African American Lives

B

BAILEY, PEARL

(29 Mar. 1918–17 Aug. 1990), actress, singer, and entertainer, was born Pearl Mae Bailey in Newport News, Virginia, the daughter of the Reverend Joseph James Bailey and Ella Mae (maiden name unknown). Her brother Bill Bailey was at one time a well-known tap dancer.

While still in high school, Bailey launched her show business career in Philadelphia, where her mother had relocated the family after separating from Rev. Bailey. In 1933, at age fifteen, she won the first of three amateur talent contests, with a song-and-dance routine at the Pearl Theatre in Philadelphia, which awarded her a five dollar prize. In a second contest at the Jungle Inn in Washington, D.C., she received a twelve dollar prize for a buck-and-wing dancing act. After winning a third contest at the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem, she began performing professionally—first as a specialty dancer or chorus girl with several small bands, including NOBLE SISSLE’s band, on the vaudeville circuits in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington during the 1930s, then as a vocalist with Cootie Williams and COUNT BASIE at such smart New York clubs as La Vie en Rose and the Blue Angel, and on the World War II USO circuit, during the 1940s.

Bailey made her Broadway debut as a saloon barmaid named Butterfly in the black-authored musical St. Louis Woman, which opened at the Martin Beck Theatre, 30 March 1946, and ran for 113 performances. Although the show was only modestly successful, she was praised for her singing of two hit numbers, “Legalize My Name” and “(It’s) A Woman’s Prerogative (to Change Her Mind).” For her performance, she won a Donaldson Award as the best Broadway newcomer. After several failed marriages, one to comedian Slappy White, Bailey married the legendary white jazz drummer Louis Bellson Jr., in 1952; they adopted two children. Their marriage was reportedly a happy one. In later years, she frequently sang with her husband’s band, and at one time toured with CAB CALLOWAY and his band.

Pearl Bailey in her first starring role on Broadway, as Madame Fleur in House of Flowers (1954), with her three flowers, left to right, Tulip (Josephine Premice), Pansy (Enid Mosier), and Gladiola (Enid Moore). © Bettmann/CORBIS

After appearing in supporting roles in two predominantly white shows in 1950–1951, Bailey’s first Broadway starring vehicle was House of Flowers (1954), a Caribbean-inspired musical. Bailey played the part of Mme. Fleur, a resourceful bordello madam, whose house of prostitution in the French West Indies is facing hard times, forcing her to resort to desperate measures to save it. The show opened at the Alvin Theatre, 30 December 1954, and had a run of 165 performances. Despite what the New York Times (30 Dec. 1954) called “feeble material,” she was credited with “an amusing style” and the ability to “[throw] away songs with smart hauteur.”

Bailey’s most important Broadway role was as the irrepressible Dolly Levi (a marriage broker who arranges a lucrative marriage for herself) in the all-black version of Hello, Dolly!, which opened at the St. James Theatre in November 1967 for a long run, sharing the stage with the original 1964 Carol Channing version. The black version provided tangible evidence that roles originally created by white actors could be redefined and given new vitality from the perspective of the African American experience. Lyndon Johnson, who had used the show’s title song as his campaign theme song in 1964, changing the words to “Hello, Lyndon!,” saw the show when it came to Washington and was invited, along with his wife Lady Bird, to join Bailey onstage for a rousing finale. For her performance, Bailey won a special Tony Award in 1968.

Bailey’s most important film roles included Carmen Jones (1954), as one of Carmen’s friends; St. Louis Blues (1958), as composer W. C. HANDY’s Aunt Hagar; Porgy and Bess (1959), as Maria, the cookshop woman; All the Fine Young Cannibals (1960), as a boozing, over-the-hill blues singer; and Norman. . . Is That You? (1976), opposite comedian REDD FOXX, as estranged parents of a gay son. Her voice was also used for Big Mama, the owl, in the Disney animated film The Fox and the Hound (1981).

A frequent performer and guest on television talk shows beginning in the 1950s, Bailey also hosted her own variety series on ABC, The Pearl Bailey Show (Jan.–May 1971), for which her husband directed the orchestra while she entertained an assortment of celebrity guests. She also appeared on television in “An Evening with Pearl” (1975) and in a remake of The Member of the Wedding (1982), in the role of Berenice. Bailey released numerous albums and was also the author of several books, including two autobiographies, The Raw Pearl (1968) and Talking to Myself (1971), and Pearl’s Kitchen (1973), a cookbook.

In 1975 Bailey was appointed as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations. Other honors and awards included a citation from New York City mayor John V. Lindsay; Cue magazine entertainer of the year (1969); the First Order in Arts and Sciences from Egyptian president Anwar Sadat; the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding achievement in fostering the finest ideals of the acting profession; and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Georgetown University (1977). She later earned a degree in theology from Georgetown.

During the later years of her life, Bailey was hospitalized several times for a heart ailment. She also suffered from an arthritic knee, which was replaced with an artificial one just prior to her death. She collapsed, apparently from a heart attack, at the Philadelphia hotel where she was staying (her home was in Havasu, Arizona); she died soon after at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.

Bailey was best known for her lazy, comical, half-singing, half-chatting style, expressive hands, tired feet, and folksy, congenial philosophy of life, which endeared her to audiences both black and white. The New York Times obituary (18 Aug. 1990) called her “a trouper in the old theatrical sense,” who had “enraptured theater and nightclub audiences for a quarter-century by the languorous sexuality of her throaty voice as well as by the directness of her personality.” At her funeral, Cab Calloway, who had starred with her in Hello, Dolly!, said that “Pearl was love, pure and simple love”; and her husband called her “a person of love,” who believed that “show business” meant to “show love.”

BAKER, ELLA JOSEPHINE

(13 Dec. 1903–13 Dec. 1986), civil rights organizer, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of Blake Baker, a waiter on the ferry between Norfolk and Washington, D.C., and Georgianna Ross. In rural North Carolina where Ella Baker grew up, she experienced a strong sense of black community. Her grandfather, who had been a slave, acquired the land in Littleton on which he had slaved. He raised fruit, vegetables, and cattle, which he shared with the community. He also served as the local Baptist minister. Baker’s mother took care of the sick and needy.

After graduating in 1927 from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, Baker moved to New York City. She had dreamed of doing graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago, but it was 1929, and times were hard. Few jobs were open to black women except teaching, which Baker refused to do because “this was the thing that everybody figures you could do” (Cantarow and O’Malley, 62). To survive, Baker waitressed and worked in a factory. During 1929–1930 she was an editorial staff member of the American West Indian News and in 1932 became an editorial assistant for GEORGE SCHUYLER’s Negro National News, for which she also worked as office manager. In 1930 she was on the board of directors of Harlem’s Own Cooperative and worked with the Dunbar Housewives’ League on tenant and consumer rights. In 1930 she helped organize and in 1931 became the national executive director of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, a consumer cooperative. Baker also taught consumer education for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and, according to a letter written in 1936, divided her time between consumer education and working at the public library at 135th Street. She married Thomas J. Roberts in 1940 or 1941; they had no children.

Beginning in 1938 Baker worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and from 1941 to 1946 she traveled throughout the country but especially in the South for the NAACP, first as field secretary and then as a highly successful director of branches to recruit members, raise money, and organize local campaigns. Among the issues in which she was involved were the anti-lynching campaign, the equal-pay-for-black-teachers movement, and job training for black workers. Baker’s strength was the ability to evoke in people a feeling of common need and the belief that people together can change the conditions under which they live. Her philosophy of organizing was “you start where the people are” and “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” In her years with the NAACP, Baker formed a network of people involved with civil rights throughout the South that proved invaluable in the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Among the more significant of her protégés was the Alabama seamstress ROSA PARKS. Baker resigned from her leadership role in the national NAACP in 1946 because she felt it was too bureaucratic. She also had agreed to take responsibility for raising her niece. Back in New York City, she worked with the NAACP on school desegregation, sat on the Commission on Integration for the New York City Board of Education, and in 1952 became president of the New York City NAACP chapter. In 1953 she resigned from the NAACP presidency to run unsuccessfully for the New York City Council on the Liberal Party ticket. To support herself, she worked as director of the Harlem Division of the New York City Committee of the American Cancer Society.

In January 1958 BAYARD RUSTIN and Stanley Levison persuaded Baker to go to Atlanta to set up the office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to organize the Crusade for Citizenship, a voter registration program in the South. Baker agreed to go for six weeks and stayed for two and a half years. She was named acting director of the SCLC and set about organizing the crusade to open simultaneously in twenty-one cities. She was concerned, however, that the SCLC board of preachers did not sufficiently support voter registration. Baker had increasing difficulty working with MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., whom she described as “too self-centered and cautious” (Weisbrot, 33). Because she thought that she would never be appointed executive director, Baker persuaded her friend the Reverend John L. Tilley to assume the post in April, and she became associate director. After King fired Tilley in January 1959, he asked Baker once again to be executive director, but his board insisted that her position must be in an acting capacity. Baker, however, functioned as executive director and signed her name accordingly. In April 1960 the executive director post of SCLC was accepted by the Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker.

After hundreds of students sat in at segregated lunch counters in early 1960, Baker persuaded the SCLC to invite them to the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University on Easter weekend. From this meeting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was eventually formed. Although the SCLC leadership pressured Baker to influence the students to become a youth chapter of SCLC, she refused and encouraged the students to beware of SCLC’s “leader-centered orientation.” She felt that the students had a right to decide their own structure. Baker’s speech “More Than a Hamburger,” which followed King’s and James Lawson’s speeches, urged the students to broaden their social vision of discrimination to include more than integrating lunch counters. JULIAN BOND described the speech as “an eye opener” and probably the best of the three. “She didn’t say, ‘Don’t let Martin Luther King tell you what to do,’” Bond remembers, “but you got the real feeling that that’s what she meant” (Hampton and Fayer, 63). JAMES FORMAN, who became director of SNCC a few months later, said Baker felt SCLC “was depending too much on the press and on the promotion of Martin King, and was not developing enough indigenous leadership across the South” (Forman, 216).

After the Easter conference weekend, Baker resigned from the SCLC, and after having helped Walker learn his job she went to work for SNCC in August. To support herself she worked as a human relations consultant for the Young Women’s Christian Association in Atlanta. Baker continued as a mentor to SNCC civil rights workers, most notably ROBERT P. MOSES. At a rancorous SNCC meeting at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in August 1961, Baker mediated between one faction advocating political action through voter registration and another faction advocating nonviolent direct action. She suggested that voter registration would necessitate confrontation that would involve them in direct action. Baker believed that voting was necessary but did not believe that the franchise would cure all problems. She also understood the appeal of nonviolence as a tactic, but she did not believe in it personally: “I have not seen anything in the nonviolent technique that can dissuade me from challenging somebody who wants to step on my neck. If necessary, if they hit me, I might hit them back” (Cantarow and O’Malley, 82).

After the 1964 Mississippi summer in which northern students went south to work in voter registration, SNCC decided to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the regular Democratic Party in Mississippi. Thousands of people registered to vote in beauty parlors and barbershops, churches, or wherever a registration booth could be set up. Baker set up the Washington, D.C., office of the MFDP and delivered the keynote speech at its Jackson, Mississippi, state convention. The MFDP delegates were not seated at the Democratic National Convention in Washington, D.C., but their influence helped to elect many local black leaders in Mississippi in the following years and forced a rules change in the Democratic Party to include more women and minorities as delegates to the national convention.

From 1962 to 1967 Baker worked on the staff of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), dedicated to helping black and white people work together. During that time she organized a civil liberties conference in Washington, D.C., and worked with Carl Braden on a mock civil rights commission hearing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In her later years in New York City she served on the board of the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, founded and was president of the Fund for Education and Legal Defense, which raised money primarily for scholarships for civil rights activists to return to college, and was vice chair of the Mass Party Organizing Committee. She was also a sponsor of the National United Committee to Free ANGELA DAVIS and All Political Prisoners, a consultant to both the Executive Council and the Commission for Social and Racial Justice of the Episcopal Church, and a member of the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience and the Coalition of Concerned Black Americans. Until her death in New York City she continued to inspire, nurture, scold, and advise the many young people who had worked with her during her career of political activism.

Ella Baker’s ideas and careful organizing helped to shape the civil rights movement from the 1930s through the 1960s. She had the ability to listen to people and to inspire them to organize around issues that would empower their lives. At a time when there were no women in leadership in the SCLC, Baker served as its executive director. Hundreds of young people became politically active because of her respect and concern for them.

BAKER, GEORGE.

See Father Divine.

BAKER, JOSEPHINE

(3 June 1906–10 Apr. 1975), dancer, singer, and entertainer, was born in the slums of East St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Eddie Carson, a drummer, who abandoned Baker and her mother after the birth of a second child, and of Carrie McDonald, a one-time entertainer who supported what became a family of four by doing laundry. Poverty, dislocation, and mistreatment permeated Baker’s childhood. By the age of eight she was earning her keep and contributing to the family’s support by doing domestic labor. By the time Baker was fourteen, she had left home and its discord and drudgery; mastered such popular dances as the Mess Around and the Itch, which sprang up in the black urban centers of the day; briefly married Willie Wells and then divorced him; and begun her career in the theater. She left East St. Louis behind and traveled with the Dixie Steppers on the black vaudeville circuit, already dreaming of performing on Broadway.

Baker’s dream coincided with the creation of one of the greatest musical comedies in American theater, Shuffle Along, with music by EUBIE BLAKE and lyrics by NOBLE SISSLE. A constant crowd-pleaser with her crazy antics and frantic dancing as a comic, eye-crossing chorus girl, Baker auditioned for a role in the musical in Philadelphia in April of 1921, only to be rejected as “too young, too thin, too small, and too dark.” With characteristic determination, she bought a one-way ticket to New York, auditioned again, and was rejected again, but she secured a job as a dresser in the touring company. On the road she learned the routines, and, when a member of the chorus line fell ill, she stepped in and became an immediate sensation. More than five hundred performances later, in the fall of 1923, the Shuffle Along tour ended, and Baker was cast in Sissle and Blake’s new show, Bamville, later retitled and better known as The Chocolate Dandies. When the musical opened in New York in March of 1924, Baker not only played Topsy Anna, a comic role straight out of the racist minstrel tradition, but also appeared as an elegantly dressed “deserted female” in the show’s “Wedding Finale,” foreshadowing the poised and polished performer of world renown she would become.

In the summer of 1925 Baker’s dancing at the Plantation Club at Fiftieth Street and Broadway caught the eye of Caroline Dudley Reagan, a young socialite planning to stage a black revue in Paris in the vein of Shuffle Along or Runnin’ Wild, the revue that introduced the Charleston in 1924. The company that came to be known as La Revue Nègre was long on talent, with such now legendary figures as the composer Spencer Williams, the bandleader and pianist Claude Hopkins, and the clarinetist SIDNEY BECHET, the dancer and choreographer Louis Douglas, and the set designer Miguel Covarrubias. Baker joined the troupe as lead dancer, singer, and comic. When the performers arrived in Paris in late September 1925, opening night at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées was ten days away. During that brief time the revue was transformed from a vaudeville show, replete with the stereotypes expected by a white American public, into a music-hall spectacle filled with colonialist fantasies that appealed to the largely male, voyeuristic Parisian audience.

When La Revue Nègre opened to a packed house on 2 October 1925, it was an instantaneous succès de scandale. First, Baker stunned the rapt onlookers with her blackface comic routine, in which, seemingly part animal, part human, she shimmied, contorted her torso, writhed like a snake, and vibrated her behind with astonishing speed. Then she provoked boos and hisses as well as wild applause when, in the closing “Dance sauvage,” wearing only feathers about her hips, she entered the stage upside down in a full split on the shoulders of Joe Alex. Janet Flanner recorded the moment in the New Yorker: “Midstage, he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood like his magnificent discarded burden, in an instant of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female ebony statue.” Called the “black Venus” and likened to African sculpture in motion, Baker was seen both as a threat to “civilization” and, like le jazz hot, as a new life force capable of energizing a weary France mired down in tradition and in need of renewal.

Paris made “la Baker” a celebrity, embracing both her erotic yet comic stage persona and her embodiment of Parisian chic as she strolled the city’s boulevards beautifully dressed in Paul Poiret’s creations. Beginning in 1926 Baker starred at the oldest and most venerated of French music halls, the Folies-Bergère. Once again, she was a shocking sensation. Instead of the customary bare-breasted, light-skinned women standing in frozen poses onstage at the Folies, Baker presented the Parisian audience with a dark-skinned, athletic form clad in a snicker-producing girdle of drooping bananas, dancing the wildest, most electrifying Charleston anyone had ever witnessed. As the young African savage Fatou, she captured the sexual imagination of Paris.

In 1928, sensing that her public was beginning to tire of her frenetic antics, Baker left Paris. During an extended tour of European and South American cities with her manager and lover, Giuseppe “Pepito” Abatino, she studied voice, disciplined her dancing, and learned to speak French. However, Baker’s reception in such cities as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Munich was not what it had been in Paris. Protests broke out in hostile reaction to her nudity, to jazz music, and to her foreignness. Baker also encountered for the first time the racism she thought she had left behind in America, the racism against which she would campaign onstage and off for the rest of her life. By the time she made her triumphal return to Paris two and a half years later, she had transformed herself into a sophisticated, elegantly attired French star.

In the 1930s Baker’s career branched out in new directions. Singing took on new importance in her performances, and in her 1930–1931 revue at the Casino de Paris she perfected her signature song, “J’ai deux amours,” proclaiming that her two loves were her country and Paris. She began recording for Columbia Records in 1930. She starred in two films, Zou-Zou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935), whose story lines paralleled her rags-to-riches life. In the first film she is transformed from a poor laundress to a glamorous music-hall star and in the second from a Tunisian goat girl to an exotic princess. In the fall of 1934 she successfully tackled light opera in the starring role of Offenbach’s operetta La Créole.

One year later, hoping to enjoy the success at home she had earned abroad, Baker sailed with Pepito to New York and began four months of preparation for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. The reviews of the New York opening in January took hateful aim at Baker’s performance. Belittling her success abroad with the explanation that in France “a Negro wench always has a head start,” the reporter remarked that “to Manhattan theatergoers last week she was just a slightly buck-toothed Negro woman whose figure might be matched in any night-club show, and whose dancing and singing might be topped practically anywhere outside of Paris.” Critics, black and white, resented her performing only French cabaret material rather than “Harlem songs.” Newspapers also reported that Baker personally was snubbed, refused entrance to hotels and nightclubs.

Reactions to this discrimination varied, with some condemning her for “trying to be white.” The columnist Roi Ottley of the Amsterdam News, on the other hand, praised her efforts to overcome Jim Crowism, saying that “she was just trying to live ignoring color.” He recommended that “Harlem. . . should rally to the side of this courageous Negro woman. We should make her insults our insults.”

