The gift of Alvin White:
Hogan, Lawrence D.
the forest to mark the boundary line between the two countries. On the Mexican side the trees were thick, but on the Guatemalan side they had been chopped down to make it easier to spot the...
...to Morn and Dad who gave me the eyes to see them...
...When Joe Lapchick was coach of the New York Knickerbockers he told me Bob had the teams but Abe SaperCommonweal: 82 Alvin White and Roy CampaneUa, Norman "Chief" Cobb, and Don Newcombe in the Brooklyn Dodgers' dugout...
...With little formal education, one brother was teaching tailoring, the other was learning to be a health promoter...
...Whenever I ponder as an historian the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom...
...On public TV we have had the massive documentary of the Vietnam War...
...Marian Anderson, Al's all-time favorite, with a voice Toscanini described as coming once in a lifetime, making her Easter Sunday TV debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, and holding cast, technicians, and the M.C...
...For the better part of sixty years he has earned his living as a newspaper reporter I1 II I III 1 I I 1 Ill II I I LAWRENCE D. HOGAN iS associate professor history at Union College in Cranford, New Jersey, and the author of A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press 1919-1945 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press...
...His voice first came to me eight years ago from an upstairs apartment in his daughter and son-in-law's home in Worcester, Massachusetts...
...As usual, AI has a comment...
...Al has never been a man to hold in his opinions...
...The women kept the simple bamboo house I I I II I II I I II I I I swept and neat and offered us thick tortillas, pared by hand and baked on the low wood fire...
...On commercial TV we have had a most momentous return engagement: the three-part, six-hour NBC "Kennedy" marking the twentieth anniversary of the assassination...
...They were an athletic arm of a social club, the Adelphia Social Club, and the footballers were called the A.S.C...
...AI White has been staging a play for me through eight years of a rich, rewarding correspondence...
...The scenery in another act is President and Mrs...
...Handy whose music could enter though he could not...
...He was a professional fight to the end...
...As we talked, suddenly they were tense and listening: "the helicopter...
...I can only be thankful that this eighty-eight-year-old history-maker, reporter, and record straightener has chosen to share his world with me, and can only be conscious of an obligation I have to share it with my children, and with all the young people who come through my classroom...
...They resist vaccination and are suspicious of drugs and treatments...
...The nucleus of that team had been tops in black football...
...He then took me to the house of one family -- two brothers, their wives and children, a sister and the sixty-seven-year-old mother...
...The district in Richmond known as Jackson's Ward proudly bears the name of the man Theodore Roosevelt singled out as worthy of presidential attention...
...And Harlem was 116th Street and Park Avenue at the international market of an international community with foreign born blacks - - "British, French, Dutch, Danish, Spanish, and even a few Swedes" -- proud of the separate heritages they brought with them from the islands, and celebrating, of all things, Queen Wilhelmina's or Juliana's birthday, or singing the "Marseillaise" on Bastille Day...
...He told me: "Most of the 100,000 refugees in the area have had no contact with western medicine...
...Let AI tell the story: Now fussball, as the Germans would say...
...Last fall's movies have indicated that the irony was not on the student but the teachers, particularly those in the thirty-toforty age group whose narcissism has for so long sustained a feeling of being above history...
...We have been there before, but somehow we missed what Al White saw...
...It occurs to me that reversing the words to read journalist extraordinary sounds better...
...That's nitpicking...
...and my friend, A~lvin White, an extraordinary journalist...
...The journey he takes me on is as rich and varied as the life he has led...
...D OOLEY WILSON crooning"A kiss is but a kiss, a sigh is but a sigh...
...Listen to the extraordinary black orator, Roscoe Conklin Simmons, who was a power, to the degree there could be such, in national Republican party circles during the early part of the century...
...For diverse and sundry reasons, this fight little corps left Richmond and came to Harlem where I was already with the New York News...
...Later the doctor took me on his rounds and to visit a special family...
...For several months, the incidents involving Guatemalan soldiers actually entering refugee camps and capturing or killing people had been reduced, but people continue to live in fear...
...L WHITE has made his life into a rich journey that allows him to fill his stage with a delightfully varied and marvelously drawn set of players, most of whom lived their lives behind the veil that has for so long separated black from white America...
...On the Mexican side the trees were thick, but on the Guatemalan side they had been chopped down to make it easier to spot the refugees as they made their last dash to safety...
