Almost 18 years ago in The New Yorker, Anisfield-Wolf Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. profiled the intellectual and novelistAlbert L. Murray, concluding, with a flourish, “this is Albert Murray’s century; we just live in it.”
That century ended August 18, 2013, when the Alabama-born man of letters died in New York at age 97. Gates memorialized the man, writing “Murray will be remembered as one of the great aesthetic theorists of American culture, specifically for his concept of the ‘blues aesthetic,’ which he identified as the subtext and deep structure of what, to the last, he thought of as Negro-American culture.”
That hyphen was inviolate to Murray.
In his magnificent 1970 essay collection, The Omni-American, Murray states, “American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto.”
He took a dim view of separatism of all stripes. “Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e. heroic) endowment” wrote Murray in The Hero and the Blues. In 1997, he came to Cleveland to accept an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement award.
Murray – friend of Duke Ellington, who called him “the unsquarest man I know,” and confidant of novelist Ralph Ellison since their Tuskegee Institute student days – lived to see a 44th American president embody some of his own notions. The public continues to wrestle with Murray’s ideas today – as indicated by the comment thread on the man’s front-page obituary in the New York Times. Better reading is found in Murray’s books. His novel, “Train Whistle Guitar,” is a felicitous place to start.
On March 21, 2013, another literary titan died at age 82 after a brief illness. Chinua Achebe (pronounced CHIN-you-ah Ah-CHAY-bay) was only 28 in 1958 when William Heinemann Ltd. of London published his first book, a brisk Nigerian novel, Things Fall Apart. Achebe took the title for his anti-colonial masterpiece from a Yeats poem, “The Second Coming,” and—in 209 pages—remade the global literary conversation.
Things Fall Apart is now a classic—with more than 10 million copies sold—and taught around the globe. Philosopher and Anisfield-Wolf winner Kwame Anthony Appiah praised Achebe for his moral intensity, writing: “It would be impossible to say how ‘Things Fall Apart’ influenced African writing. It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.”
The novel chronicles how a proud Igbo man named Okonkwo is brought low in late 19th-century Nigeria. It stands at the headwaters of contemporary literature, and, as Appiah noted, “opened up the magic casements of African fiction.”
Two years ago, writers Toby Barlow and Sarah Cox got together to discuss Detroit.
Negative headlines pounded the city’s reputation, but the duo knew there was more to Detroit than foreclosures and shuttered factories. Barlow proposed creating a writer’s residency within the city, but Detroit didn’t need temporary residents—it needed permanent ones. A September estimate put the number of vacant homes at 78,000, or one-fifth of the housing stock.
“We wanted more intelligent, interesting writing about Detroit,” Cox said. “So we looked at how we could make that happen.”
The board members pooled their money to buy two homes. A third home was donated to the group. They formed a mutually beneficial partnership with Detroit Young Builders, a vocational training program for city youth. The construction team would provide the labor to rehab the homes. Write A House launched its IndieGogo campaign this week to raise $25,000 to finance the renovation.
Applications for the residences will be available in spring 2014, hoping to select writers who are committed to Detroit for the long haul. “We want people to know what they’re getting into,” Cox said. “You’re living in Detroit and you need to be comfortable with that.”
The judges include former National Poet Laureate Billy Collins, poet Major Jackson, and writer and activist Dream Hampton. Writers don’t need to be Detroiters to apply. The winners will live in the house rent-free for the first two years and will be responsible for paying insurance and property taxes. After that, the writer will receive the deed to the house, free and clear.
Write A House also stipulates that the winners participate in Detroit’s literacy scene, but will let those individual decide how. “They could host a reading series or tutor kids,” Cox explained. “We’ll leave it up to them. We want someone who feels like they’re part of the community.”
On the day Nelson Mandela’s body was lowered into the ground, Congressman John Lewis raised his voice half a world away to exhort the December graduates of Cleveland State University to begin lives of activism and “to get into good trouble.”
Lewis, 73, told the almost 1,000 graduates that he had been “very moved” in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of the U.S. delegation to the Mandela memorial service.
“Don’t give up; don’t give in; go forth and be good citizens, not just of America, but citizens of the world,” Lewis said, connecting his listeners to Mandela’s legacy and the American Civil Rights movement. “This is your day, not mine,” he said, with more than the snowy date on the calendar in mind.
