Jazzy Cartoons

"Jungle Jive: Race, Jazz, and Cartoons," by Daniel Goldmark

Jazz was an integral element in the sound and appearance of animated cartoons produced in Hollywood from the late 1920s through the late 1950s.1 Everything from big band to free jazz has been featured in cartoons, either as the soundtrack to a story or the basis for one. The studio run by the Fleischer brothers took an unusual approach to jazz in the late 1920s and the 1930s, treating it not as background but as a musical genre deserving of recognition.

Instead of using jazz idioms merely to color the musical score, their cartoons featured popular songs by prominent recording artists. Fleischer was a well-known studio in the 1920s, perhaps most famous for pioneering the sing-along cartoon with the bouncing ball in Song Car-Tunes. An added attraction to Fleischer cartoons was that Paramount Pictures, their distributor and parent company, allowed the Fleischers to use its newsreel recording facilities, where they were permitted to film famous performers scheduled to appear in Paramount shorts and films.

Thus, a wide variety of musicians, including Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallee, the Mills Brothers, Gus Edwards, the Boswell Sisters, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong, began appearing in Fleischer cartoons. This arrangement benefited both the studios and the stars. Once the Fleischers chose a song from the featured artist to use in a cartoon, the writers constructed a story that made the song’s performance the centerpiece of the short. That the song’s title usually was borrowed for the cartoon’s title was just one way in which such cartoons helped publicize a performer’s work.

Minnie the Moocher

The Fleischers also responded to local influences of the Manhattan music scene in their choice of performers: they combined themes from their own lives as middle-class, secular Jews in New York with their own cultural and musical notions of African Americans, funneling all these raw materials into a popular representational form—cartoons. Their earlier success with the Song Car-Tunes was owed to their use of Tin Pan Alley tunes and nineteenth-century popular songs, styles familiar in the city on vaudeville and other stages. The proximity of the Fleischer studio to premier music venues, particularly the uptown clubs in Harlem that featured artists such as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Cab Calloway, clearly shaped their creation of cartoons in the nascent jazz era. The aura of danger and excitement that surrounded jazz, especially during the Harlem Renaissance, likely added to the attraction. As Nathan Irvin Huggins describes it: “How convenient! It was merely a taxi trip to the exotic for most white New Yorkers.

In cabarets decorated with tropical and jungle motifs—some of them replicas of southern plantations—they heard jazz, that almost forbidden music. It was not merely that jazz was exotic, but that it was instinctive and abandoned, yet laughingly light and immediate—melody skipping atop inexorable driving rhythm. . . . In the darkness and closeness, the music, infectious and unrelenting, drove on.”3 Lou Fleischer, the brother in charge of music for the studio, remembered going to the Cotton Club to listen to Calloway so that he could choose the songs that might work well in a cartoon. The performances themselves no doubt gave the writers at the studio ideas for future cartoons. They could easily take the numbers they had seen onstage and, choosing to view them from the contrived primitivist perspective then dominant, create stories that blended the performers’ music and the visual trappings of the clubs with the animators’ ideas.

Cab Calloway St. James Infirmary by Fleischer


Amiri Baraka points out that whites eagerly engaged with the new black music that offered such a novel image of America,5 desiring to experience the sensual overtones ascribed to “primitive” music. By visiting clubs in Harlem and even by viewing cartoons, whites could gain access to something they felt implicitly lacking in their lives: the freedom and hedonism believed to be characteristic of a simpler, more instinctual society.

By couching the featured songs within the stereotyped narratives that shaped the musicians’ live acts, the Fleischer cartoons enabled moviegoing audiences around the country to experience an even more fantastical version of those narratives that previously had been enjoyed by only a small group of nightclub patrons in New York City. Just as they had done while attending live stage shows with blackface performers, white audiences could watch blacks in these newer mediated spaces and hope for what Huggins calls “the possibility of being transported into black innocence.”6 The cartoons that simultaneously presented the idea of jazz and primitivism also emphasized, in a tone mixing envy and condemnation, the stereotyped notion that blacks live their lives with careless freedom.

