Length: 26:37
{cassette tape starting effect]
[Excerpts from speeches from Shirley Chisholm, Toni Morrison, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis]
{"Hip Hop Instrumental 2," by Ketsa]
Jo'-Hannah: Hey guys, I'm Jo'-Hannah Valentin—
Shay:— and I'm Shay Milner—
Jo: — and you're listening to Black Tea.
Shay: Black Tea is a podcast through Vanderbilt University that strives to highlight underrepresented and undiscovered perspectives on campus. This month, we are doing a mini series in commemoration of Black History Month, where we will be interviewing influential black faculty on campus about topics ranging from black feminism and masculinity, black literature, the origins of black history, and black Greek life.
Jo: This month, we'll be drinking black tea, of course because we're black.
[comedic drums effect]
[laughs]
Jo: Oh yeah, that was that was—
Shay: —that was terrible.
Shay: Um, for the historical event that we are advertising today, we're going to be talking about the Black Arts Repertory Theatre—
Jo: —which goes hand in hand with what we'll be discussing today with the person we're interviewing.
Shay: According to the website, Black Power, the Black Arts, Repertory Theater, or BARTS, was a school in Harlem opened by leaders Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka. BARTS was a black art school that supported black poetry, theater, politics, philosophy, and history for Harlem Youth. Black arts leaders saw the need for a radical black cultural movement. With the creation of BARTS, they hoped to develop a black cultural center in Harlem. This encouraged the development of subsequent centers and eventually a movement. Although the school was shut down due to budget cuts, by the late 1960s, many cities and college campuses with large black populations— including Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco— had some form of a black radical art organization, revealing the impact the school had on spreading the need for black cultural organizations. The opening up this school is said to have sparked the beginning of the larger Black Arts Movement during the mid-60s to the mid-70s.
Shay: For more information about BARTS, or the Black Arts Movement, we will be attaching some links to the Black Power website that we just read from and also to additional resources that pertain to the Black Arts Movement.
[water boiling effect]
Jo: So today's Self Care Tip of the Day is to go to an art gallery. For us, that'd be either the Frist or the art gallery in Cohen, which is doing a show on Art and Black Freedom. So, if you're really interested in seeing some more— I think I saw, like, a picture of Toussaint Louverture. So just go and check it out. It's really cool and Cohen especially, but also Frist if you feel like traveling.
Shay: And if you think you're not into art, you'd be surprised because I work at the Cohen Art Gallery, and I'd never been to an art gallery growing up but being there. . . I don't know it's very quiet and it's nice to be alone with the paintings especially with paintings that are representative of your identity. And I feel like the Black Freedom exhibit that's going on right now at Cohen is really representative of that.
Jo: And you don't even have to, like, I know a lot of times people think going to an art gallery, you kind of just sit there, look at the art and have to come up with something deep that you got from it—
Shay: —yeah, like it's an individual experience, you don't have to prove anything to anybody—
Jo: Exactly, just like soak it in and whatever you feel is what you feel. You don't have to like make up some deep paragraph or short answer answer about what you felt—
Shay: —yeah you don't have to [mocking voice] write a manifesto on a painting that you just looked at.
[laughs]
Shay: It's it's all independent. It's up to you.
Jo: Exactly.
[Ketsa, "Hip Hop Instrumental 2]
Shay: So for today's episode, we will be talking to Vanderbilt English professor Dr. Anthony Reed about the Black Arts Era. Dr. Reed will be talking with us about many things ranging from why the black arts era began when it did to how black freedom resistance movements can implement principles and theories from the Black Arts Era today.
{Transition: "Hip Hop Instrumental 2," by Ketsa]
Jo: So would you like to introduce yourself?
Dr. Anthony Reed: I am Anthony Reed, an associate professor of English here, Vanderbilt University. My research area primarily is poetry and poetics, which is the study of how poetry works, within the African diaspora, especially the English-speaking, though I have interest in the Francophone world. My Spanish is too bad for me to really claim that.
[laughs]
Jo: Um, Okay, so our first question is just kind of like a general focus for what we want to talk about in this interview. What was the black arts era?