A man of stillness and humility, Lewis moved his right hand over his heart as he accepted an honorary doctorate from Cleveland State, the latest of more than 50 such academic honors. “I’m delighted and very pleased to be with you on this important occasion,” he told his hosts. “Thank you for honoring a poor boy from rural Alabama. I was not born in a big city like Cleveland.”
But he became a man of momentous deeds – an architect of the 1963 March on Washington, a veteran of more than 50 arrests and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Two years after the March on Washington, Lewis and SNCC co-founder Hosea Williams started across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala., leading some 600 people marching for voting rights. They were beaten and gassed, and when the vigilantes and the Alabama state police were done, they had broken Lewis’ young skull.
“I was beaten unconscious and bloody in 1965 on that bridge in Selma,” Lewis told his Cleveland State audience, “but I never, ever thought about hating anyone. Hate was too big of a burden to bear.”
Cleveland State University President Ronald M. Berkman reminded the assembly that Lewis was aptly called “the conscience of the U.S. Congress.” He asked everyone to observe a moment of silence in Mandela’s memory and urged the graduates to savor the day they have earned.
Lewis entertained his listeners with boyhood stories of raising chickens, marking eggs, eating peanuts and first hearing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio in 1955. He described applying to Troy State University and receiving no reply. “My generation, we didn’t have an internet, we didn’t have a cell phone, but we used what we had to bring about a nonviolent revolution.”
He urged the graduates to find their cause. “You won’t be arrested maybe. You won’t be beaten. But do your part. The way of peace, the way of love, is the better way.”
When the Grambling State University football team refused to play this October, the eyes of collegiate sports turned to Louisiana and focused on a long-simmering problem at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs): underfunding.
Marybeth Gasman, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Minority-Serving Institutions, said in a recent op-ed that solving HBCU’s budgetary woes starts at the top. “Alumni need to be taught how to give and how to be philanthropic,” she wrote. “And this lesson must begin when alumni are students, during the first week of classes, and it needs to come directly from the president.”
One individual who has gotten the memo is Bennett College President Dr. Rosalind Fuse-Hall, who took the helm of her small liberal arts college in Greensboro, N.C., six months ago. She is continuing its momentum and is maintaining an impressive 20% annual contribution rate from graduates, beating out much larger and better known HBUCs such as Howard University.
Bennett College’s model is simple: touting the school’s strengths and aggressively soliciting donors. It isn’t as revolutionary as it is crucial. Funding for HBCUs has declined, while the day-to-day costs to run a university have soared, leading administrators to pursue to alumni giving more aggressively.
Nelson Bowman III, head of development for Texas’ Prairie View A&M University, is taking a different tact. In 2012, his HBCU rolled out a giving campaign for currently enrolled students with inspiring results—60% of freshmen pledged a gift.
“The potential has probably always been there,” Bowman wrote, “but we’ve only viewed them as students, overlooking their innate passion and willingness to engage.”
As the year concludes with a flurry of fund-raising appeals, some HBCUs have improved their pitches and upped their game. Much more than football is at stake.
Sharp-eyed Clevelanders can still spot John Anisfield’s name on the side of his old garment factory, which employed more than 700 workers a century ago. The clothing manufacturer at E. 22nd and Superior Avenue has been shuttered long decades, but the imprint of Anisfield, his fortune, and his progressive notions carry briskly into the 21st century.
John Anisfield was 16 and nearly penniless when he arrived in Cleveland in 1876, but he had an uncle, Dr. James Horowitz, who was able to place his Viennese nephew into the employ of the D. Black Cloak Company. Young John proved a quick study, rose to become a manager, quit and struck out into garment making on his own, just six years after he set foot in Cleveland.
The Civil War had remade the way Americans clothed themselves, as it remade so much of the country. The U.S. Army had taken millions of measurements of boys and men, begetting a system for sizing men’s clothing. This system and increasing mechanization fueled the ready-to-wear market from the 1860s through the 1880s, which coincided with young John’s arrival.
For approximately a half century after the 1890s, seven percent of Cleveland’s workforce toiled in the city’s garment factories, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Many of the founders and owners were Jews of German or Austrian-Hungarian extraction. Four of the nine founders of the Jewish Federation – the Federation of Jewish Welfare Charities of 1903 – led the local garment-making firms, said Dr. Sean Martin, curator for Jewish History at the Western Reserve Historical Society.