Disappointed by her reception in her homeland and saddened by the death from cancer of Pepito, Baker returned to Paris and to the nude revues at the Folies-Bergère. By then thirty years old, she wanted to marry and have children. She realized the first desire on 30 November 1937, when she wed Jean Lion, a rich and handsome Jewish playboy and sugar broker. After fourteen months of marriage, during which Baker did not become pregnant and Lion continued his wild ways, she filed for divorce, which was granted in 1942.

In June of 1940 German troops invaded Paris. Baker, who refused to perform either for racist Nazis or for their French sympathizers, fled to Les Milandes, her fifteenth-century château in the Dordogne, with her maid, a Belgian refugee couple, and her beloved dogs. Since September 1939 Baker had served as an “honorable correspondent,” gathering information about German troop locations for French military intelligence at embassy and ministry parties in Paris. Once Charles de Gaulle had declared himself leader of Free France in a radio broadcast from London and called for the French to resist their German occupiers, Baker joined “résistance” and was active in it throughout World War II, working mostly in North Africa. For her heroic work she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and de Gaulle himself gave her a gold cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the Fighting French, when he established headquarters in Algiers in the spring of 1943. Baker was a tireless ambassador for the Free France movement and for de Gaulle, performing for British, American, and French soldiers in North Africa and touring the Middle East to raise money for the cause. In recognition of the propaganda services she performed during this tour, she was made a sublieutenant of the Women’s Auxiliary of the French Air Force. After the war de Gaulle awarded Baker the coveted Medal of Resistance.

Moving into the 1950s Baker harnessed her formidable energies behind two causes. The first was her own pursuit of racial harmony and human tolerance in the form of her “Rainbow Tribe.” To demonstrate the viability of world brotherhood, with the orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, whom she had married in 1947, Baker adopted children of many nationalities, races, and religions and installed them at Les Milandes. In order to support the family that eventually numbered thirteen and to finance the massive renovation of the château and related construction projects, Baker returned to the stage. A quick trip to the United States in 1948 was as unsuccessful as the one twelve years earlier and left her convinced that, if possible, race relations there were even worse than before. This realization prompted Baker’s second cause, the pursuit of civil rights for black Americans through the desegregation of hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs.

Traveling with a $250,000 Parisian wardrobe; singing in French, Spanish, English, Italian, and Portuguese; and performing with masterly showmanship, in 1951 Baker began an American tour in Cuba. When word of her success in Havana reached Miami, Copa City moved to book the star for a splashy engagement. Contract negotiations were long and difficult. Initiating what would become her standard demand with nightclubs, Baker insisted on a nondiscrimination clause. If management would not admit black patrons, she would not perform. The integrated audience for Baker’s show at Copa City was the first in the city’s history. Baker took her tour and her campaign against color lines from city to city—New York, Boston, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Hollywood. And audiences loved her. Variety wrote, “The showmanship that is Josephine Baker’s. . . is something that doesn’t happen synthetically or overnight. It’s of the same tradition that accounts for the durability of almost every show biz standard still on top after many years.”

The pinnacle of Baker’s civil rights efforts was reached in August 1963 when she was invited to the great March on Washington. Dressed in her World War II uniform, Baker stood on the platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial and spoke to the crowd of thousands, blacks and whites, demonstrating for justice and equality: “You are on the eve of victory. You can’t go wrong. The world is behind you.” Baker was among those arrayed around Martin Luther King Jr. as he delivered his “I have a dream” speech. Certainly, for Josephine Baker, that day was a dream come true.

The remaining years of Baker’s life were not tranquil. Given her extravagant spending and generosity, financial problems continued to plague her. Jo Bouillon finally despaired of trying to raise so many children or to impose any fiscal responsibility and left Baker. In 1968 Les Milandes was sold, and Baker, who barricaded herself in the house with her children, was evicted. Such setbacks notwithstanding, she continued to give comeback performances, astonishing crowds with her ability to rejuvenate herself the moment she stepped on stage, the consummate star. Her final performance in Paris to a sold-out house on 9 April 1975 was no exception. The following day, just two months shy of her sixty-ninth birthday, Baker died of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by a stroke. All of France mourned the passing of “la Joséphine.” National television broadcast the procession of her flag-draped coffin through the streets of Paris and the funeral service at the Church of the Madeleine, where twenty thousand Parisians gathered to pay their respects.

In Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, Phyllis Rose writes of Baker’s “cabaret internationalism” as her “way of expressing a political position.” A performer of consummate skill, Baker enthralled audiences for more than a half century. But personal adulation was not enough. Like PAUL ROBESON, HARRY BELAFONTE, LENA HORNE, BILL COSBY, and others, Baker put her prestige and popularity in the service of civil rights, racial harmony, and equality for all humanity.

BALDWIN, JAMES

(2 Aug. 1924–30 Nov. 1987), author, was born James Arthur Baldwin in Harlem, in New York City, the illegitimate son of Emma Berdis Jones, who married the author’s stepfather, David Baldwin, in 1927. David Baldwin was a laborer and weekend storefront preacher who had an enormous influence on the author’s childhood; his mother was a domestic who had eight more children after he was born. Baldwin was singled out early in school for his intelligence, and at least one white teacher, Orrin Miller, took a special interest in him. At P.S. 139, Frederick Douglass Junior High School, Baldwin met black poet COUNTÉE CULLEN, a teacher and literary club adviser there. Cullen saw some of Baldwin’s early poems and warned him against trying to write like LANGSTON HUGHES, SO Baldwin turned from poetry to focus more on writing fiction. In 1938 he experienced a profound religious conversion at the hands of a female evangelist/pastor of Mount Cavalry of the Pentecostal Faith, which he later wrote about in his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), in his play The Amen Corner (1968), and in an essay in The Fire Next Time (1963). Saved, Baldwin became a Sunday preacher at the nearby Fireside Pentecostal Assembly.

In 1938 Baldwin entered De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx; he graduated in 1942. There Baldwin was challenged intellectually and was able to escape home and Harlem. He wrote for the school magazine, the Magpie, and began to frequent Greenwich Village, where he met black artist BEAUFORD DELANEY, an important early influence. Torn between the dual influences of the church and his intellectual and artistic private life, Baldwin finally made a choice. At age sixteen he began a homosexual relationship with a Harlem racketeer and later said he was grateful to the older man throughout his life for the love and self-validation he brought to the tormented and self-conscious teenager. As a preacher, Baldwin considered himself a hypocrite. At this same time, he discovered that David Baldwin was not, in fact, his real father and began to understand why he had felt deeply rejected as a child and had hated and feared his father. Fearing gossip about his homosexual relationship would reach his family and church, Baldwin broke with both the racketeer and the church. Now eighteen, he also moved away from home, taking a series of odd jobs in New Jersey and spending free time in the Village with artists and writers, trying to establish himself. He returned home in 1943 to care for the family while his stepfather was dying of tuberculosis. A few hours after his father’s death, his youngest sister was born, named by James Baldwin, the head of the family. The Harlem riot of 1943 broke out in the midst of this family upheaval, all of which Baldwin described eloquently in Notes of a Native Son (1955).

James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, photographed in Paris in 1975. © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA

After his father’s funeral Baldwin left home for the last time, determined to become a writer. In 1944 he met RICHARD WRIGHT, who helped him get a Eugene F. Saxon Fellowship to work on his first novel, then titled “In My Father’s House.” He gave part of the $500 grant to his mother and tried to start his literary career. Although Baldwin’s first novel was rejected by two publishers, he began to have some success publishing book reviews and essays, establishing a name and a reputation. At the same time, he had difficulty extracting himself from the influence of Richard Wright, who became for Baldwin the literary father that he had to reject, as David Baldwin had been the punishing stepfather to be overcome. With what was left of the Rosenwald Fellowship he had received in 1948, Baldwin, frustrated by the fits and starts of his writing career and tired of America’s racism, bought a one-way air ticket to Paris and left the United States on 11 November.

In Paris, Baldwin met writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, and Saul Bellow. He garnered notice as a critic with the essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” which came out in Partisan Review in 1949. Although mostly a critique of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this was the first of a series of three essays in which Baldwin attacked his literary mentor, Wright. Baldwin followed with “Many Thousand Gone” in 1951 and, after Wright’s death, “Alas Poor Richard” in 1961. But not until he took himself, his typewriter, and his BESSIE SMITH records to a tiny hamlet high in the Swiss Alps in 1951 did Baldwin begin to work in earnest on his first and best novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. In this autobiographical family novel, fourteen-year-old John Grimes undergoes an emotional-psychological-religious crisis of adolescence and is “saved.” Go Tell It on the Mountain explores the histories and internal lives of John’s stepfather Gabriel, mother Elizabeth, and Aunt Florence, spanning the years from 1875 to the Depression and including “the Great Migration” from the South to Harlem. It was well received and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1954; Baldwin said in an interview with Quincy Troupe that he was told it did not win because RALPH ELLISON’s Invisible Man had won in 1953 and America was not ready to give this award to two black writers in a row.

Baldwin won a Guggenheim grant to work on a second novel, published in 1956 as Giovanni’s Room, about a homosexual relationship and with all-white characters in a European setting. Baldwin’s American publisher turned it down for its honesty, so Baldwin had to publish Giovanni’s Room first in London. It was a book Baldwin had to write, he said in an interview with Richard Goldstein, “to clarify something for myself.” Baldwin went on to say, “The question of human affection, of integrity, in my case, the question of trying to become a writer, are all linked with the question of sexuality.” The central character, David, a young American living in Paris, is forced to choose between his fiancée, Hella, and his male lover Giovanni. David rejects Giovanni, who is later tried and executed for the murder of an aging homosexual. Racked with guilt, David reveals his true homosexual nature and breaks his engagement, making Giovanni the injured martyr and moral pole in the novel.

Baldwin’s first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, appeared in 1955. These autobiographical and political pieces made Baldwin famous as an eloquent and experienced commentator on race and culture in America. Here he says on his father’s funeral,

This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped. That bleakly memorable morning I hated the unbelievable streets and the Negroes and whites who had, equally, made them that way. But I knew that it was folly, as my father would have said, this bitterness was folly. It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.

(Bantam ed. [1968], 94–95)

Baldwin returned periodically to the United States throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but never to stay. He first visited the South in 1957 and met MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. In 1961 he published the collection of essays Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. By 1963 he was prominent enough to be featured on the cover of Time magazine as a major spokesman for the early civil rights movement after another collection of essays, The Fire Next Time, arguably Baldwin’s most influential work, appeared. His first play, Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), a fictionalized account of the 1955 Mississippi murder of fourteen-year-old EMMETT TILL, followed. In The Fire Next Time Baldwin effectively honed his prophetic, even apocalyptic rhetoric about racial tensions in America, fusing his themes of protest and love. During this period Baldwin had also published his third novel, Another Country, in 1962. His influence in national politics and American literature had reached a peak.

Another Country took Baldwin six years to complete; it eventually sold four million copies after a slow start with negative reviews. It is considered to be Baldwin’s second-best novel. In it Baldwin portrays multiple relationships involving interracial and bisexual love through a third-person point of view. Again he looks for resolutions to racial and sexual tensions through the power of love. The characters, however, often have trouble distinguishing sex from love and sorting through their attitudes toward sex, race, and class. Though successful, the novel is somewhat unwieldy with nine major characters, dominated by black jazz drummer Rufus Scott, who commits suicide at the end of the first chapter. The conclusion leaves readers with the hope that some of these troubled characters can achieve levels of self-understanding that will allow them to continue searching for “another country” within flawed and racist America. As Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka wrote in 1989,

In the ambiguities of Baldwin’s expression of social, sexual, even racial and political conflicts will be found that insistent modality of conduct, and even resolution, celebrated or lamented as a tragic omission—love. . . . James Baldwin’s was—to stress the obvious—a different cast of intellect and creative sensibility from a Ralph Ellison’s, a Sonia Sanchez’s, a Richard Wright’s, an AMIRI BARAKA’s, or an Ed Bullins’s. He was, till the end, too deeply fascinated by the ambiguities of moral choices in human relations to posit them in raw conflict terms. His penetrating eyes saw the oppressor as also the oppressed. Hate as a revelation of self-hatred, never unambiguously outward-directed. Contempt as thwarted love, yearning for expression. Violence as inner fear, insecurity. Cruelty as an inward-turned knife. His was an optimistic, grey-toned vision of humanity in which the domain of mob law and lynch culture is turned inside out to reveal a landscape of scarecrows, an inner content of straws that await the compassionate breath of human love.

(Troupe, 11, 17–18)

With the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and the change in the civil rights movement of the late 1960s from integrationist to separatist, Baldwin’s writing, according to many critics, lost direction. The last two decades of his life he spent mostly abroad, particularly in France, which may have increased his distance from America in his work. In the essay collection No Name in the Street (1972), Baldwin discussed his sadness over the movement’s waning. At the same time, he found himself the subject of attacks by new black writers such as ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, much like his own rejection of Richard Wright in the 1950s. The Devil Finds Work (1976) is Baldwin’s reading of racial stereotypes in American movies, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), an account of the Atlanta child murder trials, was unsuccessful, although the French translation of this book was very well received. Baldwin also wrote a series of problematic novels in his later years: Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just above My Head (1979). In these novels Baldwin seems to go over the familiar ground of the first three novels: racial, familial, and sexual conflicts in flawed, autobiographical plots. He never again achieved the mastery of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, one of the key texts in all of African American literature and of American literature as a whole.

After Baldwin died on the French Riviera, his funeral was celebrated on 8 December 1987 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where MAYA ANGELOU, TONI MORRISON, AMIRI BARAKA, the French ambassador Emmanuel de Margerie, and other notables spoke and performed. Baldwin has generally been considered to be strongest as an essayist, though he published one outstanding novel, and weakest as a playwright because he became too didactic at the expense of dramatic art. His achievements and influence tended to get lost in the sheer productivity of his career, especially as his later work was judged not to measure up to his earlier work. After his death scholars were able to look at Baldwin’s contribution with perspective and a sense of closure, and his literary stature grew accordingly.

BANNEKER, BENJAMIN

(9 Nov. 1731–19 Oct. 1806), farmer and astronomer, was born near the Patapsco River in Baltimore County in what became the community of Oella, Maryland, the son of Robert, a freed slave, and Mary Banneky, a daughter of a freed slave named Bannka and Molly Welsh, a freed English indentured servant who had been transported to Maryland. Banneker was taught by his white grandmother to read and write from a Bible. He had no formal education other than a brief attendance at a Quaker one-room school during winter months. He was a voracious reader, informing himself in his spare time in literature, history, religion, and mathematics with whatever books he could borrow. From an early age he demonstrated a talent for mathematics and for creating and solving mathematical puzzles. With his three sisters he grew up on his father’s tobacco farm, and for the rest of his life Banneker continued to live in a log house built by his father.

At about the age of twenty Banneker constructed a striking clock without ever having seen one, although tradition states he may once have examined a watch movement. He approached the project as a mathematical challenge, calculating the proper sizes and ratios of the teeth of the wheels, gears, and pinions, each of which he carved from wood with a pocket knife, possibly using a piece of metal or glass for a bell. The clock became a subject of popular interest throughout the region and many came to see and admire it. The timepiece operated successfully for more than forty years, until his death.

After his father’s death in 1759, Banneker continued to farm tobacco, living with his mother until she died some time after 1775. Thereafter he lived alone, his sisters having one by one married and settled in the region. They attended to his major household needs. His life was limited almost entirely to his farm, remote from community life and potential persecution because of his color, until the advent of new neighbors.

In about 1771 five Ellicott brothers of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, purchased large tracts of land adjacent to the Banneker farm and began to develop a major industrial community called Ellicott’s Lower Mills (now Ellicott City, Maryland). They initiated the large-scale cultivation of wheat in the state, built flour mills, sawmills, an iron foundry, and a general store that served not only their own needs but also those of the region. They marketed their flour by shipping it from the port of Baltimore. Banneker met members of the Ellicott family and often visited the building sites to watch each structure as it was being erected, intrigued particularly by the mechanisms of the mills.

George Ellicott, a son of one of the brothers, who built a stone house near the Patapsco River, often spent his leisure time in the evenings pursuing his hobby of astronomy. As he searched the skies with his telescope, he would explain what he saw to neighbors who came to watch. Banneker was frequently among them, fascinated by the new world in the skies opened up by the telescope. Noting his interest, in 1789 young Ellicott lent him a telescope, several astronomy books, and an old gateleg table on which to use them. Ellicott promised to visit Banneker as soon as he could to explain the rudiments of the science. Before he found time for his visit, however, Banneker had absorbed the contents of the texts and had taught himself enough through trial and error to calculate an ephemeris for an almanac for the next year and to make projections of lunar and solar eclipses.

Banneker, now age fifty-nine, suffered from rheumatism or arthritis and abandoned farming. He subsequently devoted his evening and night hours to searching the skies; he slept during the day, a practice that gained him a reputation for laziness and slothfulness from his neighbors.

Early in 1791 Banneker’s new skills came to the attention of Major Andrew Ellicott, George’s cousin, who had been appointed by President George Washington to survey a ten-mile square of land in Virginia and Maryland to become the new site of the national capital. Major Ellicott needed an assistant capable of using astronomical instruments for the first several months of the survey until his two brothers, who generally worked with him, became available. He visited Ellicott’s Lower Mills to ask George to assist him for the interim, but George was unable to do so and recommended Banneker.

At the beginning of February 1791 Banneker accompanied Major Ellicott to Alexandria, Virginia, the beginning point of the survey, and was installed in the field observatory tent where he was to maintain the astronomical field clock and use other instruments. Using the large zenith sector, his responsibility was to observe and record stars near the zenith as they crossed the meridian at different times during the night; the observations were to be repeated a number of nights over a period of time. After he had corrected the data he collected for refraction, aberration, and nutation and compared it with data in published star catalogs, Banneker determined latitude based on each of the stars observed. He also used the transit and equal altitude instrument to take equal altitudes of the sun, by which the astronomical clock was periodically checked and rated.

Banneker had the use of Major Ellicott’s texts and notes, from which he continued to learn, and spent his leisure hours calculating the ephemeris for an almanac for 1792. In April, with the arrival of Major Ellicott’s brothers, Banneker returned to his home. He was paid the sum of sixty dollars for his services and travel. Ellicott was paid five dollars a day exclusive of room and board while his assistant surveyors were paid two dollars a day. Banneker still supported himself primarily with proceeds from his farm.

Shortly after his return home, with the assistance of George Ellicott and family, Banneker’s calculations for an almanac were purchased and published by Baltimore printers Goddard & Angeli as Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of Our Lord, 1792 . . . ; a second edition was produced by Philadelphia printer William Young. The almanac contained a biographical sketch of Banneker written by Senator James McHenry, who presented Banneker’s achievement as new evidence supporting arguments against slavery.

