Fall 2003 Bulletin

asks her if she would like to have hers straight- ened as well. “Not now,” his daughter answers. “Maybe when I’m older. It’ll be something different.” “Do you think you will like it?” Early asks. “Maybe,” his daughter answers. “In that ‘maybe,’” Early writes, “so calmly and evenly uttered, rest the complex contradictions, the uneasy tentative negotiations of that which cannot be compromised yet can never be realized in this flawed world as an ideal; there is, in that ‘maybe,’ the epistemol- ogy of race pride for black American women so paradoxically symbolized by their straight- ened hair.” It seems to me that Early’s writing encompasses all of the complex contradictions and uneasy negotiations of African American culture and of American culture in general. Early studies jazz, boxing, baseball, beauty contests, and film for their deeply human meanings. As a writer, he is one of the great essayists of our time. But more than that, he is an explorer. He is a thinker. His trademarks are utter honesty, a powerful intellect, and fierce independence. The African American experience is the lens through which Early photographs the world, but he is not a sepa- ratist. While showing the richness and com- plexity of African American culture, he also shows it as an organic part of American culture. After reading Early, we feel provoked in the best sense of the word, and we also feel more whole. One of Early’s most appealing qualities, to me, is his modesty. He does not try to establish a Race, Art, and Integration: The Image of persona. Rather, he wants to be measured by his thought–and that quiet thought has been the African American Soldier in Popular widely recognized and honored. In 1988 he received a coveted Whiting Prize for promis- Culture During the Korean War ing writers near the beginning of their careers. In 1995 his essay collection Gerald Early The Culture of Bruis- ing: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern Introduction by Alan Lightman American Culture won a National Book Critics This presentation was given at the 1867th Stated Meeting, held at the House of the Academy on Circle Award. Other of his books include Tux- February 12, 2003. edo Junction: Essays on American Culture, Daugh- ters: On Family and Fatherhood, and One Nation Gerald Early, a Fellow of the American Academy Alan Lightman Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture. since 1997, is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern He is the editor of many volumes, including Letters and the Director of The Center for the Hu- There’s a poignant moment in Gerald Early’s The Sammy Davis, Jr., Reader, The Muhammad manities at Washington University in St. Louis. essay “Life with Daughters: Watching the Ali Reader, and Body Language: Writers on Sport. Miss America Pageant”–an essay that was His edited volume Lure and Loathing: Essays on Alan Lightman is Adjunct Professor of Humanities included in Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation at mit. A Fellow of the American Academy since Essays of the Century. In that moment, Early was named an Outstanding Book by the 1996, he is the author of several books, and his most catches his daughter looking at “her mother’s Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigot- recent work of fiction is Reunion. very long and silken straight hair, the hair that ry and Human Rights in 1993. He has been a the other black girls at school admire,” and commentator for National Public Radio, and 32 Bulletin Fall 2003 he has appeared in Ken Burns’s series on base- occurring at the time. People in the film indus- ball and jazz. But probably nothing was try, for example, were under attack for their alleged affiliation with communists (and had At Washington University in St. Louis, Early is held in lower regard or seen adopted a policy of self-regulation back in the the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters 1930s after first being attacked). Many people and professor of English and African and Afro- as more dangerous by many had mixed feelings about American popular American studies. From 1992 to 1999 he was adults of the period than music–especially jazz and the new rhythm- the director of the African and Afro-American and-blues music of the late 1940s–and the studies program there. He is currently director comic books. people who played it. But probably nothing of The Center for the Humanities. Since his was held in lower regard or seen as more election to this Academy, Early has been an tation by African Americans as being instigat- dangerous by many adults of the period than active member, and he serves as an Academy ed by communists. The repressive political at- comic books. councilor, representing the humanities. mosphere in the United States during the early So integration did not resolve racial tension 1950s tended to make any expression of liberal in the American society of the early 1950s. perspectives suspect, even condemned, as if Gerald Early Rather, in the various ways it was depicted, bourgeois liberal reform were interchangeable integration reflected the complex depths of a with socialism or communism. An extraor- Integration in America Before the profound contradiction Americans felt deep- dinary example of this–especially relevant Brown Decision ly–not only about race but also about the in this instance, as it relates to the loyalty of strength of their institutions and the influen- Between 1945, which marked the end of World African Americans and their willingness to tial reach of popular culture. Nowhere was War II, and 1954, the year of the Brown deci- fight for the United States against a foreign this complex welter of tensions more richly sion, which outlawed racial segregation in power–is Jackie Robinson’s testimony before expressed than in the cultural representations the nation’s public schools, the United States the House Un-American Activities Commit- of the most important act of institutional inte- experienced integration in several symbolic tee on July 18, 1949, spurred by Paul Robeson’s gration to occur before the Brown decision– and potentially powerful ways that challenged comment a month earlier that he thought that is, the 1948 decision to integrate the Amer- institutionally the ideology of white suprema- African Americans should fight against lynch- ican military. And nothing dramatized the cy. The fact that World War II was fought, in ing in the United States and not against the integration of the military, or accelerated it, part, against the racist ideology of Nazism; Soviet Union.* more than the Korean War–the most sig- that increasingly race was being challenged Nonetheless, important acts of integration, nificant political event for the United States in academic circles as a legitimate scientific of crossing over, occurred during that time, between the end of World War II and the concept; that sociological studies such as the particularly in the cultural realm–including Brown decision. pathbreaking , compiled by American Dilemma the integration of major-league baseball when Gunnar Myrdal, described America as a soci- Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers ety suffering from a disjunction between its Integration in the Mainstream as a rookie in 1947; the awarding of the Nation- democratic creed and its practice of segrega- al Book Award in 1953 to Ralph Ellison for his ec tion and racial oppression; that African Amer- The cover of the January 1954 issue of novel Invisible Man, published in 1952; and the icans had become more deeply restive about Comics’s Frontline Combat showed a black awarding of the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry their situation and more militant about social soldier (along with three white soldiers) in to Gwendolyn Brooks for her collection Annie change–all partly explain the shift that was combat. This was highly unusual. Blacks were Allen, published in 1949. Indeed, in some re- beginning to accelerate during those postwar almost never seen on the covers of comic spects racial integration had become, as these years. Furthermore, the rise of communism as books in the 1940s and 1950s–the heyday of instances indicate, something of a mainstream a world power, through both the expansion of comics–unless they were depicted as jungle act in American culture by the early 1950s. Yet the Soviet Union and the establishment of the natives or as comic caricatures. Comic books integration had not gained casual acceptance; People’s Republic of China in 1949, had put were a highly racialized and intensely racist it was still seen in many circles as something more pressure on the United States to change art form during this period of the early cold unusual, radical, associated with the Left. its racial practices in order to influence non- war. The exceptions to this were some special- After all, a good portion of the American pub- white third-world countries in Africa and edition sports comics that featured on their lic did not trust popular culture, within which Asia. covers noncaricatural images of such popular several noted examples of integration were black athletes as Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, However, there was still much uncertainty Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and Joe Louis. and nervousness about drastic racial change Published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the United States at the time. It must be re- * For more on this, see Roger Kahn, The Era these comics reflect the positive, if limited, membered that while World War II was, in a 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and impact that the integration of sports–particu- way, a war against racism, the United States the Dodgers Ruled the World (New York: Ticknor larly team sports–had on the United States was intensely racist in its pursuit of victory & Fields, 1993), 198–207; Martin Duberman, and on how whites in this country saw African against the Japanese, spewing forth virulently Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Knopf, Americans.

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