During this fertile period, John Anisfield began inviting his only child, Edith, downtown to his office on Saturdays, where the two would consider the family’s philanthropy. She was just 12 in 1901 when this consultation began – a full 19 years before the country decided to give women the right to vote with the 19th Amendment.
The forward-looking father and precocious daughter (Edith could read French, German, and English) sent money to Mount Sinai Hospital, the first such Cleveland institution to accept patients regardless of creed or color. When John Anisfield died in 1929, his daughter took five years to decide how to honor him: a literary prize that became the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
“The most important legacy of the garment industry is its philanthropic legacy,” historian Martin told a packed audience at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. “The wealth they generated – not just for themselves but for their employees – is still with us.”
The 2010 Census figures tallied Harlem’s black population at its lowest since the 1920s. Such broad demographic changes have left some New Yorkers, like Jacob Morris of the Harlem Historical Society, concerned about the neighborhood’s future.
“Harlem was the capital of black America,” Morris said. “But as demographics change, a city loses awareness of its history. I wanted to do something about it, before the composition of the community changed so much that they didn’t care anymore.”
Naming streets after prominent African-Americans connected to Harlem became a galvanizing idea. Morris pursued the first street co-naming in 2005; two years later, he succeeded. Frederick Douglass Landing was christened on Chambers Street in Manhattan, which commemorated the place Douglass landed in 1838, as a 20-year-old escaping from slavery, on his third try.
Since 2007, the Harlem Historical Society has helped almost 30 luminaries take their place on street signs all over the neighborhood—including (Anisfield-Wolf winner) Zora Neale Hurston Place and (Supreme Court Justice) Thurgood Marshall Place.
Morris is especially proud of the women the society has rallied to recognize, including civil rights activist Ella Baker, who helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “If there was a Mount Rushmore for the civil rights movement, Ella Baker would be on it,” he said.
The latest push is to honor James Baldwin. Morris said he and Herb Boyd, who wrote Baldwin’s Harlem, came up with the idea four years ago to honor James Baldwin, but needed to pinpoint an appropriate location. They chose W. 128th between Fifth and Madison Aves., the site of Baldwin’s elementary school. Because young Baldwin had a transient childhood, “the real continuity in young James’ life was the school,” Morris explained.
Baldwin’s nephew, Trevor Baldwin, joined the campaign, and the resolution passed the city’s traffic and transportation committee this month, with official news coming in early 2014.
African-American tech insiders will talk about their work stories in a new series on National Public Radio’s Tell Me More.
From Dec. 2 until Dec. 20, Twitter users can follow the #NPRBlacksInTech hashtag to follow a day-in-the-life of these “tech thinkers.” Michel Martin, host of Tell Me More, expects this feature will broaden the conversation about who staffs the tech revolution.
“‘A Day in the Life’ allows us to experience in real time the imprint that African-Americans are making on our country’s STEM engine,” Martin said. “The series throws open the door to the worlds of these highly important, but largely invisible, individuals.”
Anjuan Simmons, who this year published the book “Minority Tech,” said he jumped at the chance to give others a glimpse of his work as a software project manager. (He will be live-tweeting his day December 6.)
“We are at a potential inflection point in getting people of color into technology,” Simmons said. “After being left out of past revolutions, the technology revolution needs to be the most inclusive jump in human potential and productivity that we’ve seen in this country.”
Poet Joshua Bennett adjusted the mic stand at Kent State University. “I was raised Baptist,” he warned the audience in Oscar Ritchie Hall. “I need energy from you. I’m open to any and all forms of enthusiasm.”
Dressed in dark skinny jeans, a cranberry sweater vest and Oxford shirt, Bennett steadied himself and spoke of his recent discovery of Lucille Clifton’s poetry. Using the last stanza of Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate With Me,” he began his poem, “Say it, Sing it, as the Spirit Leads,” written in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict: “Come, celebrate with me. Every day something has tried to kill me and failed.”
A special guest of KSU’s Wick Poetry Center, the man from Yonkers, N.Y. has entered the national conversation during the past three years, driven in part by his viral poem, 2010’s “10 Things I Want To Say To A Black Woman.” A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Bennett has performed at the NAACP Image Awards, the Kennedy Center, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University.