Shortly before the almanac’s publication, Banneker sent a manuscript copy of his calculations to Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state, with a covering letter urging the abolition of slavery. Jefferson replied, “No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence. . . . No body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be.” The exchange of letters between Banneker and Jefferson was published as a pamphlet by Philadelphia printer David Lawrence and distributed widely at the same time that the almanac appeared. Promoted by the abolitionist societies of Pennsylvania and Maryland, the almanac sold in great numbers.

Encouraged by his first success, Banneker continued to calculate ephemerides for almanacs that were published for the succeeding five years and sold widely in the United States and England. A total of at least twenty-eight editions of his almanacs were published, largely supported by the abolitionist societies. Although he continued to calculate ephemerides each year until 1804 for his own pleasure, diminishing interest in the abolitionist movement failed to find a publisher for them after the 1797 almanac.

Although he was not associated with any particular religion, Banneker was deeply religious and attended services of various denominations whenever ministers or speakers visited the region, preferring meetings of the Society of Friends. He was described as having “a most benign and thoughtful expression,” as being of erect posture despite his age, scrupulously neat in dress. Another who knew him noted, “He was very precise in conversation and exhibited deep reflection.” Banneker died in his sleep during a nap after having taken a walk early one Sunday morning a month short of his seventy-fifth birthday. He had arranged that immediately after his death, all of his borrowed texts and instruments were to be returned to George Ellicott, which was done before his burial two days later. During his burial in the family graveyard on his farm, his house burst into flames and was destroyed. All that survived were a few letters he had written, his astronomical journal, his commonplace book, and the books he had borrowed.

The publication of Banneker’s almanacs brought him international fame in his time, and modern studies have confirmed that his figures compared favorably with those of other contemporary men of science who calculated ephemerides for almanacs. Long thought lost, the sites of Banneker’s house and outbuilding have been the subjects of an archaeological excavation from which various artifacts have been recovered. Banneker has been memorialized in the naming of several institutes and secondary schools. Without the limitation of opportunity because of his regional location and the state of science in his time, Banneker would undoubtedly have emerged as a far more important figure in early American science than merely as the first black man of science.

BANNISTER, EDWARD MITCHELL

(c. 1826–9 Jan. 1901), painter, was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, the son of Hannah Alexander, a native of New Brunswick, and Edward Bannister, from Barbados. While his birth date has generally been given as 1828, recent research has suggested that he was born several years earlier. After the death of his father in 1832, Edward was raised by his mother, whom he later credited with encouraging his artistic aspirations: “The love of art in some form came to me from my mother. . . . She it was who encouraged and fostered my childhood propensities for drawing and coloring” (Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 17). His mother died in 1844, and Edward and his younger brother, William, were sent to work for a wealthy local family, where he was exposed to classical literature, music, and painting. Edward’s interest in art continued, and an early biography of the artist reported that “the results of his pen might be seen on the fences and barn doors or wherever else he could charcoal or crayon out rude likenesses of men or things about him” (Hartigan, 71).

In the early 1850s Bannister settled in Boston, where he supported himself by working as a hairdresser. By 1853 he was employed by Madame Christiana Carteaux, a successful black entrepreneur who operated several beauty salons and sold her own line of hair products and who would later become his wife. Unable to persuade any of the local established artists to take a black man on as a pupil, Bannister studied art independently during this period. Despite these obstacles, he achieved some local recognition as a landscapist and portrait painter. In 1854 Dr. John V. DeGrasse, the first black doctor admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society, gave Bannister his first commission, a harbor scene entitled The Ship Outward Bound (location unknown).

One of the first African American painters to receive national recognition, Edward M. Bannister was known not only for landscapes and seascapes but also for portraits and genre works, such as The Newspaper Boy of 1869. Art Resource/Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Jack Hafif and Frederick Weingeroff

On 10 June 1857 Bannister and Carteaux were married, and by the following year Bannister had established himself as a full-time artist. His wife’s financial and emotional support was critical to his success. As he recalled in later years, “I would have made out very poorly had it not been for her, and my greatest successes have come through her, either through her criticisms of my pictures, or the advice she would give me in the matter of placing them in public” (Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 8). The couple was active in Boston’s African American arts community and in the abolitionist movement. Bannister served as an officer of the Union Progressive Society and the Colored Citizens of Boston and was a delegate to the New England Colored Citizens Convention in 1859 and 1865.

In the 1860s Bannister began his professional artistic career in earnest. A listing in the Boston city directory identifies him as a portrait painter, and in 1862 he traveled to New York to study photography in order to enter into the lucrative daguerreotype business. Bannister advertised his services as a daguerreotypist in 1863 and 1864, but none of his photographs has been identified. During these years he also undertook his only formal art training, taking life-drawing classes at the Lowell Institute between 1863 and 1865 with the sculptor and anatomist Dr. William Rimmer. Few works survive from this period of Bannister’s career, but his portraits of Prudence Nelson Bell (1864, private collection) and of Robert Gould Shaw (c. 1864, location unknown), the latter raffled to raise money for the families of black soldiers killed in the Civil War, are evidence both of his success as a portraitist and his ties to Boston’s abolitionist and activist communities.

In 1869 Bannister left Boston and settled in Providence, Rhode Island, perhaps because of his wife’s family ties to the area. He announced his professional arrival in the city by exhibiting two paintings, a portrait of the famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (location unknown) and Newspaper Boy (1869, National Museum of American Art [NMAA]), a sensitive portrait of one of the many young boys who sold papers on the streets of Boston. Although the racial identity of the fair-skinned child is uncertain, the painting is often discussed as one of Bannister’s few known works dealing directly with African American subjects.

Upon moving to Providence, Bannister began to paint fewer portraits and more landscapes and sea scenes, the work for which he is primarily known today. While he never traveled to Europe, his work—like the work of many American painters—was strongly influenced by European art, particularly the landscape paintings of the Barbizon school. These loosely handled scenes of peasants and farm animals working in bucolic harmony touched a chord among many American landscape painters, and in works such as Driving Home the Cows (1881, NMAA) and Hauling Rails (1891, NMAA), Bannister created similarly idyllic images of pastoral landscapes. In Haygatherers (c. 1893, private collection), Bannister extended this poetic vision of rural life to a specifically American context, depicting African American women and children loading a cart with hay. The artist also painted many scenes of Rhode Island’s coastline, which he observed from the decks of his small yacht, the Fanchon. In addition to his finished oil paintings completed in the studio, Bannister did many sensitively handled oil sketches and drawings, and these small works are among the freshest and most attractive of his works.

Like many nineteenth-century artists, Bannister viewed the depiction of the natural world as a spiritual endeavor. In a lecture delivered in 1886, he described the artist’s role as “the interpreter of the infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea centreing [sic] in all created things, expounding for us the laws of beauty, and so far as finite mind and executive ability can, revealing to us glimpses of the absolute idea of perfect harmony” (Hartigan, 77).

Bannister came to national attention when his painting Under the Oaks (location unknown) was awarded a first-prize medal at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. The only other African American artist represented at the exhibition was EDMONIA LEWIS, whose life-sized sculpture, Death of Cleopatra, caused quite a sensation. Bannister had submitted his work without any biographical detail, and he later recalled the surprise of the awards committee upon learning of his racial identity: “Finally when I succeeded in reaching the desk where inquiries were made, I endeavored to gain the attention of the official in change. He was very insolent. . . . I was not an artist to them, simply an inquisitive colored man; controlling myself, I said deliberately, ‘I am interested in the report that Under the Oaks has received a prize; I painted the picture.’ An explosion could not have made a more marked impression. Without hesitation he apologized, and soon every one in the room was bowing and scraping to me” (Hartigan, 70). A Boston collector, John Duff, purchased the painting for fifteen hundred dollars, a substantial sum of money at the time.

This success led to increased demand for his work and to his visibility and prominence in the local Providence art world. Bannister served on the first board of the new Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and was a founding member of the Providence Art Club. Officially chartered in 1880, the club served as a center for Providence’s artistic community, hosting lectures and social events and mounting regular exhibitions in the spring and fall. Bannister showed his work at the club’s exhibitions for the remainder of his career and served regularly on the executive committee. His work was purchased both by African American patrons, such as JOHN HOPE, George Downing Jr., and MADAME SISSIERETTA JONES, and by local white collectors, such as Isaac Bates and Joseph Ely.

While landscape and sea scenes remained Bannister’s specialty, he made occasional forays into religious and history painting throughout his career. An account of Bannister’s studio in the 1860s mentions a painting of Cleopatra Waiting to Receive Marc Antony (location unknown), and in the 1890s he painted several literary compositions, including a small oil sketch of Leucothea Rescuing Ulysses (1891, Newport Hospital, Rhode Island) and scenes from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Bannister’s figure paintings are less confident in their execution than his landscapes, perhaps because of his lack of formal artistic training, but he continued to experiment artistically throughout his career. The late work Street Scene (late 1890s, Museum of Art, RISD), a brightly colored impressionist view of an urban thoroughfare, demonstrates Bannister’s continued interest in experimenting with new styles and subjects even in the final years of his career.

Bannister died of a heart attack on 9 January 1901, while attending a prayer meeting at the Elmwood Street Baptist Church in Providence. In May of that year a memorial exhibition of his work, including 101 paintings, was mounted at the Providence Art Club. In the catalog the artist John Arnold recalled, “His gentle disposition, his urbanity of manner and his generous appreciation of the work of others made him a welcome guest in all artistic circles. . . . He was par excellence a landscape painter, the best our state has ever produced. He painted with profound feeling, not for pecuniary results, but to leave upon the canvas his impression of natural scenery, and to express his delight in the wondrous beauty of land, sea, and sky” (Painters of Rhode Island, 1996, 13).

BARAKA, AMIRI

(7 Oct. 1934–), poet, playwright, educator, and activist, was born Everett Leroy Jones in Newark, New Jersey, the eldest of two children to Coyette Leroy Jones, a postal supervisor, and Anna Lois Russ, a social worker. Jones’s lineage included teachers, preachers, and shop owners who elevated his family into Newark’s modest, though ambitious, black middle class. His own neighborhood was black, but the Newark of Jones’s youth was mostly white and largely Italian. He felt isolated and embattled at McKinley Junior High and Barringer High School, yet he excelled in his studies, played the trumpet, ran track, and wrote comic strips.

Graduating from high school with honors at age fifteen, Jones entered the Newark branch of Rutgers University on a science scholarship. In 1952, after his first year, he transferred to Howard University, hoping to find a sense of purpose at a black college that had eluded him at the white institution. It was at this point that a long process of reinventing himself first became evident; he changed the spelling of his name to “LeRoi” and told anyone who asked that he was going to become a doctor. Yet, he was more interested in pledging fraternities than getting good grades. In retrospect Jones blamed the college’s “petty bourgeois Negro mentality” (Autobiography, 113) for his academic failure and came to regard black colleges as places where they “teach you to pretend to be white” (Watts, 22).

With his college ambitions dashed, Jones joined the air force in 1954, where he trained as a weatherman. He graduated at the top of his class and was stationed at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico. There he became an avid reader of Proust, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Camus. He subscribed to literary journals such as the Partisan Review and began to send his poems to publishers, who promptly rejected them. Jones claimed that his possession of left-leaning reading material was responsible for his dishonorable discharge from the military in 1957. Working as a stock clerk at the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, he resumed a friendship with Steve Korret, an aspiring writer in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Through Korret, Jones was introduced to an avant-garde literary scene and a bohemian culture that profoundly altered his life. Allen Ginsberg, the doyen of the Beat poets of the 1950s, became a mentor after Jones wrote him a letter on toilet paper to show how hip he was. Charles Olson, a leader of the ultramodern Black Mountain poets, influenced his writing, and even LANGSTON HUGHES, who occasionally gave readings in the Village accompanied by bassist CHARLES MINGUS, encouraged him and nurtured a friendship that Jones cherished deeply. In 1958 Jones married, in a Buddhist temple, a white, Jewish woman, Hettie Cohen, the secretary of The Record Changer, a jazz magazine where Jones worked as the shipping manager. Together they had two children and published Yugen, a chic, though short-lived, literary magazine.

By the late 1950s Jones’s poetry began to appear in such periodicals as Naked Ear, Evergreen Review, and Big Table, and in 1959 he founded a publishing company, Totem Press, which issued his first collection of poems, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961). Though his poetry at this point had a distinct blues idiom, it was not yet overtly political. That transformation was prompted by a visit to Cuba in 1960, where he saw artists as revolutionaries who advanced Cuban nationalism. This experience led him to view his own situation more critically. Soon after returning he began to write polemical essays such as “Cuba Libre,” he became a street activist, and he urged his Beat peers to strive for greater political relevance in their work. Jones then demonstrated that he was a serious student of history and music with the publication of Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963). RALPH ELLISON remarked that “the tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues” (Justin Driver, New Republic, 25 Apr. 2002), but most critics regarded the book as an important contribution.

In 1963 Jones tried his hand at playwriting and discovered that here, too, he had the Midas touch. Dutchman, a play about a “black boy with a phony English accent” who has a fatal encounter with an attractive white woman on a New York City subway, won an Obie in 1964, and became a sensation in many circles; it continues to be performed, and established Jones’s new persona as an American firebrand. The following year, while at a book party surrounded by his cohorts from the Village, Jones received word that MALCOLM X had been assassinated up in Harlem. He later remembered this moment as an epiphany in which he realized that he was in the wrong crowd: “I felt that I had been dominated by white ideas, even down to my choice of wife” (Village Voice, 12 Dec. 1980). He left his wife and moved to Harlem, where he established the Black Arts Repertory Theater-School and soon became a leading black nationalist.

Jones’s only novel, The System of Dante’s Hell, was published in 1965, and much of the poetry he wrote during this period was a repudiation of his earlier life and career. In “Black Dada Nihilismus” he wrote, “Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. . . choke my friends,” and in “The Liar” he reasoned, “What I thought was love / in me, I find a thousand instances / as fear.” In “Black Art” he lays out his criteria for black poetry in lines such as “Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth. . . . We want poems / like fists beating niggers out of Jocks / or dagger poems in the slimy bellies / of the owner-jews,” and he speaks of his verses as a “poem cracking steel knuckles in a jew-lady’s mouth.” Later, in an essay entitled “Confessions of a Former Anti-Semite,” he acknowledged that during his “personal trek through the wasteland of anti-Semitism,” his need to make an intellectual and political break with American liberals was unfortunately expressed as a venomous attack on Jews—who had earlier been his greatest liberal influences—and was often motivated by an unresolved anger towards his ex-wife. “Anti-Semitism,” he wrote, “is as ugly an idea and as deadly as white racism” (Village Voice, 12 Dec. 1980).

The treatment of gays and homosexuality in Jones’s work is highly problematic, as it is both complex and contradictory. Two of his early plays, The Baptism, set in a church, and The Toilet, set in a men’s room, feature gay characters who can be interpreted sympathetically. According to Werner Sollors, “Homosexuality is viewed positively by Baraka both as an outsider-situation analogous to, though now also in conflict with, that of Blackness, and as a possibility for the realization of ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ against the racial gang code of a hostile society” (Sollors, 108). Ron Simmons argues that the gay tension is present in his work because Jones “never reconciled his homosexual past,” a past that Jones alludes to in The System of Dante’s Hell and ruminates about in “Tone Poem:” “Blood spoiled in the air, caked and anonymous. Arms opening, opened last night, we sat up howling and kissing. Men who loved each other. Will that be understood? That we could, and still move under cold nights with clenched-fists” (Simmons, 318). Jones concludes that race-conscious men could not safely sleep with men and be credible black nationalists. Yet, unlike ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, Jones did not see a contradiction in JAMES BALDWIN, who was explicit and unapologetic about his homosexuality. In “Jimmy!,” a stirring eulogy to Baldwin he read at Baldwin’s funeral in 1987, he credits Baldwin with starting the Black Arts Movement and pleads, “Let us one day be able to celebrate him like he must be celebrated if we are ever to be truly self determining. For Jimmy was God’s black revolutionary mouth.”

In 1966 Jones married Sylvia Robinson, a fellow poet. The following year he adopted the Swahili Muslim name Imamu Amiri Baraka (which means “spiritual leader, prince, blessed”), and she became Amina (“faithful”) Baraka. Together they had five children. Baraka never fully embraced Islam as a religion and later dropped Imamu from his name. Rather he practiced “Kawaida,” a form of cultural black nationalism that is an eclectic blend of Islamic, Egyptian, West African, and other traditions synthesized by Maulana Karenga, Baraka’s mentor from about 1967 until Baraka became a Marxist in 1974. With the publication of Home (1966), especially the seminal essay “The Myth of ‘Negro Literature,’” Baraka profoundly influenced a new generation of writers, including AUGUST WILSON, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez. As a political organizer in 1970, Baraka helped Kenneth Gibson to become the first black mayor of Newark, New Jersey, where Baraka had returned to live, and he was a principal organizer of the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972.

While serving a forty-eight week sentence in a Harlem halfway house in 1979, following a domestic dispute and a conviction for resisting arrest, Baraka began writing his autobiography, in which he characterizes some of the earlier sexist, racist, and specious ideological reasoning of the Black Power movement as little more than “nuttiness disguised as revolution” (Autobiography, 387). After becoming a Third World Marxist, the pace of both his writing and his activism slowed over the next two decades, during which he taught at several colleges, including Yale University, Rutgers University (where he was denied tenure), and at Stony Brook University, where he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1999. He received the American Book Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, and in 2002 he was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey. Yet controversy continued to dog him as the governor and state legislature introduced legislation to remove Baraka as laureate in reaction to his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which alleges that Israel and President George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York City.

BARNETT, CLAUDE ALBERT

(16 Sept. 1889–2 Aug. 1967), entrepreneur, journalist, and government adviser, was born in Sanford, Florida, the son of William Barnett, a hotel worker, and Celena Anderson. His father worked part of the year in Chicago and the rest of the time in Florida. Barnett’s parents separated when he was young, and he lived with his mother’s family in Oak Park, Illinois, where he attended school. His maternal ancestors were free blacks who migrated from Wake County, North Carolina, to the black settlement of Lost Creek, near Terre Haute, Indiana, during the 1830s. They then moved to Mattoon, Illinois, where Barnett’s maternal grandfather was a teacher and later a barbershop owner, and finally to Oak Park. While attending high school in Oak Park, Barnett worked as a houseboy for Richard W. Sears, cofounder of Sears, Roebuck and Company. Sears offered him a job with the company after he graduated from high school, but Barnett’s mother insisted that he receive a college education. He graduated from Tuskegee Institute with a degree in Engineering in 1906. His maternal grandfather and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, founder and head of Tuskegee Institute, were the major influences on Barnett’s life and values. He cherished the principles of hard work, self-help, thrift, economic development, and service to his race.

