#Harlem in Depression

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Depression in Harlem, ca. 1934.

Photo: Aaron Siskind via the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

[frogteethblogteeth]

Cab Calloway and his band in a sleeper car, 1933

[kaijuno]

LOUISE JENKINS MERIWETHER

(May 8, 1923 – October 10, 2023)

Louise Jenkins Meriwether, a novelist, essayist, journalist, and social activist, was the only daughter of Marion Lloyd Jenkins and his wife, Julia. Meriwether was born May 8, 1923, in Haverstraw, New York, to parents from South Carolina.

After the 1929 stock market crash, Louise’s family migrated from Haverstraw to New York City. They moved to Brooklyn first and later to Harlem. The third of five children, Louise grew up during the Great Depression, a time that would deeply affect her young life and ultimately influence her as a writer.

Louise Jenkins attended Public School 81 in Harlem and graduated from Central Commercial High School in downtown Manhattan. In the 1950s, she received a B.A. in English from New York University before meeting and marrying Angelo Meriwether, a Los Angeles teacher. Although this marriage and later marriage to Earle Howe ended in divorce, Louise continued to use the Meriwether name. In 1965, Louise earned an M.A. in journalism from the University of California at Los Angeles. Her first book, Daddy Was a Number Runner, a fictional account of the economic devastation of Harlem in the Great Depression, appeared in 1970 as the first novel to emerge from the Watts Writers’ Workshop.

The circumstances surrounding this photo are largely unnatributed to larger context but some citation indicates that Jenkins-Merriwether was being questioned by police at a protest.

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Evelyn Preer

Evelyn Preer (née Jarvis; July 26, 1896 – November 17, 1932), was an African American pioneering screen and stage actress, and jazz and blues singer in Hollywood during the late-1910s through the early 1930s. Preer was known within the Black community as "The First Lady of the Screen."

She was the first Black actress to earn celebrity and popularity. She appeared in ground-breaking films and stage productions, such as the first play by a black playwright to be produced on Broadway, and the first New York–style production with a black cast in California in 1928, in a revival of a play adapted from Somerset Maugham's Rain.

Evelyn Jarvis was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 26, 1896. After her father, Frank, died prematurely, she moved with her mother, Blanche, and her three other siblings to Chicago, Illinois. She completed grammar school and high school in Chicago. Her early experiences in vaudeville and "street preaching" with her mother are what jump-started her acting career. Preer married Frank Preer on January 16, 1915, in Chicago.

At the age of 23, Preer's first film role was in Oscar Micheaux's 1919 debut film The Homesteader, in which she played Orlean. Preer was promoted by Micheaux as his leading actress with a steady tour of personal appearances and a publicity campaign, she was one of the first African American women to become a star to the black community. She also acted in Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920), in which she plays Sylvia Landry, a teacher who needs to raise money to save her school. Still from the 1919 Oscar Micheaux film Within Our Gates.

In 1920, Preer joined The Lafayette Players a theatrical stock company in Chicago that was founded in 1915 by Anita Bush, a pioneering stage and film actress known as “The Little Mother of Black Drama". Bush and her troupe toured the US to bring legitimate theatre to black audiences at a time when theaters were racially segregated by law in the South, and often by custom in the North and the interest of vaudeville was fading. The Lafayette Players brought drama to black audiences, which caused it to flourish until its end during the Great Depression.

She continued her career by starring in 19 films. Micheaux developed many of his subsequent films to showcase Preer's versatility. These included The Brute (1920), The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), Deceit (1923), Birthright (1924), The Devil’s Disciple (1926), The Conjure Woman (1926) and The Spider's Web (1926). Preer had her talkie debut in the race musical Georgia Rose (1930). In 1931, she performed with Sylvia Sidney in the film Ladies of the Big House. Her final film performance was as Lola, a prostitute, in Josef von Sternberg's 1932 film Blonde Venus, with Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich. Preer was lauded by both the black and white press for her ability to continually succeed in ever more challenging roles, "...her roles ran the gamut from villain to heroine an attribute that many black actresses who worked in Hollywood cinema history did not have the privilege or luxury to enjoy." Only her film by Micheaux and three shorts survive. She was known for refusing to play roles that she believed demeaned African Americans.

By the mid-1920s, Preer began garnering attention from the white press, and she began to appear in crossover films and stage parts. In 1923, she acted in the Ethiopian Art Theatre's production of The Chip Woman's Fortune by Willis Richardson. This was the first dramatic play by an African-American playwright to be produced on Broadway, and it lasted two weeks. She met her second husband, Edward Thompson, when they were both acting with the Lafayette Players in Chicago. They married February 4, 1924, in Williamson County, Tennessee. In 1926, Preer appeared on Broadway in David Belasco’s production of Lulu Belle. Preer supported and understudied Lenore Ulric in the leading role of Edward Sheldon's drama of a Harlem prostitute. She garnered acclaim in Sadie Thompson in a West Coast revival of Somerset Maugham’s play about a fallen woman.

She rejoined the Lafayette Players for that production in their first show in Los Angeles at the Lincoln Center. Under the leadership of Robert Levy, Preer and her colleagues performed in the first New York–style play featuring black players to be produced in California. That year, she also appeared in Rain, a play adapted from Maugham's short story by the same name.

Preer also sang in cabaret and musical theater where she was occasionally backed by such diverse musicians as Duke Ellington and Red Nichols early in their careers. Preer was regarded by many as the greatest actress of her time.

Developing post-childbirth complications, Preer died of pneumonia on November 17, 1932, in Los Angeles at the age of 36. Her husband continued as a popular leading man and "heavy" in numerous race films throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and died in 1960.