Bennett said he didn’t begin to explore poetry until he was 17, when a friend invited him to a spoken word event. “Afterward, I bought a CD and a T-shirt, took a couple workshops, and my life changed,” he said. “I was a hip-hop kid before I started with poetry.”
Now in his early 20s, that hip-hop influence still saturates both his content and his delivery. Through his 45-minute set, he veered from racial politics, to love discoveries, to questions of identity, sometimes within the same piece. He wants his poetry, he said, to help eradicate shame.
Bennett has three siblings, each with a disability: his older sister is deaf, his older brother is schizophrenic and his younger brother is autistic. “For Levi,” his tribute to his younger brother with autism, ends with:
Tell them Levi is just shorthand for levitate.
That your calling is to the clouds
and you would pay them a lot more attention
but you are simply too busy having a conversation with God right now.
Then smile for them. Smile big. Smile pretty.
A woman in the audience told Bennett that hearing him speak inspired her to take her poetry more seriously. Bennett looked humbled and then offered her a word of advice. “Poems should be archeology,” Bennett said. “Write the things that cost you. Every poem has to cost you something if it’s going to be good.”
Watch Joshua Bennett perform “Plankton,” a love poem
When Whoopi Goldberg made plans to revive her one-woman Broadway show on Moms Mabley, she ran into a problem: few people remembered the comedy pioneer, who died in 1975.
Goldberg shelved the show and switched to making a documentary on Mabley and her place in American culture. “She loved to tell stories,” Goldberg told ABC’s Good Morning America. “There’s something about Moms, in finding that she had such a large part in civil rights, that she was the first female stand-up, and how funny she was—the jokes stand up to today.”
Born Loretta Mary Aikin in the Brevard N.C., of 1894, she was one of 16 children. Loretta ran away to Cleveland at age 14, joined a traveling minstrel show, and came out as a lesbian at age 27. She became one of the most successful performers on the Chitlin’ Circuit, earning $10,000 a week at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem at the height of her popularity.
Goldberg ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the documentary, which premiers on HBO tonight at 8 p.m. Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, and Joan Rivers lent their time and talent to this project, to help rescue Mabley from the margins of cultural memory.
Despite 50 years on stage, few recordings of the comedian exist, partly because African-American acts often went undocumented through most of the 20th century. Goldberg and her production crew fill the void with animated re-creations of Mabley’s creative genius. Her material was often blue, as Cosby notes, but she cracked the mainstream during the 1960s, when she performed at Carnegie Hall and on television for “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Smothers Brothers.”
Mabley’s racy jokes and biting punchlines cut to the racial tensions of the era. “I wanted this to be a reminder of what we fought for, how we did it, the various ways people used their artistry to say, hey, we’re going to make a change,” Goldberg said.
Goldberg’s directorial debut airs tonight. Watch this brief snippet below:
“We have all won the lottery of life,” Sheryl WuDunn said she criss-crossed the stage during her recent appearance at Kent State University’s presidental speakers series. Her husband and co-presenter, Nicholas Kristof, sat off to the side and nodded in agreement. “Once you have most of your material needs met, as most of us sitting here have, there are few things that actually elevate your level of happiness, and one of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.”
Co-authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, WuDunn and Kristof are a powerhouse couple. The pair won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square protests; Kristof went on to win an individual Pulitzer in 2006 for his Dafur genocide coverage as a New York Times columnist. The first Asian-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, WuDunn currently serves as a senior managing director at Mid-Market Securities, a boutique investment firm.
WuDunn and Kristof lived in Beijing in the early 1990s and were struck by the degree to which inequalities were targeted at girls. While there, they traveled to a small, rural village and met DiMon Ju, a bright sixth-grader forced to stay home from school because her family could not afford the $13 annual tuition.
Kristof wrote about Ju’s plight and the implications for hundreds of thousands girls just like her in his column. Soon after, letters from readers poured in, many containing $13 checks.
And then, there was one wire transfer of $10,000. Hurriedly, Kristof and WuDunn set up a fund to keep thousands of girls in school. It wasn’t until they called the donor to thank him for his generosity that they learned there had been a mistake: the donor only sent $100. A banking error was the source of the misunderstanding. Kristof quickly secured a donation of the difference from the bank’s president.