Following graduation from Tuskegee, Barnett worked as a postal clerk in Chicago. While still employed by the post office, in 1913 he started his own advertising agency, the Douglas Specialty Company, through which he sold mail-order portraits of famous black men and women. He left the post office in 1915 and in 1918, with several other entrepreneurs, founded the Kashmir Chemical Company, which manufactured Nile Queen hair-care products and cosmetics. Barnett became Kashmir’s advertising manager and he toured the country to market its products and his portraits. He helped to develop a national market for Kashmir and also pioneered the use of positive advertisements. Traditional advertisements featured an unattractive black woman with a message that others should use the company’s products to avoid looking like her. In contrast, Barnett used good-looking black models and celebrities with positive messages about the beauty of black women. He visited local black newspapers to negotiate advertising space and discovered that they were desperate for national news but did not have the resources to subscribe to the established newswire services. Barnett recommended that the Chicago Defender, founded by ROBERT ABBOTT in 1905 and the most widely circulated black newspaper during the early twentieth century, establish a black news service. The newspaper rejected his proposal since it had enough sources for its own publication and feared harming its circulation by providing competitors with material.

In March 1919, with backing from Kashmir’s board of directors, Barnett started the Associated Negro Press (ANP) in the company’s office. In 1926 the Kashmir Chemical Company dissolved under legal pressure from Procter and Gamble, which made a similar line of products called Cashmere. Barnett was now free to devote his attention fully to ANP. During this era black newspapers published weekly, so ANP evolved as a mail service rather than as a wire service, thereby making it affordable to subscribers. Moreover, the major wire services did not offer much information about African Americans. Barnett began ANP with eighty subscribers, including almost all the black newspapers and several white papers. He charged $25 to join ANP and a monthly fee of $16 to $24, depending on whether newspapers received dispatches once or twice a week. Subscribers agreed to credit ANP for articles featured in their newspapers, to provide ANP with news about their communities, and to forfeit membership if they failed to pay for the service within sixty days.

The staff produced about seventy pages of copy a week, including news stories, opinion pieces, essays, poetry, books reviews, cartoons, and occasionally photographs; the copy was then mimeographed and sent to subscribers. It did not cost much to operate ANP. The service mined news stories from various sources, such as black newspapers, the white press, special correspondents, and news releases from government agencies, foundations, organizations, and businesses, creating one of the most comprehensive files of news stories about African Americans. Barnett wrote some of the stories himself under the pen name Albert Anderson, a combination of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name. Because subscribers usually were late in paying their fees, Barnett struggled to keep ANP afloat. Sometimes he took advertising space in the newspapers in lieu of news service fees. His companies, first Associated Publishers Representatives and later the National Feature Service, then sold the space to advertisers, offering advertisers lower rates than they would get if they placed advertisements directly with the newspapers.

In 1932 Barnett became one of the first graduates to serve on Tuskegee Institute’s board of trustees. He also served as president of the board of trustees of Provident Hospital in Chicago, director of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, member of the Red Cross’s national board of governors, and trustee of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he headed the Republican Party’s publicity campaign for the black vote. Some of his ANP subscribers became upset by his stories that favored the Republicans. After Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to the presidency in 1932 and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s growing popularity among African Americans, Barnett ended his relationship with the Republican Party.

Barnett married the popular concert singer and actress Etta Moten in 1934. She had three daughters from a previous marriage. Barnett managed her career until 1942, when she assumed the lead role in the Broadway show Porgy and Bess and began to require the attention of a full-time agent. Also in 1942, Barnett became special assistant to the secretary of agriculture, Claude R. Wickard, a position that he held with successive secretaries until 1952, when the Republicans regained the White House with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower. During his tenure with the Department of Agriculture, Barnett was a strong advocate for black tenant farmers and sharecroppers and sought to make it possible for them to own land. He also tried to improve the condition of black farmers through federal aid for health, education, and insurance programs. He was particularly interested in strengthening black agricultural colleges.

During World War II, ANP employed eight people at its Chicago headquarters and had almost two hundred subscribers. The news service opened an office in Washington, D.C., and later one at the United Nations in New York City. Barnett penned many articles about segregation in the military and pressed the federal government to accredit black journalists as war correspondents. His advocacy of racial equality played an important role in President Harry S. Truman’s decision in 1948 to desegregate the military.

With an expanding African independence movement after World War II, Barnett secured more than one hundred African newspapers as subscribers to ANP. In 1959 he organized the World News Service to provide copy to subscribers in Africa. Barnett traveled to Africa more than fifteen times to solicit subscribers and to collect material for articles on black progress. He and his wife became avid collectors of African art and were much-sought-after speakers on Africa to African American civic, fraternal, and religious organizations. Although he had no formal training as a newsman, Barnett helped to develop a generation of black journalists. Most of his featured columnists wrote for the benefit of a large black audience rather than for pay.

With the rise of the civil rights movement during the late 1950s, many white newspapers began to cover the black community in the United States. News organizations started hiring black correspondents, most of whom had broken into the industry with ANP. Barnett had established a means for the black press to secure national and later international news about black people. ANP, with its motto “Progress, Loyalty, Truth,” set professional standards for the black press and nurtured black journalists who were well prepared to move into mainstream media with the success of the civil rights movement. Increased competition, persistent financial problems, and failing health forced Barnett to close ANP and to retire in 1963. He made several more trips to Africa and began writing an autobiography. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his Chicago home.

BARTHÉ, RICHMOND

(28 Jan. 1901–6 Mar. 1989), sculptor, was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, the son of Richmond Barthé and Marie Clementine Roboteau, a seamstress. His father died when Barthé was one month old. Barthé began drawing as a child and first exhibited his work at the county fair in Mississippi at age twelve. He did not attend high school, but he learned about his African heritage from books borrowed from a local grocer and publications given to him by a wealthy white family that vacationed in Bay St. Louis. This family, which had connections to Africa through ambassadorships, hired Barthé as a butler when he was in his teens; he moved with them to New Orleans. At age eighteen Barthé won first prize for a drawing he sent to the Mississippi County Fair. Lyle Saxon, the literary critic for the New Orleans Times Picayune, then attempted to register Barthé in a New Orleans art school, but Barthé was denied admission because of his race.

In 1924 Barthé began classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his tuition paid by a Catholic priest, Harry Kane. Living with an aunt, Barthé paid for his board and art supplies by working as a porter and busboy. During his senior year Barthé began modeling in clay at the suggestion of his anatomy teacher, Charles Schroeder. His busts of two classmates were shown in the Negro History Week exhibition. These works, along with busts of the Haitian general Toussaint-Louverture and the painter HENRY OSSAWA TANNER (first exhibited at a children’s home in Gary, Indiana), were included in the Chicago Art League annual exhibition in 1928, the year of Barthé’s graduation.

Barthé achieved wide recognition for his bronze busts and figures in the 1930s and 1940s. Within a year after his move to New York City in February 1929, he completed thirty-five sculptures. He continued his education at the Art Students League with fellowships from the Rosenwald Foundation (1929–1930). Barthé’s first solo exhibitions (favorably reviewed by the New York Times) were in 1934 at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in New York, the Grand Rapids Art Gallery in Michigan, and the Women’s City Art Club in Chicago, followed by exhibitions in New York at Delphic Studios (1935), Arden Galleries (1939), DePorres Interracial Center (1945), International Print Society (1945), and Grand Central Art Galleries (1947). He also exhibited in numerous group shows at various institutions, including the Harmon Foundation (1929, 1931, and 1933), the New York World’s Fair (1939), the Whitney Museum annual exhibitions (1933, 1940, 1944, and 1945), the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Artists for Victory (1942), and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ annual exhibitions (1938, 1940, 1943, 1944, and 1948).

Many of Barthé’s early works, such as Masaai (1933), African Woman (c. 1934), and Wetta (c. 1934), depict Africans. Barthé dreamed of visiting Africa, stating, “I’d really like to devote all my time to Negro subjects, and I plan shortly to spend a year and a half in Africa studying types, making sketches and models which I hope to finish off in Paris for a show there, and later in London and New York” (Lewis, 11), but he never traveled to the continent. Other works by Barthé, such as Feral Benga, Stevedore, and African Man Dancing (all 1937), were among the first sculptures of black male nudes by an African American artist.

In the mid-1930s Barthé moved from Harlem to midtown Manhattan for a larger studio and to be closer to major theaters, as many of his clients were theatrical celebrities. Among his portrait busts are Cyrina (from Porgy and Bess, c. 1934), Sir John Gielgud as Hamlet (commissioned for the Haymarket Theatre in London, 1937), Maurice Evans as Richard II (1938, now in the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut), and Katherine Cornell as Juliet (1942). Barthé later produced busts of other entertainers, such as Josephine Baker (1950) and Paul Robeson as Othello (1975).

Richmond Barthé’s sculptures depicting African and African American themes garnered acclaim and success from the Harlem Renaissance on. The Blackberry Woman of 1932, with its fluid sense, is characteristic of his bronzes. Whitney Museum of American Art

Barthé’s largest work was an eight-by-eighty-foot frieze, Green Pastures: The Walls of Jericho (1937–1938), which he completed under the U.S. Treasury Art Project at the Harlem River Housing Project. His other public works of art include portraits of Abraham Lincoln, in New York (1940) and India (1942); Arthur Brisbane, in Central Park; GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER, in Nashville (1945), and BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, at New York University (1946).

Many of Barthé’s busts, such as Birth of the Spirituals (1941) and The Negro Looks Ahead (1944), are imbued with a calm spirituality. Barthé described his representational work as an attempt to “capture the beauty that I’ve seen in people, and abstraction wouldn’t satisfy me. . . . My work is all wrapped up with my search for God. I am looking for God inside of people. I wouldn’t find it in squares, triangles and circles” (Reynolds and Wright, 154). A strong believer in reincarnation, the artist often called himself an “Old Soul” who had been an artist in Egypt in an earlier life.

In the 1940s Barthé received numerous awards, beginning with Guggenheim fellowships in 1941 and 1942. In 1945 he was elected to the National Sculpture Society (sponsored by the sculptor Malvina Hoffman) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received the Audubon Artists Gold Medal of Honor and the James J. Hoey Award for interracial justice. The sculptor was also active in several artists’ organizations: the Liturgical Arts Society, the International Print Society, the New York Clay Club, and the Sculptors Guild. He also had solo exhibitions at the South Side Art Center in Chicago (1942); the Sayville Playhouse on Long Island (1945); the Margaret Brown Gallery in Boston (1947); and Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey (1949).

In 1950 Barthé received a commission from the Haitian government to sculpt a large monument to Toussaint-Louverture; it now stands in front of the Palace in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. In 1947 Barthé had moved to Jamaica, where he remained through the late 1960s. His most notable works from this time are the General Dessalines monument in Port-au-Prince (1952) and a portrait of Norman Manley, the prime minister of Jamaica (1956). The Institute of Jamaica hosted Barthé’s solo show in 1959. In 1964 the artist received the Key to the City from Bay St. Louis. He then sculpted contemplative black male nudes, such as Meditation (1964), Inner Music (1965), and Seeker (1965).

Barthé left the West Indies in 1969 because of increasing violence there and spent five years traveling in Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. He then settled in Pasadena, California, and worked on his memoirs. In 1978 he had a solo exhibition at the William Grant Still Center in Los Angeles and was subsequently honored by the League of Allied Arts there in 1981. He died in Pasadena. Following his death, a retrospective was held at the Museum of African American Art (1990). Barthé’s work toured the United States with that of Richard Hunt in the Landau/Traveling Exhibition Two Sculptors, Two Eras in 1992. His work, which was eventually collected by the Metropolitan and Whitney museums in New York City, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others, continues to be featured in exhibitions and survey texts on African American art.

BASIE, COUNT

(21 Aug. 1904–26 Apr. 1984), jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader, was born William James Basie in Red Bank, New Jersey, the son of African American parents Harvey Lee Basie, an estate groundskeeper, and Lillian Ann Chiles, a laundress. Basie was first exposed to music through his mother’s piano playing. He took piano lessons, played the drums, and acted in school skits. An indifferent student, he left school after junior high and began performing. He organized bands with friends and played various jobs in Red Bank, among them working as a movie theater pianist. In his late teens he pursued work in nearby Asbury Park, but he met with little success. Then, in the early 1920s, he moved to Harlem, where he learned from the leading pianists of the New York “stride” style, Willie “The Lion” Smith, James P. Johnson, Luckey Roberts, and especially FATS WALLER, his exact contemporary.

Basie remained undecided between a stage or musical career. Until 1929 he alternately combined playing in Harlem nightclubs and theaters (on piano and organ) and touring with bands for vaudeville and burlesque troupes, which took him as far from New York as New Orleans, Kansas City, and Oklahoma. In Kansas City, during a layover in 1927 or 1928, Basie was stricken with spinal meningitis. After recovering, he worked solo jobs and eventually joined Walter Page’s Blue Devils, a major regional dance band. The Blue Devils featured the southwestern boogie-woogie style of relatively spare blues-based melodies, effortless dance rhythms, and “swinging” syncopation (all hallmarks of the later Basie band style). Basie worked at devising arrangements for the band, assisted by trombonist-guitarist Eddie Durham. Basie’s ability to read and write music improved over the years, but he continued to rely on staff and freelance arrangers. At this time Basie lost interest in the musical stage and dedicated himself to dance music.

Kansas City, a wide-open hub of speakeasies, gambling, and prostitution, offered an active job market for black musicians who specialized in the aggressively swinging southwestern (or Kansas City) blues style. While with the Blue Devils, Basie blended this style with his New York “stride” piano background, and in 1929 he was hired by Bennie Moten, who led the most successful Kansas City band of the time. Basie later called this move both the greatest risk and the most important turning point of his career. The Moten band toured extensively and played to large crowds in Chicago and New York.

About 1930, while working as Moten’s second pianist and arranger, Basie married Vivian Wynn, but they soon separated and later divorced. Also in 1929 or 1930, he met a young chorus dancer, Catherine Morgan. She and Basie married in 1942 and had one daughter.

During a touring break in 1934, Basie took some Moten band musicians to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a longer-term job at a single location, after which the Moten band broke up. Back in Kansas City, Basie worked as a church organist and was preparing to join Moten’s newest group when the bandleader died unexpectedly in 1935.

Since 1928 Basie had called himself “Count” in imitation of royal nicknames used by other Harlem musicians, but only on taking over the Moten band did he bill himself by that name. Basie soon had the best players from the Moten unit working for him at the Reno Club in Kansas City. This nucleus included trombonists Dan Minor and Eddie Durham, who was the band’s chief arranger during its early years; tenor saxophonists Herschel Evans and Lester Young, a key innovator in jazz history; and the inimitable blues vocalist Jimmy Rushing.

To many listeners, however, the heart of the band was its superb rhythm section: on drums, Jo Jones, a keenly knowledgeable musician who revolutionized both big band and small group drumming; on guitar, Claude Williams, who was replaced in 1937 by Freddie Green (the mainstay of the Basie group for five decades); and on bass, Walter Page, former leader of the Blue Devils. These three men, in concord with Basie’s own idiomatic piano work, synchronized their playing with unmatched skill, lightening and shading the driving, four-to-a-bar Kansas City beat, and infusing the band’s ensemble play with supple, flowing, danceable rhythms.

In 1935 the white writer, critic, and record producer John Hammond heard a Basie radio broadcast and made arrangements to give the band national exposure. Expanding the group to thirteen men, Basie took his musicians to Chicago, where six of them made their first, classic recordings under the pseudonym (for contractual reasons) Jones-Smith, Inc. In New York City the band played at the Roseland Ballroom and recorded for Decca Records, with which the inexperienced Basie signed a demanding, long-term contract that paid no royalties. Included in the larger band’s initial recordings was Basie’s signature tune, “One O’clock Jump,” which featured the leader’s slyly spare opening piano solo and the repeated, haunting melody played by the band. By this time Buck Clayton’s often muted trumpet solos had become another of the band’s features, while Ed Lewis on trumpet, Earle Warren on alto saxophone, and Jack Washington on baritone saxophone anchored those instrumental sections. The band later formed an association with Columbia Records, which continued into the 1940s.

The Basie orchestra had come to New York City at the height of the big band era, but the group’s relaxed, unembellished, freely swinging style reportedly puzzled those mostly white East Coast listeners who were enthusiasts of the strictly disciplined, thoroughly professional Benny Goodman orchestra. Hammond worked with Basie to tighten the band’s section work and solo presentations. Such New York musicians as trombonists Dicky Wells and Benny Morton and trumpeter Harry Edison were hired. BILLIE HOLIDAY, who already had forged her own deeply personal jazz singing style, became the band’s first woman vocalist, to be replaced a year later by Helen Humes. They each joined Jimmy Rushing, who solidified his position as the leading male blues singer of the big band era. The changes paid off in the late 1930s with successful stints at New York’s Famous Door and Savoy Ballroom (“the home of happy feet”), followed by engagements in Chicago and San Francisco.

Basie later recalled that by 1940 “what that name [Count Basie] stood for now was me and the band as the same thing.” The band undertook almost constant tours throughout the country and continued its prolific recording work. Among bandleaders Basie was matched only by DUKE ELLINGTON as a careful, tenacious master of a group of disparate individual artists. Both men were ambitious leaders who defined the basic sounds of their groups, and each of them was ready to step back and allow great freedom to their soloists. But although Ellington was a composer of major stature, Basie was the more successful in integrating his band into the lucrative, white-dominated entertainment industry of the 1940s through the 1970s.

With the start of World War II, Basie, like many other bandleaders, had to cope with myriad difficulties; some of these included restrictions on travel, the musicians’ union’s two-year recording ban, and above all the military draft’s continual disruption of the band’s roster. Basie again showed great skill in choosing talented replacements, at different times bringing in trombonist J. J. Johnson, trumpeter Joe Newman, tenor saxophonists Lucky Thompson, Paul Gonsalves, and Illinois Jacquet, and drummer Shadow Wilson, among others. All through the 1940s the orchestra worked at choice locations such as New York’s Ritz-Carlton and Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, while it also maintained nearly continuous nationwide touring. After the recording ban was lifted at the end of 1943, the band resumed making records until the close of the decade. In addition, the Basie group was featured in several Hollywood films—Reveille with Beverly, Crazy House, and Top Man (all 1943)—and made frequent appearances on Kate Smith’s national radio show.

Following the war Basie continued to revise personnel and shuffle arrangers; he allowed younger players like Wardell Gray on tenor saxophone and Clark Terry on trumpet to introduce a few new bebop ideas. But by the late 1940s the band had become relatively unadventurous. That development coincided with waning public interest in swing era orchestras, and in 1950 Basie was forced to disband.