Betty Boop-1938-Sally Swing

Louis Armstrong and his band made their sole appearance in a Fleischer cartoon in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You (Fleischer, 1932). Like most of the cartoons in this series,7 the film opens with a sequence of live footage following the title cards. Armstrong and his band are featured performing before moving on to the animated story, thereby both giving the audience the opportunity to see the actual musicians and providing Armstrong with valuable publicity. But rather than performing the title song right away, Armstrong and his men play another piece, “Shine,” that segues neatly into the background music for the animated sequence. The audience must watch what amounts to half the cartoon before Armstrong begins the title song. This clever strategy on the part of the studio kept viewers’ attention on the characters and reflects a technique commonly used in the musical cartoons created by Warner Bros.

Betty Boop "Just A Gigolo" 1932

The story centers on Betty Boop and her companions, Bimbo the dog and Ko-Ko the clown, as they explore the depths of the African jungle. They inevitably become involved in a chase with some natives, which culminates in the performance of the title song. As Bimbo and Ko-Ko try to give the slip to their pursuer, a repetitive “ONE-two-three-four” drum beat—a musical stereotype often associated with Native American drumming patterns—starts playing in the background. This short rhythmic cue transitions almost immediately into the title song, for which the drums have set up the tempo.

As the beat ostensibly comes from “native” drums and is heard as if being played off-screen, the music establishes, before any lyrics are heard, the supposedly native origin of the song, which then springs full-formed from the primordial rhythm. During the chase, the native pursuing Bimbo and Ko-Ko literally loses his head, which, detached from his body, flies after them in the sky. As the introduction to the song ends and its opening verse begins, the head dissolves into Armstrong’s own live-action head in profile, singing the title song. This transformation focuses on another facet of the primitivist caricature, implying that Armstrong is still a denizen of the jungle himself. The skies even darken forebodingly as the native/Armstrong initially runs up behind Ko-Ko and Bimbo, who clearly fear Armstrong, his jazzy song, and the black community that created it.

A number of features of these cartoons made them attractive for white viewers. Not only were audiences transported to faraway lands, but the humorous and fantastical sight gags that characterized the Fleischer style also removed the aura of danger from Africa by offering comical and dehumanizing images of African natives. Such portrayals could naturally be extended to the urban American black, who could become less (or more) fearsome to white audiences through such caricatures. Their experience of the forbidden music of Armstrong or Calloway as a soundtrack to the journey created an additional level of excitement.

Betty Boop Cartoon with Louis Armstrong

Armstrong, of all the jazz personalities featured in Fleischer cartoons, probably received the most extremely stereotyped treatment in his single appearance. The dissolve between Armstrong’s live-action head and that of his animated savage counterpart made the animators’ visual statement about theconstitution of his “inner” nature absolutely clear. Even Armstrong’s voice lent itself to the stereotype of the savage persona. In vaudeville, as Huggins points out, the dialect associated with minstrelsy characters “was coarse, ignorant, and stood at the opposite pole from the soft tones and grace of what was considered cultivated speech.”10 Of course, Armstrong’s raspy and ebullient singing was a signature element of his act, yet in the context of this cartoon, his style of making music suddenly takes on primitive characteristics—especially given his frequent exclamations that often bordered on the unintelligible. Later cartoons that caricatured Armstrong fetishize the same idiosyncratic elements of his performing style; his voice is usually the most obvious, most easily imitated (albeit poorly), and therefore most often satirized aspect of his public image.

Many of these features highlighting Armstrong’s “savage” qualities first appeared in A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), a one-reel Paramount musical short that was directed by Aubrey Scotto. The film opens in a rundown home where a black man sits listening to his Louis Armstrong records and playing a makeshift drum kit while his wife admonishes him to clean the house. When she knocks him out cold with a mop, the bubbles in the soap bucket, combined with the jazz music in background, lead to his wild fantasy in which he is the king of Jazzmania. The scene is apparently set in a throne room where, dressed in a military outfit, the “king” is entertained by Armstrong and his band, all dressed in leopard skins and similar costumes, while unseen machines churn away and fill the foreground with bubbles. Armstrong sings “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You,” followed by “Shine” before the man awakens from his reverie.