Their daughter Edeve Thompson converted to Catholicism as a teenager. She later entered the Sisters of St. Francis of Oldenburg, Indiana, where she became known as Sister Francesca Thompson, O.S.F., and became an academic, teaching at both Marian University in Indiana and Fordham University in New York City.

Still from the 1919 Oscar Micheaux film Within Our Gates.

[nebbbula2]

Human AU Blade Headcanons No One Asked For

This guy has been listening to AC/DC since he was a kid in the late 70s. The records in tower are his, and Patch takes very good care of them.

Mayday encouraged Blade to keep his pilot's license and choose a career in fire where he could use it. He also helped Blade out of a grief spiral after Nick died, and Blade thinks of him as a mentor figure.

Blade has a natural intelligence for problem solving.

While Blade wants nothing to do with his fame or acting career, he still appreciates acting as an art form. He enjoys watching movies with other people to discuss afterwards, but he struggles to invite others to do it with him.

He might not wear it outwardly, but Blade is a total aviation nerd. That man loves rotary aircraft and anything else that flies.

(more depressing stuff below the cut)

Blade grew up in San Fran and became familiar with American West Coast culture at an early age. Like many young men in the 80s, he was involved in gay nightlife. Unfortunately, Blade chose to pull away from the community when more and more of his buddies were falling ill. It was difficult for him to stay around that despair, and he'd also need that separation in case his acting career blew up.

The only people who knew about Blade's relationship with Nick were Nick's parents, who accepted him as a member of their small family. Nick's parents suffered from health issues, so Blade would pitch in around their house like second son during visits. He even learned some of their family recipes.

See this post.

Blade spent so much time with Nick that he picked up small pieces of his East Harlem dialect, like his use of the word "ain't." He also learned a couple Spanish phrases from being around Nick's family, but they're specific to the Caribbean variant that's spoken in Puerto Rico.

Blade has a collection of Polaroid photos that feature his relationship with Nick.

Lot's of people in Hollywood, and even at Piston Peak, speculate about what went on with Blade and Nick. Blade wants to reveal more about their relationship, but first, he needs to think of a plan. He wants it to special and on his own terms.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Walked into my cousin’s house (he’s a firefighter) to find everyone trying to find out what it means when the firemen say, “A Collyer’s Mansion Situation.” No need to look, I knew it referred to the Collyer Brothers of New York City- the code for fire in a hoarder’s house. The picture above is of the police knocking down their door w/an axe. 

It usually means it’s not safe to enter the building. In 1947, it took police 5 hours to plow thru the junk and find the first brother’s body. It took them 3 weeks to find the 2nd brother just 10 feet away, buried under a collapsed junk tunnel.

History’s worst hoarders, the tragic but fascinating tale of the Collyer brothers can speak to anyone with a penchant for collecting or thrifting. How did 2 prominent members of society end up sealing themselves off from the outside world, fiercely reclusive and entombed by over 140 tons of collected items?

Homer and Langley were both educated at Columbia University. Homer had a degree in law and Langley studied engineering and also became an accomplished concert pianist who performed at Carnegie Hall.

They had a normal childhood. They never married or lived on their own, & chose to remain at the family’s Harlem brownstone with their mother. When their parents died, everything was left to them.. 

In 1933, Homer went blind from eye hemorrhages. His younger brother quit his job to care for him full-time, which is when their withdrawal from society began. Langley began keeping years of newspapers so his brother could read them when his sight was restored.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the brothers became increasingly fearful of their own neighborhood, which was shifting from the upper-class area they had known to an area synonymous with poverty and crime.

People became curious, local kids threw rocks at the windows, increasing their paranoia. Langley boarded up the windows, removed the doorbell and wired the doors shut.

Several people attempted to burgle the home, which prompted Langley to construct booby traps and elaborate tunnel systems made of junk all around the house.

Langley ventured out only after midnight for food runs. He would collect countless unwanted and abandoned items on the street that caught his eye along the way.

When Homer became paralyzed due to rheumatism, the brothers refused to seek medical treatment. Even though their father was a Dr., they didn’t trust them. Instead, they decided to use their fathers medical library in the house.

Langley believed his brother’s sight could be restored with a diet high in vitamin C so he fed Homer 100 oranges a week. He adapted a Model T Ford to generate electricity after their power was cut off, along with their water and gas, due to unpaid bills.

When the bank came to evict them, police found Langley in a clearing he had made in the walls of junk. Without a word, he wrote a check for the equivalent of nearly $100,000 today to pay off the mortgage and ordered everyone off the property.

The next time authorities returned, it would be to search for the bodies of the Collyers. To enter the sealed brownstone, an officer broke a window on the second floor and climbed through.

Unable to get past the solid walls of junk, a squad of men began making their way through the debris by throwing out everything blocking their way onto the street. The spectacle drew a crowd of thousands.

After several hours, they found Homer’s body. Medical examiners later determined he had died of starvation and heart disease.

When they couldn’t find Langley, they thought he fled and launched a search. Finally, a workman found his decomposing body. He was buried in one of his 2ft. wide tunnels lined with rusty bed springs and a chest of drawers. He had died of asphyxiation after he accidentally tripped one of the booby traps and was crushed. Police believe that he was bringing food to his brother. 

The house was deemed an unsafe fire hazard and was razed later that month in 1947. Some of their stuff went to museums and the rest was sold at auction.  Since the 1960s, the site of the former Collyer house has been a pocket park, named for them.

messynesschic.com

[cartermagazine]

Today We Honor Philip A. Payton Jr.

