This Day in African-American History (Bojangles Taps Down Broadway on His Birthday)

May 25, 1939—To celebrate his 61st birthday, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson displayed, to the joy of astonished onlookers, the tap-dancing skills that made him a Harlem legend, capering down Broadway from Columbus Circle to 44th Street.

The same year, he demonstrated that age had hardly diminished his versatility when he appeared on Broadway and in the World’s Fair in Hot Mikado, a jazzed-up version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. His solo turn amid an all-black cast in the Michael Todd production led a Theatre Arts critic to exult, “Never … has one note been made to sing and soar, to whisper and to laugh, in such astonishingly complex rhythm.”

Baby boomers are likely to associate Robinson with the Jerry Jeff Walker-penned song “Mr. Bojangles,” which zoomed up the pop charts in a cover version by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band—then became a Las Vegas staple in the performances by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Neil Diamond and Tom Jones.

It might come as a surprise, then—including, as it happens, to me—that the song has nothing to do with the ground-breaking African-American entertainer. Walker wrote the poignant tune after being jailed for drunkenness in a rowdy Fourth of July celebration in the 1960s, where he met a homeless man who, at one point, demonstrated his soft-shoe instincts to his cellmate.

Those points are pertinent because a) the jail where this encounter occurred was segregated, so the homeless man/dancer was white, and b) the real Bill Robinson had died in 1949, well before this incident. The “Bojangles” of the song, then, is not a reference to the Harlem entertainer of stage and screen, but rather to an unfortunate street person whose nickname represented a tip of the hat to the late celebrity.

I just referred to “the real Bill Robinson,” but, in a sense, even that was elusive, for neither Bill nor William was his given first name at birth. “Luther”—a name he loathed—was it, so, like most entertainers, he simply reinvented himself, borrowing “William” from his younger brother.

I also called him “a Harlem legend.” He was all of that, and yet the truth was more complicated there, too.

The description that novelist Dawn Powell came up with for herself—a “permanent visitor” who made Manhattan her adopted home after coming from the Midwest—could apply equally well to Robinson. He started out in Richmond, Va., where he defied the grandmother who raised him by dancing for nickels and dimes on street corners, then proceeded to Washington, D.C., and only ended up permanently in Harlem in 1928.

If you want to start with the actuality of Bill Robinson, then turn to one of the films he made in the 1930s as Hollywood, exploiting the full possibilities of talking pictures, began to develop the movie musical. Robinson’s partner in several of these dance sequences was child star Shirley Temple, and you can see one of these in this clip from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938).

Much of Robinson’s best work, however, was done for vaudeville, an entertainment form already disappearing by the 1930s, thereby necessitating his foray into Hollywood. While plying his trade on this circuit featuring lightning-fast songs, skits, jokes and dances, the dancer impressed a future white superstar, Fred Astaire.

One of my professors at Columbia University, Ann Douglas, discusses in her book Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) how Astaire borrowed and transformed elements of Robinson’s elegant tap style (Robinson, for instance, kept his torso rigid, while Astaire used virtually every muscle in his body). Astaire’s “Bojangles of Harlem” solo in the film Swingtime—done, admittedly, in a blackface fashion that will inevitably set off the P.C. alarms of many of today’s viewers—was meant as a sincere tribute to Robinson.

Admired by blacks and whites alike, Robinson made a great deal of money, but he probably could have made much more but for the pervasively racist age in which he lived. The compromises he had to make probably made this proud man grit his teeth.

Like Frank Sinatra, he was a fireball of an entertainer, universally acclaimed for his artistry but unnerving those who weren’t sure if they were about to encounter him at his worst (a gambling addiction, a fierce temper, and a habit of leaving his gold-plated pistol obtrusively out on a table while playing pool) or his best (an extraordinary generosity that led him to perform in 3,000 benefits).

When Robinson passed away, a decade after his delighted jaunt down Broadway, the line for the funeral procession for the “honorary mayor” of Harlem stretched for blocks.

This Day in African-American History (Frederick Douglass Escapes From Slavery)

September 4, 1838—Completing a perilous 24-hour escape from slavery, 20-year-old Frederick Douglass arrived in New York City near what is now Chambers Street, his first step in becoming arguably the most important African-American leader before Martin Luther King Jr.