Basie remained active for more than a year with a sextet that showcased Gray, Terry, and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. In 1952, at the urging of singer Billy Eckstine, he assembled a new orchestra, which eventually would include Marshall Royal as first alto saxophonist and rehearsal director; the highly original trumpeter Thad Jones; tenor saxophonists Frank Foster, Frank Wess, Paul Quinichette, and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis; Basie’s longtime rhythm colleague Freddie Green; drummer Gus Johnson, soon replaced by Sonny Payne; and the blues and ballad singing of Joe Williams. Birdland, then the most thriving club for jazz in New York, served as an effective home base, though the band often played the Blue Note in Chicago and the Crescendo in Los Angeles as well.

This edition of the Basie orchestra placed new emphasis on arrangers and precisely played ensembles. Arrangers Neal Hefti, Ernie Wilkins, QUINCY JONES, and “the two Franks” (Foster and Wess) played key roles in making the band sound more appealing to a wider audience. The Basie orchestra now served a varied range of popular tastes, recording with celebrity singers such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and featuring everything from Wild Bill Davis’s crowd-pleasing arrangement of “April in Paris,” to popular television theme songs, to jazz versions of rhythm and blues hits. In 1963 the Basie orchestra was featured in four best-selling albums, including two instrumental records arranged by Quincy Jones. Such popularity had not been attained by any big band since World War II, and, with rock music coming to dominate the record industry, it was a feat not to be duplicated.

Basie and his musicians had made the first of thirty successful European tours in 1954, and in 1963 they made the first of eight trips across the Pacific Ocean. Frequent national tours continued, usually reaching the West Coast twice each year. By 1961, when it performed at one of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural celebrations, the band had become part of America’s official culture. Further appearances at the White House culminated in a reception for Basie in 1981, which celebrated a Kennedy Center honor for his contributions to the performing arts. In 1982 he was given a tribute, sponsored by the Black Music Association, at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.

Six years earlier, in 1976, Basie suffered a heart attack that kept him away from the band for half a year. After returning, he continued the band’s touring on a reduced schedule, while remaining active at work in the recording studios. But various illnesses further weakened him, and a year after his wife’s death, he died in Hollywood, Florida.

Basie’s unique ability to inspire a large jazz band with the rhythmic drive and ease of 1930s Kansas City small combos, to select and lead an ever-changing roster of talented and complementary musicians, to adapt to rapidly evolving and diverse musical tastes while maintaining artistic integrity, to integrate his band into the mainstream of American entertainment, and to give the band matchless worldwide exposure all show him to have been one of the major figures in twentieth-century American music.

BASQUIAT, JEAN-MICHEL

(22 Dec. 1960–12 Aug. 1988), painter, was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Gerard Basquiat, an accountant originally from Haiti, and Matilde Andradas, of Puerto Rican descent. A precocious draftsman from childhood, Basquiat received little formal artistic training. The last school he attended was the experimental City-as-School program in Manhattan, where he befriended fellow artist Al Diaz.

Before quitting school altogether in 1978, Basquiat created SAMO (meaning “same old shit”), which was variously a pseudo-religion, a fictional logo, a nom de plume, and a persona. Basquiat and Diaz spray-painted original aphorisms with a copyright symbol next to the word SAMO on walls and in alleys in lower Manhattan. Their mock epigrams and mottoes included “SAMO as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy,” “SAMO saves idiots,” and “plush safe he think, SAMO.” Whereas other graffiti artists such as Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000, and Rammellzee painted multicolored and elaborately designed “tags” on subway cars and alleyways, Diaz and Basquiat focused on their concepts and text-based work rather than aesthetics. In the 11 December 1978 issue of the Village Voice, Basquiat and Diaz identified themselves as SAMO; soon thereafter, they parted ways.

Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari, 1982, by Jean-Michel Basquiat, is six feet square, and done in acrylic, oil, and oil paintstick on canvas with exposed wood supports. The Hermes Trust (Isle of Man). Collection of Francesco Pellizzi

Aside from his SAMO work, Basquiat drew and painted his own art on any available surface he could find, including refrigerator doors; he also made postcards and t-shirts, which he sold on the street. Using oil and acrylic paints, oil paint sticks, and collage materials, he blended roughly drawn visual elements and text. When asked about his subject matter, Basquiat responded that he painted “royalty, heroism, and the streets.” Black male figures, skulls, crowns, and hobo symbols proliferated in his paintings. He sometimes included references to his personal heroes, such as musician CHARLIE PARKER and boxer JOE LOUIS, as well as art-historical references such as Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks. Basquiat used words not as expanded captions but as crucial components in the composition and meaning of the work, sometimes repeating words or crossing them out, as in Horn Players (1983, Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles). In this painting, the artist painted Charlie Parker’s name and the word “ornithology” (referring to the musician’s nickname “the Bird”) several times on the canvas, overlaid with more paint and next to his painted images of the musician. Basquiat once said, “I cross out words so that you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”

In 1980 Basquiat painted a large mural for his first group exhibition, the Times Square Show. Organized by Colab (Collaborative Projects Incorporated), the exhibition featured several artists early in their careers, including Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, and Kiki Smith. The following year Basquiat took part in numerous exhibitions in New York, such as New York/New Wave at P.S. 1, along with artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol, and Beyond Words: Graffiti Based-Rooted-Inspired Works at the Mudd Club. The Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, Italy, held Basquiat’s first one-man exhibition in the spring of 1981.

In 1980 New York art dealer Annina Nosei began selling Basquiat’s work and offered him her gallery basement to use as his studio. Despite this unusual arrangement (Nosei was criticized for having Basquiat “on exhibit”), she exposed Basquiat’s art to several important collectors and gave him his first U.S. one-man exhibition in 1982. Although Basquiat changed dealers often in his short career, he maintained steady relationships with Los Angeles dealer Larry Gagosian and Bruno Bischofberger, who was based in Switzerland and was the artist’s international representative.

Basquiat was the youngest artist in the prestigious Documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel, Germany (1982), and in the 1983 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Museum of Modern Art included him in their International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at MOMA (1983).

He continued to gain recognition when, in 1983, he became a close friend of Andy Warhol, who was also represented by Bischofberger. At the suggestion of the dealer, the two artists collaborated on several paintings in 1985. Warhol painted or silk-screened corporate logos such as those of GE and Arm & Hammer along with other images including Felix the Cat. Basquiat painted over and around Warhol’s work with his repertoire of motifs and words. Their paintings, exhibited in New York at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery that same year, received mixed reviews. One New York Times critic wrote that Basquiat was an art world mascot and that Warhol used him to regain his own popularity. Warhol and Basquiat ended their friendship following the exhibition.

An article on Basquiat written by Cathleen McGuigan for the New York Times Magazine (10 Feb. 1985) exposed him to a popular audience but also posed questions about the consequences of an inflated art market on such a young career. Some critics claimed that Basquiat became more interested in making art that would satisfy his collectors than in creating innovative work. But many of his last works featured new developments, such as very dense accumulations of words and images, as in Untitled (Stretch) (1985, estate of the artist), or starkly powerful compositions, as exemplified by Riding with Death (1988, private collection), which shows a dark human skeleton riding a white skeleton of a horse.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose in New York at the age of twenty-seven. His death at such an early age commanded reflection in the art world, an environment where artistic ideals had been replaced by greed and the pursuit of fame due to a period of auspicious wealth and soaring art prices. Basquiat, who never hid his career aspirations, was hailed as the first African American art star. Bearing the burden of this title, he was sometimes viewed as an exotic novelty or as a traitor to his race in the predominantly white art world. But Basquiat refused to be labeled. He said, “I don’t know if my being black has anything to do with my success. I don’t think I should be compared to black artists but all artists.”

Although not an organized movement, Basquiat and other painters grouped as “neo-expressionists”—including Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, and Susan Rothenberg—returned a sense of bravura and improvisation to painting that harked back to the abstract expressionists. Influenced by pop art, Basquiat’s wordplay and use of signs and symbols aligned him with other postmodern artists, particularly those like Robert Longo who combined specific and sometimes edited images inspired by the mass media to convey meaning. Basquiat also maintained a very personal vision in his work, painting his heroes (boxers and jazz musicians), his artistic influences (da Vinci and Warhol), and episodes from his own life (drug use and racism) in his idiosyncratic style. His poetic means of combining text with imagery and social issues with personal experiences resonates in the work of several contemporary artists such as Glen Ligon and Lorna Simpson.

BASS, CHARLOTTA

(Oct. 1880–Apr. 1969), journalist, activist, and vice presidential candidate, was born Charlotta Amanda Spears in Sumter, South Carolina, the sixth of eleven children of Hiram Spears and Kate (maiden name unknown). The details of her childhood are unknown, but sometime before her twentieth birthday she went to live with her brother in Providence, Rhode Island, and began work at the Providence Watchman, selling ads and helping in the office. After ten years, suffering from exhaustion, she went for a rest to California on the advice of her doctor.

At the beginning of what was to have been a two-year stay, Spears went against her doctor’s orders and took a job at the Eagle, a newspaper with a largely black readership. Her job was to sell advertising and subscriptions. However, when the newspaper’s editor, John Neimore, became ill, he began to turn the operations of the Eagle over to Spears. When he died, the paper’s new owner put Spears in charge, in May 1912. Spears continued to publish news of black society but increasingly dealt with social and political issues in the paper she renamed the California Eagle. Her commitment to righting the wrongs of society quickly became apparent.

Charlotta Bass became the first black woman to run for national office when she accepted the Progressive Party’s nomination as candidate for vice president in 1952. Los Angeles Public Library

In 1912 Joseph Bass joined the paper as an editor. Bass had been one of the founders of the Topeka Plain Dealer, and he shared Spears’s concerns about injustice and racial discrimination. The two were soon married and ran the paper together for the next two decades. Among the targets of their passionate attacks was D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which perpetuated the worst kind of racial stereotyping in order to glorify the Ku Klux Klan. (The Klan tried to sue the paper for libel in 1925, but the suit was unsuccessful.) The Basses powerfully championed the black soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Infantry who were unjustly sentenced in a 1917 race riot that took place in Houston, Texas. They also filled their newspaper with support for the SCOTTSBORO BOYS, nine young men who were framed and convicted of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The Basses also strongly endorsed labor leader A. PHILIP RANDOLPH in his battle against racial discrimination in railroad employment.

Away from the newspaper, Bass helped found the Industrial Business Council, which fought discrimination in employment practices and encouraged entrepreneurship among black people. In an effort to defeat housing covenants in all-white neighborhoods, she formed the Home Protective Association. In 1919 she attended the Pan-African Congress in Paris, organized by W. E. B. DU BOIS, and during the 1920s was co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of MARCUS GARVEY’S Universal Negro Improvement Association.

After Joseph Bass died in 1934, Charlotta Bass continued to run the California Eagle on her own. She also became more active in local and national politics. In 1940 the Republican Party chose her as western regional director for Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign. Three years later she became the first African American member of the Los Angeles County Superior Court grand jury. In 1945 Bass ran for the L.A. city council as a “people’s candidate” in a landmark election for black Angelenos. Although she lost the race, her progressive platform and powerful campaigning united diverse black organizations throughout the city’s Seventh District. Her campaign also laid the groundwork for later, more successful, African American candidates, notably future L.A. city councilman and mayor TOM BRADLEY.

The immediate postwar years in the United States were marked by a growing demand for African American civil rights, which was met by an upsurge in Klan activity and other forms of racial violence. In her newspaper and in her political activities, Bass took an unyielding stand against these horrors. When blacklisting hit Hollywood, she spoke out in favor of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of screenwriters who had refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about alleged Communist infiltration of the film industry. She herself was called before the California equivalent of HUAC, the Tenney Committee, which she denounced as “fascist.”

Believing that neither of the major parties was committed to civil rights, Bass left the Republican Party in the late 1940s to become one of the founders of the Progressive Party. Nearing the age of seventy, she campaigned heavily for the party’s presidential candidate, Henry Wallace, in the 1948 election. Leaving the California Eagle in the early 1950s, she traveled to wherever she felt her voice might make a difference for the causes that she believed in. She went to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to support the Stockholm Appeal to ban the bomb at the peace committee of the World Congress. Like other members of the American Left at the time, notably PAUL ROBESON, she traveled to the Soviet Union and commented on its apparent lack of racial discrimination.

In 1950, she ran for California’s Fourteenth Congressional District, but lost again. Bass nonetheless believed that her campaign had been successful in raising the issues she felt were important. This realization led her to accept the Progressive Party’s nomination for vice president of the United States in 1952, making her the first black woman to run for national office. Bass was a consistent thorn in the side of her Republican opponent, Senator Richard Nixon, attacking him fiercely throughout the campaign. Her platform called for civil rights, women’s rights, an end to the Korean War, and peace with the Soviet Union. By the early 1950s, however, the Progressive Party was perceived by many Americans to be too closely linked to the Communist Party. Some of those links were real; others the result of McCarthyite hysteria. Either way, Bass and her running mate fared poorly, even among African Americans in those states that allowed blacks to vote. Nationally, the Progressive Party won only 0.2 percent of the vote.

In 1960 Charlotta Bass wrote an autobiography entitled “Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper.” During her years of retirement, she maintained a library in her garage for the young people in her neighborhood. It was a continuation of her long fight to give all people opportunities and education. She died in Los Angeles.

With remarkable dedication, Charlotta Bass used her role as editor of the oldest black-run newspaper on the West Coast to crusade against injustice and inequality. She may never have won an election, but, as she said in her 1952 campaign, “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.”

BATES, DAISY LEE

(11 Nov. 1914–4 Nov. 1999), journalist and civil rights activist, was born Daisy Lee Gatson in Huttig, Arkansas, to parents she would never know. She may also have had four brothers. Bates learned as a child that three white men had attempted to rape her mother, who died while resisting them. Realizing that a black man in Arkansas could not successfully prosecute whites for murder, and fearing reprisals if he attempted to do so, Daisy’s father left town shortly afterwards, leaving his infant daughter with friends Orlie and Susie Smith, who adopted her. Daisy enjoyed the close love and attention that came from being an only child, but the Smiths could not protect her from the most pernicious manifestations of white supremacy in Jim Crow Arkansas: verbal and physical abuse from whites, substandard education, and minimal economic opportunities. Her childhood was also scarred by the presence in town of one of her mother’s murderers, though Daisy, the image of her mother, exacted a kind of revenge by staring at and haunting the man referred to in her memoirs as the “drunken pig.”

At the age of fifteen she met twenty-eight-year-old Lucius Christopher “L.C.” Bates, a journalist then working as an insurance agent. The couple courted for several years and married in 1942, moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, to establish the Arkansas State Press, a weekly newspaper for the black community. They had no children.

Daisy Bates (standing, second from left), with the Little Rock Nine, who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School against fierce opposition in 1957. Library of Congress

During World War II, the State Press exemplified the increasing determination of southern blacks to challenge their second-class citizenship. In 1942, for instance, its reporting of a white policeman’s cold-blooded murder of a black soldier on the streets of Little Rock prompted white advertisers to withdraw their financial support of the paper in protest. The Bateses persisted in exposing police brutality, however, and by the end of the war the State Press’s campaigns had persuaded the Little Rock authorities to hire black policemen to patrol African American neighborhoods. The paper’s crusading reputation greatly increased its circulation among blacks throughout Arkansas but also earned the Bateses the enmity of conservative whites. In 1946, for example, Daisy and L.C. were sentenced to ten days in prison for publishing an article criticizing the conviction of labor activists, but the couple was later released on bond, and the Arkansas Supreme Court quashed their sentences.

In 1952 the Arkansas NAACP recognized Daisy Bates’s tireless campaigning for civil rights by electing her its president, a post that placed her at the forefront of desegregation efforts two years later, when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its Brown v. Board of Education decision. Commentators believed that Arkansas under Governor Orval Faubus, a racial moderate, might lead the region in compliance with the school desegregation ruling, and that progressive Little Rock would lead Arkansas. After 1955, however, the Court’s implementation decree, Brown II, emboldened segregationist whites. Brown II required local authorities to desegregate with “all deliberate speed,” a phrase that white-dominated school boards, including Little Rock’s, interpreted as a signal to delay and obstruct integration. In 1956 Bates responded to white delaying tactics by urging readers of the State Press to support Cooper v. Aaron, an NAACP lawsuit recommending the speedy integration of the Little Rock schools.

In September 1957 the Little Rock school board finally unveiled its plan to enroll nine black students in the previously all-white Central High School, but even that token effort enraged whites. Working-class whites were particularly aggrieved that their children would be integrated while the children of wealthier whites would not. Tensions were raised further on the first day of classes, when Governor Faubus enlisted the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school. Warning that “blood would run in the streets” if blacks entered the building, Faubus had essentially used military force to deny the “Little Rock Nine” their constitutional right to attend an integrated school. Such defiance encouraged other whites to resist violently. Someone threw a rock through Bates’s window, threatening dynamite next. And when one of the students, Elizabeth Eckford, attempted to enter the school alone, white mobs jeered at, spat at, and physically threatened the fifteen-year-old.

Throughout the tension, Daisy Bates served as the main adviser and confidante of the children and their parents. She paid for private bodyguards, held strategy sessions in her home, tutored the children during the three weeks that the state of Arkansas refused to do so, and helped handle the demands of the world media. On 25 September 1957, after President Dwight Eisenhower had federalized the National Guard and sent one thousand Screaming Eagles paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the law, Bates escorted the students through the front door of Central High School. In the year that followed, she continued to act as a mentor for the students when they braved intimidation and assaults, and also when they fought back, as one student did when she emptied a bowl of hot chili on the head of a white youth who taunted her. Bates’s defiance and the courage of the students earned them the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1958.

The successful, albeit minimal, integration of Central did not end conflicts between Bates and the Little Rock authorities. In October 1957 she resisted a local ordinance that required organizations to provide the city clerk with financial records and the names of staff and officers. Other municipalities used such information to harass and punish NAACP members, and Bates argued that compulsory disclosure of these records infringed citizens’ rights to freedom of association. The local court duly convicted Bates of violating the ordinance in 1957, but that conviction was reversed in 1960 by a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Bates v. Little Rock.

After the Little Rock crisis, Bates faded from the national spotlight but remained active in civil rights. She spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, worked in the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty, and led a community revitalization project in rural Arkansas. In 1984 the University of Arkansas awarded her an honorary degree. Many other awards followed. The city of Little Rock named an elementary school in her honor in 1987, and she even carried the Olympic torch en route to Atlanta in 1996. She received her greatest honor posthumously, when President Bill Clinton, a fellow Arkansan and friend, awarded Bates and the Little Rock Nine the Congressional Gold Medal. As the Nine received their honors from the president in November 1999, Bates lay in state in the Arkansas Capitol, a few feet away from the spot where Governor Faubus had predicted blood in the streets in 1957.