That village and the surrounding communities, Kristof noted, have improved drastically since the 1990s, but that particular village that received donations has seen the most progress, a feat Kristof credits to the increased education of girls and women. “The central moral challenge of the world is the oppression of women and girls worldwide,” Kristof said. “Gender discrimination is lethal.”
Kristof and WuDunn exposed the crowd to the horrors of human trafficking—girls as young as toddlers being kidnapped and sold to brothels, where they have no say over the sexual acts they are forced to perform on often violent customers. The couple urged the Kent State community to join the fight for women’s rights.
“I bought two Cambodian girls from a brothel,” Kristof said. “I bought one for $150 and the other was a little over $200. I got receipts. When you get a receipt for buying another human being in the 21st century, something is profoundly wrong.”
Marvel Comics, home to some of the world’s most recognizable superheroes, has widened diversity among its trademark characters with the announcement of its newest superhero — Kamala Khan, a Muslim-American Jersey teen with shape-shifting abilities.
Khan will make her debut in early 2014. Khan’s fascination with Marvel superhero Carol Danvers leads her to adopt the same secret identity: Ms. Marvel.
Editor Sana Amanat used her own American coming-of-age as the basis of the new series. “We strive to show the diverse world that exists out of our window,” she said. “[The series is] to show that outsiders don’t exist — we’re all insiders.”
Axel Alonso, Marvel’s editor-in-chief, called the addition a sign of the times. “The Marvel universe is best when it reflects the diversity of the world around it, but sculpts a narrative that is universal,” he said of the world’s largest comic book publisher.
Rula Jebreal, a foreign-policy analyst for MSNBC, praised Marvel Comic’s decision to cast a Muslim girl as a hero in a post 9/11 world. “Marvel’s work is a watershed moment in breaking down fear and ignorance, and creating greater awareness and familiarity,” she wrote on The Daily Beast.
This isn’t the first time Marvel has flipped the script — in 2011 they introduced Miles Morales, a biracial teen who takes on Spiderman’s identity after Peter Parker dies. The update garnered mixed results. Spider-Man creator Stan Lee praised the story line, and others thought Morales was a great role model for young men of color, but sales were modest.
Culture-watchers will have a sense of Khan’s popularity after her series begins February 6.
The potency of literature went on vivid display in early November when readers gathered around the writers who won this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prizes. They started with an intense and intimate two-hour session at Sinclair Community College in downtown Dayton.
“I need to give a shout-out to Wendell Berry, whose ‘The Gift of Good Land’ was one of the most important books of my life,” boomed Sinclair President Steven Lee Johnson, turning to the celebrated Kentucky author in praise of the 1981 essay collection, one of Berry’s 50 titles.
A bit later, a woman in a pink sweater rose, lifted her chin to Berry and fiercely declared, “Your words have changed my life, over and over. I carry your books when I am sad and frightened and they have changed things for me.” She paused, looked at the 300-member audience. “How awesome is that?”
Berry, 79, in Dayton to accept his distinguished achievement award, decided to address the fervor. “When people say my writing has changed their life, I feel complimented, but also a little frightened,” he said. “I didn’t sit down to change anybody’s life.” His eyes sought out the woman. “I think my book spoke to something in you that changed your life. That is to your credit and you should not give the credit to me.”
Nevertheless, credit abounded at the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a legacy of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that negotiated a stop to the Bosnian War. Established a decade later, the award seeks to recognize literature as “an enduring and effective tool for fostering peace.” It is now eight years old.
“The writers who win see the sincerity of the people who come and the people who work on this,” said Sharon Rab, founder and co-chair of the awards. “There is an entire community dedicated to peace and literature and the connection between the two.”
Pat Fife, a teacher at suburban Dayton’s Kettering-Fairmount High School, said her students were studying human trafficking with a class of like-minded students in Bosnia. Both groups read Ben Skinner’s “A Crime So Monstrous” about “modern-day slavery.” It won the 2009 Dayton prize.
“I thought it might be a little controversial, but people have been more than willing to engage it,” Fife said. Her students linked up with a nearby Methodist Church that works to fight human trafficking.
In Dayton, Solomon declared that “human diversity matters just as much as species diversity.” He noted that roughly 50 years ago Time magazine could denigrate gays as sub-human and the Atlantic Monthly could recommend exterminating infants with Down Syndrome. “I wanted to understand how something universally understood as an illness turned into an identity,” he said.
