In ideal circumstances, the human body flows in a state of strut. A jauntiness, an ease. A response to the rhythms that animate the earth. To strut is to reflect the graceful rotation of the planet in one’s breath, in one’s step, in the pace and melody of one’s speech, in one’s swerve and laughter. I strut, therefore I am.
Strut is the body in motion, occupying, manipulating, and moving through space. Strutting requires freedom, the liberty to flex and stretch. Lately, I have been habitually watching a short film by Andrew Margetson. His camera follows the brilliant dancer Lil Buck as he floats, pops, and glides through the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Dancers are often so supple they can’t help themselves, walking with a distinctive grace that signals their talent. Lil Buck doesn’t walk like that. He enters the museum as any ordinary mortal would. He is lithe and trim, to be sure, but with an unassuming gait that hides his kinetic genius. Then the music begins and he leans into the air, his ankles as improbably bent as a hapless guard defending LeBron James. His voice-over narration introduces his style as a blend of hip-hop and ballet. “As performing artists, as dancers,” he explains, “we see everything as art.” Up the escalator and through a light-filled space adorned with paintings, Lil Buck maneuvers his undeniably dark body, pirouetting, altering time and gently challenging gravity. He bends to the point of crumpling, only to reassemble, restoring his smooth musculature as if by magic.
The beauty of the dance is a timely distraction. Lil Buck moves adroitly in a space where figures like his have seldom been regarded with respect or delight. His sublime whirl helps me forget, however briefly, that darkness in a body complicates even the most basic stroll, reduces an inalienable right to an elusive privilege.
The unbound black body is profoundly inconvenient. The dark muscles, the bones underneath, the vulnerable organs, and the sheltering skin—each comprises a segment on the map of a plundered continent, each is redolent of conquest and empire. Four centuries ago, our ancestors were marched at gunpoint across sand and savannah, far from their home villages to near-death and misery in the confinement castles of the African west coast. Those who stumbled and lost their footing never made it even that far. Inevitably, history complicates our strut.
Then as now, locomotion sometimes can require treading the slender border between life and death. Lately, headlines remind us of all the same and different ways a black body can collide with its inconvenience. Breathing. Walking. Waiting to cross at the light. Using a golf club as a cane while crossing a Seattle intersection. Heading home while carrying candy and a can of ice tea. Any of these can be seen as unforgivable trespass, alien intrusion on ground that must be defended. The wrongful arrests; the point-blank executions; the gunshots to the back; the militarized police responses; the illuminating silence of white self-styled liberals and, most critical, the paucity of convictions all point to the same existential question: How can we strut in a strange land?
Have I thought of the body as sanctuary?
—LIA PURPURA, “ON LOOKING”
While my contemplation of strut respects the question of how to live in a black body, I am more interested in how to escape my own imprisoning concept of that body. I don’t believe the black body has any more potential than any other kind, but I am concerned with the extent to which its capabilities are suppressed by one’s own internalized limitations. Racism and its accompanying cruelties have shaped me to police myself, to restrict my own movement through spaces. And by spaces I mean both actual and metaphorical. The great Resister Carter G. Woodson warned, “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action.” He might have added, Independent thinking seldom goes undisciplined. Some black people use this fact to justify subjecting their children to corporal punishment. They contend, incorrectly, “I beat my son so the police won’t.” On any given day, how often do I manage to keep oppressive thinking out of my head? Am I ever free from an imagined white gaze? How often do I succumb to beating myself?
If he should Runaway, he must wear a Pothook about his neck, and if that won’t bring him under, he must wear Iron spaneals upon his Legs till you are pretty sure he will be orderly; for as he is my slave he must and shall be obedient, but if he be orderly use him kindly.
—JOSEPH BALL, COLONIAL PLANTER
When my wife and I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture during its opening weekend, immense crowds made it impossible to linger before any of the exhibits. Still, it was easy to make connections between past and present even while moving rapidly. Easy, for example, to note the painful irony of tolerating forced, elbow-to-elbow intimacy with strangers in underground passageways while looking at displays about the cramped horrors of the Middle Passage. Easy to look at shackles and think of Alton Sterling, executed by police a few months earlier while bound and subdued in Baton Rouge, or Kajieme Powell: after killing the mentally disturbed man, St. Louis police officers rolled his corpse over and cuffed his inert wrists behind his lifeless back, as if mocking that whole freedom-in-death thing. Similarly, it was hard to look at images of Africans chained in the holds of storm-tossed trading vessels and not think of Freddie Gray, shackled in the back of a speeding Baltimore police van, on a rough ride to his death. Hard to avoid the unsightly realization that rusted iron manacles from the mid-1800s, forged specifically to hold a black body in place, still look sturdy enough to do the job.