Within a few years, displaying a fiery eloquence and bearing personal witness to the evils of slavery, Douglass made for one of the most prized speakers on the abolitionist circuit. He would also edit one of the leading abolitionist papers, North Star; press during the Civil War for immediate emancipation and for the utility of African-American troops in destroying the Confederacy; and served as a U.S. Marshal toward the end of the Reconstruction Era.

His flight for freedom would make any short list of the greatest, most consequential escapes in American history. Yet Douglass only revealed the full details in his third autobiography, Life and Times (1881), by which time the issue of slavery had been decided by force of arms and his disclosures about who aided him and how would not open anyone to reprisals.

Those dangers were real because of fugitive slave laws on the books at the time. For instance, for assisting Virginia and Maryland slaves on their flight north, Charles T. Torrey, an abolitionist journalist and former Congregationalist pastor, was sentenced to six years at hard labor in the Maryland state penitentiary, where he died.

As a youngster, Douglass was taught, for awhile, to read by Sophia Auld, until her husband Thomas put an end to it, fearing it would make the boy discontented with his lot as a slave. Thereafter, he learned to read on the sly—copying out letters written on lumber by carpenters and asking his white playmates to show him how to form other letters properly.

At age 18, he had tried unsuccessfully to run away. After he was caught, Thomas Auld told him he’d get his freedom at age 25—if he learned a trade in the meantime. By the end of the summer of 1838, however, Thomas’ brother Hugh decided to end a hiring-out arrangement he had had with Douglass that allowed the slave greater financial earning power.

Concerned that he’d be sold and forced to live away from the woman he’d come to love, Anna Murray, Douglass decided on August 12 that on September 3 he would escape. As the day he picked grew closer, his anxiety mounted as he thought of the people he loved that he might never see again if he succeeded and on the probability of severe punishment if he failed.

With help from Anna, who sold two featherbeds to assist him, Douglass managed to get hold of “free papers” that allowed manumitted blacks to move around with some degree of freedom. Dressed in a sailor’s red shirt and black cravat, he boarded a train bound for Wilmington, Del., where he switched to a steamboat for Philadelphia—and even this wasn’t enough, because he promptly booked a train to New York City.

From what I have seen of high school and college curricula, the first autobiography written by Douglass—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)—is the most assigned of his memoirs, perhaps because it is the shortest and most concentrated in its depiction of slavery. For my part, I prefer Life and Times—not only because it fills in the details of his escape, but because of its vivid portraits of two men with whom he came in contact later on: Daniel O’Connell, the Irish lawyer-politician who gained Catholic emancipation as a Member of Parliament, and Abraham Lincoln. Although O’Connell earned Douglass’ admiration from the beginning for his eloquence and his unwavering denunciation of slavery, Lincoln won it by degrees, after his slow but finally unshakeable move toward emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War.

“No transatlantic statesman bore a testimony more marked and telling against the crime and curse of slavery than did Daniel O’Connell,” Douglass wrote. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which he reflects on the awful price paid by North and South alike for their part in this crime, might merit the same tribute. So, of course, might Douglass himself.

In a class I took at the Chautauqua Institution last month on Seneca Falls and the women’s rights movement, our instructor, Rick Swegan, drew our attention to the portrait of Douglass that I have used for this post. It was taken at roughly the time he wrote the Narrative.

The steady, unflinching look of Douglass in this daguerreotype, Rick noted, was similar to that of some famous black militants of the late 1960s. Though I came across another, earlier image from the time of Douglass’ escape, I felt, like Rick, that the 1840s picture captured something essential in the man—his self-possession, his dignity, and his refusal to be taken for granted by anybody.

This Day in African-American History (White-on-Black Violence in the Land of Lincoln)

August 14, 1908—A white woman’s spurious claim of rape led to the start of three days of violence directed against the African-American citizens of Springfield, Ill. By the end of the rampage—which featured racial wolfpacks that burned 40 homes and 24 businesses, not to mention pummeling more than a dozen people and leaving at least seven dead (and probably more) in their wake—the governor of the state had declared martial law and five thousand troops were needed to restore order.

I’m sure there are more extensive studies of these days of mindless rage, but for the time-pressed, I can recommend two short accounts: George F. Will’s column from earlier this week and a short vignette in, of all places, an extremely fine baseball book that doubles as a fascinating social history of early 20th-century America: Crazy ’08, by Cait Murphy.

