In Vogue: Josephine Baker and Black Culture and Identity in the Jazz Age Author(S): Bettye J

In Vogue: Josephine Baker and Black Culture and Identity in the Jazz Age Author(s): Bettye J. Gardner and Niani Kilkenny Source: The Journal of African American History, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Winter, 2008), pp. 88-93 Published by: Association for the Study of African American Life and History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20064259 Accessed: 18-01-2017 01:47 UTC

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This content downloaded from 172.88.86.10 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 01:47:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SPECIAL REPORT II IN VOGUE: JOSEPHINE BAKER AND BLACK CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN THE JAZZ AGE

Bettye J. Gardner and Niani Kilkenny*

In commemoration of the centennial anniversary of the birth of Josephine Baker, the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Embassy of France, presented on 18 November 2006 at the National Museum of Natural History IN VOGUE: Black Culture and Identity in the Jazz Age?A Symposium on the African American Presence in American Public Life. Donald Murray, chair of the Board of Directors of the District of Columbia Humanities Council, set the tone for the symposium when he stated, "There is a timelessness and personal nature to the African American struggle for. .. humanity in America and in the world." Using Josephine Baker as a metaphor for the African American experience in Paris, the symposium explored the social and cultural history of 20th century African Americans from the vantage point of the 21st century and examined the impact of three key intellectual and cultural centers of the Jazz Age: Washington, DC, Paris, and New Orleans. "In these cities," Murray declared, "African Americans individually and collectively used culture and identity to be remembered, acknowledged, and renewed." As Joy Austin, the Humanities Council's executive director, also commented, "African Americans provided immeasurable intellectual capital and creativity" in these cities "and defined the landscape that shaped their identity." Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the 1920s as "the Jazz Age," marking the first time that an African American contribution to the national culture had defined an era. It was the cultural outpouring of the 1920s that laid the groundwork for the momentous changes that lay ahead for African Americans. By 1920 African Americans had experienced the Reconstruction and post Reconstruction eras, World War I, an epidemic of lynchings and race riots, and the beginning of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban North. A

*Bettye J. Gardner, Program Chair for IN VOGUE, is Professor of History at Coppin State University in Baltimore, MD; Niani Kilkenny, Program Consultant for the IN VOGUE symposium, lives in Washington, DC.

This content downloaded from 172.88.86.10 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 01:47:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Special Report II?In Vogue: Josephine Baker and Black Culture and Identity 89

long list of militant intellectual, religious, and cultural "race leaders" arose demanding immediate full civil liberties, equal rights, and an end to legal segregation. Old patterns were crumbling, and a new self-confident, self assertive, self-reliant generation was coming of age. This generation of leaders, activists, and intellectuals was characterized as the "New Negro" and their artistic expression became the New Negro Renaissance. This Renaissance led to a growth of interest in America and Europe of all things Negro.1 The District of Columbia had been considered the intellectual capital of African America since the late 19th century and was one of the key centers of the New Negro Renaissance. Distinguished Howard University Professor Alain Locke was one of the guiding forces and leading mentors of this new cultural aesthetic and in 1925 he published the groundbreaking anthology The New Negro2 Central to Locke's thinking was the mandate that the "New Negro had to smash" all of the racial, social, and psychological impediments that had long obstructed black achievement. The New Negro was a highly contested concept among African Americans promoting sharp debate about race, class, politics, and the future of the black community. Although Harlem emerged as the cultural headquarters of the New Negro Renaissance, sixteen of the twenty-five contributors to Locke's New Negro anthology were born, raised, educated, or worked in Washington, DC, or had studied at Howard University. New Orleans, home to a musically sophisticated African American community and a vibrant black Creole culture, had access to rural Mississippi blues traditions via rail yards and waterfronts. These elements combined to make New Orleans a fertile breeding ground for a new music called Jazz. Coronet player Charles "Buddy" Bolden, one of the best known of the early Jazz musicians, and Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, an accomplished pianist composer, played key roles in developing Jazz. Recordings made by Morton and his ensemble "The Red Hot Peppers" in 1926 and 1927 are generally thought to be the best recordings from that era of New Orleans Jazz.3 Paris, the "City of Lights," became a key destination for African Americans who sought a more liberal and racially integrated environment and greater intellectual and cultural freedom. The legendary Josephine Baker and New Orleans Jazz great Sidney Bechet were among the most celebrated African Americans in Paris. Bechet was one of the first Jazz musicians to spend extensive time in Paris and achieved the status of a cultural hero in France. By the time Josephine Baker made her spectacular debut in Paris in 1925, a community of several hundred African American expatriates had already made the city their home. Baker became one of the most photographed women in entertainment and, by the late 1920s, was the highest paid entertainer in Europe.4 In the symposium's first session, "Josephine and the Jazz Age," Lonnie Bunch provided in his speech the historical context for "Black America at the