Popular histories of the civil rights era often depict Daisy Bates as the epitome of virtuous, nonviolent resistance and grace under pressure, largely on the strength of her brave, motherly shepherding of the Little Rock Nine. Indeed she was nonviolent in her approach, but she was also a realist. Her journalism was confrontational. She challenged police brutality and, from the time she learned of her mother’s murder, found it “hard to suppress certain feelings, when all around you see only hate” (Tyson, Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, 153). Such feelings were not unreasonable given that the Ku Klux Klan raised three fiery crosses on her lawn and that white supremacists bombed her home several times. In 1959 she was at first equivocal about the case of Robert Williams, a North Carolina NAACP leader who advocated that blacks arm themselves in self-defense. After NAACP Executive Secretary WALTER WHITE promised Daisy an extra $600 a month to help the ailing State Press, however, she agreed to support White’s campaign to censure Williams. That decision reflected Bates’s pragmatism—white advertisers had withdrawn support from the State Press, and the paper would soon fold. Daisy Bates was certainly courageous, but like others in the civil rights movement—and like activists in all eras—she recognized that success often requires compromise.

BAYLEY, SOLOMON

(c. 1771–c. 1839), was born a slave near Camden, in Kent County, Delaware. Bayley wrote in his Narrative that his grandmother was a “Guinea woman” who had been transported from West Africa to Virginia when she was only eleven years old and sold to “one of the most barbarous families of that day.” Despite this, she gave birth to fifteen children and “lived to a great age” (38). Bayley’s mother had been born and raised with the same Virginia family. She had had several children with her husband, Abner, by the time her master and mistress died and one of their daughters and her husband moved to Delaware, taking the black family. A few years later Solomon Bayley was born, one of thirteen children.

Bayley grew to manhood in Kent County, Delaware. He took a slave named Thamar as his wife and they had two children. When the wife of the couple who owned them died, and her husband moved back to Virginia in 1799, Bayley and his family, along with his mother and father and siblings, were transported to Hunting Creek, which later became Alexandria, Virginia. Under Delaware law, slaveholders taking slaves out of the state were not permitted to put them up for immediate sale, but soon after they arrived the owner sold the entire family. Moreover, they were scattered in all directions, “some to the east, some west, north and south” (39). About one year after the sale, Bayley’s father, brother, and sister were sold and taken to the Caribbean. His mother was more fortunate. She ran away with Bayley’s infant brother, and made it to freedom in New Jersey.

In his reminiscence, Bayley explained that, shortly after arriving in Virginia, he began legal proceedings to secure his freedom. Not only did Delaware law prohibit his immediate sale, but a Virginia statute, passed in 1795, gave persons illegally detained as slaves the right to sue for their freedom. If they did not have enough money to launch a suit, they would be assigned counsel and allowed to sue in forma pauperis (as a poor person). “I employed lawyers,” Bayley wrote, “and went to court two days, to have a suit brought to obtain my freedom” (2). Two days before the trial date, he was “taken up and put on board a vessel out of Hunting Creek, bound to Richmond.” Jailed and cast into irons, he was “brought very low.” After some time, he was put into one of three wagons owned by his new master and began a journey toward the mountains. “Now consider, how great my distress must have been,” he later confessed, “being carried from my wife and children” (2).

At this point, Bayley decided to run away. Waiting for the right moment, he slipped off the wagon and hid in some bushes until the other wagons had passed. He then set out across the countryside heading back toward Richmond. Thinking he would surely perish, he ran at night and with the aid of “a dreadful wind,” thunder, lightning, and rain, he avoided capture. Twice slave catchers with their trained hunting dogs came close, but the rain covered up his scent. From Richmond, Bayley made it to Petersburg, remaining there three weeks before going down the James River in a small boat with another runaway. When they reached Chesapeake Bay, his companion was detected, captured, and after trying to escape by jumping over the side of a boat, was bludgeoned to death with an oar. Bayley, however, escaped detection. Having instructed his wife if they were ever parted to run away and meet him at a specific location on the Eastern Shore (perhaps the farm of an antislavery white or free black family), Bayley miraculously found his wife and his two children. Together, they set out to the North and freedom.

When Bayley and his family returned to Kent County in 1799, the white man who had illegally sold him and his family in Virginia confronted Bayley and threatened to enslave him again; Bayley, in turn, threatened to take him to court. In the end the two compromised; if Bayley paid the man eighty dollars, a fraction of his market value, he would be allowed to go free. Bayley agreed, purchased himself, and finally, as he put it, “the yoke was off my neck” (18). In freedom, the ambitious and energetic Bayley learned the trade of coopering. With the demand for barrels high, and his wages higher than those of many whites, he was able to save enough to purchase his wife and children. He made his final purchase in 1813, buying his son, described by the auctioneer as a “likely young negro,” for $360 and one shilling. Several white men, including one whom Bayley described as a “great man,” assisted him, paying him for his security bond and asking another bidder to allow Solomon to purchase his son.

During the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, Bayley experienced a religious conversion. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, became one of its most devout members, and, when one minister suggested it was a sin not to sanctify his marriage in the eyes of God, he married his wife (he was in the process of purchasing her freedom at the time) in a church ceremony. Bayley felt so strongly about his new faith that he gave up working as a cooper because the wooden barrels he made were used for whiskey. Following his conversion, he became a farm laborer and spent a good deal of time as a lay preacher.

In 1820 Robert Hurnard, a British abolitionist visiting Delaware, heard stories about Bayley’s remarkable escape and invited him to talk about his life. Upon his return to England, Hurnard wrote to Bayley, asking him to write a memoir and some letters about his life. Hurnard learned that Bayley had placed his two daughters, Margaret and Leah, “out in the service of respectable families” (vi) but they, along with his son, Spence, had died prematurely. Although advanced in life, Bayley enjoyed good health, as did his wife, who was four years older.

In 1824 Bayley’s recollections were published in England, with Hurnard promising to “transmit the whole of the profits of the publication to America, for the benefit of the aged couple” (viii). Although disjointed and containing lengthy Biblical quotations, A Narrative gives the reader a rare glimpse into the life of a runaway slave in the late eighteenth century. It emphasizes Bayley’s fear, anxiety, and the remarkable obstacles confronting runaways. It also reveals the treachery of greedy whites, as well as the sympathy and support of those whites opposed to slavery. It also shows the primary importance of the black family, Christianity, and the triumph of human spirit over adversity.

In one of his letters, the self-taught Bayley observed that, for some time, he had followed the career of the pan-Africanist PAUL CUFFE SR. and was himself considering leaving the United States. In 1827 Solomon and Thamar Bayley decided to emigrate to Liberia, a fledgling colony in West Africa. Before departing, Bayley obtained a letter of commendation from Willard Hall, a U.S. District Court Judge and leader in the Delaware colonization movement, a group of whites who offered assistance to free blacks who wished to settle in West Africa; Hall wrote that despite his “unfavorable age” (Bayley was about fifty-six) “his character stands high not only among his people of colour, but among the most respectable of our citizens.” The two former fugitive slaves then boarded the brig Doris out of Baltimore, and, along with eighty other passengers, mostly from New York and Maryland, they set sail via Norfolk, Virginia, for Liberia.

During the period when the Bayleys arrived in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, there were clashes between native inhabitants and the approximately twelve hundred settlers, and newcomers were dying from “the fever,” or malaria. Nonetheless, the Bayleys cleared a seven-acre plot and began cultivating a small farm on the outskirts of Monrovia, near the St. Paul’s River. Solomon built a platform overlooking the river under a large tree, where, time permitting, he read and wrote. Following the death of his wife in 1833, Bayley published A Brief Account of the Colony of Liberia, which discussed the agricultural and commercial progress of the colony and the relationship between settlers and native Africans. He returned to the United States that year and visited a number of cities, but returned to Liberia, where he remarried and continued to farm, preach, and participate in community life until his death.

BEARDEN, ROMARE

(2 Sept. 1911–11 Mar. 1988), artist, was born Romare Howard Bearden in Charlotte, North Carolina, the son of R. Howard Bearden, a grocer, and Bessye Johnson. When Bearden was about four years old, the family moved to New York, settling in Harlem, where he went to public school and his parents developed a wide network of acquaintances among the Harlem jazz musicians and intellectuals of the day. His father later became an inspector for the New York Board of Health; his mother, a civic leader. Bearden finished high school in Pittsburgh, however, having lived there for a time with his grandmother. In 1932, after two years at Boston University, he transferred to New York University, where he created illustrations for the undergraduate humor magazine and earned a BS degree in Education in 1935. For the next two years he contributed political cartoons to the Baltimore Afro-American. Unable to find steady work, he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied drawing with the German emigré artist George Grosz in 1936–1937.

At about this time, Bearden joined the 306 Group, an informal association of black artists and writers—among them JACOB LAWRENCE and RALPH ELLISON—who met in the studio of his cousin, the painter Charles Alston, at 306 West 141st Street. From 1938 to 1942, now beginning to paint, Bearden supported himself as a full-time caseworker with the New York City Department of Social Services, a job to which he returned after World War II. In 1940, at the Harlem studio of a friend, Ad Bates, Bearden exhibited some of the work he had completed over the past four years, including paintings in oil and gouache, watercolors, and drawings. Taking his own studio on 125th Street, located over the Apollo Theater, he began work on a series of paintings that evoked the rural South of his childhood. Typical of the series is Folk Musicians (1941–1942), painted in a bold and dramatic style with flat planes and simplified, colorful figures.

In Romare Bearden’s works, particularly his jazz-and Cubism-inspired collages, all aspects of African American life—from labor to love, rural to urban, domestic to public—are both particular and universal in nature. © Manu Sassoonian

While serving with an all-black regiment in 1944, Bearden mounted a solo exhibition at the “G” Place Gallery in Washington, D.C., which brought him to the attention of the influential New York dealer Samuel Kootz. Bearden’s first exhibition at the Kootz Gallery, in 1945, was devoted to the Passion of Christ series, a group of semiabstract, cubist-inspired watercolors on paper. The exhibition was highly successful in terms of reviews and sales; He Is Arisen, purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was the first of Bearden’s works to enter a museum collection. The following year, Kootz exhibited Bearden’s painting Lament for a Bullfighter, inspired by Garcia Lorca’s poem “Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter.” Inclusion of Bearden’s works in the 1945 and 1946 annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and in the Abstract and Surrealist American Art show held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1948 further boosted his growing reputation.

In 1951 Bearden went to Paris on the GI Bill to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. In addition to meeting the cubist masters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Bearden joined the circle of black artists and writers inspired by the concept of negritude. As he later admitted, however, the most significant thing he learned during his year in France was how to relate the black experience to universal experience. Between 1952, when he returned to New York, and 1954, the year he married West Indian dancer Nanette Rohan, Bearden devoted himself mainly to music; some twenty of the songs he wrote in this period were published and recorded. Bearden then returned to painting and set up a new studio in lower Manhattan, on Canal Street, where he and his wife lived for the rest of his life. (They had no children.) In 1961 he showed some of his now wholly abstract oil paintings in the first of several solo exhibitions at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, his dealers from that year on.

Bearden, who had described art in the journal he began keeping in 1947 as “a kind of divine play” (Schwartzman, 217), was increasingly drawn to collage, a way of “playing” with assortments of materials to create a whole and a medium much employed by the cubists. He created his first signed collage, Circus, in 1961; three years later collage became his chief method of expression. The beginning of the civil rights movement and his participation in the discussions of the Spiral Group (which he cofounded in 1963) on the role of black artists in a time of new challenges coincided with this profound change in Bearden’s art. In 1964 he created a series of small montages composed of fragments of reproductions cut from newspapers, magazines, or postcards and pasted onto a paper backing; these assemblages were then photographed and enlarged. The resulting Projections, as Bearden titled them, were exhibited that year at Cordier & Ekstrom. Later, arranged in series by subject matter, they were developed into true collages. One such sequence, titled The Prevalence of Ritual, includes individual panels representing “The Funeral,” “The Baptism,” and “The Conjur Woman.” Another collage series evokes Harlem street life, as in The Dove, a crowded assemblage of cutout figures set against a suggestion of city buildings. The bizarrely composite figures, the abrupt shifts in scale between heads and bodies, and the arbitrary spatial relationships convey the rich, kaleidoscopic variety of the scene. Other series recall the Harlem jazz world of the 1930s (The Savoy, for example) and southern life (the nostalgic Train Whistle Blues).

As Bearden developed his collage techniques into the 1970s, he began to incorporate more of his own painted touches, in acrylics or watercolors, as well as torn pieces of paper in various hand-painted colors and bits of fabric. Spaces were opened up and thus were easier to perceive. Coinciding with the start of annual visits to his wife’s family home on Saint Martin, the artist’s palette took on the lush colors of the Caribbean and the collage figures became overtly sensuous. One of these later collages, The Block (1971), a large six-panel composition, approached mixed-media work; with the accompaniment of taped gospel and blues music, children’s voices, and actual street noises, it re-created the look, sounds, and “feel” of an urban street.

Besides working in collage, Bearden designed tapestries and posters; in 1968 he was represented in an international poster exhibition in Warsaw, Poland. He designed sets for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in 1977 and continued to make prints, including the colored lithographs that illustrate a 1983 edition of the work of the Caribbean poet DEREK WALCOTT. He also created murals, such as Quilting Time, commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts and installed there in 1986. In it, the quilter and six onlookers form a frieze against a brilliantly hued tropical setting. The whole is a mosaic of glass tesserae, so combined and colored as to suggest the molding of bodies and the textures and folds of fabrics.

A large traveling retrospective of Bearden’s work, organized by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1980 and concluding its tour at the Brooklyn Museum in 1981, capped Bearden’s career. Also in 1980 he taught at Yale University, one of several temporary teaching posts he held during the course of his career. Represented in every major museum in New York City and in others throughout the country, he is considered to have transformed collage, generally regarded as a minor art form, into a forceful means of expression with universal appeal. His biographer called him “An artist for all seasons and for all humankind” (Schwartzman, 305).

In addition to The Painter’s Mind: A Study of Structure and Space in Painting, written with his longtime friend, the artist Carl Holty (1969), Bearden wrote (with Harry Henderson) A History of Afro-American Artists from 1792 to the Present, which was posthumously published in 1993. He and Henderson also wrote a book for young readers, Six Black Masters of American Art (1972).

Part of Bearden’s legacy consists of his multiple roles as teacher; as art director of the Harlem Cultural Council, to which he was appointed in 1964; as organizer of the landmark exhibition, the Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800–1950, held at City College of New York in 1967; and as cofounder, in 1969, of the Cinque Gallery in New York, a showcase for younger artists from various minority groups. For these contributions, Bearden was inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1966; he was honored by his home state in 1976 as recipient of the Governor’s Medal of the State of North Carolina, and he also was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1987. The Pratt Institute (1973) and Carnegie-Mellon University (1975) awarded him honorary doctorates. He died in New York City.

BECHET, SIDNEY JOSEPH

(14 May 1897–14 May 1959), clarinetist, soprano saxophonist, and composer, was the youngest of five sons and two daughters (three other children died in infancy) born to Omar Bechet, a shoemaker, and Josephine Michel in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bechet was raised as a middle-class Creole at the time when state law reclassified Creoles of color as Negro. The adoption of the black codes and de jure segregation had profound repercussions for the first generations of “ragtime” and jazz musicians in the Crescent City. Although Sidney spoke French in his childhood household and his grandfather, Jean Becher, was free and had owned property since 1817, Sidney Bechet identified himself as African American.

The Bechet family was decidedly musical. Sidney’s father played the flute and trumpet for relaxation, and Sidney’s brothers all played music as a hobby and developed skills in various trades for their vocations. Homer was a janitor and string bassist, Leonard a dentist and trombonist, Albert Eugene a butcher and violinist, Joseph a plasterer and guitarist. When he was only seven or eight years old, Sidney began playing a toy fife and soon began practicing on his brother’s clarinet morning, noon, and night. He played in a band with his older brothers, but his family and other adult musicians quickly realized that Sidney was a prodigy whose technique outstripped that of some professionals.

Sidney’s mother organized parties and hired professional bands to play in her home. When Sidney was just ten years old, she hired the great band of Manuel Perez (who sent the equally legendary Freddie Keppard as a substitute) to play for her oldest son’s twenty-first birthday. George Baquet, the band’s clarinetist, was late for the engagement, and Sidney, sequestered in another room, began playing his brother’s clarinet as Baquet arrived. Sidney played well enough to cause Keppard to believe that it was Baquet warming up. As a result, Baquet began giving Sidney clarinet lessons. Bechet learned from him certain rudiments of clarinet playing, but he had already developed an unorthodox set of fingerings and refused to learn to read music. Bechet also studied with Paul Chaligny and Alphonse Picou. His most important influence, however, came from “Big Eye” Louis Nelson. Nelson did not play in the academic style and specialized in the rougher “uptown” styles of the black players. Another lasting influence was the opera, which his mother took him to listen to. He especially liked the tenors (his favorite was Enrico Caruso), and the heavy vibrato that characterized his playing was in part modeled after them.

As Bechet began to play with professional organizations in parades, picnics, dance halls, and parties, he did not attend school regularly, despite his family’s admonitions, and he reportedly ignored their advice about learning a trade other than music. At age fourteen he joined the Young Olympians, and soon he was playing with all the notable bands of New Orleans, including those led by Buddy Petit and Bunk Johnson. Bechet’s family worried about the boy’s exposure to the seamier aspects of musicians’ nightlife. Yet, in this setting, Bechet developed into a soft-spoken and charming fellow who was very attractive to women. He also became a heavy drinker with a very short fuse and sometimes displayed a violent temper. As a teenager he was jailed for a violent incident. This odd mixture of musical virtuosity, charm, and violence would follow Bechet throughout his adult life.

Bechet went to Chicago in 1918, where he quickly found work within the various New Orleans cliques that dominated the scene. There he met and played for NOBLE SISSLE, JAMES REESE EUROPE, and WILL MARION COOK. Bechet’s virtuosity and his ear for melodies and harmony were such that he amazed all three of these bandleaders, despite his not being able to read music, a skill normally required for these orchestras. In 1919 Bechet joined Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra, which brought him to New York, where his talents were much in demand. He then went to the British Isles with Cook’s orchestra. British audiences received the orchestra warmly, and many critics singled out Bechet’s playing as noteworthy. The most important review came from the Swiss conductor Ernst Ansermet, who wrote, in what was the first truly insightful critical article on jazz, that Bechet was an “extraordinary clarinet virtuoso” and an “artist of genius.”