A Rhapsody in Black and Blue clearly had a powerful influence on the Fleischer animators. In I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, they used the same songs and primitive ambience featured in Rhapsody. Though the live-action short never leaves the soundstage, the Fleischers took advantage of the immense freedom of their medium by setting the story in the jungle itself. They even retain some of the camera work from Rhapsody. Only two musicians get close-ups in Rhapsody, Armstrong and his drummer, Tubby Hall. Likewise, both Armstrong and Hall receive special emphasis in the Fleischer cartoon, as both have their visages transposed with those of jungle natives.

(source: Institute for Studies In American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, NEWSLETTER, Volume XXXIV, No. 2, Spring 2005)

Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine Cartoon

Little Racist Things Are a Big Deal!

From the University of Dayton, RACE, RACISM AND THE LAW:Speaking Truth to Power!! "In Racism, Little Things Are a Big Deal!" by Phillip Atiba Goff

I cannot imagine that 10 minutes passed from the time it first appeared online to the time my phone rang early this morning. The New York Post had published a (now controversial) cartoon depicting two police officers that had shot a monkey one of them quipping, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

The cartoon you see it here was clearly referencing the recent odd-ball news item, that a woman from Stamford, Conn., had been mauled by someone else's pet chimpanzeeand that the animal had to be "put down," as it were, to preserve public safety. But the political commentary seemed an odd juxtaposition to the visual. Could the cartoon have been suggesting that Barack Obama, principal champion of the bill and our first black president, was somehow chimp-like?

Though much of the reaction to the cartoon has been outrage at the implication that our 44th president is remotely simian, there have been other messages in the blogosphere as well. A few pleaded with us to see reason in this post-Obama era. They begged us to understand that the cartoonist clearly meant to impugn congress, Wall Street executives and academic economists and that there was no racial subtext to the piece. Others saw the cartoon as racist but declined to become outraged. Saw the injustice in the image, but saw it as a minor injustice, not one worth worrying too much about. After all, they argue, having a black president means that America is post-racial and does not need to worry about petty things like harmless pictures in a paper. They insist this was a little thing.

The best science available suggests otherwise.

For the better part of the past seven years, my colleagues and I have conducted research on the psychological phenomenon of dehumanization. Specifically, we have examined cognitive associations between African Americans and non-human apes. And the association leads to bad things. When we began the research, we were skeptical of whether or not participants even knew that people of African descent were caricatured as ape-like as less than human throughout the better part of the past 400 years. And, in fact, many were not. However, even those who were unaware of this historical association demonstrated a cognitive association between blacks and apes. That is, when they thought of apes, they thought of blacks and vice versa when they thought of blacks, they thought of apes.

But the fact of this cognitive association was not the most disturbing part of the research. Rather, it was the fact that the association between blacks and apes could lead to violence.

In one study, participants who were made to think about apes were more likely to support police violence against black (but not white) criminal suspects. The association actually caused them to endorse anti-black violence. Most disturbing of all, however, was a study of media coverage and the death penalty. Looking at a sample of death-eligible cases in Philadelphia from 1979 to 1999, the more that media coverage used apelike metaphors to describe a murder trial (ie. "urbanjungle," "aping the suspects behavior," etc.) the more likely black suspects, but not white suspects, were to be put to death.

Not surprisingly, black suspects were much more likely to be described in ape-like terms. And they were more frequently executed by the state.

Similar psychological mechanisms of discrimination are at work in the bloated incarceration rates of young black men, the trenchant educational achievement gap between blacks and whites, and theracial bias evidenced in law enforcement officer's use of force. Though some are demonstrating leadership towards equality, we find that many of our nation's oldest racial shames have persisted into a period when a black person can reasonably aspire to the highest office in the land.

I mention these depressing findings because it is tempting to ignore them in the wake of President Obama's inauguration to downplay the significance of"isolated events" of bigotry and "harmless words or pictures." But precisely because the dream ofpost-raciality is seductive for so many, it is all the more important that we not forget that cartoons like the one in today's New York Post are never isolated-and consequently, never harmless.