Dr. Reed: So first dates: it runs from roughly 1956 or 57 or so and through about 1974-75. And focusing on it gives an alternative way of framing the mid century that doesn't foreground what has come to be a restricted version of Civil Rghts Era. Usually, we think of civil rights— and unless we're historians or people who really studied it, we're not being very fine grained— so we run together, the kind of legislative activism and legal activism of the NAACP through the 40s that most famously culminates in Brown V. The Board and also all the anti-housing discrimination stuff, we ran that together with the emergence of this Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And this becomes a sort of imprecise, and especially it leaves many things, both unanswered, but also not really. . . they don't seem like interesting questions. And so we end up with this model of a lot of binaries, "oh, you're either on the side of King or the side of Malcolm X," or "either the side of non-violence or you're a separatist," and I think that these are basically false divisions.
Dr. Reed: So the Black Arts Era, as I've come to think of it, to borrow a term from other black activists in South Africa, is a period of black consciousness, and of a new black consciousness, coming out of, on the one hand, the Harlem Renaissance, the kind of period of really emphasizing middle class values and aspirations in publishing, the production of black art that would prove black suitability for civilization. This is the kind of James Weldon Johnson argument. You pass from that through the 30s and 40s, identified really with a lot of left organizing in and around the Communist Party that's also organic to the Harlem Renaissance era, but we tend to downplay that. And by the 1950s, you're starting already to see the. . . both the fruit of successful activism and mobilization that has gained more African Americans access to middle class institutions, colleges, universities, and traditionally identified middle class professions. So you have that happening.
Dr. Reed: And you also have young people because young people often are often the people who lead movements, who start to take seriously the idea that what needs to happen is deep research into an African past. And we pass through that through the 1950s when, across the diaspora, you start to get intense interest in just what were African civilizations like, what did African people do prior to colonialism, prior to Colonial slavery in the United States that tended to translate among African American news into new modalities of race pride, but especially what makes black art distinct is, you get people really starting to answer a call that somebody like Richard Wright had already made to make art for black people, and to make art that isn't concerned with the gatekeeping institutions and aesthetic standards and judgment of traditionally identified or just white-dominated industries.
Dr. Reed: So in the jazz world, you get the emergence of things like soul jazz, you start to get the emergence of gospel as a mainstream form, you get the reemergence and celebration of the blues, this is happening among not just African Americans, of course. And in literature, you start to get people really searching for new ways of making art that are based in the traditions and traditional understandings of their parents. And the traditional understandings of the places they've come from. You have all these people who've made the migration who are now starting to think back on the places that they come from, and how to have those experiences— and experiences of the people that grew up with— reflected in their art and to make art for those people.
Dr. Reed: And I think, still. . . I mean, the other thing that would be important for the Black Arts Era is World War Two, and all the other returning vets. So, World War One, the returning vets from World War One who fought, fought in the war and thought "we're winning democracy for Europe, we're winning democracy back home." Their disillusionment helps to really influence and direct both the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, and it continues as it's sustained in the kind of radical organizing of the 30s and 40s. Likewise, World War Two, those returning vets kind of come back and look around and say, "Hey, wait a minute, why did we just fight a war against fascism for? Look at what's happening in in". . . well, not just in the South, but Jim Crow was the most spectacular example. It was galvanizing in a way that I think is hard to calculate, and so many of the people, especially musicians, who are involved in the kind of radical experimentation are also vets. I'll be remiss not to mention just that.
Jo & Shay: Yeah.
Dr. Reed: I'll stop there. And I can tell you later why it ends in the mid-70s.
Jo & Shay: Yeah.
Jo: I really liked that and how you even said, with like, the Civil Rights Era, like what people think of the Civil Rights Movement, is a restricted kind of idea of it because it's really been kind of transcending throughout the decades. And it wasn't just that one little section of time.