It’s impossible to ignore the great irony of this orgy of looting, rioting, and lynching—it happened in the town that launched the political career of Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” and which also serves as the site of his final resting place. To be sure, Lincoln was careful in his debates with Stephen Douglas not to challenge the politically privileged position of whites over blacks in the virulently racist society of his time. But had he lived several decades more, as the crime of lynching entered American society like a virus, it’s inconceivable to me that this most humane of men would not have denounced it.

There was only one positive development from the violence, in my opinion: it so shocked the opinion of liberal whites that they joined with African-Americans the following year to form the NAACP.

I have to admit to some impatience on the subject of the labels we have for people and their views—fascist, communist, liberal, conservative. Whatever shorthand use they provide us is lessened by the ways in which so many people close their minds to an argument simply according to such labels, without any regard to the complexities of a person’s background, position or overall views.

Lynchings provide one demonstration of this very situation. A post on a blog called “O.U.P. (for Oxford University Press), “Why Is H.L. Mencken Relevant Today?” discusses the seeming contradiction of a great columnist, editor, memoirist, and lexicographer whose private musings have led posterity, not unreasonably, to see him as racist and anti-Semitic.

African-Americans first began to desert the GOP during FDR’s administration, as the New Deal provided desperately needed employment for this most economically marginalized of groups. Unlike Mencken, who tossed around terms like “blackamoor” pretty freely, F.D.R. did not, to my knowledge, use racial epithets.

Anyone who’s read my posts on Roosevelt knows my respect for the way he gave hope to Americans during the Depression, conserved America’s resources, and led the global coalition that halted the seemingly unstoppable march of the Axis powers. He amply deserves his reputation as one of America’s greatest presidents. Yet on the issue of lynching legislation, Mencken was far braver than the political titan of the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Even without pressing for voting rights or equal public accommodations—perhaps a political non-starter given the times—F.D.R. could have made a signal difference for African-Americans in the very fact of their lives by pressing to ban lynching. It would have signaled unmistakable that nobody was above the law and would have dealt a body blow to racism in this country. It might even have been politically possible to pull this off—while many white politicians were willing to go along with segregation, lynching revolted many—including more aristocratic southerners—as crude. Instead, he did nothing, hoping that the employment boost provided by the New Deal, as well as the constant advocacy of his wife Eleanor, would be enough to convince African-Americans that his heart was in the right place.

Contrast that with Mencken, whose protests against lynching on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, coupled with his advocacy of federal legislation against the practice in front of Congress, led to threats against his life. In light of this stance, historians who’ve denounced him for racism might want to reconsider whether FDR was all that much enlightened than Mencken.

This Day in African-American History (Dr. Williams Performs Open-Heart Surgery)

July 10, 1893—James Cornish, a 24-year-old African-American stabbed in a fight, was experiencing a rapid decline in his condition when the attending surgeon at Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Medical Center, Daniel Hale Williams, decided to open him up and see if something could be done before the patient bled to death internally. Williams’ solution—suture the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the myocardium), while leaving the heart muscle to heal by itself—was daring and pioneered a whole new medical field.

Americans are obsessed with anything that’s first or most. It’s a little bit like the Olympics—nobody cares who came in second. Over the years, it has become common to see many reference sources in hard copy or online credit Dr. Williams with performing the first open-heart surgery.

Well, to some extent that depends on how you define “open-heart surgery.” If you see it as suturing a heart wound itself, then credit for that would properly go to Ludwig Rehn of Germany, who did so in 1896. Henry C. Dalton appears to have performed an operation similar to Williams two years before.

In another sense, it doesn’t matter. Williams had performed an unbelievably risky operation—without the benefit, let it be noted, of any X-ray machine—and he had done so in an interracial hospital that he himself had founded because opportunities for African-American physicians and nurses were so limited: Provident Hospital of Chicago.

In a time when history is being forgotten, let it also be recorded that Williams’ yeoman service was being done when African-Americans needed such pioneers more than ever, both because of their swelling presence in Chicago (where their population increased from 3,700 in 1870 to nearly 10 times that—30,000—in 1900) and because of the opportunities dwindling nationally during the desperate post-Reconstruction period.