Philip A. Payton Jr. was a real estate magnate who turned Harlem into a black mecca. Harlem was white and home to wide boulevards, brownstones and row houses in the early 1900s.

Payton opened a Midtown real estate office with a partner in the fall of 1900. When the business flopped after a few months, he struck out on his own, sustained by the sewing work of his wife, Maggie. The couple moved to Harlem, where there was a high vacancy rate in the many new brownstone buildings. Payton then positioned himself to guide black tenants from Midtown to new homes.

“My first opportunity came as a result of a dispute between two landlords in West 134th Street,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Age, a black newspaper. “To ‘get even’ one of them turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants.”

As more black citizens arrived, white ones fled, depressing property values and creating more opportunities. Soon Payton became a building owner himself. And by 1904, the year the subway reached Harlem, he incorporated the Afro-American Realty Company to help remake Harlem as a home for black citizens who faced discrimination in housing.

He told black investors: “Today is the time to buy, if you want to be numbered among those of the race who are doing something toward trying to solve the so-called ‘Race Problem.’ ” The company’s brochure stated that “race prejudice is a luxury, and, like all other luxuries, can be made very expensive in New York City. The very prejudice which has heretofore worked against us can be turned and used to our profit.”

In July 1917 Payton closed his biggest deal, buying six apartment houses worth more than $1 million.

“All my friends discouraged me,” he later remembered. “All of them told me how I couldn’t make it. They tried to convince me that there was no show for a colored man in such a business in New York.”

CARTER™️ Magazine

[beardedmrbean]

Sorry, for these constant ranting about African and black American culture

It just sucks look at history as a black American at times. There no ancient kingdom or empire, like Han, Gupta, and Roman to call back to. No Mythos with great epics like Hellenism or Hinduism where I can see myself in.

No great warriors that might have shared your face and people use as inspiration in media. No great battle like the battle of Thermopylae for people recreate again and again

No great leaders like Alexander the Great, Ashoka the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar that change the course of history

As soon as January and February ends, seemly everyone forgot your people history.

Will we be remember when mankind enter interstellar?

Sorry maybe my borderline suicidal depression kicking in. Despite all the diversity push, has black Americans done anything beyond fighting slavery and racism? So we still have to hijack other people history and pop culture? Are any of our stories worth being told by media?

Or are we nothing but a sad pitiful group? Ugh sorry for making you my therapist

It just sucks look at history as a black American at times. There no ancient kingdom or empire, like Han, Gupta, and Roman to call back to. No Mythos with great epics like Hellenism or Hinduism where I can see myself in.

Check the Nubians and southern kingdom of Egypt there were black Pharaohs and dynasties those are recorded and attested by non Egyptian sources.

As for the Mythos Rome took a bunch of them from conquered lands, much like Greece did, like Babylon and Assyria did, Egypt too, oh and Hindus did the same thing. Easier to keep a population happy if you point out how our gods and your gods are the same guys just with different names.

No great leaders like Alexander the Great, Ashoka the Great, Julius and Augustus Caesar that change the course of history.

They existed, we just don't have any records of who they were, nothing concrete at least, gotta decide for yourself how faithful the oral tradition is.

Or you can treat it like folklore, doesn't mean there's not some truth to it, exaggerated is all.

As soon as January and February ends, seemly everyone forgot your people history. Will we be remember when mankind enter interstellar?

No need to keep them separate, just because a skin colour isn't the focus doesn't mean people forget, stuff like the 'black national anthem' is divisive, it's bringing back segregation saying we have a different national anthem than you. No if you're Americans you've got the one, go start your own country if you want a different one.

Haiti looks like it's about to reset try there.

If you want some heroes that look like you, meet the Harlem Hellfighters

To our eternal shame the US wasn't in the business of giving medals to black soldiers in WW1 not so much in 2 either, France however was.

Sergent Johnson here managed a Coup De Gras for valor in the battle that got him named "The Black Death" it's always the black something isn't it, we back home finally rectified the travesty that had him overlooked for the Medal of Honor in 2015, he more than earned it, wish he could know how many people look up to him now.

I do hope he saw this after he got home at least, I'd have that on my wall lmao.

Legacy section of his Wikipedia page has lots of things on it, but this I think would be the thing I would be proudest of,

In 1919, co-founder of the American Legion Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of former United States President Theodore Roosevelt, referred to Johnson as one of the "five bravest Americans" to have served in World War I.

One of the good Roosevelt's, and I'm gonna guess this got to him too, since he was still around.

You need a warrior here's one, he led and sacrificed, he's a good one to look up to, refused to let his buddy be taken captive at great personal risk after they'd fought of 12 Germans.

Need another group of warriors, we've got the Tuskegee Airmen.

Made a lot of white (fighter) pilots mad because they were that good at their job, white bomber crews loved them they saw the red taifin on the P-51 their hope for surviving the mission went way up, because they were that good at their job.

Look them up too if you haven't before, check out the movie "Red Tails" Black writers adapted a story by one of them about a damn fine group of pilots, I enjoyed the movie watched it a bunch of time when I was living in Florida because it was on one of the movie channels the hotel I was living in carried.

You've got warriors who fought great battles that you can look up to though, even more so because they knew what life was like back home and how they were treated and would be on their return, and they fought anyhow.

Admirable men worthy of being looked up to by anyone really. At least for this service which is what counts for me right now.

Will we be remember when mankind enter interstellar?

How could humanity forget these men, and so many other incredible human beings that worked for the betterment of humankind in their own ways? __________

As a aside, Max Brooks got together with a artist named Caanan White who I don't know anything about but they did a fictional graphic novel about the Harlem Hellfighters and it looks pretty dang cool, so you may want to look into that at some point too.

