Photo of the Day: Juneteenth Celebration, Englewood NJ

My hometown, Englewood NJ, celebrated Juneteenth with not one but four days of a festival from this past Thursday through Sunday. I took this photo yesterday, as residents thronged Depot Square to eat, go on rides, and, as you see here, listen to the music.

For those who’d like to ponder the meaning of Juneteenth, when it began in 1865 in Texas (the last state in the Union to hear the proclamation that all slaves were free) and to our own time, I urge you to read this blog post from historian, literary critic, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates connected to his PBS documentary series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

This Day in TV History (‘Leave It to Beaver’ Debuts)

October 4, 1957—For an America unsettled by a changing world, the premiere of Leave It to Beaver served as a welcome balm. The Soviets launched Sputnik that day, African-Americans were clamoring for their long-denied rights, and rock ‘n’ roll was unnerving parents even as it excited their teenaged children. 

But for a little boy in the town of Mayfield, blessed with a wise father, a loving mother, and a well-meaning older brother, the world was an innocent place where the worst scrape you could get into involved a baby alligator named Captain Jack that you tried to hide (unsuccessfully, of course) from Mom and Dad. It would be a decade before Billy Joel would use the name "Captain Jack" to evoke a sinister drug pusher servicing the needs of an aimless suburban loser who can't understand "why you've got to keep in style and feed your head."

Mayfield exists in an unnamed state, just as Ward Cleaver works in an unspecified job. The vagueness was intentional: the show’s creators wanted viewers to project themselves onto the characters, and boy, did they ever. Watching the show more than a decade later in syndication, several years after its original run ended, I, as the youngest, most bewildered member of my family, identified with Beaver. I saw more than a little bit of Wally in my two older brothers. And, like just about every else I've come across, I've known at least a few brown-nosers who seemed to have taken their cue from Eddie Haskell.

I also don’t remember ever seeing rain in any episode in the sitcom's six-year run. I’m sure the show must have had it, but in the prototypical TV suburb of the Eisenhower era, sunlight seems everywhere. It would take another decade for the appearance of dark shadows (with and without initial capital letters).

That idyllic image was a suburban dream come true for many Americans in the early postwar era, and one to which millions more aspired—including, as it happened, African-Americans. Future Harvard academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote about the show’s ineffable appeal to his childhood West Virginia community of Piedmont in an essay in the recent issue of American Heritage:

“Beaver’s street was where we wanted to live, Beaver’s house where we wanted to eat and sleep, Beaver’s father’s firm where we’d have liked Daddy to work. These shows for us were about property, the property that white people could own and that we couldn’t. About a level of comfort and ease at which we could only wonder. It was the world that the integrated school was going to prepare us to enter and that, for Mama, would be the prize.”

Gates immediately undercuts that vision with some harsh reality: “Lord knows, we weren’t going to learn how to be colored by watching television. Seeing somebody colored on TV was an event.”

Gates had the whole landscape of American television in mind, but Leave It to Beaver was a useful case in point.  Not until the show’s sixth and final season did one of the last of the 234 episodes feature an African-American, and she was a maid—the kind of stereotypical role that Hollywood had been peddling for years. Minorities, quite simply, were invisible for much of America in those years, on their screens and in their lives.

Take the show for what it is, and was: the baby boomer TV equivalent of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, where there’s a good deal of mild-mannered mischief but precious little mayhem. We had to look later for a less innocent, truer reflection of Americans coming of age in those years, just as Twain’s readers would have to wait nearly a decade for a more realistic depiction of the horrors perpetrated by an abusive, substance-abusing parent and a class- and race-haunted society: Huckleberry Finn.

(Photo of the cast of Leave It to Beaver, 1960, from left: Hugh Beaumont—Ward; Tony Dow—Wally; Barbara Billingsley—June;  and Jerry Mathers --Theodore AKA "Beaver").

This Day in Jazz History (Miles Davis’ Arrest Sparks Near-Riot)

August 25, 1959—Last month, Henry Louis Gates asked the policeman responding to reports of a break-in at his Cambridge, Mass. home if he was being questioned “because I’m a black man in America.” For all his outrage, whatever indignities the Harvard professor experienced on that now-famous night pale next to what happened to Miles Davis outside Birdland 50 years ago.

Here was another case in which a white cop in a metropolitan area failed to recognize one of the most famous African-Americans of his day—only this time, the civilian, Davis, ended up on the ground bleeding before being arrested, brought to police headquarters, then forced to run a months-long legal gauntlet.

The Gates case provoked weeks of cable TV rants, blogger battles, and a beer summit at the White House; the Davis incident nearly started a race riot, at a time when U.S. credibility as a beacon of liberty was being questioned abroad because of the continuing American apartheid.

It happened only months after what might have been the professional highlight of the trumpeter’s life: Kind of Blue, his bestselling album and, as The Wall Street Journal noted earlier this year, still considered “for many, the quintessential jazz album.”

Three decades later, in the autobiography he co-wrote with Quincy Troupe, Davis still couldn’t get over the outrage that “changed my whole life and my whole attitude again, made me bitter and cynical again when I was really starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country.”

Just before midnight, near the end of a triumphant two-week run at the jazz club promoting the release of Kind of Blue, Davis, between sets, had just escorted “a pretty young white girl named Judy” to her cab. Tired on this steamy summer night, he paused outside Birdland to take a drag on a cigarette when a white cop told him to move along on the crowded sidewalk.

“Move on, what for?” Davis asked. “I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis.”

The officer repeated his command, then decided to make an arrest when Davis gave him a hard stare. The cop claimed that Davis pulled away, then tried to grab his nightstick; Davis, who’d taken boxing lessons, said he was moving forward to cushion the force of any blow that might come.

One of three detectives passing by saw the cop falling forward, then rushed toward the musician, pounding him repeatedly on the head with his nightstick.

The beating occurred in a terrible moment in New York, when a deeply racist police force was bringing to the surface long-simmering anger among African-Americans. Not long before, the arrest of a drunken woman in Harlem had led to a riot that required the intervention of boxer Sugar Ray Robinson to quell.

This time, with more than 200 people yelling for the cops to stop beating Davis, the potential for trouble seemed just as great. Hauled down to the 54th Street precinct headquarters, the musician was, he said later, constantly provoked by cops, then booked for disorderly conduct and assaulting an officer. A doctor from St. Clare’s Hospital put five stitches in his scalp.

The next day, columnist and TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen, a friend of Davis, had a front-page story in the New York Journal-American about the beating, and pictures of the musician bleeding while in police custody flashed all across the country.

After two separate court appearances, Davis was acquitted on both charges. He had threatened to sue the police department for half a million dollars, but the suit fizzled out. (According to the musician, his lawyer had failed to file in time to beat the statute of limitations requirements; biographer John Szwed repeats rumors that Davis was amenable to dropping the case, lest the incensed police “make even more trouble for him.”)

Davis had expected racist treatment in his native East St. Louis, but not in supposedly tolerant New York. “But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when this happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None.”

Just how much the incident seared the musician can be seen in You’re Under Arrest, an LP released just over a quarter century later, in which Davis mixed denunciations of police brutality and Reagan foreign policy.

Like Frank Sinatra, Davis was a man whose belligerence often camouflaged a sensitivity that came out most piercingly in love songs. It’s an open question how much of the trumpeter’s moodiness and irritability over the years derived from insecurity, how much from the effects of substance abuse, and how much from the pain of living in a country where he felt marginalized by the color of his skin.

Davis was particularly incensed at accusations that he was racist and irredeemably angry. Just how complex a personality he was can be seen on You’re Under Arrest. Side by side on the album, next to songs of volcanic pain and rage, are ones where he reached for another emotion. How well he could achieve this, even in his final years of physical decline, can be seen in one of the latter songs, Cyndy Lauper’s “Time After Time.” It was as if he had achieved a transcendence, through his instrument, that he couldn't find in life.