Today's Post cartoon is not far removed from the "Curious George" Obama sock puppet, a "Curious George" Obama T-shirt, a Japanese advertisement depicting Obama as a monkey, and countless other Obama/monkey comparisons that cropped up throughout the year-long Democratic primary and presidential campaigns. Psychological science has long known that words and pictures, far from harmless, can be the very instruments of dehumanization necessary for collective violence-regardless of how innocently they are intended.



As we live through this historic presidency, there will doubtless be more of these moments of impolitic insensitivity. Some will be more egregious than others. But, as a scientist, my sincerest hope for us all is that we not be biased by the desire to see our struggle towards racial equality as over. The evidence is too clear that the little things are still a big deal. (source: University of Dayton)

Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, who will deliver "Revolutionary Impatience: Charting a New Path to the Mountaintop,"

The Racialized Ape Image

From the Los Angeles Times, "Race and the ape image: Research indicates that associating blacks with apes is deeply embedded and has disturbing effects," published on 28 February 2009, by Phillip Atiba Goff and Jennifer L. Eberhardt:

An apology has been issued. The protests are fading. And it may be tempting to dismiss the uproar over the provocative chimpanzee cartoon in the New York Post last week as just another "race card" dust-up.

But that would obscure an underlying reality captured in the Post situation and demonstrated by research we have conducted: Some racial associations are embedded so deeply that they are difficult to recognize, much less eradicate -- and they continue to shape our behavior and ideas.

The Post cartoon depicted two police officers standing over a chimp they had shot dead in the street. The image directly referenced the killing in Connecticut of a pet chimp that had mauled its owner's friend. But the caption was more oblique: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

Many people thought they recognized a hateful association in the cartoon -- between blacks and apes. They were shocked by the ugly possibility that it was equating the violent chimpanzee with President Obama. Some even considered it a veiled invitation to murder the nation's first black president.

Ota Benga, Pygmy man on display in the Bronx Zoo, New York 1901

In the 19th century and well into the 20th, popular media from movies to fiction to political cartoons frequently portrayed blacks as more simian than human. It was an association that provided cover for slavery itself, as well as anti-black violence. Lynchings in the United States were often justified by relying on this dehumanizing association, and it surfaced in the Rodney King controversy in Los Angeles: LAPD Officer Laurence Powell had referred to a black couple as "something right out of 'Gorillas in the Mist' " moments before he was involved in the King beating. Like nooses, the "N-word" and white sheets, referring to blacks as apelike is among the most violent and hurtful legacies of our nation's difficult racial past.

The negative association -- this linking of two ideas in the human mind -- goes far beyond historical legacy. In multiple studies on ape and African American associations, using different experimental approaches with white and nonwhite subjects, we have found that the link persists and can be triggered in the most egalitarian of people. Our research also suggests a particularly disturbing consequence: When the association was called to mind, even in the absence of conscious awareness, participants in our laboratory experiments were more likely to endorse violence against African Americans.

In one study, for example, we exposed some participants to words such as "chimp," "gorilla" and "orangutan," flashed on a computer screen at such a rapid rate that they could not be consciously detected. Next, we asked all the participants to watch a two-minute videotape of police officers who had surrounded a suspect and were violently subduing him. Some participants were led to believe that the suspect was white; others were led to believe he was black.

What did we find?

Tiger Woods

When the participants were led to believe that the suspect was white, exposing them to the ape words beforehand made no difference in their judgments about the use of force displayed in the video. However, when participants believed the suspect was black, those who were exposed to the words thought the police officers were more justified in the amount of force they used. They thought that the black suspect deserved the violence that was directed at him.

This finding is made more disturbing by one of the other studies we conducted. It looked into the role of the media in death penalty cases. Using data compiled by the criminologist David Baldus, we examined 153 cases in the Philadelphia area in which a defendant was found guilty and statutes allowed for the application of the death penalty, among other sentencing options.


We read every article published about these cases in the Philadelphia Inquirer, from the time the crime was first reported to the sentencing of those arrested, and we tallied the number of ape-related metaphors that appeared in print -- things such as "an urban jungle" and "aping a victim's screams." Not only were black men and their crimes much more likely to be described in apelike terms, but the number of ape-related metaphors predicted the likelihood that a defendant would be sentenced to death.