[gangles-toybox]

Idk if I'll draw it but random Youtuber/Influencer AU for TADC go brr. Putting a break because SHIT MAN this is longggg lol

Pomni- General internet goer and one of those Youtubers that made "day in the life" type vlogs showcasing how much fucking pressure she's under, has a pretty loyal and caring audience for her despite herself, ~100,000 subscribers or so and she *tries* to respond to every comment.

Caine- Not so much an Influencer persay but more so of creator of the popular social media apps and tries to be #hipwiththekids...it does not work very well he's posting Pokémon Go and Harlem shake memes in 2024..bless his heart

Bubble- Caine's social media manager! He's a little better with being hip with the kids, up to date with memes n stuff but he also gets attention in...less than convential ways. Think of what was happening with the Norm of the North Twitter account, just weird..weird shit.

Sun & Moon- They act as a duo of sorts on Tik Tok and they make skits and #unhinged humor that is probably liked by majority of everybody. Nobody can tell if they're dating or just friends, since Sun will say the most unhinged shit and Moon will just sigh dreamily at it while reciting a poem or shit. Moon has to stop Sun from responding to hate comments and going off on them and finding their address n shit.

Gloink Queen & Gloinks: The Gloink Queen is one of those Facebook moms who takes pictures of their children(her Gloinks) every time they do anything, even when they're crying, because she thinks it's "cute". She gets fairly popular at first and even gets to sell merchandise however as her audience grows, so does her criticism but Facebook doesn't do anything about it and she continues to exploit her children for views and attention.

Princess Loolilalu- Tiktok influencer that shows the daily life of a royal. She's fairly unpopular but she was the hot topic for a week because people thought she was flexing and she had to explain she wasn't trying to, she was just trying to show the daily life since some people in her kingdom had inquired about it. She gets very low engagement but she admires every comment she gets. She starts to shift towards more crafty stuff after honestly getting a bit bored filming every second of her life and that grows her audience a little bit.

Gummigoo - Tiktok Influencer that make illegal life hack videos and him just working on a farm(I assume he does cuz he gives off cowboy vibes) and he's unintentionally thirst trapping through those videos, which gives him a pretty large, dedicated and possibly a little too obsessed, audience.

Zooble- Youtuber that talks about the most depraved shit that people do in humanity, think like iceberg videos about shitty people online or the dark corners of Reddit and 4chan. Also probably has a second channel where they play *nothing* but Plants vs. Zombies 2 because idk it's funny and they need to do something else to not get entirely depressed

Kinger- He is a Youtuber, techinally, though he doesn't know how to operate a camera very well. Most of his videos are just snippets from his life, cooking some food, badly singing his favorite songs, and sharing a little too much of his life online. Still, he's regarded as Youtube's grandpa.

Kaufmo- A YouTube "prankster" that would do the worst fucking things imaginable(not illegal but..close to it) and one day he did..something..and he got killed for it as a result, it was all caught on camera. He was criticized a lot for doing what shit he was doing and when he died, it was covered but nobody was suprised.

Ragatha- If Kinger is the grandpa of YouTube, then Ragatha is the grandma because she posts a lot of crochet and stitching how tos while also sprinkling in her personality and some of her other interests, like making a crochet Undertale plushie or something.

Gangle- She's a very famous twitch streamer who is...I don't even know really how to describe it but she's very like "uwu" abt everything as her streamer personality yknow? And..I mean..it works, she gets enough donations in a 1 hour stream to pay her rent for 2 months so..as for her content, it depends, sometimes it's horror games and other times it's just chilling with chat.

Jax- Jax is...also...a streamer. He does snuff streams where he gets donations to torture people and stuff. It's illegal but he makes as much money, if not more, than Gangle.

[paolo-streito-1264]

John Albok. Brother and sister during the Great Depression. Harlem, New York, USA, 1933.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Bootblacks in Harlem, ca. 1937-40.

Photo: Aaron Siskind via the Jewish Museum

[rockclimbinglover12107]

Unpopular OITNB opinions because I’m bored and procrastinating

I had little to no interest in Taystee and found her outright annoying at times. She was okay in the earlier seasons and my idea of her was that she was good character that I didn’t like due to personal preference. However, in the later season, I felt that she could be irritating, irrational and depressing in an unenjoyable way and that she got far too much screen time for what I considered to be a rather dull plot.

I find it hilarious when people try to complain about people on the show being mean or bad people. Like yes, that’s why 99% of them have landed themselves in prison. The funniest examples of this complaint are when people say that Lorna, someone who grew up Italian-American in New York, could sometimes say racist things or when Flaritza, two girls who probably couldn’t even legally drink before they went to prison and, in Maritza’s case at least, didn’t seem to have parents who cared for them, could sometimes be bitchy and immature. These comments are even funnier when whoever says this then goes on to say that they love Frieda, Carol and Barb.

In my personal opinion, Season 2 was the best season quality-wise but Season 4 was better when it came down to drama and entertainment. Season 3 was actually one of my favourites aside from Alex’s whole paranoid arc and I didn’t really mind the panty storyline. Season 1 was obviously good, if a little slow and boring at first. Season 5 shouldn’t have dragged on for so long, if they were only going to cover three days, although I probably would have enjoyed it if it hadn’t felt so absurd and weird compared to previous seasons. Season 7 was depressing trauma porn from start to finish and Season 6 was dreadful n every single way and a terrible conclusion for the riot.