...9 Old time professional baseball greats such as the "consensus great of all, John Henry Pops Lloyd," and pitchers like Cannonball Dick Redding and Smoky Joe Williams, who are largely unknown, and excluded from the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown because of the arbitrary admission date set by those who vote on entrance...
...I sat and chatted with the people waiting for the bus, mostly women with their children and bundles, and I observed the Mexicans and Guatemalans obviously getting along together...
...What is A1 White giving us...
...When I talk with my students about the decade of the 1890s and the imposition throughout the South by state legislation of an institutionalized system of Jim Crow, I think about the stupidity involved in denying society the enriching contact it should and could have had with the talented black Richmond that produced Alvin White...
...A short time ago he had me back to 1907...
...His name is Alvin White...
...The dedication page will read, to the three who count the most, Sally, Rebecca, and Matthew...
...This young doctor was giving his services voluntarily...
...They had fled together from one of the most severely repressed areas of Huehuetenango...
...In one paragraph we have moved through an important chapter of Southern history, into the Harlem of the great northern migration of blacks, and bowed in the direction of the social experiment conducted by Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson that changed the face of American sports...
...I am flattered no end by your compliment in including me in the dedication as an extraordinary journalist...
...We in the U.S...
...As in the past --- say with the Great War Novels of World War One -- it takes more than a decade to get perspective on events, to evaluate what really happened...
...he acted in a good role for which he was now the fight age...
...Well that t!fle was hardly suitable, so I decided to use the initials substituting All Southern Collegians for the original Adelphia Social Club...
...That was orie year after the great educator, scholar, and activist W.E.B...
...I don't do cheap stuff like this," she exclaimed, and back it went to the White House into the regular wash...
...In addition, it may be that the people who grew up in the Kennedy and Vietnam War years are now in positions of power in the movie industry and are using it to reflect on their past...
...DuBois saw displayed next to the chopped beef and red steaks in the window of a butcher's market in Atlanta the fingers of a freshly lynched black sharecropper...
...and more recently of Richard Nixon's New Federalism, and of Ronald Reagan's truly new federalism -- anything last practiced in this country during the administration of Calvin Coolidge deserves to be called new -- I find myself reminded of one thing or another AI has written on one of the hundreds of pages of correspondence through which he has shared with me the rich experience of a long life well lived...
...an unmitigated headache...
...This summer he celebrated his eightyeighth birthday in a nursing home he calls Gehenna in a state he refers to as Gawga...
...History and awareness are what AI White is about...
...outfit...
...Anyhow, thanks...
...Every year we designate one month, February, as Black History Month...
...stein (who started the Harlem Globetrotters) made the money...
...AI White has us in that year of 1907 witnessing an unusual occurrence, an odd scene...
...Fairleigh Dickinson University Press will publish this year a book titled A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press, 1919-1945...
...Our very first game, a guarantee of $150, was against the Third Ward Pros of Paterson, New Jersey...
...The main political event of the fall was richer but simpler: sixties nostalgia...
...The mother, with the dignity of her years, spoke of the flight...
...The simple answer is time...
...Moments more sublime...
...Wilson, ALl tells us, "like so many other talented blacks of that era, unfortunately, was ahead of his time...
...The range of characters he parades before us is extraordinary...
...Nuts...
...AI White is, in effect, writing a play that is meant to straighten out a record too often filled with misjudgments and absences and distortions: _9 His lawyer's brief defending the actor Stepin Fetchit against those critics who fail to see that he and his fellow thespians "took what was offered, and their portrayals were often forced over caricatures...
...To his credit," and in Kauffmann's opinion unlike the performance of Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, March "didn't trade on the fact of his age...
...It is a drama filled with T HE FILM CRITIC, Stanley Kauffmann, in an acerbic review of the Oscar-winning On Golden Pond, comments on the acting of the aging Frederic March in The Iceman Cometh...
...and individuals of extraordinary achievement who are not found in the standard history books...
...Where...
...But as usual I have a second opinion...
...a Harlem rich in ways we seldom hear about...
...We ran out and stood under the cover of a tree looking across the small hillock to the border 500 yards away...
...I was taken to visit the sewing class -- Mexican villages and Guatemalans learning how to use sewing machines to make clothing...
...In 1926 the All Southern Collegians came into being...
...What tremendous qualities of courage, creativity, and leadership were apparent in this small representative group...
...Maybe it had to happen, one of those predictable cyclic turns in American fashion and faddism...