It is important to note that in every study in which we measured people's racial attitudes, using varying techniques, those views about blacks did not influence the results. In other words, the measurable presence of anti-black prejudice did not dictate how strongly people associated blacks with apes.

Song: "All Coons Look Alike To Me"

Instead, we believe that even among people who aren't particularly prejudiced, the association between blacks and apes is still strong, held in place through "implicit knowledge," the result of a lifetime of conditioning, rooted in historical representations of blacks as less than human.

All of this suggests that it was not simple racism, or just a desire to liken the creation of the stimulus bill to an out-of-control chimp, that was reflected in the Post cartoon. It was a kind of racial programming, a legacy even something as progressive as Obama's election cannot obliterate. (source: Los Angeles Times)

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is the process whereby opponents view each other as less than human and thus not deserving of humane treatment or what are generally accepted as fundamental human rights. It is necessary, psychologically, to so categorize the enemy if it is to be possible to engage in warfare or otherwise violate the generally accepted norms of behavior regarding one's fellow man.

"Negro Boy and Apes. On the left side of the figure there is a young

Chimpanzee, and on the right a young Orangutan." Taken from Shufeldt, R.W.'s America's Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915).

Dehumanization is actually an extension of a less intense process of developing an "enemy image" of the opponent. An enemy image is a stereotype-a negative oversimplification--which usually views the opposing group as evil, in contrast to one's own side, which is seen as entirely good. Enemy images are usually black and white. Shades of gray (meaning one's own faults or one's enemis' values) are usually discounted, denied, or ignored.

This is accentuated, according to psychologists, by the process of "projection"-in which people "project" their own faults onto their opponents. This means that people or groups who tend to be aggressive or selfish are likely to attribute those traits to their opponents, but not to themselves. This improves one's own self-image and group cohesion, but it also escalates the conflict and makes it easier to dehumanize the other side.

While the formation of enemy images is very common, it is a dangerous process that becomes especially so when it reaches the level of dehumanization. Once the enemy is considered to be less than human, it becomes psychologically acceptable to engage in genocide or other atrocities such as those that occurred in Rwanda, Cambodia, and the former Yugoslavia. (source: Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado)

Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century

Mr. Patler talked about his book Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century, published by University Press of Colorado. The author discussed the history of the Jim Crow segregation laws and how they caused conflicts within Woodrow Wilson's presidential campaign. During his presentation, Mr. Patler profiled lesser-known African-American equal rights leaders such as William Monroe Trotter. Mr. Jordan assisted with a reading of a screenplay describing the second meeting that Mr. Trotter had with President Wilson. Following his presentation, the author responded to questions from members of the audience.

click here to view on C-SPAN

Brown v. Board 50 Years Later: Dr. Charles Ogletree

Dr. Charles Ogletree Lecture Brown v. Board 50 Years Later: Successes and Failures

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

Anti-busing protest in Boston, 1976

Nothing Changes

Peter Irons begins Jim Crow's Children with voices from the past. Drawing from WPA interviews, he quotes former slaves talking about difficulties they faced trying to read. "If we told [Mr. Tabb] we had been learnin' to read," recounts one slave, "he would near beat the daylights out of us" (p. 1). According to Irons, little has changed. African Americans still confront serious barriers to acquiring equal education in the United States.

In a sweeping work that traces black education from slavery to the present, Irons, who teaches at [***], suggests that Brown v. Board of Education,[1] the landmark Supreme Court ruling calling for the desegregation of public schools in the South, failed blacks. Although instrumental in dismantling federal approval of de jure segregation, or Jim Crow, in the South, Brown failed to deliver equal education to African American youth, a goal that continues to prove elusive, even today.