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Dawn of the 20th Century." Shaped by the experiences of slavery in the years before the Civil War and by Jim Crow segregation in the last decades of the 19th century, African Americans responded by building enduring communities and a dynamic leadership group that included Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and others. By World War I the ferment engendered by the emerging strategies of these leaders had created a more militant black population and was helping dislodge the racial and cultural stereotypes presented in minstrel shows, films such as Birth of a Nation (1915), and other popular entertainment venues.5 Literary scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin's discussion of Josephine Baker was a fascinating account of the world that Baker entered when she arrived in Paris in the 1920s. Griffin pointed out that the tradition of "black vernacular dance" was not new. When Baker reached Paris, she encountered African-descended women from the French colonies who had created an environment in which black exotic dancers were accepted and lauded. In many ways the French were excited by Baker because she fit into their stereotype of "the primitive" and "the exotic." "La Revue Negre" (1925) proved to be the turning point of her career and led to Baker's tremendous success from that point on. Josephine Baker's celebrity status even exceeded that of the leading white film actresses Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. Griffin's assessment of Baker's success in Europe acknowledged that in many ways it played into the French ideal of exotic beauty and over time laid the foundation for later generations of Black women entertainers such as Eartha Kitt, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, and Beyonce Knowles, who have used talent and beauty to elicit adulation from broad audiences. Griffin concluded that for generations of French people, Josephine Baker allowed them to see themselves as "liberal" in racial matters. Both Donna Wells in the first session and Deborah Macanic in the session titled "The New Negro in the New Century: The 1920s Revisited" built on Bunch's statements by providing visual insights on the Jazz Age. Explaining that the Jazz Age was not only about Jazz music (although it was at the core), Wells presented images of the period which documented particular personalities and locales and offered wonderful visuals of African Americans before and after World War I. The audience was exposed to the transformative sights, sounds, and styles that stood in stark contrast to those of the Victorian era that preceded it. Reflecting on the long expatriate history of African Americans in France dating to the 1840s, Deborah Macanic showed that the positive experiences of African American soldiers fighting with the French in World War I motivated many black veterans to remain in Europe. By the end of World War I, they were influenced by a cultural and musical style they had largely helped create such as in the case of James Reese Europe, the well-known musician from New York City whose band introduced the new Jazz sounds to Paris. Eleanor Traylor, in her presentation "From Washington to Paris," drew parallels between the emerging

artists, writers, and intellectuals of the New Negro movement in the District and their connections to the cultural movement in Paris. Central to her discussion was Alain Locke's role as a leading mentor and sponsor of the movement. It was during this time that Langston Hughes first arrived in Paris and was introduced to other artists by Locke. Several Washingtonians spent time in Paris and were part of the evolving Jazz Age culture, among them Anna Julia Cooper who received her doctoral degree from the Sorbonne in March 1925, and Lois Pierre Noel who became a well-known painter during this period. It was also during his time in Paris that Alain Locke was asked to edit a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic (1924), which subsequently became one of the major publications of the era, The New Negro. The Jazz Age also served as a prism for considering several questions in the final session, "20-20 Vision: Black Culture and Identity 100 Years Later," among them: What impact would gentrification and dislocation have on the preservation of cultural traditions in major cities such as Washington, DC, and New Orleans? What did Hurricane Katrina reveal about race, class, and public policy in New Orleans and Louisiana? Do race and racism require redefinition in the 21st century? The session began with a presentation of the work of four emerging 21st century poets: Abdul Ali, Derek Weston Brown, Tinesha Davis, and Ava Wilson. They were followed by panelists Tricia Rose, Marvette Perez, Michael White, Malkia Lydia, and John W. Franklin, each of whom discussed some aspect of 21st century African American life and culture. Tricia Rose, in her discussion "Inside and Out: Rebuilding Black Cultures and Communities in the Post-Civil Rights Era," emphasized the impact of dislocation on African-descended people beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing as a central dynamic of the African American experience right through Hurricane Katrina. However, without the creative responses and expressions that emerged from those dislocations, the African American cultural realities so widely accepted and celebrated would not exist. It was the proximity of African Americans to one another, and the enforcement of rigid racial segregation, which created the communities that nurtured and preserved the artistic and cultural expressions soon embraced by many throughout the world. From the 1950s to the present, however, "Negro removal" in one way or another has become an urban reality. The most significant assault on urban black communities began in the 1970s and continues today in the form of gentrification. Rose pointed out that the post-civil rights era has witnessed African Americans in more positions of authority as mayors, city council persons, and other officials, but oftentimes their power has been neutralized. As a result, many of the remaining African American neighborhoods became places of little economic value?plagued by increased homelessness, drug addiction, gang related crimes, and higher rates of unemployment?and where creative expression was many times stifled in ways that did not exist during the era of