Dr. Reed: There's a historian— Jacquelyn Dowd Hall— who has a series of wonderful writings where she really lays out the stakes of a kind of narrow definition of a Civil Rights Era that really omits the practical and theoretical importance of the labor movements that, I mean, Bayard Rustin, was, among other things with labor organizer, and the first— and aborted— March on Washington was to be about labor. And, so much of what the Civil Rights Movement was about wasn't just equality of opportunity. That's an ideological reframing that denies what was really radical about the Civil Rights Movement the first place, which draws together janitors and doctors in one movement.
Jo: Oh, okay. That's really cool.
Dr. Reed: I mean, it was everybody, in part because you have to fight Jim Crow, but even when you didn't, it was. . . we understand, people understood practical links between themselves. That's the post-war Civil Rights Era that is a history that gets lost when it just becomes McDonald's or somebody playing a little few seconds of the "I Have a Dream speech."
Jo: Yeah.
Dr. Reed: This is part of the background of why with the Black Arts Movement emerged. Why it would call itself the sister concept of the Black Power is because you had these people who were ready to fight, who understood who they. . . they had an understanding who their oppressors were, and they didn't have people who were willing to fight with them. They, the people who should have been fighting with them, who should have been their natural allies, were willing to turn them loose, or ask them to get in line and discipline, you know, themselves to accommodate other people in the movement.
Dr. Reed: One of the important things that propels the Black Arts Movement is that many of the intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance started teaching in HBCUs and so they have stu— they have for their students Amiri Baraka and Toni Morrison and A.B. Spellman and Gil Scott-Heron and, and on and on, Soñia Sanchez. People are interested not only in making art for black people, as I said, kind of ideologically and aesthetically, but also they're really, intensely interested in institutions and building institutions to circulate, to create, to publish, to disseminate, and control their own images and their own art, which you hadn't seen in the same way for lots of reasons during earlier moments.
Shay: Going back to your point about the Black Arts Movement being sister to the Black Power movement, the next question is how did the development of black art and the Black Arts Movement contribute to the larger Black Power movement?
Dr. Reed: So Larry Neal said that black arts was the spiritual sister to the Black Power concept. And, I think what he meant is that as Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton formulated a program, really, of black self determination, if we think of a lot of black arts production, most fundamentally, the majority of it is sort of nationalist in outlook, which is to say, it's about rooting itself in black vernacular practices, upholding and affirming those and really trying to create. . . create art that would nurture and nourish, sustain and energize the black majority. And one way that they did that is through the circulation of what today we would call memes and what, probably more accurately, slogans, sayings, signs, symbols; the shorthands, the afro the dashiki; greeting one another As-salamu alaykum, adopting names often from Swahili but not exclusively, and really trying to mark themselves as Africans in America, really trying to mark and make something of their difference, to make their exclusion from the mainstream into the basis of building something in the art insofar as it rejected— or claimed to reject— Western aesthetic standards could be doing the same thing, trying to hold up a mirror to the black majority and saying, "this is your culture. This is yours, and you should claim it and claim it with me."
Dr. Reed: Within that, there's lots of ideological divisions between people. So people like Ron Karenga, the person who developed and popularized Kwanzaa. He really thought that black art should be explicitly in support of the revolution and in support of his ideals of black consciousness and black community. And it led him to things like rejecting the blues, and saying black people have no use for the blues. People like Larry Neil himself or Amiri Baraka, it was kind of a, to quote King, "I might not get there with you, Ron Karenga. We need the blues, that's part of our culture, we can't just annex it." So there's, there's a lot of disunity and a lot of disagreements. But the main thing is that it needed to be oriented towards the majority, and really giving people ideas, concepts and even language that they could use to survive and fight.
Jo: That kind of brings us to our next question with, like, the views, you said that there were symbols used and just, kind of like, the different ideas that they would put in the media almost like the memes of today. So how would these pieces of black art and, like, these symbols fight against the negative and harmful representations of black people in popular Western and white media?