...I I.I ] I I HI I I I Screen TOUCHING THE HEM LOST HOPES & FALLEN LEADERS S EVERAL YEARS AGO a fellow teacher told me about a question asked in her political science class...
...Through six decades he has been reporting and making the one by being the other...
...That town was always a good sports town, the Paterson Silk Sox being a top white semi-pro baseball team that sent two men, brothers, Claude and Bubber Jonnard, to the majors...
...I have a friend...
...The noise subsided and I walked back through the village to wait on the dusty roadside for the rare, ramshackle bus (it came two hours later) to take me back to Comit~in, followed by another two-hour ride to San Cristobal...
...Some call it Black Awareness Month...
...Was it imagination, or wasn't that milestone marked by far more observance and nostalgia than the tenth...
...Together with the films reflecting on the past, they suggest that someCommpnweal: 84...
...What does all this recollecting mean...
...March presumably knew it was his last performance...
...9 A portrait of "dignity personified," Dr.Carter G Woodson, the father of black history in the twentieth century, whose high standards, accompanied by warmth toward his students, contrast with "present day pygmies who now glory in the production of the giants...
...She told me that when she had once mentioned the Kennedy administration she saw a hand go up...
...DuBois tells us it was that sight as much as anything that turned him from student and scholar of the Black American experience to committed racial activist and propagandist...
...On weekends when the Bushwicks played the Black Homestead Grays or some other good team of blacks they outdrew the Dodgers -- which was one motivation for Branch Rickey's move -- besides his alleged recognition of blacks as human beings and not clowns...
...cannot offer the Guatemalan refugees the simple hospitality of the Mexican homes or share a plot of land, but we can offer our support by speaking out and insisting that Washington not renew military aid or support the government of Guatemala that is causing its people to flee their homeland in terror...
...he acted in a good role for which he was now the fight age...
...I have come to recognize this as a typical AI White journey...
...I could not hear anything, but their oversensitized ears had caught the low hum...
...Colonel Giles Beecher Jackson (the title had been conferred by President McKinley) had conceived and engineered through the Congress of the United States a major appropriation for the erection of a Negro Pavilion at the Tercentenary Exhibition...
...They all spoke of hope and faith that one day they would return to rebuild a more just society in Guatemala...
...But there were many political movies this fall -- in addition to the nostalgic ones -- Hanna K., Silkwood, Under Fire, and the excellent NBC treatment of the murdered American churchwomen in El Salvador, Choices of the Heart...
...It was the kind of student question that makes professors cringe at first, but which they somehow never tire of repeating at faculty coffee klatch reviews of the decline and fall of general intelligence...
...A Cotton Club, for instance, that was a front for a massive beer running operation, and a showcase for black entertainers, but typically supportive of the racial status quo in closing its doors to the patronage of Harlem's black residents, even when they had the status of a W.C...
...himself enthralled during a rehearsal as she quietly entered the theater, moved down the aisle to the pit, talked for a moment with the orchestra leader, Ray Block, and began singing "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands...
...He had worked in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas during the 1979 final offensive, and later with the Salvadoran guerrillas, but felt he should return and give assistance to his own country in an area of desperate need...
...Chafing from inactivity, they sent an emissary to talk me into taking charge and fielding a team, hoping to continue as the old A.S.C...
...When I try to convey to these same students a meaningful picture of the world war we entered in 1917 to make the world safe for democracy, I think about what AI has told me of his work as a stevedore in a labor battalion in France, and about the race riot he witnessed in that same France where so much American blood had been shed in the war to end all wars...
...What did Stanley Kauffmann say about Frederic March...
...The most important political factor on screen this fall was not the portrayal of John Glenn in The Right Stuff or the fuss over the TV movie The Day After...
...A more recent letter moves the Richmond of Giles Jackson, and of Alvin White's youth, into the Harlem of the 1930s in the persons of semi-pro football players who were part of the epic migration that changed the face of Black America from rural to urban...
...And as always, to give the man his due, there's a reference to the historical record, for Dooley Wilson was, as we are reminded by A1 White who knows whatof he speaks, an original member in 1915 of "the most talented and versatile group of black actors ever assembled," the famous Lafayette Players...
...They fled as whole families and villages, and have been allowed to stay together...
...For me the answer is very direct -- something I am fre10 February 1984:83 quently conscious of...