Much like James Patterson's Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and its Troubled Legacy,[2] Irons summarizes an ever increasing body of secondary literature on school segregation, adding weight to ascendant views that Brown did not end America's struggle with segregated education. In pursuing this goal, Irons provides a detailed summary of educational policy towards blacks beginning as early as slavery. He does an excellent job of showing, for example, that the South was never much of an outlier in either its racial views or racial practice, despite the absence of formal Jim Crow segregation in the North. Irons also does a deft job of summarizing the NAACP's strategy leading up to Brown, a story familiar to fans of Richard Kluger's classic work, Simple Justice.[3]

The full weight of Irons's book, however, does not come to bear until the second half. Dedicating six chapters to the reaction and results of the Supreme Court's ruling, Irons shows first how southern and later northern and western whites opposed forced integration. He documents white flight, busing controversies, and even terrorism in cities like Cleveland (which boasted large black populations and extreme white resistance). In his closing chapters, Irons picks through the ruins of desegregation, even interviewing black students and former plaintiffs in Brown, revealing that Jim Crow's spirit, if not his body, lives on.

The culprit, according to Irons, is the federal judiciary, and in particular the Supreme Court. If it weren't for the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, he contends, integration would have continued. The courts proved effective in the early stages of integration, first by forcing the South to submit to federal mandates, and later by imposing busing on the rest of the nation--only to concede ground in the 1970s and 80s by removing busing mandates and tolerating white flight out of heavily black districts.

Irons's argument is, undoubtedly, right. If the Supreme Court had continued to aggressively back desegregation, Jim Crow would have suffered. But, this is not the only reason to read Jim Crow's Children. In fact, Irons's work raises questions that are, in certain ways, even more interesting still. Irons shows that American whites, contrary to their oft-professed liberal proclamations about racial equality, proved reluctant to sacrifice what they perceived to be the future of their children for an abstract social ideal. And the Supreme Court, as much symbolic authority as it may possess, has been unwilling and (perhaps more important) unable to force Americans, over long periods of time, to do things they do not want to do. Herein lurks the most interesting part of Irons's study. He shows effectively not just that courts refused to back desegregation, but that white America refused to back desegregation. In pushing aggressively for the abstract goal of integration, Irons shows how the courts, through busing and other plans, destroyed American cities by driving white taxpayers from them, eroded faith in the courts as a means of protecting white interests, and drove a wedge between liberal left-wing elites and the white working class, thereby setting the stage for the impressive consolidation of power across class lines that we see in today's Republican Party.

Jim Crow's children then, are not just African American youths who may have been better off under equalization programs, but Republican crusaders like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and William Rehnquist who rose to power expressly to dismantle what the Warren Court had wrought. Brown created both a myth and a monster.

Why? That is the subject of another study. And yet, racism, although an obvious culprit, may not be the only force at work here. On the contrary, an even deeper force, long at work within America's social formation, is likely also to blame. That is the utility of segregated education to the preservation of class.

When confronting the prospect of having their children bused into inner cities, white Americans did not have to be racist to realize that their children would suffer. It may be true, for example, that integration among children of the same class is a positive good. But, it may also be true that integration of children from different classes may prove, and will likely prove, the opposite. This is not because black children are different racially, but rather because Jim Crow involves much more than simply racial separation.

Segregation in America, whether de jure or de facto, has always been about resources just as much as about race. The idea behind segregation, initially, was not simply to punish blacks, but to create an underclass that was limited in terms of what it could accomplish, and thereby better suited for the menial tasks assigned to it. There was a reason, in other words, that Mr. Tabb would have beaten his slaves. If they had learned to read, they would have been less suited to being slaves.

Although slavery is gone, class structure continues in America, as in most societies. In this respect, centuries of segregated schooling have served their purpose--namely, the perpetuation of a class system in which African Americans inhabit the bottom caste, performing menial tasks with limited hope of advancement. The prospect confronting white parents with forced busing then, was to suddenly have their children relegated to the same lower class, not simply by association with black students, but being sent to underfunded, poorly equipped schools with student bodies who lacked the appropriate cultural, not to mention financial, capital.

If Irons had pursued this angle of analysis, he may have been less harsh on the Supreme Court. After all, Brown itself was an ambitious move--one that most white Americans agreed with only insofar as it did not affect them personally. In fact, like the due process revolution for criminal rights initiated by the Warren Court, Brown was a radical step against the grain of American popular opinion, one that invited the very backlash it received.

