if it is made in Texas, using Texas ingredients and flavor profiles. .... Texas hot sauces...must be made in Texas from ingredients sourced from Texas. ....Texas takes great pride in its hot sauce. ....The defendant trades on the reputation of Texas. There is nothing Texas about them."

Nowhere on the label does it say "Texas-style" (whatever that is). There's only a cartoon-drawing of a cowboy wearing a 10-gallon hat, with a whip in his hand, and three red peppers near the logo. The label says the company has been making Texas Pete hot sauce "Since 1929." Which leads one to ask this question, why has it taken 93 years to complain about the product's authenticity?

Frankly, I don't know what makes Texas hot sauce different from any other hot sauce. If there is such a thing as Texas-style hot sauce and the recipe is generic and in the public domain, how is its replication by others injurious to the reputation of Texas? I'm not a lawyer but based on the above quote, this lawsuit sounds frivolous. That could mean it will get thrown out of court.

On The Road With Langston Hughes And Friend

I enjoy a good road-trip movie like The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Thelma & Louise (1991). And for a long time I've seen the movie potential of a road trip by car that Langston Hughes and his traveling companion, Zell Ingram, a young artist, took in 1931. (Ingram is described by the biographer Arnold Rampersad in his The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (Oxford University Press, 1986) as "a big, handsome, young black man, about twenty-one years old, who lived with his mother over a popular Cleveland hot-dog shop.")

The trip took them from Cleveland to Florida. And from there to Cuba and Haiti; then back to Florida, where they picked up the black civil rights activist and college president Mary McLeod Bethune in Daytona Beach. She became Hughes's second traveling companion all the way to New York City.

While Hughes and Ingram were in Cuba and Haiti, they encountered enough adventures and misadventures to make a feature-length movie a riveting cinematic experience.

Sometimes I think I should become a movie producer.

How About A James Baldwin Biopic?

Earlier today I re-read the chapter on James Baldwin in Christopher Bram's wonderful book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (Twelve/Hachette Book Group), published in 2012. The chapter is an excellent summation of Baldwin's life and literary career.

What prompted me to re-read the chapter was the idea that came to me that Baldwin's life, especially his early life, would make a riveting biopic. Drawing on previous biographies and his essays, the film would trace his evolution as a writer from his impoverished childhood in Harlem to his first few years in Paris where he, as an American expatriate, struggled to survive while completing his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).

I think this would be the sort of cinematic project that would interest directors like Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler, and Ava DuVernay.

Concerning who would portray Baldwin, a good choice would have been the late Chadwick Boseman, who somewhat resembled Baldwin. Unfortunately, since Boseman is no longer available, Don Cheadle, who did a brilliant job of portraying Miles Davis in Miles Ahead (2015), would be another possible choice.