Dr. Reed: Well, this is what's interesting about the Black Arts Era and I need to take you back a little bit. In the blueprint for negro writing, Richard Wright had criticized the Harlem Renaissance, and that they had really engaged in what Wright called kind of "question begging," where they set out to continually prove and reprove their humanity and set out to counter negative stereotypes. And there are a lot of them. So one thing that it did that was directly about refuting is the sense of black people, people of African descent, as having had no past and no civilization. And that's why I dated back to the 50s because as early as. . . I think is 1952, the intellectual and historian Cheikh Anta Diop from Senegal, publishing his Présence Africaine, the important Negritude journal, published a book— The African Origin of Civilization— about Egypt. And this is in conversation with lots of people. Melville Herskovitz had a book, The Myth of the Negro Past— lots of people were starting to really think about what is a black past, what were black civilizations like. And one thing that many black arts era writers and thinkers did is promote, like, no, there was a civilization. They promoted the idea that we were kings and queens and princes and princesses in Africa. And that that's our legacy, that we were not just perpetual slaves, which is the figure of African Americans, of people of African descent, that was popular in Western media. So that's one thing that was very powerful.
Dr. Reed: By and large, though, they adopted rights posture and said, "We don't need to prove anything to those people. They're not going to accept us, they don't care about us, so we're going to care about us and kind of look inward."
Shay: I don't know if you're able to specify exactly what, but why did it end in the 70s?
Dr. Reed: A combination of things. So, Amiri Baraka breaking with black nationalist, really dr— it split, a lot of people who were in organizations that he led or that were adjacent to his, there was just a split, some people went with him, some people went with Karenga. There's also things that happened. So through the 70s, as you probably know, we get— and the late 60s— cities start electing black mayors and majority black city councils. And people are. . . they put all their energy and Baraka himself helps to get Kenneth Gipson elected mayor of Newark, and the disillusionment that comes when those people come into power, with what they're able to do, with what they choose to do. And all of that, coupled with the fact that the generation immediately following them, the baby boomers, are the first to be able to go to historically white institutions, historically exclusionary institutions, in large numbers. It sort of. . . it starts to just diffuse some of the energy and many people who really accepted that equality of opportunity was the thing to fight for— as James Brown had put it, "I don't want nobody to give me nothing. Open up the door, and I'll get myself." A lot of people, there's that spirit that runs deep in black communities and black working-class communities. And a lot of people said, "Well, we have access to Vanderbilt, or to, you know, Harvard or whatever." And so they kind of started to think, you know, "the only thing holding you back is you, you just need to get out there and get an education and you can fix your own community," and, you know, and so on and so forth. Which is exactly the way that both President Obama and Jay Z and many other people who are tremendously successful in the chastising and infantilizing black communities.
Dr. Reed: So it's a combination of those factors, but especially around the 70s, as— for lots of reasons— ideological splits, and splits in just the adaptation, the acceptance that equality of opportunity is the thing to fight for, on top of the harassment, assassination, jailing, or exiling of many of the important key leaders, who most would have been organizing for an alternative. That also happens and I don't want to minimize that and act like, [mocking] "Well, people just changed their minds—"
[laughs]
Dr. Reed: You know, when you start seeing that, from Fred Hamp— from Malcolm X, really but from Malcolm X to King to Fred Hampton to, you know, and a list, we could be here all day, that those people are jailed, or they're sent away, or they going to exile or they just become estranged, they themselves undergo strange ideological reversals, and are disillusioned people. When that starts to happen, those things collectively start to really drain the energy out of the movement. Plus, a lot of the ways that the community arts organizations and theaters were able to sustain themselves, there were two important funds: one was philanthropy— and a lot of that money, instead of going to those radical black organizations instead went to. . . back to places like the Lincoln Center in New York and more mainstream places that themselves put out their own version of radical black art— and government grants. And the government, under Nixon especially, starts to shut all that down and says, "we're not, we're not just giving you radically negroes money to—
[laughs]
Dr. Reed: "— to do whatever you want." And so that, that sort of starts to. . . also the economic base, on top of which there's a recession that happens in the mid-70s, so that the working classes themselves, they, the. . . they don't have the money to sustain the organizations on their own, they really needed outside funding. It's a combination of those things is what helps to, on top of the kind of ideological and political factors that I named before, help to just drain away all the energy.
Shay: Thank you so much for letting us interview you.
Dr. Reed: Thanks for having me.
Shay: Before you leave, would you like to explain some of the classes that you're teaching?