While in England, Bechet bought a soprano saxophone. The soprano saxophone was used very little in jazz, in part because of the severe intonation problems it presents, especially in the early models. But Bechet had a strong embouchure and a highly developed vibrato that allowed him to express himself with the instrument, and his supremacy as the greatest soprano saxophonist in jazz was not challenged until JOHN COLTRANE took up the instrument years after Bechet’s death. The saxophone was perfect for Bechet, as its brassier and louder projection facilitated his natural inclination to take the melodic lead, usually the prerogative of trumpeters in the jazz ensembles of the 1910s and 1920s.

Bechet’s stay in London ended when he was charged with assaulting a woman. Bechet pleaded not guilty, as did his codefendant, George Clapham. The stories of the two defendants and the two women involved conflicted, and Bechet hinted that his troubles with the police in England had racial overtones. He was sentenced to fourteen days of hard labor and was then deported on 3 November 1922.

Upon his arrival in New York, Bechet began to work in the theater circuit. He joined Donald Heywood’s show How Come, in which Bechet played the role of How Come, a Chinese laundryman who was also a jazz musician. He was later billed as the “Wizard of the Clarinet” in theater bookings under Will Marion Cook’s leadership. Bechet also began his recording career in New York, through Clarence Williams, a shrewd talent scout who helped supply black talent to record companies eager to cash in on the blues craze that followed Mamie Smith’s hit record “Crazy Blues.” In 1923 Bechet recorded his soprano saxophone on “Wild Cat Blues” and “Kansas City Man Blues” on Okeh Records. These records were listened to by thousands and served as models of jazz phrasing and improvisation for young musicians, including the likes of Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, and Lionel Hampton. Bechet’s success led to other recordings, where he accompanied singers such as Sara Martin, Mamie Smith, Rosetta Crawford, Margaret Johnson, Eva Taylor, and Sippie Wallace. Bechet also began composing and made a big impression with his “Ghost of the Blues.” He also wrote significant portions of Negro Nuances, a musical cowritten with Will Marion Cook and his wife, Abbie Mitchell. While the musical was not successful, Cook praised Bechet’s compositions lavishly in the Chicago Defender.

In 1925 Bechet joined the Black Revue, featuring JOSEPHINE BAKER. The show took them to France, where they both became expatriates. Bechet continued working under the leadership of Noble Sissle and others. He also worked extensively in Germany, where he met Elisabeth Ziegler in 1926. He would eventually marry her in 1951, after both of them had married and divorced others. His original plans to marry Ziegler, after bringing her back to Paris in 1928, were spoiled. An argument between Bechet and the banjoist Gilbert “Little Mike” McKendrick began over a dispute about the correct harmonies to a song they had just played. By the end of the night the two were shooting at each other. Neither Bechet nor McKendrick was hit, but the pianist Glover Compton was shot in the leg, the dancer Dolores Giblins was shot in the lung, and an innocent bystander was shot in the neck. Bechet was sentenced to fifteen months in jail and was then deported.

He moved to Berlin and later returned to the United States after rejoining Noble Sissle’s orchestra. In New York he led the New Orleans Feetwarmers with the trumpeter Tommy Ladnier. The group was short-lived, and Bechet briefly went into retirement from music and opened the Southern Tailor Shop in Harlem. In addition to tailoring, Bechet held jam sessions in the back room and cooked and served Creole cuisine. In 1934 Bechet returned to music once again at the behest of Noble Sissle. By the end of the 1930s the market for Bechet’s style of jazz had lessened, but his cachet increased by the 1940s during the crest of the jazz revival. He played as either a bandleader or a star soloist throughout the United States. In 1949 he returned to Europe, eventually settling in France again, where he was the acknowledged patron saint of the European jazz revival. In 1951 he married Ziegler, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. He also had another home with a woman named Jacqueline, with whom he had a son, Daniel, in 1954. Bechet penned his most famous composition, “Petite fleur,” in 1952, and in 1953 the Paris Conservatory Orchestra debuted his La Nuit est une Sorcière, a ballet in seven movements. With the help of two amanuenses, Joan Reid and Desmond Flower, Bechet also wrote Treat It Gentle, one of the most literarily ambitious jazz autobiographies.

Bechet, along with LOUIS ARMSTRONG, was among the first great jazz improvisers to liberate their solos from the rhythms and contours of the melody. Bechet’s fame might have been even more widespread had the clarinet not fallen out of favor and the soprano saxophone been less obscure. He was the first to fashion legato melodies on the instrument and influenced such saxophone giants as Johnny Hodges and Coleman Hawkins. He died before two of his disciples on the instrument, Steve Lacy and John Coltrane, popularized the instrument in the 1960s.

BECKWOURTH, JIM

(26 April 1800?–1866?), mountain man, fur trapper and trader, scout, translator, and explorer, was born James Pierson Beckwith in Frederick County, Virginia, the son of Sir Jennings Beckwith, a white Revolutionary War veteran and the descendant of minor Irish aristocrats who became prominent Virginians. Little is known about Jim’s mother, a mixed-race slave working in the Beckwith household. Although he was born into slavery, Jim was manumitted by his father in the 1820s. In the early 1800s, Beckwith moved his family, which reputedly included fourteen children, to Missouri, eventually settling in St. Louis. Some commentators suggest that Beckwith, an adventurous outdoorsman, was seeking an environment less hostile to his racially mixed family.

As a young teenager, after four years of schooling, Jim Beckwourth (as his name came to be spelled) was apprenticed to a blacksmith. Unhappy as a tradesman, he fled to the newly discovered lead mines in Illinois’s Fever River region and then to New Orleans in search of greater adventure. Motivated by a lack of work and by the racism he encountered, Jim responded to a newspaper ad placed by the entrepreneurial fur traders Andrew Henry and William Henry Ashley. The ad called for “One Hundred MEN to ascend the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains”; Jim enlisted in 1824. The Ashley-Henry strategy, which Beckwourth emulated, combined direct beaver trapping with trading for furs at the Indian villages. He learned trapping and frontier skills alongside legendary mountain men Jedediah Smith and Jim Bridger, becoming a crack shot and expert bowie knife and tomahawk handler. Beckwourth was present at the first Mountain Man rendezvous at Henry’s Fork on the Green River in 1825. He claimed to have been married briefly to two Blackfoot Indian sisters during this period.

While on a trapping expedition in the late 1820s, Beckwourth was captured by Crow Indians (Absaroke or Sparrowhawk people). How exactly Beckwourth came to live with the Crow remains unclear. During the years he lived with the tribe, Beckwourth became a valued Crow warrior and tribe member. He lived with a succession of Indian women and acknowledged one child, Black Panther or Little Jim. Beckwourth’s tribal names—Morning Star, Antelope, Enemy of Horses, Bobtail Horse, Bloody Arm, Bull’s Robe, and Medicine Calf—capture both the romance and the narrative value of his years living, hunting, and raiding with the Crow.

The adventurer and explorer Jim Beckwourth. William Katz Collection

Leaving the tribe and the Ashley-Henry fur trading company behind in 1836, Beckwourth crisscrossed the Western frontier playing cards, prospecting, trapping, selling whiskey to Indians, stealing horses, brawling in saloons, and guiding settlers. Hired by the U.S. Army as a muleskinner, messenger, and scout during the Seminole War of 1837, he fought against the Seminole, a confederation of Native Americans and runaway slaves. Subsequently, Jim traveled the Southwest working as a fur trader and translator for Andrew Sublette and Louis Vasquez on the Santa Fe Trail and as a wagon loader at Bent’s Fort in Taos. In 1842 Beckwourth opened a trading post with his current wife, Louise Sandoval, in what is presently Pueblo, Colorado. A few years later, abandoning yet another family, Beckwourth answered the siren call of California, where he survived as a horse thief (he claimed to have stolen over two thousand horses), a letter carrier, and from 1846 to 1847 as a guide for the American forces during the conquest of California.

The discovery of gold in 1848 brought Beckwourth to the Sierra mining camps. But while most forty-niners panned for gold, Jim invested in a more lucrative gamble: a passable travel route through the rugged mountain terrain. In 1850 he located the Beckwourth Pass near present-day Reno, Nevada. Capitalizing on his discovery, Jim built a wagon road servicing settlers and gold rushers and established a ranch and trading post in what came to be known as Beckwourth, California. A charming and personable host, Jim briefly reinvented himself as a hotel and saloonkeeper. The pass, which in its heyday accommodated ten thousand wagons annually, remained popular until the railroad supplanted wagon travel in 1855.

In 1858 Beckwourth traveled east to St. Louis, Denver, and Kansas City, until gold was discovered near Pikes Peak, Colorado. Beckwourth and his latest wife, Elizabeth Lettbetter, worked as shopkeepers in Denver, but Jim never quite adapted to city life; his marriage dissolved, and he subsequently married a Crow woman named Sue. The Colorado Volunteer Cavalry hired Beckwourth to locate Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian camps in 1864. Beckwourth’s role in the subsequent Sand Creek Massacre permanently alienated him from the Indian tribes.

The facts of Beckwourth’s life remain in contention. Even the year of his birth is debated among historians. Much of the historical perplexity is the result of obfuscations in the autobiography that Beckwourth dictated to Thomas D. Bonner in 1854. Most significantly, the autobiography omits any mention of Beckwourth’s race. While it was Bonner who altered the spelling of the name “Beckwourth,” Jim was responsible for confusing dates, omitting details, and lavishly embellishing the facts of his life, including his role in events, the number of rivals killed, money made, and battles waged. He may have taken as his own the heroic tales of other frontiersmen, including EDWARD ROSE, who lived with the Crow a generation before Beckwourth. The book, published in 1856, put into print stories Beckwourth had been spinning for years. Storytelling was a valued skill and an important part of the period’s oral tradition, and Beckwourth had spent a lifetime fashioning elaborate narratives with himself as the hero. The book found a ready audience among armchair travelers fascinated and titillated by the exoticism and liberation of frontier stories. Once the inaccuracies of his text were revealed, however, Beckwourth was quickly labeled a liar. As a result, many early historians wrote him off as an unreliable and purposeful braggart, while others, fueled by racism, attacked him on the basis of his “mixed blood.” Today, historians generally agree that much of the text’s basic narrative can be believed and that it represents an invaluable documentary record.

An inveterate adventurer and explorer, Beckwourth looked and dressed the part. Dark-eyed, muscular, and taller than six feet, he often dressed in embroidered buckskin, Crow leggings, ribbons, earrings, and gold chains and wore his thick, dark hair loose to his waist or elaborately braided. Beckwourth was not, as has been claimed, completely illiterate. He spoke English with great skill, fluent French, some Spanish, and a number of Indian dialects. The elision of race in his autobiography has been compounded by numerous painted portraits that untruthfully depict him as very light-skinned and by the 1951 film Tomahawk, which cast Jack Oakie, a white actor, as Beckwourth.

Mystery still surrounds Beckwourth’s death in Crow territory near the Bighorn River in 1866. While it is generally believed that he died of sickness or food poisoning, the rumor lingers that he was purposefully poisoned by the Crow after rejecting offers to rejoin the tribe.

BELAFONTE, HARRY

(1 Mar. 1927–), singer, actor, activist, and producer, was born Harold George Belafonte Jr. in Harlem in New York City, the son of Harold George Belafonte Sr., a seaman, and Melvine Love, a domestic worker. Belafonte Sr. was an alcoholic who contributed little to family life, other than occasionally hitting his spouse, and the young Harry was brought up almost exclusively by his mother. Harold and Melvine, who were both from the Caribbean, had a difficult time adjusting to life in New York, and after the Harlem race riots of 1935, Melvine and her son moved to her native Jamaica, where Harry spent five years shielded from American racism. When World War II broke out, the Belafontes returned to Harlem. Hoping for better conditions, the family would often try to pass for white. With white relatives on both the mother’s and father’s sides, they were all fair-skinned enough to be taken for Greek, Italian, or even Irish. Duty bound, Belafonte joined local gangs, drafted to help defend his white enclaves from neighboring blacks.

Belafonte attended school in Harlem, but struggled with dyslexia; by ninth grade he had had enough and dropped out. Soon thereafter he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was assigned to an all-black unit. Because of his race—and his temper—Belafonte was assigned as a munitions loader, one of the most dangerous jobs on the home front. “The men who were stuck with munitions loading were very bitter, very angry,” he recalls. “In our bitterness and anger we went out and got drunk. We wanted to beat up everybody we met, including each other” (Eldridge, 117–118). When feeling less pugilistic, Belafonte discovered a passion for politics. He enjoyed sitting in on discussions of race and racism in the United States and labored to understand pamphlets and essays by W. E. B. DU BOIS.

Belafonte met his first wife, Margurite Byrd, while his unit was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Byrd was studying psychology at the nearby Hampton Institute; she remembers their early relationship as “one long argument over racial issues” (Gates, 160). Belafonte and Byrd married in 1948 and had their first child, Adrienne, a year later. By this time, Belafonte had finished his tour of duty and moved his family to New York. Here, at Harlem’s American Negro Theatre (ANT), Belafonte saw a play that sparked his interest in acting. With support from the GI Bill, he was soon enrolled in a workshop at the New School for Social Research, together with Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, and Bea Arthur. Working as a janitor’s assistant to help pay the bills, Belafonte volunteered backstage at the ANT. This quickly led to a role in a production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock.

It was also at the ANT that Belafonte met SIDNEY POITIER, another black actor of Caribbean extraction, who became a lifelong friend and who, some say, stole Belafonte’s career. The two were almost exact contemporaries and competed for many of the same roles. In a 1948 show called Days of Our Youth, Poitier was working as Belafonte’s understudy. When Belafonte could not perform one night owing to his janitorial duties, Poitier filled in. A producer happened to be in the audience that evening and approached Poitier after the show. It was the actor’s big break, the one that eventually landed him in Hollywood.

Belafonte soldiered on in the theater, but slowly began to turn his attention toward music. On a friend’s suggestion he performed at amateur night at a midtown club called the Royal Roost and was immediately hired full time. His performance consisted of pop jazz standards, a repertoire Belafonte found less than edifying; after a year he called it quits. By this time he had saved up a tidy sum of money, and he used it to open a grill called the Sage in Greenwich Village. The restaurant folded after eight months, but during that time it had served Belafonte as a late-night rehearsal space. Belafonte began indulging his interest in folk music at the Sage, and, after it closed, he pursued his research at a more conventional venue, listening to field recordings in the Library of Congress.

In 1951 Belafonte brought his new act to the stage. Folk hardly seemed a promising genre at the height of the McCarthy era, when many of its left-leaning practitioners such as PAUL ROBESON and Pete Seeger were blacklisted, but success came quickly, with sell-out crowds at big-name clubs and a recording contract from RCA. Harry Belafonte’s voice alone cannot account for his success, but combined with his stage persona—tight trousers, open shirt, and shiny, mocha skin—it wowed audiences. Belafonte sang the expected folk standards, but then veered off toward African, Caribbean, and even Hebrew songs like “Hava Nageela.” (He claims most American Jews learned the tune from him.) In spite of his success, Belafonte suffered the same indignities as other black entertainers of the day and was routinely denied the right to eat or sleep at the same venues that paid dearly to book his act. But Belafonte was quick to have revenge; in 1954, after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional, he cancelled his engagements in the South.

Belafonte released several folk albums, but it was not until 1956 that he fully embraced the Caribbean music that delighted his audiences. Harry Belafonte—Calypso proved an instant classic, and two songs in particular, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” topped the charts. Some claimed Belafonte had bastardized true Trinidadian calypso, but Belafonte was unapologetic about tailoring the music to American audiences. It was clearly an astute commercial move; in a year’s time the album had sold 1.5 million copies, more than any previous record by a single artist.

As audiences grew and shows sold out, Belafonte resumed acting, taking roles in films and plays, including John Murray Anderson’s Broadway revue Almanac, which earned him a Tony Award. Perhaps his most personally significant performance was in Carmen Jones (1954), an all-black film version of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen that also starred DOROTHY DANDRIDGE and PEARL BAILEY. Belafonte and Marguerite Byrd’s second daughter, Shari, was born in 1954, but Belafonte’s marriage ended in divorce in 1957. That same year he married Julie Robinson, a dancer with the KATHERINE DUNHAM Company, with whom he would later have a son, David, and a daughter, Gina. Initially, Belafonte’s divorce slipped under the media’s radar screen, but word of his remarriage eventually did get out, not least because his new bride was white.

Belafonte continued to act, including a role in 1957’s Island in the Sun, a controversial tale of interracial love, but he found himself increasingly put off by Hollywood’s ham-fisted attempts to deal with race. The scripts that came his way ranged from the shallow to the offensive, and Belafonte seemed unable to get any of his own ideas produced. In the 1960s he abandoned the cinema and engrossed himself in politics.

Belafonte had met MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott and was immediately taken with King’s passion and candor. At that first meeting, King seemed uncertain about the fate of the civil rights movement. He asked Belafonte for support, and over the next decade Belafonte lent his name and energy to the cause. He proved instrumental in rallying celebrities at home and abroad, forging political connections, and organizing fundraisers. Belafonte also devoted large sums of his own money, heavily insuring King’s life and bailing out activists arrested during sit-ins and protest marches. When King was jailed in Birmingham, it was Belafonte who led the charge to raise the fifty-thousand-dollar bail. His efforts earned him a place on the board of directors of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Over the years of their joint involvement, Belafonte and King developed a close personal friendship, which lasted until King’s death in 1968.

After the civil rights movement began to wane, Belafonte shifted his focus to Africa. His appointment by President John F. Kennedy as a cultural adviser to the Peace Corps in 1961 had first sparked his interest, and through the coming decades he devoted boundless energy to campaigns for development aid and human rights. Chief among these was the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, which consumed Belafonte in the 1980s. In 1987 the United Nations Children’s Fund recognized his efforts and made him a goodwill ambassador, a position he has used to draw attention to famine, war, and the plague of AIDS.

Belafonte’s activism often drew on his connections in the entertainment world. For a week in 1968 he guest hosted Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, turning light entertainment into politics with guests like Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In his anti-apartheid efforts, he worked to introduce exiled South African musicians like Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela to listeners in the United States, and in 1988 he released Paradise in Gazankulu, his own album of South African-themed music. In 1985 Belafonte took a similar approach to relief efforts for famine in Ethiopia. Inspired by pop stars from the British Isles who launched Band Aid in 1984, Belafonte was the driving force behind “We Are the World,” an American effort in 1985 which raised over seventy million dollars in aid for Ethiopian famine victims.

Perhaps because his political and show-business interests have always been so entwined, Belafonte has never been forced to choose between the two. In the thick of the anti-apartheid movement, he resumed acting and found time to mount major concert tours. Earlier, at the height of the civil rights movement, Belafonte had begun what may be his most ambitious musical project, a series of records then called Anthology of Negro Folk Music. He wanted to showcase the richness and variety of the African American musical tradition with a collection that included work songs and spirituals, minstrel tunes and lullabies. But when recording was completed in 1971, the backers of the project, RCA and Reader’s Digest, pulled out, citing lack of commercial prospects, and the tapes languished in RCA vaults. They were finally released in 2001 as The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music and were nominated for a Grammy Award for best historical album.