I felt like the family dynamics became way less cohesive it’s the show progressed and people that had once gotten on perfectly well were suddenly at each other’s throats and vice versa. A good example of this was Spanish Harlem which went from a clearly outlined family where Aleida and Gloria acted as parents, Blanca was not a part of the group and the other four ( Maria, Daya, Maritza and Flaca ) pretty much did whatever Aleida said. Contrast this to Season 4/5 where Aleida leaves but Flaritza and Maria don’t seem to even notice, Gloria just let’s Maria have control over Harlem with no complaints whatsoever, Maria and Maritza seem to be at each other’s throats one second and back to there seemingly rather good Season 2/3 friendship the next, Blanca is suddenly an active member of the group and Gloria only cares about Daya. This faulty dynamic is true for all of the other groups as well, and never gets the chance to recover after they are sent to Max.

I didn’t like how some of the seriously traumatic stuff that happened to some of these characters, especially in Season 4, was never addressed by the show again and seemed to forgotten after the episode ended by both the writers and the character themself. You’re telling me that Maritza was creeped on, forced to eat a live animal, held at gunpoint and repeatedly harassed but she bounced back after throwing up like twice and hugging Flaca. In reality, she would probably take a long while to recover or feel truly comfortable in her own skin again, maybe even experiencing some PTSD, which could have been an interesting storyline to take her character down through Season 5, instead of relegating her back to comedy bits and pop culture references.

That’s all my opinions for now, although I will probably make a Part 2 for this post. Hope you agreed with at least one of my takes and that you don’t want to kill me for some of the things I said.

[alaffy]

Riverdale 7x20 - Goodbye, Riverdale (Spoilers)

Jesus, this was depressing. After seven years, Riverdale comes to an end. And I can absolutely guarantee that nobody ever expected it to end like this. That being said, while this is not the ending I would have chosen, I also can't say I dislike this ending. We watched these character going through year after year of hell and the fact that most of them have a good life and there is a happy-ish ending to this...well, I'm content with it. Riverdale, for me, probably will be the first four seasons, but I don't hate this ending.

Anyway, we start with an Eight Six year old Betty who's learned Jughead has passed away. Betty is now the last of the gang to survive. Betty wants to visit Riverdale one last time and her granddaughter promises to take her there the next day. That night Betty is visited by Angel/Writer Jughead who takes her back to the last day of high school so she can see her friends one last time. During these moments we find out what happened to all of the characters. And I'm just going to go through this real quick.

Ms. Andrews will fall in love with a woman who will live in the with Ms. Andrews until she passes away. Polly will end up having her twins (Juniper and Dagwood). Alice will eventually divorce Hal (I think, my cable screwed up and I missed part of this), become a flight attendant, and marry someone else.

During junior year of high school, Fangs records a hit single and is able to convince Midge's parents to let him marry her. Their happiness is short lived as, not long after high school, Fangs goes out on tour and is killed in a bus accident. Midge and her daughter will live off the royalties of Fang's two songs (right).

Pop's apparently dies before the kids graduate high school. That's the grave Betty is visiting. The writers clearly are choosing violence here.

Clay and Kevin move to Harlem together. Clay becomes a professor at Columbia (I think) and Kevin opens his own off Broadway production. Kevin will die of old age in his sleep and Clay will pass away a few weeks later sitting on a park bench.

Cheryl and Toni move west and live a more bohemian life. They have a son named Dale (after Riverdale). They will live a long and happy life together.

Reggie will go on to play basketball for the Lakers and then become the coach at Riverdale High. He has two sons who will run the Mantle used car lot. Reggie was buried in Duck Creek.

As for the core four, well they all decide during senior year to all just date each other. Yup. Well, maybe, as we never see anything happen between Archie and Jughead. After high school....

Veronica moves back to LA and becomes a big movie mogul. I don't think it's directly said, but it seems like she was the first of the four to go. I does seem like Betty, at least, looses touch with her over time.

I'm not going to go into the last Barchie scene. While I didn't particularly like that couple, what the writers did in that scene was nothing short of sadistic to those fans. But one could argue that same was done to Bughead and Varchie fans in season four. Anyway, Archie will go out west and find a woman that he decides to settle down with. He lives a long, good life with her and, when he dies, he's buried next to his father.

Jughead will create Jughead's Madhouse Magazine (Mad Magazine) and had a successful life as a writer/editor. He never marries.

Betty also creates her own magazine. (And late '60s/early '70s Betty's look is my favorite Betty look). Betty never married, but she did adopt a daughter. Which she considers her legacy, her family.

Anyway, Angel/Writer Jughead takes Betty back to the present. The next day, Betty's granddaughter takes her to Riverdale. As they pull into Pop's parking lot, the building is for sale, she discovers Betty has died.

But then young Betty steps out of a car as she has been transported to an functioning Pop's Restaurant. Jason is at the door (yep, the actor is back). And everyone is there (well, of the cast that still worked on the show). And as the story ends, Betty joins the other three at the table and in the Hereafter.

Like I said, not the way I imaged the show would ever end. Not the way I would have ended it. Still, it was a very bitter sweet ending. I shed some tears and, yeah, part of me is sad to see it end.

Of course, that part of me will soon be knocked unconscious by my sanity....

[madamlaydebug]

June 22, 1937: A crowd of 65,000 at Comiskey Park in Chicago watched Joe Louis became the 1st African-American World heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson.

Louis dethroned James Braddock, knocking out "The Cinderella Man" in the 8th round.

Braddock was able to knock Louis down in round 1, after that, he could accomplish little.

The Brown Bomber's victory was a seminal moment in African American history. Thousands of African Americans stayed up all night across the country in celebration.

Noted author and member of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes described Louis's effect in these terms:

"Each time Joe Louis won a fight in those depression years, even before he became champion, thousands of African-Americans on relief or W.P.A., and poor, would throng out into the streets all across the land to march and cheer and yell and cry because of Joe's one-man triumphs. No one else in the United States has ever had such an effect on Negro emotions – or on mine. I marched and cheered and yelled and cried, too."— #joelouis #boxing #history

[girlactionfigure]

“Don't ever let injustice go by unchallenged," his mother told him.

He was a rebel, a self-described “angry misfit”.

He and a friend would survive an ambush by KKK members who tried to force their vehicle off the road.

Born in Manhattan on March 1, 1927, and raised in Depression-era Harlem, he said he spent his life “in a constant state of rebellion.”

“His parents were mixed-race undocumented immigrants who constantly changed jobs, apartments and even their names to avoid authorities,” wrote Andrew R. Chow in Time Magazine. “Throughout my childhood we lived an underground life, as criminals of a sort, on the run,” [he would] write in his 2011 memoir.

Life for him as a child “was rife with hardship and sorrow, . . . His alcoholic father beat him bloody; his schoolyard years were full of fights waged with “bottles, garbage cans, rocks, hands and feet.” When he was a toddler, he accidentally cut himself in the eye with scissors, blinding himself in one eye for the rest of his life. [He] was also dyslexic, and his poor eyesight led him to drop out of school in the ninth grade, leaving him few career prospects.”

Poverty “defined” him, he wrote in his memoir.

“A day after his 17th birthday, he enlisted in the Navy and soon was disabused of romantic notions of military fellowship,” wrote Adam Bernstein of The Washington Post. “Minor infractions landed him for two weeks at the Naval Prison in Portsmouth, Va., where he saw German POWs receiving better treatment.”

“The injustice of this sickened me,” he wrote, adding that the experience “radicalized” him politically.

“Despite his service he was often turned away from segregated restaurants or concert venues.”

“The all-too-frequent incidents of prejudice kept me in an almost constant state of simmering rage,” he wrote.

When he returned, he found work as a janitor in a Harlem apartment building. A grateful tenant gave him tickets to the American Negro Theatre, where he started connecting with like-minded people. One of those, another janitor at the theater, became a life-long friend.

While looking for an acting job, he and his newlywed wife lived on her teacher’s salary in a $55-a-month apartment.

“In the meantime, he found a mentor in the African American entertainer Paul Robeson, a leading activist for civil and union rights who was hounded by federal authorities for his alleged socialist sympathies,” wrote Bernstein. Urged by Robeson, [he] began using folk songs to decry racism, poverty and other social ills.”

“In 1956, [he] decided to record an entire album of Caribbean island songs, much to the chagrin of his label, RCA, who felt it would be too “ethnic,” according to Chow. But [his album] was a runaway success: It made history as the first album to sell a million copies in the U.S., and embarked on a 99-week Billboard chart run that wouldn’t be matched until Michael Jackson’s Thriller more than a quarter-century later.”

Wrote Joshua Jelly-Schapiro of New York Magazine:

“In 1956, a Harlem-bred child of Caribbean immigrants [became] bigger than Elvis. But where Elvis built Graceland, [he] used the proceeds from [his album]” to assist a young Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement for civil rights. Along with his friend, the former janitor, Sidney Poitier, they became outspoken voices for justice and racial equality.

This Harlem-bred child of undocumented immigrants was born as Harold George Belanfanti Jr., but his parents had Americanized his name.

Harry Belafonte smashed “a series of barriers during five decades as a movie, TV and stage star, “ wrote Bernstein. “His artistic and humanitarian work frequently overlapped, reflecting his belief that ‘the role of art isn’t just to show life as it is but to show life as it should be.’”

He became “a dynamic force in the civil rights movement,” according to the New York Times.

This is a new story from the Jon S. Randal Peace page to honor the life and achievements of Harry Belafonte, who died of congestive heart failure Tuesday, April 25, at the age 96 at his New York home, according to his longtime spokesman.

The Peace Page focuses on past and present stories—some seldom told, others simply forgotten, still others intentionally ignored. The stories and chapters are gathered from writers, journalists, and historians to share awareness and foster understanding—to bring people together—and, as such, they are available all year in the Peace Page archives with new stories appearing each week throughout the year. We encourage you to learn more about the individuals and events mentioned here and to acknowledge the writers, educators, and historians whose words we present. Thank you for being here and helping us share awareness.

~~~~~

Growing up, Belafonte would refer to “my people” as “gangsters”, but clarified that by saying, “I don’t mean major American crime; I mean, as an immigrant, if you can’t find work inside the law, you find work outside the law. Running numbers and so on. Which is, of course, a characteristic of the poor, who find ways to break the rules, since the rules are always stacked against them.”

When he joined the Navy in 1944, he was hoping for adventure and glory on the Eastern front of World War II. “But the armed forces were still segregated, with African Americans often relegated to dangerous grunt work like handling live ammunition.”

When he “later enrolled in the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research,” his classmates included “Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Rod Steiger and Tony Curtis,” according to writer Drew Weisholtz.

When he released his history-making album “Calypso,” he said “It’s a song about my father, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica.”

"The song is a work song," he said. "It's about men who sweat all day long, and they are underpaid. They're begging for the tallyman to come and give them an honest count: 'Count the bananas that I've picked so I can be paid.' When people sing in delight and dance and love it, they don't really understand unless they study the song — that they're singing a work song that's a song of rebellion."

"When people thought he was just singing about good times in the islands, he was always like infusing messages of protest and revolution in everything he did," John Legend said.

“There had never before been any singer that popular with White middle-class audiences as well as Black audiences,” the cultural critic and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in an interview. “In that sense, he was an agent of change, the musical voice of civil rights.”

“Using music to espouse universal brotherhood, Mr. Belafonte encouraged audiences to sing along to calypso, protest and chain-gang songs, the ballad ‘Danny Boy’ and the Hebrew folk song ‘Hava Nagila’, according to The Washington Post.

“A two-time Grammy Award winner, Belafonte also won a Tony Award for best actor in a featured role in a musical for ‘John Murray Anderson’s Almanac’ in 1954,” according to Weisholtz.

“The first Black producer in television, he also won an Emmy Award in 1960 for his special ‘Tonight with Belafonte.’ In 2015, he was recognized with a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars, giving him coveted EGOT status.”

Despite his popularity, Belafonte “still met with plenty of resistance, especially as he entered previously segregated spaces,” wrote Chow. “While walking up Coldwater Canyon while filming his first Hollywood role, Bright Road, he was arrested and charged with illegal loitering. In Las Vegas, he was turned away from the resort he was playing at and instead told to stay at a dingy colored motel across town. A Chicago club’s manager initially refused to let him into his own show.”

In one famous incident, “Mr. Belafonte and White British singer Petula Clark were performing a duet of the antiwar song ‘Paths of Glory’ on an NBC special,” according to Bernstein. “An advertising manager for the automaker Chrysler-Plymouth, which was sponsoring the show, objected when Clark spontaneously touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm.

“The executive, who interrupted the song and had called for a retake, was later reprimanded by Chrysler and called Mr. Belafonte to apologize. ‘Your apology comes 100 years too late,’ the singer replied. NBC kept the scene when the show was televised. Mr. Belafonte later told an interviewer, “It is essential to television and industries to know that people like [this] exist. I’m tired and frustrated by what I’ve had to go through in this medium.”

~~~~~

“At the height of his mainstream fame, Belafonte stepped back from entertainment to devote the bulk of his time to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement,” according to Time Magazine. “He became a key economic engine and behind-the-scenes organizer for many of the sit-ins, freedom rides and marches that would sweep the South and propel social and federal change.”

“He became one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most trusted confidants, serving as a mediator between King and John F. Kennedy’s White House; he stood at the front lines at the March on Washington and the final march from Selma to Montgomery.”

“Belafonte’s global popularity and his commitment to our cause is a key ingredient to the global struggle for freedom and a powerful tactical weapon in the civil rights movement here in America. We are blessed by his courage and moral integrity,” King once said.

“In the immediate wake of the Birmingham protests in 1963, when thousands of children were jailed by Bull Connor’s police forces, [Belafonte] raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and worked closely with King, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and union leaders to bail scores of children out of jail,” wrote Chow.

“He also brought Brando, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman and Tony Bennett to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech — a critical show of White support that made King’s address all the more universal in its appeal,” according to the Washington Post.

And, he “used his friendships with Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Lena Horne and Henry Fonda to raise more than $100,000 to fund the Freedom Rides in 1964 that challenged racial segregation in interstate transportation.”

This was the time he and Poitier sped down the highway as a pursuing group of the Ku Klux Klan fired gunshots at them.

“Whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open,” Coretta Scott King wrote of Belafonte in her autobiography.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter Bernice King remembers, "When I was a child, Harry Belafonte showed up for my family in very compassionate ways. In fact, he paid for the babysitter for me and my siblings . . . I won’t forget.”

“­Belafonte also persuaded JFK to approve airlifting a planeload of Kenyan students to America in 1961,” according to Joshua Jelly-Schapiro of New York Magazine.

Belafonte remembered, “We had the airlift, right. Myself, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a woman called Cora Weiss. And we brought Kenyan students, before independence . . . we got them visas to enter American universities. And one of our lifts—and we didn’t have many—on one of those planes, we had Barack Obama’s father.”

“In the decades to come he would expand his empathetic push to a global scale, fighting against apartheid in South Africa, famine in Ethiopia, and genocide in Rwanda,” wrote Chow. “He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador . . . and railed fiercely against the Iraq War.”

He “was also one of the driving forces behind ‘We Are the World,’ the star-studded charity single that raised more than $60 million for Ethiopian famine relief after its 1985 release,” according to Larry McShane and Peter Sblendorio of the New York Daily News. “He appeared in the video with an assortment of fellow musical legends, including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles and Bob Dylan.”

And, speaking of Dylan, “during the recording of his 1962 album ‘Midnight Special,’ Belafonte brought in a recently-transplanted Minnesota musician to play harmonica. The young man, named Bob Dylan, made his recording debut playing on the title track.”

“At pivotal moments, he was one of the most critical supporters of the civil rights movement,” said Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian. “Harry was a strong force for keeping people on an even keel.”

“After King’s assassination in 1968, Mr. Belafonte became a roving humanitarian without portfolio,” wrote Bernstein. “He helped start TransAfrica, a lobbying group that pressed for economic sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. He lobbied for the release of Nelson Mandela and then helped coordinate the future South African president’s first visit to the United States after his liberation in 1990.”