...Thus most recently a typical feature article with the AI White byline, carried by the Worcester Evening Gazette in the aftermath of Ingrid Bergman's death, recalled for film buffs the career of Dooley Wilson, who as Sam sang the poignant As Time Goes By for Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in the film classic, Casablanca...
...II I I I I I I I II I I SHARING A WORLD THAT jIM CROW KEPT APART The gift o.f Alv i n White II IIII I II III I II II II [1 III II III LAWRENCE D. HOGAN I II and free-lance writer...
...and of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society of Wilson's White House successors...
...That was a day -the 1920s through the 1950s--that, according to Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist and student of American race relations, saw the black press as the "greatest single power in the Negro race...
...Why...
...10 February 1984:81 fascinating scenes and characters, with voices from a past that in recent years we have begun to pay attention to and appreciate in new ways...
...More importantly, when I think about the dignity and presence of a Marian Anderson, the voice and witness of a Paul } Robeson, the courage of a Roy Wilkins or a Martin Luther King, the skill at bat and grace a field of a John Lloyd, the coaching and promoting skills of a Bob Douglas, and the names of countless other Black Americans, no less deserving of accolades, whom I would not know if it were not for AI, the picture I have is shaped by a gift to me of a world that as a society we know too little of, and would benefit so greatly by knowing so much better...
...The secret service, failing to take into account the easily offended dignity of the proud colored laundress, were brought up short by her curt remark on the arrival of the first load of Truman wear...
...He was an old-fashioned eloquent orator who strutted, postured, asked the audience questions -- and when he turned around and said scornfully, 'Sirs, I give you this,' you were ready to stand up and sing the 'Star Spangled Banner' in deepest and darkest Dixie, which is where I heard him in 1915 when Villa was giving the U.S...
...Special voices jump out from Al White's stage...
...Straightening the record is what AI White's play is about -seizing opportunities, whenever they present themselves, to reach out to an audience that needs to know what this man knows...
...It was white American soldiers fighting black American soldiers on that April in 1919 when Christians were commemorating the resurrection of the Prince of Peace...
...Here is the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, alighting from his carriage on a visit to Richmond in connection with the Virginia Tercentenary Exhibition, walking to the front door of the office of an ex-slave who was the first black admitted to practice law before the Virginia Supreme Court, and announcing in a loud voice that he wished to see Mr...
...Marian Anderson holding a theater spellbound...
...And the special places this "playwright" has been -- for instance the storied Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s...
...Richmond of course...
...This Harlem that Ai White lived in was much more than an entertainment oasis where whites could enjoy a quality of music found nowhere else...
...A few years ago we waxed nostalgic for the fifties, with resurrected hula hoops, fascination with early rock and roll, slicked back hair, and the simplicities of an older vision of America which Ronald Reagan evoked and fed...
...They told their stories of fleeing the military after the San Francisco massacre near their village...
...Roosevelt's laundry strung out to dry in the back yard next to 1445 T Street where a close friend of Al's lived...
...The other top team was the Bushwicks, out on Long Island close to Brooklyn...
...A low mist hung over the higher hill which marked the boundary line and by now you could hear the muffled sound of the engine of the Guatemalan military plane as it flew along the dividing line, attempting to sow panic and terror among the refugees...
...It would only change with FDR's untimely death...
...He didn't trade on the fact of his age...
...in films, The Big Chill, The Right Stuff, and even, replaying their campus tour, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary in the documentary Return Engagement...
...Jackson...
...Excuse me," a student said, "but are we responsible for American history in this class...
...9 A history maker in a different field, Bob Douglas, sports promoter extraordinary and founder of the famed Harlem Renaissance Five, "When you mention Bob Douglas you tap another giant...
...The eager researcher on the road to his degree got more than he bargained for -- and he is still getting...
...Delivered by the secret service to a special laundress and ironed to the perfection that only the first family's white tailored monogrammed shirts and expensive silk undergarments could command, this scene was part of a well established routine...
...It was also the northeast comer of 135th Street and 7th Avenue where Southern collegians, with time off from summer jobs as bellhops and waiters on overnight steamships to Boston or Albany, or from hustling bags at Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations, would gather to "shoot the breeze" and plan for their return to school...
...Alvin White was responding to an inquiry from an aspiring Ph.D candidate who wanted to know what it had been like being a black reporter for the Associated Negro Press, the leading news agency of its day...
...But now the media is dominated by a different set of memories, based on the sixties, and the early seventies, the very time we were formerly fleeing...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