I could find little information on the “spaneals” Joseph Ball referred to in his letter. He may have been referring to an iron version of spancels, which, according to the dictionary, are noosed ropes used “to hobble an animal, especially a horse or cow.” Owner of the Epping Forest plantation in colonial Virginia, Ball enslaved and traded human beings from Africa until his death in the early eighteenth century. His nephew, George Washington, was also obsessed with policing the mobility of his enslaved. In Henry Wiencek’s book An Imperfect God, the historian writes that the man who would become president “created a new problem he called ‘night walking’—men and women going out at night to visit family members. A man named Boson, who was twice caught running away in 1760, may actually have been night walking to visit his lover when he was caught.” Yet, do I marvel at the complexity of such a strut, the strategy and fortitude employed in traveling great distances, avoiding paddy rollers under cover of darkness, indulging hurried kisses and urgent embraces before rushing back to begin the day’s drudgery.
Ball and Washington were long dead by 1849, when Supreme Court chief justice Roger B. Taney weighed in on the intricacies of strut. In his dissent in the Passenger Cases, he wrote, “We are all citizens of the United States; and as members of the same community, must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States.” The court’s decision in Passenger struck down laws in New York and Massachusetts involving the collection of head taxes on incoming immigrants. But, as Kunal M. Parker points out in The Cambridge History of Law in America, “Beneath this constitutional debate lay the explosive question of whether free blacks were part of the community of U.S. citizens and, as such, whether they possessed the right to travel throughout national territory.” Eight years later, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Taney would explain exactly whom he meant by “we.” He declared that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” casting Scott’s desire to strut to free territory as an affront that the South would consider grounds for war.
Their debasement reaffirmed by Taney’s court, both the enslaved and those tethered by subtler bonds continued to rely on culture for solace and even transcendence, however brief. In jubas, ring shouts, and cakewalks, black bodies turned and pranced with rhythm, delicacy, and commitment, as if they could strut all the way to Africa or, failing that, a territory where slavery had been banned. As they stepped and whirled through war and its aftermath, as the contours of their collective strut distorted and bent under the ignorant gaze of their captors, as movements that began as parody became subjects of parody themselves (blackface minstrelsy), their motions must have acquired a melancholy knowingness. Yet, they pressed on, dipping, wheeling, and risking delight.
With the Southern Rebellion ostensibly resolved in their favor, the newly “emancipated” were no doubt inclined to waltz directly from the fields and quarters to the beckoning world, the postbellum precursor to dancing in the streets. But in their initial jubilation they struggled to withstand a new reality in which they stood unshackled but remained unfree. That condition was already familiar to those who had earlier slipped through the cracks the Rebellion had created. Desperate and with few friends or resources, they followed the conquering footsteps of the Union Army. “Neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking them,” DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. “In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.” Blackness to a ragged thinness beat shines nonetheless: in the midst of filth and misery, the refugees shared sustenance and intelligence, forming new alliances of bond and blood. They made a way out of no way, just as their ancestors had done in the sweltering bellies of Jesus, Amistad, Henrietta Marie, and the other vessels that had dragged them, battered and tormented, to the looming horrors of a strange new hell.
Sometimes, I picture in my mind a crimson thread originating in Africa, unspooling alongside a young boy stumbling and choking as his coffle yanks him toward the sea. The thread extends apparently without end, through the bloody spill of centuries and across fruited plains and fetid plantations, trailing the double-time stomp of a black Union soldier and continuing to unspool beside the swollen ankles of a church matron marching her way from Selma to Montgomery. I could see the thread snaking along Pennsylvania Avenue during Barack and Michelle Obama’s stately walk to the White House. It’s a spirit-lifting fantasy of black endurance and triumph, a useful antidote for the Weary Blues. I imagine the black refugees that DuBois wrote about might have been similarly revived by the sight of dark-skinned soldiers garbed in Union blue, counting off cadences while picking them up and putting them down. Just such a scene unfolds in Glory, the Oscar-winning 1989 film about the mostly black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. A group of black children scurry across a yard and line up at a picket fence to gape and grin at the regiment as they proceed down a Southern lane, rifles poised on their shoulders. With fifes and drums providing accompaniment, Morgan Freeman, portraying Sgt. Maj. John Rawlins, pauses to smile kindly at the children. “That’s right,” he tells them. “Ain’t no dream. We run away slaves but we come back fighting men.” The children, bathed in a sepia glow, stare in awe at the soldiers’ retreating ranks. In the background, a choir sings soaring angelic notes.
By the end of the Rebellion, nearly 200,000 black men had helped defend the Republic against the Confederate traitors (179,000 in the Union Army, 19,000 in the Navy). At the same time, black women like Harriet Tubman engaged in a stealthier strut, risking their lives to assist the war effort by gathering intelligence behind enemy lines. While their deeds were inspiring to their fellow black people, most whites had quite a different reaction. For them, the notion of armed, marching Negroes was the stomach-churning stuff of nightmares, frequently involving the violation of white women and the pillaging of land claimed by whites. Instead of DuBois’s starved and naked horde, they saw a weaponized and rapacious swarm, lockstep in bodacious strut. Marching—unarmed—would indeed become a favorite method for nonviolently protesting white “supremacy,” especially as black activists and their allies came to rely increasingly on civil disobedience in the century to come. In the meantime, whites set about repairing their broken commonwealth. After a brief flirtation with genuine reform, they rushed to reconcile with their former enemies, easily finding common ground in a seductive compulsion to confine the black body to its proper place—geographical, social, and metaphorical. The black strut developed a dispiriting pattern: two steps forward, one step back.
There’s a certain
amount of traveling
in a dream deferred.
—LANGSTON HUGHES, “SAME IN BLUES”
After the Hayes-Tilden compromise killed Reconstruction in 1877, the white American obsession with breaking people and things found release in the form of ritualized murders that involved torture, mutilation, burning, and communal immersion in a ceremony of sexual and religious fervor. Lynchings, as they came to be known, were a national pastime, like county fairs, Sunday school, and spectator sports. They continued in their principal form well into the 1950s, with occasional outbreaks occurring even now. The Equal Justice Initiative’s recent comprehensive study found evidence of 4,075 lynchings of African Americans in the South between 1877 and 1950. That figure doesn’t include the murders of Emmett Till in 1955 and James Byrd Jr. in 1998, to say nothing of the numberless killings that took place above the Mason-Dixon line during the same period. Perversely democratic, these blood rites claimed a variety of sacrificial victims, including children, expectant mothers, and fetuses ripped from wombs and nailed to trees. Not surprisingly, soldiers in uniform, whose sheer effrontery provoked such irrational horror, were often favorite targets.
While many lynchings focused on one or a small number of victims, the compulsion occasionally erupted with such orgiastic excess that it engulfed entire communities. The East St. Louis massacre of 1917 provides an appalling example. The factory town on the border between Illinois and Missouri had become contested ground after nearly twelve thousand blacks migrated there from the violent, unrepentant South. Conflicts between white workers and black newcomers blew up on July 2. A group of black people, fearing for their lives and standing their ground, returned fire at a car carrying two white men. The men were police officers, and both died instantly. Soon a mob of whites rampaged through the city, focusing their rage on “Black Valley,” the African American community. Carlos F. Hurd, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, published a chilling eyewitness account of small, leaderless groups, moving with “horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun” as they set about “destroying the life of every discoverable black man.” Their methods included stoning, bludgeoning, shooting, hanging, and burning victims alive. “The sheds in the rear of Negroes’ houses, which were themselves in the rear of the main buildings on Fourth Street, had been ignited to drive out the Negro occupants of the houses,” Hurd wrote. “And the slayers were waiting for them to come out. It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered. A moment before I arrived, one Negro had taken the desperate chance of coming out, and the rattle of revolver shots, which I heard as I approached the corner, was followed by the cry, ‘They’ve got him!’”
Official reports listed thirty-nine dead black people, but others put the number much higher. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat’s banner headline declared, “100 Negroes Shot, Burned, Clubbed to Death in E. St. Louis Race War.” Six thousand black residents fled, rushing headlong over the two bridges stretching across the Mississippi River and into St. Louis.
Forty-eight hours after the slaughter, Ida B. Wells arrived at the scene via train and disembarked with a purposeful strut. As president of the Chicago-based Negro Fellowship League (which included criminal injustice and lynching among its concerns), she had raised funds for the trip and set out to investigate the atrocity firsthand. She would have been in her midfifties then, a renowned antilynching activist and seasoned warrior in the battle for justice. Because of her superhuman qualities, I’ve always thought there should be an action figure based on her. She had survived being violently tossed from a segregated Southern train, biting one of her assailants, and battling the railroad in court. She had narrowly escaped death at the hands of enraged whites who burned her Memphis newspaper office and printing press to the ground. I can see her on the platform in East St. Louis, a determined beauty in a fine dress, a string of pearls, and her signature upsweep hairstyle. She holds her head high, eyes missing no detail as she makes her way to the scenes of the crime. “No one molested me in my walk from the station to the City Hall, although I did not see a single colored person until I reached the City Hall building,” she later reported. A few feet away, black bodies lay smoldering in the wreckage of the barbarity, in mounds of charred viscera and bones, half-sunk in the rubble of their ruined homes and businesses, and submerged in hastily dug mass graves.
Wells joined forces with a Red Cross volunteer, assisting refugees as they gathered whatever belongings they had left. They told her their stories while traveling back and forth to St. Louis in a truck with an armed soldier at each end. Along with Hurd’s report in the Post-Dispatch and DuBois’s twenty-four-page report in The Crisis, Wells’s oral histories remain some of the most reliable documentation of the massacre. Working tirelessly (so much so that she forgot to eat or drink), she spent the night in a municipal lodging house on the Missouri side. The place was packed with hundreds of displaced individuals and families.
Every which way we turned there were women and children and men, dazed over the thing that had come to them and unable to tell what it was all about. Most of them had left clothes and homes behind, thankful to have saved their lives and those of their families. Some of them had not located relatives and did not know whether the mob or fire had taken them. They lined the streets or were standing out on the grassy banks of the lawns that surround the City Hall, or stood in groups discussing their experiences. Red Cross and charitable workers gave them food to eat, and the city the place to sleep in the city lodging house, and some of them had clothing which they were issuing to these people who had suddenly been robbed of everything except what they stood in.
Back in Chicago, Wells and her allies used her report to challenge the governor of Illinois to do something, anything on behalf of the murdered and exiled. “No one has any feeling of certainty that anything will be done, either to punish the rioters or to make the lives and property of Negroes more secure permanently,” she wrote. Wells went on to press her case with the federal government. Her committee’s letter to Congress read in part, “The riot was no sudden outburst of passion. It was a combination of a publicly declared determination on the part of white laborers to drive colored laborers from work or kill them. There was no provocation by acts of lawless blacks, no drunkenness on the part of the whites—nothing but the deadly vindictiveness of labor trouble accentuated by hatred toward the Negro.”
The bloodbath drew the condemnation of other black activists as well, including Marcus Garvey. The head of the United Negro Improvement Association spoke passionately at a public forum in New York. “I can hardly see why black men should be debarred from going where they choose in the land of their birth,” he said.
To go where one chooses was certainly an animating impulse for African Americans who abandoned places like Louisiana and Mississippi (where Ida B. Wells was born in slavery) for towns like East St. Louis, lured by fantastic tales told by relatives, the inventive lobbying of Pullman porters, and the promise of employers offering higher wages than a sharecropper ever dreamed of. But the Great Migration, its own kind of epic strut, was not without dead ends and hard reversals. Wells told the Chicago Herald that the labor unions of the North and the planters of the South were working together, using murder, arson, and intimidation “to drive the Negro back where he came from.” Two steps forward, one step back.
Like Wells, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also pressed for congressional action, including an antilynching bill. In addition, on July 28, 1917, it staged the largest civic demonstration of its kind ever held before in the United States, a breakthrough display of collective strut. Ten thousand strong, black people marched along New York City’s Fifth Avenue in a parade of protest. Men dressed in dark suits and straw boaters, women and children in white. Their expressions solemn and unyielding, they blazed a trail through public space, raising banners that announced their outright dissatisfaction.
MR. PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY?
MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN?
YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.
Unlike the iconic mid-century marches that would follow, multiracial assemblies in which the heartfelt harmonizing of spirituals, civil rights anthems, and folk tunes provided a rousing chorus, not a song was sung. With the East St. Louis butchery still so fresh that they could almost taste the ash, the marchers stepped resolutely across New York City and never said a mumbling word.
The only sound was muffled drums.
It is absolutely necessary to the safety of this Province, that all due care be taken to restrain … Negroes [from the] using or keeping of drums … which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.
—SLAVE CODE OF SOUTH CAROLINA (1740)
In choosing an instrument denied black people during their captivity, the NAACP was perhaps indulging in a bit of spiritual reclamation. The slaveholders’ fear of drums bordered on superstition. They believed them capable of stirring up frenzy so contagious and fast-spreading that it was nearly impossible to resist. Ironically, their suspicions were confirmed in the early twentieth century, when jazz became a national fascination. Like lynching, it frequently brought whites together to entertain appetites often scorned in polite society. Then, as now, whites’ interactions with African Americans and their culture reflected a perplexing conjunction of lust and disdain. Many white East St. Louisans, for example, may very well have been in their parlors listening with rapt attention to a recording of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” before going out to mutilate and murder their neighbors in nearby Black Valley.
Released less than two months before the massacre, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s rendition of the song quickly ruled. Written by black composer Shelton Brooks, the tune interests me because it was among the first to introduce the black strut to a mass “mainstream” audience. An all-white combo, the Originals made their name, as it were, copying the black music developed in and around the Storyville district of New Orleans. (A 1917 record cover proclaims them “The Creators of Jazz.”) The area’s most notable native son was Louis Armstrong, whose “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” (along with dozens of his other tunes) also became a jazz standard. My favorite of his many versions was recorded in 1953, fifteen years after Joe Louis made mincemeat out of Max Schmeling, twelve years after Navy crewman Dorie Miller grabbed an antiaircraft gun and helped blast dive-bombing Japanese out of the sky, and six years after Jackie Robinson disrupted baseball with his Negro League panache. In a French film called La route du bonheur (“The Road to Happiness”), Armstrong and his All Stars blew with their usual pizzazz.
The set is made up to look like a street lined with bars and clubs. “Armstrong” blinks from a marquee in the background as the band assembles and quickly starts to play. Meanwhile, vocalist Velma Middleton cavorts among them with a baby carriage. The performance is at once rollicking and polished, with Armstrong’s trademark trumpeting inducing in listeners an insistent urge to strut. Middleton’s charms are evident but she never opens her mouth to sing, thus becoming a dark body whose purpose is purely ornamental. (Although one could imagine her as a proxy for Lil Hardin, Armstrong’s second wife and, more important, the composer of the song). Watching the scene puts me at ease, as if my relatives at the family reunion suddenly sprang from their picnic blankets and revealed themselves as musical geniuses. Still, it’s impossible to dismiss the band’s mugging and what we might call extreme grinning, especially on the part of Armstrong and bassist Arvell Shaw. Radiating an unlikely exuberance that recalls the ruby-lipped caricatures on the sheet music of “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” they stretch their faces to such an extent that it becomes difficult to distinguish a grin from a grimace. Are they mugging to make their brilliance more acceptable? Or could they simply be caught up in the ecstasy of making art? Their elastic expressions raise the specter of a judgmental audience lurking just beyond the frame. Unlike my experience watching Lil Buck dance, I can’t watch Armstrong strut without phantom viewers threatening my enjoyment.
Lil Buck gets to narrate his own story, although it tellingly ends in the museum, where he has been alone the whole time. Our gaze supersedes that of the camera and perhaps even our double consciousness, enabling us to consider for a moment that our interaction with Lil Buck is unmediated. The noise of racially turbulent France fails to penetrate the museum’s walls.
Unlike Lil Buck and Louis Armstrong, most of us can’t trip the light fantastic or transform trumpet solos into miracles of sound and feeling. We are left to rely on others in the struggle to rouse our bodies and spirits into motion. When I stagger from my house still groggy with sleep, I turn to the generous gods of bop and groove to help me get my hustle on. I pop my earbuds in, press Play, and soon I’m walking down the street like Bernie Casey in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, my theme music guiding my feet. My playlist is subject to the twists and turns of my fickle tastes, but some tunes never lose their favored status:
“Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s
“Groove Yard” by the Montgomery Brothers
“Steppin’” by the World Saxophone Quartet
“The ‘In’ Crowd” by the Ramsey Lewis Trio
“The Sidewinder” by Lee Morgan
“Giant Steps” by John Coltrane
“Soulful Strut” by Young-Holt Unlimited
My playlist propels me through public spaces where my presence might be questioned or challenged. One August morning I was walking with earbuds firmly in place when someone called out to me. I turned and saw a white cop standing in the middle of the street, the sun glinting off his mirrored sunglasses. “You doing laps?” he asked. I told him I was.
“Which lap is this?”
“My second,” I replied.
He gave me a thumbs-up. I nodded, unsmiling, and went on my way. I couldn’t tell if he was just being friendly or letting me know that I was under surveillance. To ease my troubled mind, I pumped up the volume. I might even cautiously assert that I began to strut. In my case, that means walking with an exaggerated rhythm and rolling my shoulders as if they’re too muscular for my clothing to contain, a misguided idea of masculine motion that I picked up during my impressionable youth. Most people who come from where I’m from refer to it as a pimp stroll, a nod to its preeminence in popular 1970s films like The Mack and Hell Up in Harlem—although I’m pretty sure Zora Neale Hurston was describing the same action when she wrote about slick New Yorkers “percolating” down the avenue in 1942.
I’ve seen brothers in Baltimore and St. Louis rock their wheelchairs with a similar gangster lean, thereby converting the pimp stroll to a pimp roll.
You don’t have to be a man to strut, although the typical heterosexual male imagination usually mistakes any other version for a favorable response to catcalling, a hip-swinging invitation to “take things to the next level.” Freed from the default gaze, strutting is more likely to reflect the enchanting intelligence of human beings who know their power and maybe even revel in it. Janelle Monáe walking a tightrope while Big Boi chants encouragement? Strut. Ava DuVernay headed to the set of Selma? Strut. Valerie Jarrett strolling through the West Wing? Strut.
Sometimes we strut to reassure ourselves that we belong, that we have a right to the air we breathe and the space we occupy. At other times, we strut as if we could take back everything that has been lost. During a concert performance by New Orleans piano master Ellis Marsalis Jr., four of his sons, and bassist Roland Guerin, the players seem intent on reclaiming the decorum forbidden to Armstrong. As “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” begins, Branford Marsalis beams affectionately at his siblings. There is some moderate toe-tapping, knee-bending, and gentle head-nodding as the sextet methodically slays the song. But anything close to a smile is rare, and there is certainly nothing like the broad grins of Armstrong and Arvell Shaw. Their serious demeanor conveys confidence in their ability to let the music speak for itself. The audience yells enthusiastically but their gaze pales in importance to that of the benevolent yet exacting patriarch, overseeing his sons’ artistry from his perch at the keyboard.
Watching a clip of the performance, I think of Strivers Row, the Talented Tenth, New Negroes sharing their work in a Harlem brownstone. I resist the urge to visualize the musicians playing the tune at their own backyard cookout, dressed in jeans and sneakers while dinner sweats on the grill. It is perhaps a testament to their uncanny gifts that they manage to strut while mostly standing still.
Their ability to translate the raucous funk of Storyville while wearing neckties and stiff collars also testifies to the flexibility of strut, the way its boundaries shimmer and stretch. Offering further proof, Shelton Brooks has said he composed “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” with denizens of the urban underworld in mind. According to him, the city’s pimps and prostitutes held an annual event in which they discarded garb associated with their professions and dressed more like, well, an affluent jazz sextet. And even in the splendor of a concert hall we understand that “struttin’ with some barbecue” doesn’t mean taking a walk with a pulled-pork sandwich. Cab Calloway, keeper of the Book of Jive, defined “barbecue” as a girlfriend, a beauty. The song’s insinuation is closer to the musings of the eminent philosopher John Lee Hooker. “Boom, boom, boom, boom,” he sings. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love to see you strut.” Profane or proper, haughty or naughty, strutting can be roomy enough to accommodate a low-down, foot-stomping blues and the dignified signifying of the Marsalis fam.
Stony the road we trod …
—JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, “LIFT EV’RY VOICE AND SING”
I wonder what songs would have been on Elizabeth Eckford’s playlist? In 1957, four years after Armstrong and his All-Stars released “Struttin’” and decades before iPods, Eckford found herself walking alone to Little Rock Central High. Separated from the eight other black students who would join her in integrating the school, she was forced to maneuver through a crowd of furious white women and men. They spat poisonous curses at her with all the enthusiasm of monkeys hurling feces at gawking humans. One could say those rabid Arkansans were in a prison of their own making, trapped in a destructive mythology, prevented from exercising their full humanity. One could almost pity them, if not for the impact of their psychosis on the black people then living in Little Rock. They could not sleep, eat, learn, or walk according to their own desires. I have long been intrigued by the famous photograph of Eckford strutting carefully through that corridor of shrieking flesh, her expression stoic, her books held close to her chest, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses. I’m amazed that she stayed on her feet, reached her destination with no bop or groove to drown out that loathsome chorus.
In contrast to Little Rock, it was mostly men who pushed and shoved a young black woman named Shiya Nwanguma at a Louisville Trump rally in Kentucky in March 2016. Video footage shows her assailants (including white supremacist Matthew Heimbach and an elderly Korean War veteran) jostling her and cursing her while Trump hollers “Get out!” from the podium. Like the predators of Little Rock, the feverish Kentuckians can barely restrain themselves in their eagerness to inflict harm on a black woman’s body. Americans who recall the slave codes of yesterday may marvel, as I did, that those frenetic tribesmen assembled in the Louisville convention center were able “to give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes” without the assistance of a single drum. All they needed was the urging of a bully with a pulpit. In both incidents (nearly sixty years apart), a black woman walked a solitary path with her life in danger, her own deportment a dramatic contrast to the uncivilized pack yelping and snarling around her. This is called strutting while holding body and soul together.
Richard Wright successfully argued that the Negro was America’s metaphor; let us extend that notion to the situations Eckford and Nwanguma found themselves in. Their opponents—drunk on unfair advantage and absurdly imbalanced numbers—challenged their freedom to occupy, manipulate, and move through space, indeed their ability to take an independent step in any direction. On a larger scale, our former captors, similarly advantaged, frequently make a sport of denying us our basic human rights. When not pursuing physical punishment via overzealous policing, disparate sentencing, and mass incarceration, they debate our capabilities and subject us to their taxonomical impulses. Eckford’s struggle to get to school leads me to envision black bodies moving through time unhindered by desperate talk of bell curves, crime genes, fast-twitch muscle fibers, and cultures of poverty. In such visions, I seek shelter from a white majority apparently inclined to limit us to a few options: glued to a slide like a lab specimen, working tirelessly on its behalf, comforting it with entertainment, caged up, silenced, or absent. While the narrowness of white desire can sometimes threaten to render our genuine selves invisible in an Ellisonian sense, it is also true that perceived blackness is never unseen. The imagined black presence boosts our population to impossible percentages while placing us at sites of white dysfunction where we haven’t deigned to tread. From Charles Stuart and Susan Smith to Scott Lattin and Paul LePage, white people falsely implicating phantom black perps is a durable American tradition.
Perhaps the only thing that can challenge white fragility more than mythical fearsome Negroes is the disturbing sight of living, breathing black people gathering in one place by the thousands, their feet pounding the earth like those notorious drums. A. Philip Randolph’s threat to organize a nationwide march of Negroes in 1941 was enough to frighten President Franklin Delano Roosevelt into integrating the defense industries during World War II. The implications of the 1963 March on Washington depended on one’s perspective. With around 250,000 black people and their allies strutting through the nation’s capital, it was either a dream realized or a nightmare come to life. Like the NAACP’s silent march of 1917, it managed to sway the consciences of some white people while inflaming the hatred of others. It’s no stretch to draw a dotted line from that march to the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church later that year.