Such transformation doesn’t arrive all at once. One man took Solomon aside in Dayton and demanded the writer admit that “this gay rights thing has gone too far.” Solomon quietly told the stranger he would not admit that.
The author, who received a thunderous ovation at the awards ceremony, riffed on his title. “What parent hasn’t looked at their child,” he asked, “and said, ‘What planet did you come from?’”
Growing up, Solomon read and admired Berry’s poetry, and Berry said, for his part, he was thunderstruck in 1963 by Harry Caudill’s nonfiction classic “Night Comes to the Cumberlands,” a story about rural poverty that mattered.
Maaza Mengiste, Dayton’s first runner-up in 2011 for her novel, “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze,” said she had been greatly influenced by Tim O’Brien, who was on hand as last year’s distinguished achievement winner.
“Peace is a shy thing,” O’Brien told the crowd. “It doesn’t brag about itself. We are at peace in this room and we take it for granted. It’s by its absence that peace is known. Peace is a value we don’t feel until the wolf is at the door.”
Fiction winner Adam Johnson spoke eloquently about the wolf’s stranglehold on North Korea, also captured in his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son.” He asked the Dayton audience to imagine the isolation on the northern half of the peninsula, separated from its own literature. “Not a single play or poem has been smuggled out of North Korea in 60 years, unlike, even, the worse days of the Russian gulag.”
Closer to home, nonfiction runner-up Gilbert King explored “Devil in the Grove,” a harrowing, 1949 Florida case of racial injustice. It also won a Pulitzer Prize this year and centers on the legal mastery of a young Thurgood Marshall.
The crusading lawyer “was never surprised by the verdicts in the South,” King observed. “But he did say, ‘sometimes I get awfully tired of trying to save the white man’s soul.’”
International outrage over the “Grovewood boys” case in Florida helped raise the cash that supported the NAACP’s work on Brown vs. Board of Education, King said, ushering forward a new America.
Berry, lionized by O’Brien’s introduction, brought the crowd back to Earth. “There is a certain comedy in hearing one’s self praised,” he said. “I am embarrassed that I have nothing to present but me.”
At 32, Kirk W. Johnson is a veteran of a particularly harrowing kind of politics. A soft-spoken and reluctant activist, he met an auditorium full of high school students in downtown Cleveland on a mild November evening. Together, they reflected on his story, and his new book: “To Be A Friend is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind.”
The title derives from an observation by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. As America pulled out of Vietnam, Kissinger noted dryly that being an enemy of the U.S. could be dangerous, but being a friend could be fatal. Still, “within a few years, nearly a million people came here from Southeast Asia and have become a critical part of our nation’s fabric,” Johnson said. “Some are members of Congress now.”
The thousands of Iraqis who aided the United States – in the Green Zone, as translators, doing myriad support tasks – haven’t been nearly as fortunate.
Johnson’s host, “Facing History and Ourselves,” strives to teach students about perpetrators of violence, about bystanders and the rare individuals it calls “upstanders.” Mark Swaim-Fox, who directs Facing History’s Cleveland office, introduced the writer as an “upstander.”
Johnson painted himself an unlikely champion. In 2006, he was recuperating from injuries in his parents’ Chicago home, soured on his civilian work for USAID in Baghdad and Fallujah. But he opened an email from Yaghdan, an Iraqi colleague who had been spotted leaving the Green Zone. The next day Yaghdan awoke to a decapitated dog and a death threat. He fled with his wife Haifa to Dubai and sent Johnson one terse sentence: “People are trying to kill me and I need your help.”
The email led Johnson to write an op-ed piece, published in the Los Angeles Times December 15, 2006, under the headline “Safeguarding Our Allies,” the first major American newspaper to broach the plight of U.S.-affiliated Iraqis. Within days, Johnson’s inbox was flooded with pleas from Iraqis in similar straits. Frightened and uncertain what he might do, Johnson opened a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and started entering names.
The spreadsheet grew into “The List,” and then, more formally, “The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies,” a nonprofit organization that has become the largest pro-bono American legal effort on behalf of refugees. “For the last seven years, I’ve been trying to deal with the consequences of that 1,000-word op-ed,” Johnson said, smiling.
Scribner, $26, 338 pp.
