Prologue
1. Walt Whitman, “Manahattan,” in Leaves of Grass (New York: 1867).
2. Ann Petry, “Harlem,” Holiday, April 1949, 84.
Introduction
1. Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6.
2. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 43.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. Rorty distinguished between agents and spectators in the following way: “In the early decades of [the twentieth century], when an intellectual stepped back from his or her country’s history and looked at it through skeptical eyes, the chances were that he or she was about to propose a new political initiative.” This is in opposition to those who possess a “spirit of detached spectatorship, and the inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action.” Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 9, 11. Rorty is not without his critics. For our purposes, one of the most astute has been Eddie Glaude. Glaude chastised Rorty for evading “the more fundamental challenge that Baldwin’s writings present to anyone willing to engage them: that America must confront the fraudulent nature of its life, that its avowals of virtue shield it from honestly confronting the darkness within its own soul.” For Glaude, too, much of the Reformist Left celebrated by Rorty failed to fully “work to diminish human suffering and make possible the conditions for human excellence,” because of “their equivocation in the face of white supremacy’s insidious claims.” Eddie S. Glaude, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3.
5. Mary Helen Washington’s description of the playwright Alice Childress also applies to Primus, in that she “concoct[ed] for herself, in true Popular Front fashion, a politics that was part Marxist, part black nationalist, part feminist, and part homegrown militancy.” Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth Century Literature of the United States, Bill V. Mullen and James Smethurst, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 185.
6. Biondi, To Stand and Fight, 13.
Chapter 1: Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom
1. W. E. B. DuBois, “Close Ranks,” The Crisis 16, no. 3 (1918): 111. See also W. E. B. Du Bois’s editorial “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis 18 (1919): 13.
2. Karen Tucer Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women During World War II,” Journal of American History 69, no. 1 (1982): 82–97. The Fair Employment Practices Committee became the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1948, during the Truman administration.
3. Quoted in Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 93.
4. Pearl Primus, “African Dance,” reprinted in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, Kariamu Welsh Asante, ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 3.
5. Langston Hughes, “On Leaping and Shouting,” originally published in Chicago Defender, July 3, 1943; republished in Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture: 1942–1962, Christopher C. Santis, ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 199.
6. John Martin, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1966; originally published in 1933), 12.
7. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbothan, “The Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274.
8. Helen Fitzgerald, “A Glimpse of a Rising Young Star,” Daily Worker, June 3, 1943, 7.
9. VeVe Clark and Sara E. Johnson, eds., Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 347. Little has been written about Pearl Primus, and that which has been written tends to focus on this period—her emergence in the 1940s or accounts of her as a grand dame of African dance on the American stage toward the end of her career. When writing about this period, most scholars rightly focus on her involvement with the New Dance Group and her dances of social protest. This is also my interest here; however, I hope to show her dance life during this period in a more fully dimensional way. Most often scholars writing of Primus’s interest in Africa imply that her involvement in leftist politics preceded her first trip to Africa in 1948. I argue that it was her interest in Africa that preceded both her involvement in modern dance and her leftist politics.
10. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
11. Beverly Anne Hillsman Barber, “Pearl Primus, in Search of Her Roots, 1943–1970” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1984), 13.
12. Irma Watkins Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
13. “Coming to the United States,” n.d., Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm?migration=10&topic=5.
14. Pearl Primus Journals, August 1937, Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University, Box 1, Journal Correspondence.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Barber, “Pearl Primus.”
18. Lorraine B. Diehl, Over Here! New York City During World War II (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 170; Maureen Honey, ed., Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 35. “Arsenal of democracy” is the phrase used by Franklin D. Roosevelt to describe the role of the United States in providing the United Kingdom with military supplies to help defeat Germany.
19. Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 158.
20. Ibid., 117.
21. Richard C. Green, “Upstaging the Primitive: Pearl Primus” and “The Negro Problem in American Dance,” in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance, Thomas F. DeFrantz, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
22. John Martin, “The Dance: Five Artists,” New York Times, February 21, 1943.
23. John Martin, “The Dance Laurel Award No. 2,” New York Times, August 1, 1943.
24. Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 167. As Manning has noted, “for Martin, Dunham fulfilled the potential of Negro dance, while Primus merged themes that were racially authentic like Dunham’s Negro dance, with themes that were individually expressive, like modern dance.”
25. “Con Deleighbor, Katherine Dunham vs. Pearl Primus: Styles and Purposes in Negro Folk Dancing,” Amsterdam News, February 12, 1944, 11A.
26. Interview conducted with Katherine Dunham, African American Music Collection, Haven Hall, University of Michigan, www.umich.edu/~afroammu/standifer/dunham.html.