The release of Long Road topped off a flurry of show-business activity by Belafonte in the 1990s. In 1995 he starred in the independent film White Man’s Burden and the following year played gangster Seldom Seen in Robert Altman’s Kansas City. Plans were afoot for Belafonte to produce yet another picture with an unusual take on race—a film version of Amos’n Andy, the long-running radio and television show that was criticized by the NAACP, among others, for perpetuating racist stereotypes, but which nonetheless enjoyed a substantial audience among African Americans from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Belafonte has also continued to play sold-out shows and has campaigned to raise awareness about prostate health among African American men and the need to curb gang violence. He provoked controversy, however, in a much-criticized 15 October 2002 appearance on CNN’s Larry King Live, when he refused to apologize for his earlier denunciation of Secretary of State COLIN POWELL as President George W. Bush’s “house slave.” Powell called Belafonte’s comments “an unfortunate throwback to another time and another place,” but the entertainer insisted that the secretary of state was a “sell-out.” Asked by King if the same term applied to CONDOLEEZZA RICE, Bush’s national security advisor, Belafonte replied, “Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Even more so.”

In the final analysis, Harry Belafonte remains difficult to pigeonhole either as an activist or as an entertainer, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Whether his greatest achievements have taken place onstage or off remains open to debate; his success in both arenas does not.

BELL, COOL PAPA

(17 May 1903–7 Mar. 1991), baseball player and manager, was born James Thomas Bell in Starkville, Mississippi, the son of Jonas Bell, a farmer whose father was an American Indian, and Mary Nichols. James had six siblings, two sisters and four brothers, and said that his mother taught him to be an honest, clean-living man who cared about other people.

He was reared in the Oktoc community near Starkville and began playing pickup games on the local sandlots while attending the local school through the eighth grade. There was neither a high school nor gainful employment in his hometown, so in 1920 Bell moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to live with his older brothers and attend high school, completing two years before ending his formal education. Soon after arriving in St. Louis, he met Clarabelle Thompson, and they were married in September 1920. The marriage lasted seventy years but was childless.

The young husband worked for the Independent Packing Company and played baseball with the semi-pro Compton Hill Cubs and the East St. Louis Cubs. At this stage of his career, Bell was a promising, left-handed pitcher with a varied repertoire of pitches that included a screwball, a curve, and a knuckleball. He was scouted and signed in 1922 by the St. Louis Stars of the Negro National League for ninety dollars a month. In his rookie season he acquired the colorful nickname by which he was known forever afterward. In a crucial game situation, Bell struck out the great Oscar Charleston, the best hitter in the Negro Leagues at the time and a future Hall-of-Famer. Manager Bill Gatewood, impressed by the youngster’s poise under pressure, applied the appellation “Cool Papa” to his protégé, and the name stuck.

In 1924, after an arm injury ended his pitching career, Cool Papa became a full-time outfielder, where he could use his incredible speed to the greatest advantage. He played a shallow center field and routinely demonstrated extraordinary range in the field by making sensational catches. A natural right-handed batter, he learned to switch-hit to better utilize his speed from the left side of the batter’s box. He was so fast going from the batter’s box to first base that if he bunted and the ball bounced twice, the fielders would say “Put it in your pocket” because there was no chance to get him out. When JACKIE ROBINSON played in the Negro Leagues with the Kansas City Monarchs, he was a shortstop, but knowledgeable observers knew that it was not his best position and that if he wanted to break into the major leagues he would have to change position. To demonstrate this to him, Cool Papa would hit ground balls to Robinson’s right and beat the throw to first base.

Cool Papa Bell, the fastest man in baseball, could round the bases in 12 seconds. National Baseball Hall of Fame

Once clocked at twelve seconds circling the bases, Cool Papa is recognized as the fastest player ever to play the game. He was so swift that some players said that it looked like his feet did not even touch the ground. His incredible speed also made him an omnipresent base-stealing threat, and in 1933 he was credited with 175 stolen bases in a 200–game season. He sometimes took two bases on a bunt or scored from second base on a sacrifice fly.

While his speed was real, it was often exaggerated. SATCHEL PAIGE, the legendary pitcher and a skilled raconteur known to embellish stories, said that Cool Papa was so fast that he could turn off the light switch and be in bed with the covers pulled up to his chin before the room got dark. Cool Papa confirmed that he had demonstrated this skill but added a detail that Paige had conveniently omitted: the light switch was faulty, which resulted in a delay before the light went out. In later years, the boxer MUHAMMAD ALI claimed for himself the ability to perform the same feat.

During his ten seasons in St. Louis, Bell consistently batted well over .300, with his best year coming in 1926, when he batted .362, with fifteen home runs and twenty-three stolen bases in the eighty-five-game season; moreover, the Stars won Negro National League pennants in 1928, 1930, and 1931. Following the 1931 season, both the franchise and the league fell victim to the economics of the Great Depression and disbanded. With the demise of the league, the 1932 season was one of chaos, as players scrambled to earn a spot on the roster of a surviving solvent franchise. Cool Papa was no exception and played with three teams, the Detroit Wolves, the Kansas City Monarchs, and the Homestead Grays.

In 1933 he joined owner Gus Greenlee’s Pittsburgh Crawfords, and for the next four years Bell continued to bat over .300 each season, as the Crawfords contended for the championship of the new Negro National League. In 1933 Greenlee, who was league president, claimed a disputed championship, and in 1934 the team again finished strong but missed the play-offs. In 1935 the Crawfords defeated the New York Cubans in a seven-game play-off for an undisputed title, and they repeated as champions in 1936. That season was interrupted when the league sent a select All-Star team to participate in the Denver Post Tournament, which they won with ease, as Bell batted .450 and topped the tournament in stolen bases. During each of his four seasons with the Crawfords, Bell was voted to start in the East-West All-Star game, where he always played centerfield and batted leadoff.

In 1937 Cool Papa left the Crawfords and spent the next five years in Latin America. In his first season he helped dictator Rafael Trujillo’s All-Stars win the 1937 championship in the Dominican Republic. Bell later said that the players were told that if they didn’t win the championship they would be executed. In 1938 he went to Mexico, where he remained for the next four seasons. After two years with Tampico, where he batted .356 and .354, he split the 1940 season between Torreon and Veracruz and had his best year in Mexico, winning the Triple Crown with a batting average of .437, twelve home runs, and seventy-nine RBI. He also led in hits with 167 and in triples with fifteen in the eighty-nine-game season, as Veracruz won the pennant. Cool Papa played with Monterrey in 1941 and ended with a .367 career batting average in the Mexican League.

During his long baseball career, Cool Papa supplemented his summer income by playing in integrated winter baseball leagues in California and Cuba. In California he had a .368 career batting average for a dozen intermittent winters between 1922 and 1945, and in 1933–1934 he led the league with a .362 batting average. In 1928 he played the first of three consecutive winters in Cuba with Cienfuegas and batted .325, while leading the league in home runs, stolen bases, and runs scored. He returned to Cuba for the 1940–1941 season, playing with Almendares in his final season, to finish with a career .292 batting average in the Cuban winter league.

In 1942 Cool Papa returned to the United States, joined the Chicago American Giants of the Negro American League, and began a string of three additional appearances in the East-West All-Star game. In 1943 he joined the Homestead Grays, the dominant team in the Negro National League, and batted .356 as the Grays won the pennant and defeated the Negro American League’s Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro World Series. In 1944 he batted .373, and the Grays defended their Negro League championship by defeating Birmingham in a Negro World Series rematch. The following year he batted .302, as the Grays won another pennant but were swept in the World Series by the Cleveland Buckeyes. Cool Papa’s last year with the Grays was 1946, during which he batted .396. He later said that he had won the batting title that year but “gave” it to Monte Irvin to enhance his chances to play in the major leagues.

For the next four years Cool Papa was a playing manager with lesser teams, the Detroit Senators in 1947 and the Kansas City Stars, a farm team for the Monarchs, from 1948 through 1950. He finished his Negro Leagues career with a lifetime .341 batting average and also had a .391 average in exhibition games against major leaguers. In 1951 he became a part-time scout for the St. Louis Browns, until the franchise moved to Baltimore in 1954. After leaving baseball he worked as a custodian and night security officer at St. Louis City Hall until he retired around 1970.

In 1974 Cool Papa Bell was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He died of a heart attack in St. Louis, Missouri in 1991, only a few weeks after his beloved wife, Clarabelle.

For a quarter-century, Bell showcased his exceptional speed and all-around excellence on baseball diamonds throughout the United States and Latin America, demonstrating that African Americans could compete successfully against white athletes. His career contributed significantly to the eventual elimination of baseball’s color line.

BELL, JAMES MADISON

(3 Apr. 1826–1902), abolitionist, poet, and lecturer, was born in Gallipolis, Ohio. His parents’ identities are unknown. At age sixteen, in 1842, he moved to Cincinnati. While there, in 1848, he married Louisiana Sanderlin (or Sanderline), with whom he had several children, and also learned the plastering trade from his brother-in-law, George Knight. Bell worked as a plasterer during the day and attended Cincinnati High School for Colored People at night. Founded in 1844 by Reverend Hiram S. Gilmore, the school had a connection to Oberlin College and was said to have given impetus to the sentiment found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the cause of human freedom. Through his studies Bell was thoroughly indoctrinated into the principles of radical abolitionism.

In 1854 Bell moved his family to Chatham, Ontario, Canada, feeling that he would be freer under the authority of the British government. While continuing his trade he became involved in political activities and met and befriended John Brown. As his ally, Bell raised money and enlisted men to support Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. He probably was one of the last people to see Brown before the raid took place.

In 1860 Bell moved to San Francisco, California, where he became involved in the fight to ensure equal education for local black children. He also took a leading and active role at various state conventions protesting laws that discriminated against blacks. At one such convention, held by ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, Bell addressed the subjects of the role of the church and its relationship to the state. He was an active member and steward of the AME Church in San Francisco. Although far removed from the battlefield, Bell worked as a crusader for abolition during the Civil War. Bell wrote some of his most rousing poems while living in California, including “Emancipation,” “Lincoln,” and “The Dawn of Freedom.” His works were long, comprising as many as 950 lines, and were meant to be recited. Although Bell is known as a poet today, poetry came second to his activism during his lifetime.

Bell left California and moved to Toledo, Ohio, in 1865. He arrived at the time of emancipation and began to work with the freedmen, focusing his energies on the struggle for civil rights. Bell later went to Canada to visit his family and eventually moved them to Toledo. He continued to be active in the AME Church, serving as superintendent of the Sunday school and as a lay worker. Active briefly in Republican politics, Bell was elected as a delegate from Lucas County to the state convention and as a delegate at large from the state of Ohio to the Republican National Convention in both 1868 and 1872. He was a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of the nomination of Ulysses S. Grant at both conventions.

Bell traveled frequently, espousing doctrines on human liberty, enjoining blacks to use their freedom responsibly, and instructing freedmen in their political and civic duties, often reciting his long poems as the method of instruction. Bishop B. W. Arnett, a friend who worked with Bell in the church, often traveled with him as he gave public readings of his poetry and lectured on educational and legal rights for black Americans. According to Arnett, no one instructed people better or had a more imposing manner than Bell. “Many a young man who was not an honor to his race and a blessing to his people received the first spark of inspiration for true greatness” while listening to Bell’s poems (Arnett, 10).

Bell addressed many issues in his poems, including slavery, war, emancipation, and Reconstruction, often referencing historical figures, such as John Brown, or events of historical significance. Although he tended to vary the lengths of stanzas, his poems have been described as “almost identical and dull” and “without any distinctive literary quality.” Many of Bell’s poems were published individually, though they were eventually compiled in Arnett’s The Poetical Works of James Madison Bell (1901).

One of Bell’s long poems, “The Progress of Liberty” (1866), was written for the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Its 850 lines review the Civil War, the triumph of liberty, and the martyrdom of Abraham Lincoln:

The bondsman’s gloomy night has passed;

The slavery of this land is dead;

No tyrant’s power, however vast,

Can wake it from its gory bed.

It continues,

Though slavery’s dead, yet there remains

A work for those from whom the chains

Today are falling one by one;

Nor should they deem their labor done,

Nor shrink the task, however hard,

While it insures a great reward,

And bids them on its might depend

For perfect freedom in the end.

Bell also used poems to encourage blacks to be model citizens:

In this yourselves must take the lead;

You must yourselves first elevate;

Till then the world will ne’er concede

Your claims to manhood’s high estate.

In addition, Bell used his works—and the reading of them—to denounce laws and policies that he deemed to be detrimental to blacks. He is said to have triumphed in his “daring, vigorous satire of President Andrew Johnson” in the poem “Modern Moses, or ‘My Policy’ Man” (1867). Called Bell’s “most inventive and readable work” because of its “shrewd humor and irony, concrete topicality and personal emotion” (Sherman, 192), the poem ridicules Johnson from a personal as well as political perspective. It portrays the president as a Judas who betrayed the people by vetoing the Freedman’s Bureau Bill:

Mark when that bill for the supply

Of starving millions met his eye;

A breadless, clotheless, houseless throng.

Thus rendered by his nation’s wrong.

Does he the bill in haste receive

And sign, their sufF rings to relieve?

He goes on:

Then he in their deep hour of grief,

Did them relieve and kept his vow;

When with a dark and wrinkled brow,

He stamped his veto on their prayer,

And doomed the suppliants to despair.

In From Slavery to Freedom, historian JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN argues that the overwhelming acclaim of the poet PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR probably overshadowed the works of Bell and other black poets of his era. If not for Dunbar’s fame, Bell might have been more highly regarded as a poet during an age that was critical to the political, social, and cultural development of black Americans.

BELL, PHILIP ALEXANDER

(1808?–25 April 1889), newspaper editor and civil rights activist, was born in New York City, the third of three children, to Alexander Bell and Letty (maiden name unknown). A stutterer, the young Bell turned to writing to express himself, honing his natural talents under the teachers at New York City’s African Free School, an institution respected for such alumni as Shakespearean actor IRA ALDRIDGE and Episcopal priest and pan-Africanist ALEXANDER CRUMMELL. After finishing school, Bell set out to make journalism his life’s work, hoping to use the press to advance black interests.

On 25 January 1831 Bell attended a meeting of the Colored Citizens of New York at the Boyer Lodge Room. The meeting’s attendees rejected the idea of black colonization in Liberia, West Africa—a plan of the American Colonization Society—saying that blacks absolutely claimed “this country, the place of our birth, and not Africa, as our mother country.” A few months later, Bell was one of New York’s representatives at the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, held in Philadelphia in 1831, to discuss colonization, the abolition of slavery, and ways of achieving equality for “every freeman born in this country.” Bell attended a second Philadelphia convention in 1832, which revisited the previous year’s proposal, the resettlement of ex-slaves in Canada, instead of Liberia. Throughout his journalistic career, Bell regularly attended similar conventions as a delegate from New York or, later, from San Francisco.

Philip A. Bell, newspaper publisher, campaigned actively for civil rights and workers’ rights on both the East and West Coast. Schomburg Center

As an activist and writer in 1837, Bell joined with Charles Ray to establish New York’s Weekly Advocate, soon renamed the Colored American. Bell used the paper to underscore his basic themes: opposition to colonization, an end to slavery, and equal rights. After the paper’s demise, he articulated the same themes in the Philadelphia Elevator and the New York Anglo-African. Not content with just writing his message, Bell also directed the New York Intelligence Office, where he helped escaped slaves to find work or to flee to Canada.

During the 1840s and 1850s, Bell had established himself as an important newspaperman and an advocate for East Coast blacks. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, California was undergoing transformation from a Mexican province to a state. Its new status encouraged free blacks and ex-slaves to migrate there, as did Bell’s friend, the activist and future judge MIFFLIN WISTAR GIBBS. Sometime in 1859 or early 1860 Bell decided to move to San Francisco, California, arriving in 1860.

Almost immediately, Bell joined the black community’s efforts to eliminate California state statutes that prevented blacks from testifying and acting as witnesses in court cases involving whites. To end such laws and to provide a voice for the community, Bell and Peter Anderson established the San Francisco Pacific Appeal in 1862. In one of his earliest editorials, Bell wrote, “Our paper is devoted to the interests of the Colored People of California and to their moral, intellectual and political advancement [and]. . . will advocate their rights, their claims to humanity and justice; it will oppose the wrongs inflected on them.” In another editorial, Bell assessed African American life:

Exiles in our native land, aliens in the country that gave us birth, outlaws for no crime, proscribed without offence, amenable to the laws without being protected by them, thus we stand, innocent victims of an unholy and unrighteous prejudice—truly our condition is most deplorable.

(Pacific Appeal, 12 April 1862)

Bell and Anderson soon disagreed over editorial policy, forcing Bell to quit the paper in July 1862. Bell remained in the newspaper business, however, as an agent for New York’s Anglo-African, while continuing his effort to overturn the discriminatory testimony and witness laws. His struggle proved successful in March 1863, when Governor Leland Stanford signed a measure repealing these laws. For Bell, however, the struggle for rights did not stop there; African Americans needed equal education and the right to vote. To help achieve those ends, Bell established his own newspaper, the Elevator, in April 1865. Working in conjunction with the Colored State Convention of 1865, Bell and the delegates sent a petition to the California State Legislature requesting voting rights. When the California state senate tabled it, Bell responded, “We will continue to repeal slander and denounce injustice and oppression . . . and fearlessly contend for our inalienable rights.” In other Elevator editorials, Bell explained community goals succinctly:

To “set us right before the law.”

To “give us the common right of citizens—in political franchise, in the school system.”

To “give us in common with the other races, civil liberties” and “equal advantages with them in the development of common resources of the country.”

To end the United States as exclusively a “white man’s country.”

To provide “equal laws for our safeguard and protection.”

Bell spent considerable time from 1865 to 1867 working to gain the right to vote for African Americans, but then a new challenge emerged. For many years, black children in San Francisco had attended a separate elementary school, staffed by black teachers, in a building located on Broadway Street. In 1868 the San Francisco school board decided to close the school’s Broadway building, replace its black teachers, and move the students to an inferior facility at the old Greenwich Street School. Bell responded that black teachers “feel an interest in the education of their race,” and parents showed their resolve by boycotting the school. Of 209 school-age children, only twenty attended the Greenwich School. This equal-education fight dragged on for several years, until Bell convinced superintendent of schools James Denman to open a new school on Taylor and Vallejo streets. This much-improved facility, however, still did not satisfy Bell or the black parents. They pushed to have children attend the regular grammar and high schools in an integrated environment. Finally in 1875 the school board acquiesced, and both white and black students began attending the same schools.

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING