August 2008 Archives
Remembering the "Old Man"
W. E. B. Du Bois died quietly in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963 at the age of 95. Du Bois had been living in Ghana for several years at the invitation of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. Du Bois's death marked not simply the end of an era and but closure on the life of a figure who remains unprecedented in African-American life and culture. For more than 60 years Du Bois remained at the center of much of the political and social discourse that examined the life of the "Negro" in America. Beginning with the publication of his ground breaking sociological study The Philadelphia Negro, his status as a founding member of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), his stewardship of the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, his break with the organization he founded over its fear of radicalism, his run for the US Senate (New York) in 1950, his subsequent indictment as a foreign agent (the charges were later dropped) to his death in Ghana--the day before the March on Washington--Du Bois possessed a "Forrest Gump"-like presence in African-American Life.
Born in February of 1868 in Great Barrington, MA, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888. He later attended Harvard University and after extensive travel in Europe, where he attended the University of Berlin, Du Bois earned a Ph.D from Harvard in 1895, becoming the first African-American to do so. With the publication The Philadelphia Negro in 1899, Du Bois quickly became the preeminent black intellectual in the United States and a figure who is arguably peerless in that regard, John Hope Franklin, notwithstanding.
Though trained as a social scientist, Du Bois possessed an intellect that aimed to broaden the location where knowledge could be produced and disseminated. His most well known book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) provides the perfect example of Du Bois intellectual sensibilities as the books coalesces the disparate genres of music criticism, autobiography, eulogy, sociology, arts criticism and history in order to tell the story of the "Negro" only 40 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The Souls of Black Folk, in its time, very much functioned like a mixtape, using literary collage to capture the everyday concerns of communities who defined hybridity--this is what Du Bois's celebrated thesis of "double consciousness" is really about--a century before Barack Obama's name could be conjured as evidence of some post-racial reality.
Published when Du Bois was only 35-years old The Souls of Black Folk is often treated as the highpoint of Du Bois's public life and his most important contribution to American Arts and Letters. The book understandably remains a staple of African-American Studies, but Du Bois would publish thousands of essays and books during the remaining sixty years of his life (with a Tupac-like work ethic) including several novels like The Dark Princess (1928) and The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911) three autobiographies and the massive Black Reconstruction (1935) which remains his most stellar intellectual achievement. Not one to mince distinctions between the role of the public intellectual and the activist, Du Bois found a middle ground that continues to influence contemporary black intellectuals. Forty-five years after his death and on the eve of the first African-American to receive the presidential nomination of a major American political party, the legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois continues to reverberate in American life.
Marvin Gaye's "song & dance" for Nike
Moments before the start of National Basketball Association's annual All-Star Game in February of 1983, the legendary Soul singer Marvin Gaye took center court at the Los Angeles Forum to perform the "Star Spangled Banner." . Armed with only a first generation drum machine (programmed the day before by Gordon Banks), his own vocal genius and the legacy African-American protest, Gaye offered the most soulful rendition of the National Anthem that most Americans had ever heard. That singular moment in Gaye's career has been recaptured in a recent Nike commercial featuring the so-called Olympic "Redeem Team."
Give Nike credit for mining the digital crates of Black American culture to make explicit comment on the hegemony of basketball, black music and their products in the world. It's difficult to watch images of Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Dwayne Wade and Carmelo Anthony juxtaposed to classic footage of Marvin Gaye and not get warm fuzzies about America's role in the world and the position of black athletes and artists as ambassadors. The Nike commercial succeeds in part because it forces us to forget the silence of these same athletes on issues like China's support of the Sudanese government and Nike's own labor practices.
Years earlier Gaye sang the National Anthem before Game 4 of the 1968 World Series in Detroit. Months after the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the many riots that occurred that summer in cities like Detroit, there was some significance to Gaye's very traditional performance of the song. The next day, the National Anthem was performed by guitarist Jose Feliciano, who in contrast to Gaye, offered up a original Latino/a flavored version of the song, that shocked many who heard it.
Like so many artist who toiled in one of the most tumultuous moments in American history, Gaye was not immune to the realities of the Vietnam War, The Civil Rights Movement and the upheavals in the streets and on college campuses. Although Feliciano chided Gaye for playing it straight in 1968, as recounted in Michael Eric Dyson's book Mercy, Mercy Me: The Arts, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye, the artist was quite clear about his conflicted emotions on his seminal recording What's Going On.
Gaye never really returned to the political themes that marked tracks like "Inner City Blues", "Right On," and "Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)," but it is diificult to view his later performance of the "Star-Spangled Banner" without hearing resonances of Feliciano's performance and What's Going On. As such, when one official at the Los Angeles Forum heard Gaye perform the song in rehearsal the day before the NBA All-Star game, he remarked "that's not the anthem I learned in grade school." Dyson notes, "By tying the [National Anthem] so explicitly to his gospel origins, and to a distinctly black sound...[Gaye] affirmed the value of his people's culture--and the struggles that made that sound possible."
Conversely, what's striking about the Nike commercial are the struggles that the ad silences and denies in its effort to celebrate its product, the privileged social status of black athletes and the managerial genius of the Olympic Basketball team's coach Mike Krzyzewski.. Forty years after the assassinations of King and Kennedy and Feliciano's musical protest, we're unlikely to see an athletic shoe ad that highlights the protests of African-American Olympic Sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. To acknowledge that moment, would call into question the very cultural imperialism and exploitation that Nike wants us to forget and the complicity of black athletes in that process.