While Washington had been the ultimate march by any measure, few if any observers thought it would be the last. Three months after Stokely Carmichael yelled “Black Power” during James Meredith’s March against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, activists in Chicago took to the streets in nearby Cicero, Illinois. The suburb’s infamous reputation had been cemented in 1951, when six thousand whites violently attacked a single black family, preventing them from moving in. On May 25, 1966, four bat-wielding white youths upheld community values by bludgeoning Jerome Huey to death. A seventeen-year-old black college student, Huey had gone to Cicero to apply for a job. He was on his way home when the thugs jumped him near the bus stop.
The sting of Huey’s death was still lingering on September 4, when the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) led two hundred marchers into Cicero to protest segregated housing. Three thousand white hecklers were waiting to greet them. “Go back to the jungle,” they yelled while calling them “niggers,” “black bastards,” and other choice epithets. “The Zoo Wants You,” one banner proclaimed. No one was seriously hurt, the Chicago Tribune reported, although there were several skirmishes. Cicero residents hurled bricks, bottles, and firecrackers. Some marchers picked them up and hurled them back.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t participate in the march but spoke to a student group in Chicago that evening. “Some astronauts walked in outer space and you can’t walk the streets of Cicero,” he said. By then the civil rights leader had already learned that strutting could be as risky in the so-called liberal North as it was in the stubborn South.
In Cicero, Little Rock, and other hotbeds of manic segregation, racial wilding was often the province of civilians—unlettered white men and unfulfilled white housewives acting out their frustrations. In the twenty-first century, when strutting where one chooses is still seen as intolerable black impudence, police officers become gun-wielding surrogates. Licensed to kill, they can exorcise collective white hysteria by inflicting violence on our dark skins. In addition to satisfying a psychological urge, policing of the black body performs a critical economic function by supplying the nation’s need for cheap captive labor and fodder for the prison-industrial complex. For these and other reasons, African Americans move through space fully aware of this fact: Police officers break the black body with the reliable blessing of the state.
Since Darren Wilson’s killing of Mike Brown removed any doubt that an objectionable strut is grounds for murder, Black Lives Matter activists have marched in the path of their predecessors, challenging the popular compulsion to crush and consume blackness. Still the best service they contribute may be their expressed willingness to question the sanity of returning again and again to request protection and justice from a government that will not save us. The question reflects a perspective older than the republic, offered by Thomas Paine long ago: “Common sense will tell us, that the power which hath endeavored to subdue us, is of all others, the most improper to defend us.” The bloodthirsty impulse—the desire to see the dark body suffer—shared by many of those who benefit from unfair advantage based on skin color may prove impossible to rehabilitate, a prospect that many of us are reluctant to acknowledge or confront.
In 1975, I was wowed by The Wiz. There was much to admire in the brilliant, all-black reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s classic. My favorite characters had no memorable lines, no crowd-pleasing solos. Instead of Dorothy, say, or the Scarecrow, I was drawn to the Road. In Geoffrey Holder’s Broadway staging, the famous Yellow Brick Road was embodied by a quartet of golden, nappy-headed brothers who escorted the main characters on their journey to Oz. George Faison’s Tony Award–winning choreography combined the exuberance of the cakewalk with the flashy footwork of a Jackson Five performance, which the four dancers executed to the tune of “Ease on Down the Road.” In the big-screen version of The Wiz produced three years later, director Sidney Lumet replaced the silent dancers with twenty-six miles of Congoleum. The film’s disappointing box-office receipts can’t be blamed on that single change, but it sure sapped the joy out of it for me. I think I found the Road dancers appealing because they reminded me of those smooth operators who bopped through our St. Louis neighborhood. In Big Apple caps, bell bottoms, and platform shoes, they looked as if they’d leaped out of those men’s fashion ads in the back of Ebony magazine. I thought men who looked like that were the epitome of cool; free-range strutters whose knack for swagger extended beyond the block. Elegant and powerful, they were high-stepping, hip-dipping masters of the slide, the glide, and the insouciant saunter. I imagined they could go anywhere, even to the white side of town, and return with their black bodies intact. It was a fantasy, I realize, similar to the collective African American dream that we’ll someday go from trodding James Weldon Johnson’s stony road to easing on down it. It’s a vision of a free black future that keeps us on our feet. Bodies in motion, we strut despite the persistent riddle of history, hard at our heels. We strut toward a future that is neither clear nor promised. We strut with consummate style. We strut with surpassing grace. We strut, therefore.