The work also attracted independent filmmaker Beth A. Murphy, whose documentary, “The List,” draws a parallel between Oskar Schindler and Johnson.
Her subject would no doubt blanch at that comparison. As he spoke in Cleveland, Johnson repeatedly circled back to the word “frustrated,” stressing the “narcoleptic bureaucracy” that has thwarted the will of Congress, expressed in the passage of the “Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act,” which authorized 25,000 visas. That Act expired this October 1, some 17,000 visas unused.
“Bush or Obama, the bureaucrats all say the same thing: ‘9/11 changed everything. We need to keep the Homeland safe,’” Johnson said. “But has 9/11 changed this country so much that we can’t make the distinction between our enemies and our friends?”
Some of the people waiting for visas dragged wounded Americans out of harms’ way, only to lose their own legs doing so, Johnson said. It pains him that England and France evacuated their Iraqi employees within weeks, while his organization has documented that some 1,000 Iraqis were slain while their former employer, the United States, dithered.
Two who did arrive safely were Yaghdan and Haifa, who have become parents to a son. Yaghdan has earned his MBA.
Kevin Powers, winner of a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf book award for “The Yellow Birds,” called Johnson’s new memoir “a heartbreaking reminder of the wreckage we’ve left behind in Iraq. And it is unafraid to ask some of the most essential questions regarding our involvement there: Are we who we say we are? And if we are, why haven’t we kept our word? I urge everyone to read it.”
Fresh off the paperback release of his newest work, This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz swung by Cleveland State University in October for its Cultural Crossings seminar. We caught up with our 2008 fiction winner for his reflections on winning an Anisfield-Wolf award. “It puts you in remarkably excellent company,” Diaz said, and we couldn’t agree more.
In the harem, women did not go naked. Nor did they wear flimsy, see-through harem pants.
Despite the panting Western imagination, so memorably examined by Edward Said in his 1978 book “Orientalism,” the classic Western fantasy of the harem never existed in fact, reports Lisa Nielson, the Anisfield-Wolf scholar at Case Western Reserve University.
“The harem is the symbol of the Orient – women lounging, indolent, beautiful, passive objects,” Nielson said during an October lecture on “Improvisation and Transgression: Musicians of the Harem,” given for the Baker-Nord Center on Humanities at Case.
In the artistic imagination of Western painters, harems contained reliable tropes: feathers, the hookah, an exotic despot, unclothed women and often musicians. “Clothes are a sign of status, and playing musical instruments and smoking while naked is actually not that comfortable,” joked Nielson, who teaches a SAGES course on the women’s quarters in history and in the Western imagination.
Perhaps the Western nonsense reached its nadir, she said, in the 1965 Elvis Presley vehicle, “Harum Scarum.” This movie, in which Presley plays an American singer enlisted by sinister forces in the assassination of an Arab king whose daughter he loves, is so dreadful that Nielson said she “bought it for a dollar and I paid too much.”
Nielson stressed that there is much to discover about the historical harem, which is only one specific form of gender segregation among many. Such segregation is found in the Bible, ancient Greece, China, Korea, India, and Europe. The word “harem” as a reference to the women’s quarters is specific to Ottoman Empire; other cultures had different terms and rules for these spaces. Moreover, Nielson noted, “the women of the women’s quarters were highly educated, skilled, and, often quite ruthless.”
The role of the musician was one of entertainer and intermediary in the harem, reports Nielson, who earned her doctorate in ancient musicology and gender studies. As in the West, there was a struggle in Islam over whether music stirs indecency or represents a pathway to the divine. “In the West, angels play music and intercede for us,” Nielson observed. “Music itself is the intermediary. Among Sufis, music was a way of getting closer to God. Therefore, the musician, who was frequently a highly skilled member of the women’s quarters, had access to the ruler’s body and soul.”
We are very far from harem pants, indeed.
At the conclusion of this year’s ceremony, a number of Nigerians in attendance approached our lifetime achievement winner Wole Soyinka, for a chance to get close to the man they admired. A few bowed in his presence. He returned their kindness, speaking with a few before being whisked away to the book signing. We spoke with Soyinka to hear his thoughts on being honored for a lifetime of work and what it means to get that type of reception at this point in his career:
A. Van Jordanmade an October appearance at Market Garden Brewery’s Brews & Prose event, sharing snippets from his latest work, “The Cineaste,” in front of a packed crowd. We caught up with the Akron native for a brief chat on the personal significance of winning the 2005 Anisfield-Wolf award:
The wood-frame Cleveland house where Langston Hughes once scribbled teenaged insights is back from the brink. Four years ago its back door flapped open and its copper fixtures had been pilfered by thieves, leaving ugly holes in the walls.