27. David W. Stowe, “The Politics of Café Society,” Journal of American History 84, no. 4 (1998): 1384–1406.
28. Unpublished interview with Elsa Wren, 1982, Pearl Primus Collection, Duke University, 5 (“Wren interview” hereafter); Barney Josephson and Terry Trilling-Josephson, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 170–171.
29. Ibid.
30. Wren interview.
31. “Little Primitive,” Time, August 25, 1947; “Genuine Africa,” Time, May 21, 1951.
32. Peggy Schwartz and Murray Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 31–33.
33. Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920–1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 180; Phyl Garland, “The Natural Look: Many Negro Women Reject White Standards of Beauty,” Ebony, June 1966, 143.
34. Wren interview, 5.
35. Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 158.
36. “John Cage: Database of Works,” n.d., John Cage Trust, http://www.johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Works.cfm.
37. Lewis Allan was a penname; Allan’s real name was Abel Meeropol.
38. “Pearl Primus: Artistic Summary,” n.d., Dance Language Institute Archive, www.mamboso.net/primus/summary_3.html.
39. “Negro Women with White Husbands,” Jet, February 21, 1952; see also Jet, February 14, 1952, 11. For the date of Primus’s marriage to Borde, see Schwartz and Schwartz, The Dance Claimed Me, 269.
40. Daily Worker, September 28, 1944; quoted in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) File No. 100–61887, September 1944, Report by William A. Costello, 22.
41. Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007), 247.
42. Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 106.
43. See Lloyd, Borzoi Book of Modern Dance.
44. Wren interview, 9.
45. Author interview with Esther Cooper Jackson, June 20, 2011.
46. Pamphlet, “National Integrity and Security Make Negro Youth of the South Assets of Democracy,” James E. Jackson and Esther Cooper Jackson Papers, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, Box 6, Folder 29 (“Jackson Papers” hereafter).
47. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 207; Jackson Papers, Correspondence, Pearl Primus to James Jackson, July 8, 1946, Box 14, Folder 5.
48. FBI File No. 100–61887.
49. Ibid.
50. FBI File No. 100–332915, May 30, 1945.
51. Lloyd, Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, 271.
52. Donald McKayle, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life (New York: Routledge, 2002), 23.
53. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, conversation with Peggy and Murray Schwartz, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, May 24, 2012.
54. Barber, “Pearl Primus,” 176–177. Barber describes Primus’s technique in the following manner:
1. A distinctive carriage of the torso, use of the feet, and isolation of specific body parts
2. Forward lean of the body toward the earth
3. Forward inclination toward the earth
4. Feet contacting the floor fully to resemble caressing of the earth
55. Julia Foulkes, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 70–71; Wren interview, 4.
56. Josephson and Trilling-Josephson, Cafe Society, 256–257.
57. Esther Cooper Jackson, who had been the subject of extensive FBI surveillance and investigation and had been very active in Communist Party circles, said that she never heard anything about Primus having been an informant. Author interview with Esther Cooper Jackson, June 20, 2011.
58. Sapphire, The Kid (New York: Penguin, 2011), 195.
Chapter 2: Ann Petry: Walking Harlem
1. The date of Petry’s birth is listed differently in a number of publications, and Petry herself gave different dates for her birthday. Her official birth certificate says October 20, 1908. Throughout her career, she often gave the date October 12, but the years varied from 1908 to 1912. Family records indicate October 12, 1908. The town clerk of Old Saybrook once informed Petry that the doctor who signed her birth certificate dated a batch of certificates according to the date he submitted them.
2. Elisabeth Petry, At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2008), 38.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 38–39.
5. Ibid., 45.
6. Ibid., 43.
7. Petry journal entry, quoted in ibid., 166.
8. Petry, At Home Inside, 164.
9. E-mail correspondence with Elisabeth Petry, March 23, 2011; Elisabeth Petry, “What I’ve Finished Reading,” http://lizr128.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/what-i%E2%80%99ve-finished-reading/. George Petry also recalled his experience in the DC church, speaking to the author in June 1993.
10. These descriptions come from photographs taken by Morgan and Marvin Smith. See James A. Miller, Harlem: The Vision of Morgan and Marvin Smith (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
11. Nat Brandt, Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 156; see also the survey of 1,008 blacks and 501 whites in New York, conducted in the spring of 1942 and published by the Extensive Surveys Division, Bureau of Intelligence, Office of Facts and Figures, as “The Negro Looks at the War: Attitudes of New York Negroes Toward Discrimination Against Negroes and a Comparison of Negro and Poor White Attitudes Toward War-Related Issues,” Report 21, May 19, 1942. The Office of Facts and Figures became the Office of War Information.
12. Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 178.