History, for better or for worse, is rarely determined by a few old men, even if they are Supreme Court Justices. On the contrary, larger forces play into the reasons why Supreme Court justices rule the way that they do. Haunting the Warren Court, for example, was the Cold War. Irons doesn't consider this in his analysis, and yet scholars like Mary Dudziak have shown its effect.[4] In fact, if Irons had considered Dudziak's work, his conclusions would only have been stronger. After all, once the Cold War ended, there was little compelling reason to promote equal education, save perhaps abstract moral ideals. Like it or not, these have never governed educational, or any other policy, in the United States. (source: History Net)

Peter Irons: Jim Crow's Children

Faces of the Enemy

To Create An Enemy

Start with an empty canvas
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and
stain the strangers with the sinister hue
of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every finite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphasized into beast, vermin, insect.



Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.



Faces of the Enemy

Follow the Drinking Gourd

Follow The Drinking Gourd. Author: Winter, Jeanette

The song and its translation are as follows:

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

For the old man is waiting for to carry you to freedom,

If you follow the Drinking Gourd.

"When the sun comes back" means winter and spring when the altitude of the sun at noon is higher each day. Quail are migratory bird wintering in the South. The Drinking Gourd is the Big Dipper. The old man is Peg Leg Joe. The verse tells slaves to leave in the winter and walk towards the Drinking Gourd. Eventually they will meet a guide who will escort them for the remainder of the trip.

Most escapees had to cross the Ohio River which is too wide and too swift to swim. The Railroad struggled with the problem of how to get escapees across, and with experience, came to believe the best crossing time was winter. Then the river was frozen, and escapees could walk across on the ice. Since it took most escapees a year to travel from the South to the Ohio, the Railroad urged slaves to start their trip in winter in order to be at the Ohio the next winter.

The river bank makes a very good road,

The dead trees show you the way,

Left foot, peg foot, traveling on

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

This verse taught slaves to follow the bank of the Tombigbee River north looking for dead trees that were marked with drawings of a left foot and a peg foot. The markings distinguished the Tombigbee from other north-south rivers that flow into it.

The river ends between two hills,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

There's another river on the other side,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

These words told the slaves that when they reached the headwaters of the Tombigbee, they were to continue north over the hills until they met another river. Then they were to travel north along the new river which is the Tennessee River. A number of the southern escape routes converged on the Tennessee.

Where the great big river meets the little river,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

For the old man is awaiting to carry you to freedom if you

follow the Drinking Gourd.

This verse told the slaves the Tennessee joined another river. They were to cross that river (which is the Ohio River), and on the north bank, meet a guide from the Underground Railroad.

(source: NASA)

Reading Rainbow: Follow the Drinking Gourd

THE DANDY SLAVE: Baltimore, April 6, 1861

"The dandy slave: A scene in Baltimore, Maryland." From the Illustrated London News, vol. 38, no. 1082, p. 307.

THE DANDY SLAVE, April 6, 1861:

Whenever a negro can afford it, he dresses well, sometimes quietly and in good taste. His hat is sure to be of the best, his boots of the glossiest patent leather, and the rest of his adornments to match. One rainy Sunday, in Baltimore, our Artist saw and sketched one of these dandy negroes escorting home from church his mistress. He was a slave, and this poor old faded woman owned him. He was proud and fond of her, and she, no doubt, not a little attached to him. "Oh," he said, "my misses is a very good misses; fine old lady; lets me do pretty much as I'm a mind 'ter. If I feel like playing sodger, I plays sodger; and if I feels like work, I works. I ollers gives her half my wages, and she never asks no questions. Oh, lor, no; I wouldn't think of running away, or doing nothing that could noways annoy her. I gets plenty of money; hire myself down on steam-boat, Sir. I'm very good waiter; the ladies mostly likes me; and steam-boat captain likes to have waiters as is pop'lar with the ladies. I never gives no sass to nobody. It's very easy getting along when you make it a rule never to give no sass to nobody." And so our slave was getting along, making, probably, two guineas a week over and above the share of his wages due to his owners. Every month or so he would draw his pay from the steam-boat or hotel proprietor he might be serving at the time, take it home and divide it with his "misses," have a chat with the old lady, and pay her homage by waiting at table in his highest style, and perhaps, as our Artist saw him, escort her to and from the "meetin'-house."

(source: The Illustrated London News)