This content downloaded from 172.88.86.10 on Wed, 18 Jan 2017 01:47:48 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 92 The Journal of African American History legal segregation. Rose concluded by suggesting that since the 1920s African American cultural expressions should be seen as central to the global experience of African-descended people. In "Sabor: Celia Cruz and the Legacy of Afro-Caribbean Music," Marvette Perez examined the concept of dislocation and its impact on cultural traditions from the vantage point of persons coming from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to the United States, especially to New York City. There were many Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians who came to the United States in the 1920s and combined the "salsa" and "sabor" of their music with the Jazz and Blues of the period. Celia Cruz in 1920s New York City personified the newly imported spectacular sound of Afro-Caribbean music that would soon manifest itself in the interconnectedness between the Afro-Caribbean and African American communities. Perez's presentation emphasized the significance of that "mutual embrace" among peoples of African descent. In "Bearing Witness: Thoughts on New Orleans's Musical Traditions and Cultural Heritage in Jeopardy," Michael White discussed the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on his life and the lives of most residents of New Orleans. Although he continues to live and work in New Orleans, White acknowledges the difficulty that he faces on a daily basis in trying to rebuild his personal and professional life. White questioned whether the historic African American community can be revived without the familial and cultural ties that originally created it. Put simply, the question is: Can cultural traditions survive without direct connection to the people who created them? Can these traditions be patented, packaged, and sold as a defined commodity without the people who received it, lived it, and passed it on? Are there cultural links that, once broken, simply cannot be restored? Archivist John W. Franklin offered a personal assessment, recalling his childhood in Paris in the 1960s where he attended French schools and learned the language. The French family with whom he and his family became close assured him no racism existed there. But the fact was not lost on him that they seemed to know no other African Americans except his family. Racist attitudes, though not aimed at him, were manifested in the French family's statements and attitude about the Algerians. People of African descent from the former French Caribbean colonies came to France in the 1950s and 1960s for their higher education, generating a sizable Afro-French population that regarded itself as French. More recent arrivals from North and West Africa have faced discrimination and barriers to integration and upward mobility. Reflecting on a lifetime of connections to France, Franklin recalled the outbreak of racial violence in 2005 in the Paris suburbs, which demonstrated the persistence of racism in France, despite myths to the contrary. Malkia Lydia, a documentary filmmaker, briefly discussed her upcoming film Come Around Our Way, about the impact of

gentrification and changing neighborhood patterns on the 1970s generation of African Americans in Washington, DC. The symposium was designed to be a dialogue, and the intellectual exchange was rich. The presenters stimulated the cultural memory of a diverse audience of scholars, lay historians, museum professionals, artists, researchers, and students. Tricia Rose explained that this kind of shared meeting space for cultural and intellectual discourse, exchange, celebration, and affirmation is increasingly rare. The various kinds of dislocations confronting African Americans and the absence of a shared community space could pose problems in the 21st century. However, Donald Murray emphasized that each participant in the symposium and the audience had been "challenged to understand and acknowledge the centrality and importance of culture and identity in ensuring the survival and future of African Americans and their communities."

NOTES

'There are numerous excellent works on the New Negro movement; for example, see Theodore Vincent, ed., Voices of a Black Nation (San Francisco, CA, 1973); Michael Peplow and Arthur P. Davis, eds. New Negro Renaissance: An Anthology (New York, 1975); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue (New York, 1979); William Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York, 1999); Martha Jane Nadell, Enter the New Negro: Images of Race in American Culture (Cambridge, MA 2004). 2Alain Locke, "Introduction," The New Negro (New York, 1925), 6-19. 3 Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole, and Inventor of Jazz (New York, 1950); Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York, 1986); Robert O' Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York, 1998); Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley, CA, 2002); William Howland Kenny, Jazz on the River (Chicago, IL. 2005); Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong's New Orleans (New York, 2006). 4Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Urbana, IL, 1991); Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York, 1995); Theresa Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1954 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001); Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London, 1981); Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York, 1989); Jean Claude Baker, Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (New York, 1993); and Bennetta J. Rosette, et al., Josephine Baker: Image and Icon (Sydney, Australia, 2006). 5The participants in the symposium included Lonnie Bunch, Founding Director, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution; Donna M. Wells, Prints and Photograph Librarian, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Ph.D., Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Columbia University; Eleanor W. Traylor, Ph.D., Graduate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Howard University; Michael White, Ph.D., Musician, Composer and Music Historian, Xavier University; Deborah Macanic, Exhibit Developer and Project Manager, Smithsonian Institution, Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES); Tricia Rose, Ph.D., Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University; Marvette Perez, Curator, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution; Malkia Lydia, Independent Documentary Filmmaker; and John W. Franklin, Program Manager, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution.

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