13. Not all American leftists abandoned the Communist Party, and among those who did, a number remained committed to leftist politics. Others adopted more liberal or conservative stances. For insightful discussions of American leftist intellectuals and writers and their reactions to the revelations about Stalin, see Alan Wald’s two insightful studies, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War. Both were published by University of North Carolina Press, 2007 and 2012, respectively.
14. Wald, Trinity of Passion, 108–109.
15. Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993), 9.
16. Ibid., xxiv.
17. Wald, Trinity of Passion, 119.
18. Nina Mjagkij, ed., Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York: Routledge, 2001).
19. Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 39.
20. “Ann Petry,” in Adele Sarkissian, ed., Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, vol. 6 (Detroit: Gale, 1987). 253–269.
21. See African American Registry, http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/american-negro-theater-formed; see also Langston Hughes, Milton Meltzer, and L. Eric Lincoln, A Pictorial History of Black Americans (New York: Crown, 1956).
22. Ervin, Ann Petry, xiii.
23. “New York/Chicago: WPA and the Black Artist,” Exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, November 13 thru January 8, 1978, Essay by Ruth Ann Stewart, Guest Curator.
24. Ibid., xiv.
25. “Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed., Contemporary Authors?
26. Ibid.
27. Alain Locke, “Inventory at Mid-Century: The Literature of the Negro for 1950,” Phylon 12, no. 2 (1951).
28. Bill V. Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 133.
29. See Appendix C.
30. Petry, At Home Inside, 95.
31. “Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed., Contemporary Authors, 265.
32. Ibid., 152–153.
33. Maureen Honey, Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 8.
34. Boots has a dangerous operation on his ear so that he is unable to pass the physical examination required by the military. Malcolm X appeared at the induction center dressed in his zoot suit and professed a desire to “organize them nigger soldiers . . . steal . . . some guns, and kill up crackers.” Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965). Dizzy Gillespie could have been reading from a script written by Petry when he told the army psychiatrist: “Well, look, at this time, in this stage of my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man’s foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole! Now, you’re speaking of the enemy. You’re telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I’m liable to create a case of ‘mistaken identity’, of who I might shoot.” Dizzy Gillespie, with Al Fraser, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1979]), 120.
Both Malcolm X and Dizzy Gillespie were classified 4-F (registrant not acceptable for military service).
35. The full marketing plan is printed in Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 228–229; see also Hazel Arnett Ervin and Hilary Holladay, Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2004), xviii.
36. Stacy I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 2.
37. Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” in The Writer’s Book, Helen Hull, ed. (New York: Harper Brothers, 1950), 33.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. For a brilliant discussion of Cootie Williams, see Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Race Music: Black Music from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Ramsey writes: “Williams’s music provides a clear example of the stylistic flux in black popular music during the war years. In fact, I view this group as a progressive, early R&B band” (p. 69). As a band leader, Ramsey wrote, Williams “drew on many resources . . . : the repertory of his Ellington years, the jazz and swing tradition of his youth, the diverse talents of new instrumentalists and vocalists such as Powell, Vinson, and Davis, the innovations of new composers such as Monk, and the novel sounds of two emerging styles, bebop and rhythm and blues” (p. 72).
41. See Gerald Horne, Black Liberation / Red Scare: Ben Davis and the Communist Party (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 102. See also “Race Bias Denied as Rioting Factor: Spokesman for Negro Groups Lay Harlem Disorders to Sporadic Hoodlumism,” New York Times, August 3, 1943.
42. “Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed., Contemporary Authors, 265.
43. On the young Malcolm X, the culture that produced him, and the relationship of that culture to the kind of proto-revolutionary consciousness that Malcolm Little, “Big Red,” inhabits, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).
44. Records of the Harlem Magistrate, August 1943, Municipal Archives, New York.
45. Lawrence P. Jackson, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 145–146.
46. If Wright is a literary relative, so, too, is Marita Bonner. Bonner, a New Englander like Petry, graduated from Radcliffe; moved to DC, where she wrote essays and experimental plays; then married and moved to Chicago, where she began to master the short story. She created a fictional black neighborhood, “Frye Street,” for her stories about Chicago’s black migrants. Like Petry, Bonner published in The Crisis and Opportunity, but during the 1930s.
47. “Ann Petry,” in Sarkissian, ed., Contemporary Authors, 265.
48. See Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 27.
49. See Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 164.
50. Ann Petry, “Harlem,” Holiday, April 1949, 84.
Chapter 3: Rollin’ with Mary Lou Williams
1. Born September 8, 1903, in Dawson, Georgia, Davis went on to attend Morehouse and Amherst Colleges before enrolling at Harvard Law School. By the time he arrived in New England, he already had experienced protests against Jim Crow. On July 5, 1923, he was arrested in Atlanta because, like Petry’s Sam, he refused to obey Jim Crow laws governing city buses.