Today, it is renovated, and ready for its new owner, an aspiring writer from Lyndhurst. Perhaps the 3-bedroom home’s proximity to long-ago greatness will bring him luck. Langston Hughes was just 15 in 1917 when he rented the attic room on E. 86th St. His mother and stepfather had moved away, and Langston was doing well at Cleveland’s prestigious Central High School. He had started to write poems.
“The only thing I knew how to cook myself in the kitchen of the house where I roomed was rice, which I boiled to a paste. Rice and hot dogs, rice and hot dogs, every night for dinner. Then I read myself to sleep,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Big Sea.
Young Langston was a star on Central’s track team, and in its literary magazine, “The Monthly,” where his first short stories appeared. Ethel Weimer, his much-respected English teacher, encouraged him to read Walt Whitman, Carl Sandberg, Edgar Lee Masters, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay.
He went on to attend Columbia University (for a year), travel the world and play a central role in the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes returned briefly to Cleveland in the 1930s when the Karamu House produced six of his plays. In 1954, he won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his novel, Simple Takes a Wife.
But even as Hughes became enshrined in the 20th Century American pantheon, the colonial on E. 86th St. declined. In 2009, a neighborhood improvement group bought the decrepit property for $100 from the city of Cleveland, only to discover that the celebrated poet of the Harlem Renaissance had been a boy there.
Debra Wilson, real estate manager for Fairfax Development Corp., said her small nonprofit was ill-prepared to find the cash that rescuing a historic landmark would require. Nevertheless, her group managed the renovation and to sell it in October for $85,000. (See listing here.)
“We put about $174,000 into it, but we’re not complaining. We’re very proud,” Wilson said. “We’re doing a Langston Hughes reading garden next to it on land the Cuyahoga County Land Bank donated.”
Occasional news stories have meant “we get phone calls about it from around the world,” she said.
Studying the poetry Langston Hughes wrote during his adolescent in Cleveland, the scholar Arnold Rampersadobserved that it is ”dominated by images of childhood. He was a star high school athlete, the best high jumper in Ohio, and again and again he depicted himself as a child in his poetry, showing an extraordinary quality of innocence” in a complex man.
In 2012, biographer Rampersad returned to Cleveland to be honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement award.
Eugene Gloria‘s My Favorite Warlord earned praise from the Anisfield-Wolf jury for his “vivid and striking” work examining masculinity, identity, and heritage. His 2012 collection of poetry helped him snag his latest literary prize, the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf award for poetry. Prior to this year’s ceremony, we talked to Gloria about what winning the award meant to him and where he sees his career headed next.
If you follow Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Twitter or Facebook, you are probably already privy to the bevy of heavy hitters he has recruited for his new PBS series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers To Cross,” premiering Oct 21. The six-part documentary features names as varied as the Black Panther Party’s Kathleen Cleaver to Roots’ drummer Questlove. Gates has mentioned that he is particularly proud of procuring the insights of General Colin Powell.
The chair of the Anisfield-Wolf book awards serves executive producer, host and writer for the series, using his unparalleled knowledge of African-American history (and access to some of the nation’s foremost historians) to flesh out what most history books only skim. The series aspires to document the entire 500-year history of African-Americans, from the beginnings of the slave trade to the present-day occupant of the White House.
In a recent interview, Gates said this series was 40 years in the making. His inspiration for “The African Americans” was the 1968 program, “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed,” hosted by Bill Cosby, a seven-part look at the unheralded contributions of blacks in film, science and other endeavors. Gates’ series is a deeper dive into narratives much enhanced by leading historians, including former Anisfield-Wolf winners Ira Berlin, David Eltis and Annette Gordon Reed.
After the premiere on October 21, a new hour-long episode will air each Tuesday until the finale on November 26. Join us on Twitter as we tweet with Gates during each episode, using the hashtag #ManyRiversPBS. Catch a peek at the first episode with this two-minute video on a slave girl simply known as Priscilla:
