The Saints Marching In
Commentary by Chitown Kev
The Two-Flat on McDougall Street in Detroit is the spookiest house that I have ever been in, before or since. Mom says that The Two-Flat on McDougall Street always seemed spooky because it was always dark from the 40-watt lightbulbs that were used in the place for as long as she could remember. I’m talking about something else. After all, Mom remembers the Two-Flat on McDougall Street as teeming with siblings, aunts, and cousins at nearly all times of the day and night. On the other hand, I recall the aura of the place; a house of spirits if there ever was one, even though most of those spirits were still physically living in other parts of Detroit.
Still, I had some happy times in The Two-Flat on McDougall Street. I remember, for example, playing Gladys Knight and the Pips with my three second cousins. Big meals at the kitchen table that included white rice for every meal (some of my cousins can’t stand white rice to this very day). And many of those house spirits and auras, my family, were, as I have said, still physically living.
The Two-Flat on McDougall Street was located in The Black Bottom, a predominantly Black section of Detroit that, according to The Detroit Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Detroit
Black Bottom was a predominantly Black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan demolished for redevelopment in the late 1950s to early 1960s and replaced with the Lafayette Park residential district and a freeway. It was located on Detroit's near east side, bounded by Gratiot Avenue, Brush Street, the Detroit River, and the Grand Trunk railroad tracks.
My mother was born (but not raised) in The Black Bottom and remembers the place vividly and (when she speaks of it) fondly, with an air of reverence. I remember a corner store, lots of empty land, empty streets and, if I imagine deeply enough, the faintest hint of aura. A land hollowed out by the powers that were (and still be) and yet...hallowed.
Dr. Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints is a fictional biography of the people and places, the art and, most significantly, the at-ti-TUDE of The Black Bottom. It’s a fine novel, of course, an appropriately lyrical novel, whose structure is based on the famous 17th century book Lives of the Saints by Father Alban Butler.
Its main protagonist is Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, the gossip columnist of Detroit’s African American weekly, The Michigan Chronicle, as well as an emcee and the founder of a dance school. Black Bottom Saints imagines “Ziggy” Johnson on his deathbed in 1968 telling the stories of the people that he knew, the places that he’d been, and the things that he had seen. Each “saint’s” life consists of a brief vignette of their life and ends with a libation (usually a fruity mixed alcoholic drink) poured out for the saint.
Any pretense of objectivity that I could have possibly mustered in reading Black Bottom Saints was washed away the moment I read the very first biography of who I now instantly recognize as my very own patron saint, “Patron Saint of: Poets, Orphans, and Migrants”, Robert Hayden, the first Black American Poet Laurete
I’ve heard of Hayden, of course, knew that he was a native Detroiter, student of W.H. Auden...”extreme nearsightedness” with a traumatic childhood which turned him inward toward books. A man who did a “reverse migration;” who left Detroit (to teach at Fisk University) and then returned (to teach at U of Michigan).
Sounds like my patron saint.
There is a curious and perhaps significant omission in Hayden’s small profile in Black Bottom Saints.
Hayden was also the best known Black American member of the Baha'i faith and probably remains its best-known poet. Leaving aside the fact that one of the auras of The Two-Flat on McDougall Street was also a prominent member of the Baha’i Faith, it’s important because, like the Harlem, NYC of the 1920’s and 30’s, The Black Bottom was not an exclusively black community. My mother, for example, had white playmates. The Baha’i vision of “the unity of the human race” was not something that needed to be brought to Hayden or to one of those auras of mine, I would contend, it was a vision that they may have already carried because of The Black Bottom. That’s a fact that Ms. Randall, recognizes; there are white saints in Black Bottom Saints (e.g. Tallulah Bankhead)
As a novel primarily centered around the arts, Black Bottom Saints offers as nearly a fully articulated theory of an unapologetic black aesthetics that covers everything from Reconstruction performances of Black singers and comedians to Motown in a remarkable passage in the profile of the Black vaudeville/comedian/singer duo Butterbeans and Susie.
“When Butter and Sue began working together in 1915, most anybody Black over fifty in the audience had been a slave. Anybody over sixty remembered slavery well. There were seventy-year-olds in the audience the first night I applauded Butter and Sue who had made babies enslaved, birthed babies enslaved. Butter told me that. Sue told me about looking out on an audience and seeing a brand on a face, a whip scar on an arm. In Chester, Pennsylvania, they met a man, after a show, who had a scar on his face from when he was a slave child and his mistress threw him into a blazing fireplace grate. When you are dancing, and singing, and cutting up for people who look like you except for the brands and whip scars, you don’t hold nothing back if you are Butter and Sue.”
Now that’s, as we youngins’ call it nowadays, leaving it all on the floor!
A hot dog for your what?...
Chile...
The one major criticism that I have of Black Bottom Saints originates with my Mom.
Her criticism of a book that she’s only heard the barest description of: “Is Coleman Young one of these “saints?”
“No, Mom, I don’t see him.”
I didn’t think much of what my Mom said until I was reading some of the interviews in the Chene Street History Project and ran across the transcript of one Charlie Primas who says this about Young near the end of the interview:
MC: Did Coleman Young go to Miller?
CP: No, Coleman went to Miller, but we use to laugh about it all the time. He didn’t graduate from Miller though. See and I’m going to be very candid, to tell you the truth about it a lot of blacks didn’t want to go to Miller. Seriously, Coleman was one of them. He’s dead now, but that’s the truth, though. In fact, many people were ashamed to say they were from Black Bottom until Coleman became mayor because Coleman did live in Black Bottom, but there were a few of us, Black Bottom that’s all.
“Black Bottom is a defiant, inventive, modern swagger that has everything to do with being efficient, exact, ambitious, proud— and Black,” it says on page 232 of BBS. That’s as good a description of Coleman Young, a man who told the House Un-American Activities Committee to go to hell, that I have ever read.
I agree with Mom. Mayor Coleman Young belongs in BBS. Somewhere. (There are portions of the book that take you into the 1980’s. There’s room.)
(I never felt the same way about Mayor Coleman Young that my Mom does. I still don’t.)
But don’t let that one thing distract you from reading of the saints of Detroit’s Black Bottom from Della Reese to Joe Louis to Anna Gordy to even out-of-towners like Nat King Cole or Tallulah Bankhead and even Dr. King. Or of the Chicago-Detroit rivalry. Or of Henry Ford and his auto plants (spare me the “Ford was an anti-semite” crap, I wouldn’t say that my Black people loved Ford but he had his uses).
I’m simply glad to have a book/pantheon of saints of my own to to continue to contemplate where I am from and who I am.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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The COVID crisis ripped through the Black community, with Black people accounting for almost a quarter of the 600,000 deaths that America has had so far. And as the delta variant brings back crowded hospital wards and mask mandates, many health care leaders are struggling to minimize the pain for Black America. Dr. Reed Tuckson is one of those on the front lines of the fight. He’s a veteran physician, public health advocate, and co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID. On Friday’s episode of A Word, I spoke with Tuckson about increasing access to vaccines in Black communities and debunking misinformation surrounding the virus and vaccines. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Jason Johnson: What does the Black Coalition Against COVID do, and what inspired you to launch it?
Dr. Reed Tuckson: Well, thanks for asking. And I was fortunate enough to be the commissioner of public health for Washington, D.C., during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. I learned firsthand how important it is to have community-based, grassroots mobilization to fight major public health challenges as a partner with government efforts. And so when we saw Easter Sunday about a year and three months ago or so, what the pandemic looked like it was going to mean to the Black community, I was able to reach out to the community influencers all across Washington, D.C., and grab together the faith community leaders and musicians, poets, artists, organized labor, the academic community, the medical community—just bringing together community-based organizations and engage those leaders in a mobilization to fight this pandemic.
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A major earthquake struck southwestern Haiti early Saturday, collapsing buildings and historical cathedrals in a nation still struggling to recover from a devastating quake that left more than 300,000 dead over a decade ago and was already in chaos after a presidential assassination last month.
At least 304 people have died, according to Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection, which manages the island nation’s disaster relief. But the U.S. Geological Survey, issuing a “red alert” for the disaster, estimated fatalities could reach into the thousands.
“High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread. Past red alerts have required a national or international response,” the USGS said.
The quake forced government officials, humanitarian workers and weary Haitian citizens to dig through rubble for survivors, find water and food for the hungry and gauge the scope of yet another large-scale disaster — all with Tropical Storm Grace headed toward the country in the next few days.
“My initial reaction was, ‘Dear lord, not another hit,’ ” said Florida International University professor Richard Olson, who studies the politics of disasters. “We’re in the middle of hurricane season. They haven’t ever really recovered from 2010 event, and then the assassination and political instability that surrounds that. I’m almost afraid of anything else that can go wrong.”
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Two African American survivors of a century-old massacre in the United States were in Ghana Sunday with their grandchildren at the start of a visit to connect with their "motherland."
Viola Fletcher, 107, known as 'Mother Fletcher', and her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100, known as 'Uncle Red', are from the district of Greenwood in the Oklahoma city of Tulsa that was devastated in 1921 by a mob of armed white people.
Up to 300 African Americans were killed in the attack on the area nicknamed "Black Wall Street" and some 10,000 left homeless when the district was set ablaze, leaving a vibrant economy in ruins.
Fletcher and Ellis were accompanied by their grandchildren on a week-long trip to the West African nation, as part of a government campaign to attract people of African heritage abroad 'back home'.
The siblings landed in Ghana's capital of Accra on Saturday with beaming smiles, waving from their wheelchairs to airport onlookers cheering 'welcome home'.
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College has always been positioned as an opportunity to even the playing field for young adults, and especially for Black students who face a litany of obstacles when trying to advance in their careers.
However, an analysis by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), found that the median income of Black college graduates in their 30s has plummeted over the past three decades to less than one-tenth the net worth of their white counterparts.
A combination of both student loan debt and the economic crisis has created a tight hold on Black college-educated millennials. More than 84% of their households have student debt, have stopped home buying and don’t have the ability to save.
“The drop is driven by skyrocketing student debt and sluggish income growth,” WSJ reported. “Now, the generation that hoped to close the racial wealth gap is finding it is only growing wider.”
The report also found Black wealth has not grown in the past 30 years.
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As right-wing politicians across the country are waging an ideological war against Critical Race Theory, most Americans think discussing racism and discrimination is actually a good thing, according to a recent survey.
A new Pew Research Center poll says that 53 percent of Americans of all backgrounds believe discussions around race are good, while 26 percent say it is bad; 21 percent say it is neither good or bad. With Black adults, that number is even higher. Some 75 percent see discussing racism as good and as many as 54 percent say it is “very good” for society.
Sixty-four percent of Asian Americans and 59 percent of Hispanic adults also say the public discourse on race is positive, though smaller percentages say it is a very good thing compared with Black American adults. Of course, just 46 percent of white adults say the focus to the history of slavery and American racism is good; just 24 percent say it is very good and 32 percent say it’s bad.
No surprise there.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH.
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.