Dr. Reed: So this semester, I'm teaching a graduate class on Black Sound Studies, which is the study of the interrelationship between technology, and sound production, and race, and the kinds, the forms of culture that come out of those that kind of entangled in that. It's a way of talking about not just the music and traditional Jazz Studies way, for example, but also thinking about what's happening in the industry, what's happening in the world. How do we get these sounds to ourselves?
Dr. Reed: I'm also teaching an Introduction to Poetry. I am trying to give them a handle on the tradition and how ideas like, you know, that poetry is primarily about self expression. That's a relatively new idea. It goes back maybe to the mid-19th century, and before that, other things were happening even in first person, you know, lyrics. So trying to teach them the fundamentals of poetry but also teach them to think historically about the techniques are. . . they don't have content on their own. So something like the use of the first person will mean different things in different areas. That's this term.
Dr. Reed: Last time I taught an Introduction to African American P oetry, the 20th- and 21st-century, and I taught a course on. . . I called it Fictions of Slavery, which was really meant to be about prosaic depictions of slavery, from the canonical narratives of Equiano, Douglas, Jacobs, to some of the 19th century novels we read. And then the contemporary narratives of slavery and how those produce different ideas of what slavery is, what the period is, and how what's often at stake in them isn't an accurate or inaccurate depiction, but what kind of thing is slavery so that. . . because most of the people, at least that I taught, are abolitionist and in order to get people to abolish it, they have to agree and what it is. And so we will read the literature to think about what do they think slavery is? What do they think freedom is? What are they fighting for?
Jo: That's really interesting.
Shay: Well, that's all we have. Thank you again. Thank you so much.
Dr. Reed: Thanks for having me. Thanks for reaching out.
[Transition: "Hip Hop Instrumental 2" by Ketsa]
Shay: We'd like to thank Dr. Reed for talking with us today. We really enjoyed learning about the Black Arts Era and how activists today can adopt their principles.
Jo: We don't have an org to advertise today, but instead we want to highlight what's coming up in Tennessee. This upcoming Wednesday, February 12, early elections for the presidential primaries begin. It's incredibly important that, if you're from Tennessee, that you vote during this time, especially as it pertains to people of color and when it comes for the actual presidential election.
Shay: Yeah, it's incredibly important for you guys to get out there and vote for the primaries, especially if you are of a certain identity that is not currently being represented by the person in office today.
Jo: Or currently supported as well because you may not represent someone but to support them, to be an ally is what's really important, especially for, you know, people that aren't of color to support and be an ally is important, and we don't seem to have that right now.
[laughs]
Shay: So as we've said, in every single one of our episodes, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, be sure to reach out to us either at our email blackteainquiry@gmail.com, or through one of our various social media platforms.
Jo: Thank you guys so much for listening today. We'll see you next Saturday, Tea Time, 4pm.
["Hip Hop Instrumental 2," by Ketsa]
Jo: This has been black tea. Thanks for listening.
Jo & Shay: Cheers.
[Outro: "Hip Hop Instrumental 2," by Ketsa
Resources
1. Black Arts Repertory School: http://blackpower.web.unc.edu/2017/04/black-arts-repertory-theatre-and-school-barts-and-the-black-arts-movement/
Credits
Shay Milner, co-host
Jo'Hannah Valentin, co-host
Music by Ketsa at https://freemusicarchive.org/
Episode edited with Audacity
What we're drinking: Earl Grey Black Tea, https://www.bigelowtea.com/Teas/Tea-Type/Black-Tea/Earl-Grey-Tea.
Today's black history event: The Black Arts Repertory School. For more resources, check out this episode's transcript!
Self-care tip of the day: Go to an art gallery.
Be sure to vote in the primaries! If you are a Tennessee resident, you can begin early voting this Wednesday, February 12. If you want to vote absentee, the deadline to apply is February 25. For more information about Tennessee voting, go here https://www.rockthevote.org/voting-information/election-dates-deadlines/tennessee/.
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Episode transcript at: https://blackteapodcast.wixsite.com/podcast/post/episode-5-black-tea-black-arts-era