2. Gerald Horne, Black Liberation / Red Scare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 108; John C. Walter, The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammany, 1920-1970 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 110; Amsterdam News, October 30, 1943, A8.
3. New York Times, November 14, 1943, 52.
4. Ann Petry, “Harlem,” Holiday, April 1949, 84.
5. Mary Lou Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 281, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 1, Folder 2, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
6. See Tammy Kernodle, Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 103.
7. Mary Lou Williams interview by John S. Wilson, June 26, 1973, transcript, p. 130, Jazz Oral History Project, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey (“Wilson interview” hereafter).
8. Wilson interview, 32.
9. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon, 2001); Kernodle, Soul on Soul.
10. Dahl, Morning Glory, 9.
11. Mary Lou Williams, “Jazz Is Our Heritage,” Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 2, Folder 38, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
12. Quoted in Dahl, Morning Glory, 11; Wilson interview, 4. See also Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Harlem stride was a highly percussive style of jazz piano developed in New York during the 1920s. Virtuoso improvisers, stride pianists were considered among the elite of New York’s early jazz musicians. Stride pianists were also known for their “leaping left hands.”
13. Kernodle, Soul on Soul, 13.
14. Telephone conversation between author and Bobbie Ferguson, July 2012.
15. Dan Morgenstern, ed., Living with Jazz: A Reader (New York: Random House, 2009).
16. Petry, “Harlem”; telephone conversation between author and Gray Weingarten, January 11, 2011.
17. Kernodle, Soul on Soul.
18. New York, March 7, 1944, originally on World Broadcasting Systems.
19. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 265–267.
20. See Karen Chilton, Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
21. Mary Lou Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #3, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 1, Folder 3, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
22. Max Jones, Talking Jazz (New York: Norton, 1988), 204.
23. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 290.
24. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), 297, 350.
25. Jones, Talking Jazz, 205.
26. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 275.
27. Ibid., 275–276.
28. Ibid., 268–269.
29. See Dahl, Morning Glory, 115, 187.
30. Quoted in ibid., 188.
31. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #2, 273.
32. Jones, Talking Jazz, 204.
33. Ibid., 204; telephone conversation between author and Gray Weingarten, January 11, 2011.
34. “Roots: The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty,” n.d., Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/ijs/mlw/roots.html.
35. Though Williams often appeared in the Amsterdam News, the Zodiac Suite was not reviewed there. Barry Ulanov, writing for Metronome in February 1946, found the suite underrehearsed and sloppy in places. Nonetheless, he commended Williams for the courage of her musical convictions.
36. Rosenkrantz and his wife Inez Cavanaugh endeared themselves to many musicians. Gray Weingarten remembers parties at their apartment where Billie Holiday and Langston Hughes might be in attendance. She also remembers that Rosenkrantz encouraged the musicians to play and then recorded them without their knowledge. Many of these recordings were released in Denmark.
37. Jones, Talking Jazz, 202.
38. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #3, 374.
39. Ibid., 376.
40. Ibid., 379–380; telephone conversation between author and Gray Weingarten, January 11, 2011.
41. Mary Lou Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #4, 432–433, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 1, Folder 4, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #3, 376.
42. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #3, 375; Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #4, 434–435.
43. Williams, Autobiographical Notebook #3, 375.
44. Ibid., 378.
45. Mary Lou Williams to Mr. Roy Norris, June 17, 1946, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 5, Box 4, Folder 1, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
46. Eleanor Roosevelt to Mary Lou Williams, September 12, 1946, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 6, Box 1, Folder 8, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
47. Joe Louis to Mary Lou Williams, September 23, 1946, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 6, Box 1, Folder 8, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
48. Governor Ellis Arnall to Mary Lou Williams, September 23, 1946, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 6, Box 1, Folder 8, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey; Benjamin E. Mays to Bill Nunn, in copy sent from Bill Nunn to Mary Lou Williams, November 6, 1946, Mary Lou Williams Collection, MC 60, Series 6, Box 1, Folder 8, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.
49. Telephone conversation between author and Gray Weingarten, January 11, 2011.
50. Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (New York: DaCapo Press, 1976), 169.
51. “Manners and Morals,” Time, March 8, 1948.
Epilogue
1. Jean Toomer, “Song of the Son,” in Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923).
2. Jennifer Dunning, “Pearl Primus Is Dead at 74; A Pioneer of Modern Dance,” New York Times, October 31, 1994.
3. Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Ann Petry, 88, First to Write a Literary Portrait of Harlem,” New York Times, April 30, 1997.
4. These contexts also paid special attention to the gendered dimension of the lives and works of women artists. In so doing, they challenged our very understandings of the cultural milieus these women inhabited and the vocabularies we use to discuss them.