“Belafonte also created the Gathering For Justice in 2005 to stop child incarceration and put an end to racial inequity in the justice system,” wrote Weisholtz.

~~~~~

“There was never a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry,” Bob Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir.

“He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall one night and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally,” Dylan wrote. “To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re part of the human race.”

“You know,” Dylan added, “he never took the easy path, though he could have.”

“I wasn’t an artist who became an activist,” Belafonte reflected on his 90th birthday. “I was an activist who became an artist.”

Harry Belafonte was an activist into his 90s. He told NPR in 2011 that was something he learned from his mother.

"She was tenacious about her dignity not being crushed. And one day, she said to me — she was talking about coming back from a day when she couldn't find work. Fighting back tears, she said, 'Don't ever let injustice go by unchallenged.'"

"Harry Belafonte, a Trailblazer and Hero to us all," said Oprah Winfrey. "Thank you for your music, your artistry, your activism, your fight for civil rights and justice—especially risking your life back in the day to get money to the movement. Your being here on Earth has Blessed us all."

He once said, “I’ve always looked at the world and thought, ‘What can I do next? Where do we go from here? How can we fix it?’”

“And that’s still how I look at the world, because there is so much to be done.”

~ jsr

The Jon S. Randal Peace Page

[uispeccoll]

Anything but Silent: Lobby Card for Swing

Last year, Special Collections and Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries acquired items to form a new collection: the Black Film and Television Collection. In honor of Black History Month, we’re shining a spotlight on a different item from this collection.

In last week’s installment, we took a closer look at the poster for 1919’s The Green-Eyed Monster. Now we’re picking up 20 years later, with the spotlight on a lobby card from Oscar Micheaux’s 1938 film Swing, part of the Black Film and Television Collection. Starring Cora Green, Swing is notable as an example of two overlapping genres: race film and musical film.

Like many of Micheaux’s films, Swing it is also a tale centered around Black characters with grand aspirations. And like Micheaux himself, these women are pioneers, willing to make a path through the unknown.

Swing is a story born of the Harlem Renaissance, which by 1938 was declining in the wake of the Great Depression. The movie follows Eloise Jackson (Hazel Diaz) and Mandy Jenkins (Cora Green), two young women from Birmingham, Alabama. Mandy catches her husband (Larry Seymour) having an affair with Eloise, and Eloise flees to start over as a singer in Harlem. Her past catches up with her, however, and through a series of mishaps, it ends up being Mandy who succeeds as a performer on Broadway.

Who was Oscar Micheaux?

Last week’s blog touched on the work of Micheaux, but it’s worth digging deeper into the life of this singular talent.

Micheaux was born in 1884 and grew up with his 12 siblings on a farm in a small town in Illinois. His parents had been born into slavery in Kentucky, but neither emancipation nor a move north could create distance from the realities of structural racism.

The debts Micheaux’s parents had undertaken to keep the farm afloat became more burdensome over time and had educational repercussions for their fifth-eldest child. For a while, they were able to send Oscar to a school in a neighboring town, but financial difficulties eventually forced them to bring him back to work on the farm. This adjustment was difficult for an intelligent, ambitious teen to process, and Micheaux rebelled. Frustrated, Oscar’s father sent him to his older brother in Chicago, where he took work as a porter.

During this stint in the city, Micheaux set his hopes on homesteading to the west. He saved the earnings from his job until he could buy farmland in South Dakota and worked this land for years, a Black man surrounded by a community of white homesteaders. His experience in South Dakota came to an end when a drought withered his crops and his first marriage began to deteriorate. Micheaux committed these experiences to the page, emerging in 1913 with an anonymous, self-published book titled The Conquest, and a new ambition: to make his living as a storyteller.

In 1918, Micheaux would turn much of the material from The Conquest into a new, more fictionalized project, a novel he would call The Homesteader (both books can be found in the UI Libraries Special Collections & Archives). It was this work that caught the eye of the Lincoln Film Company’s George Johnson, who contacted Micheaux and offered to adapt the novel. However, the two couldn’t agree on a direction for the project, and the deal was scrapped. It became clear to Micheaux that if he wanted narrative control over a film based on his story, he’d have to make it himself. And in 1919, the new, Sioux City-based Micheaux Book & Film Company released the silent film The Homesteader.

Swing came almost 20 years after The Homesteader. By the time it was released, Micheaux had made nearly forty movies, both silent films and “talkies.” His contributions had defined the art of the race film and brought the experiences of Black Americans to the screen. As one might expect given the climate of his day, Micheaux was no stranger to controversy and censorship; his stories confronted racism directly, in ways the white establishment found “political” and therefore threatening. As an independent filmmaker in a burgeoning studio system, Micheaux’s budget was often tightly constrained. In 1928, he had to declare bankruptcy, but he continued filmmaking afterward with the same tenacity that had led him to that parcel of land in South Dakota.

Micheaux only made four more films after this one, and by his death in 1951 he had declared bankruptcy again. But in recent years, his contributions to film history have received more attention. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures features an exhibit on Micheaux’s work, and in 2010 the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in his honor.

Swing and Cora Green

Since Swing was a musical film, it also gave Cora Green a new opportunity to showcase the singing voice that had already made her a star. Green performs two of Swing’s four musical numbers, “Bei Mir Bist di Schön” and “Heaven Help This Heart of Mine.”

Though she was only in two feature films (Swing in 1938 and Moon Over Harlem in 1939), her decades as a vaudeville performer had earned her the distinction of “the highest-paid colored woman in vaudeville,” according to one contemporary newspaper. She was popular enough that during World War II, she toured with the United Service Organizations (USO) to the Persian Gulf, performing for Black troops. Unfortunately, we don’t know what direction Green’s life took after the war, since she vanishes from the record in 1949.

What Green left behind was a limited but unique body of work, and this lobby card is a small piece of her story. In Swing, her voice carries to us through the years, the sound of a new art form just hitting its stride.

Next week, we’ll explore another distinct genre of Black filmmaking: the Blaxploitation film

---Natalee Dawson, Communication Coordinator at UIowa Libraries, with assistance from Liz Riordan, Anne Bassett, and Jerome Kirby