IT JUST SUITS ME

Listen to IT JUST SUITS ME by Bessie Jones, Hobart Jones, and Group.

Faburn DeFrantz had laid his best cards on the table and the message was clear: Take Bill Garrett or we will do everything we can to embarrass Herman Wells and Indiana University over segregation in basketball.

The president needed to buy time. He fell back on his often-used tactic of feigning ignorance and surprise, "Chief, I don't know of any formal barrier to a Negro's playing basketball here. I'm surprised to hear that. I can tell you without hesitation that Bill Garrett can come here as a student if he has the grades. But I can't order Coach McCracken to play somebody. Only the coach can decide who's good enough."

Defrantz saw his opening. "So...Herman...if Bill Garrett comes to IU, and he's good enough to play basketball on McCracken's team, he can play here. Is that what you're telling me?"

***

McCracken's face reddened. Despite Wells's heads-up, he had expected blunt confrontation. He was caught off guard. The president had said he would back McCracken completely if the coach decided Garrett could make his team. Wells had, in a stroke, taken away McCracken's defenses and given him support.

In the silence DeFrantz and his colleagues waited, avoided any hint of impatience.

McCracken started slowly. He wasn't sure how to address DeFrantz, so he avoided using his name. "I never promised any boy he could play."

No answer.

"We've used up our basketball scholarships for this year. And it's awfully late."

Still silence. Sympathetic nods.

"But if he's here on campus...

"And making his grades...

"And he shows he can take the training and the discipline...

"And get along with the other players...

"And not react if the fans give him hell, which they might do..."

Long pause. DeFrantz kept his eyes on McCracken's, his expression encouraging, nodding slightly at each statement.

"And if he shows he can play well enough..."

Defrantz bolted out of his seat, grabbed McCracken's hand in both of his hands and pumped it vigorously. He knew victory when he heard it. "God bless you, Coach McCracken! You are doing the right thing! That's wonderful! They're gonna remember you for this, Coach!"

McCracken managed a weak smile. "That's what I'm afraid of."

Photo: Shoreditch mural (4).

UNION

Listen to UNION by Bessie Jones and Group B.

George W. McLaurin had long before earned his master's degree and in 1948 applied to the graduate school of the University of Oklahoma to earn his doctorate in education.

But there was a catch, as McLaurin discovered soon after returning to the state court in November to demand and win immediate admission to the state university. He became a fully matriculated graduate student of the University of Oklahoma, all right, but in accordance with the legislature's hurry-up revision of the state laws, all such instruction of colored students was to be done "on a segregated basis" within the university. And so sixty-eight-year-old
George McLaurin was made to sit at a desk by himself in an anteroom outside the regular classrooms where his coursework was given.

***

Before McLaurin was heard by the Justices in April 1950, Oklahoma modified the ordeal it had imposed on its least-likely-to-succeed student. McLaurin was now admitted to the classroom with white students. But his seat was surrounded by a railing marked "Reserved for Colored." Nauseated by the spectacle, white students tore the sign down until officials settled for assigning McLaurin to an unmarked row set aside for him and any other colored student who might enroll in quest of similar humiliation. They also let McLaurin onto the main floor of the library, but restricted him to his own table. And they let him eat in the cafeteria at the same time as whites, but still at his own place, which became endearingly known to McLaurin and his sympathizers as "The Jug." Such restrictions, Oklahoma contended in its brief to the Court, were merely nominal. They were necessary if the university was to conform to the state's separate-but-equal laws.

Photo: Shoreditch mural (3).

YONDER COME DAY

Listen to YONDER COME DAY by Bessie Smith.

Public education, a new but increasingly popular government function, was the most critical target of the racial attack.

Whites had chafed at the notion of black education as long as Africans had been imported to the United States. Instruction of slaves was illegal in the antebellum South. After emancipation, government-collected property taxes were used to open new schools for all children. Whites gawked at the schools opened for blacks during Reconstruction--even the crude one-teacher variants that predominated in the region. Per pupil spending on education for black children and white children was essentially identical, leading to widespread resentment among whites--especially in the cotton plantation regions where whites owned the vast majority of land and paid nearly all of the taxes, but were enormously outnumbered by African Americans in population. That "white taxes" were spent on education of black children, rather than solely their own, was infuriating.

***

As the popularity of state-funded free public schools surged, the friction caused by black education grew. The number of white children attending public schools in Alabama raced from 91,202 to 159,671 between the 1870s and late 1880s. At the same time, the number of black pupils increased from 54,595 to 98,919. But the amount of funding spent for every student was declining, and attempts to raise taxes were doomed.

In the legislative session of 1892, white leaders simply changed the law so that school taxes were no longer distributed in equal per pupil allotments. ... The effect on blacks was catastrophic. Overnight, white schools came to receive the vast majority of all funds for education. In one predominantly African American county, the total budget for black teachers' salaries in 1891 was $6,545--in approximate parity with what was being spent per student at white schools in the county. After turning over control to local officials, black teacher salaries were slashed. ... Forty years later, the total salaries for teachers instructing 8,483 black children in the county had risen negligibly to just over $8,000. The budget for white teachers, with fewer than 2,000 pupils, had climbed by a factor of 30, to nearly $60,000.

Photo: Shoreditch mural (2).

THE TITANIC

Listen to THE TITANIC by Bessie Jones, the Sea Island Singers, and Hobart Smith.

With the fall of Savannah, and the alarming news in the late spring of 1779 that Sir Henry Clinton would be sailing south with an army of eight thousand men, the argument about arming blacks suddenly became less philosophical and more strategic. . . .[The] planters in the South Carolina low country were in a bind. The state was having trouble filling its militia ranks precisely because adult whites were needed on the plantations to guard against the likelihood of slave insurrections and mass flight. . . .Even so, with a number of his own slaves gone to the British or taken by them, Washington was worried about the possibility of an escalating armed-slave race, each side outbidding the other.

Yet on the 29th of March Congress authorized the raising of 3,000 able-bodied blacks in Georgia and South Carolina, to be commanded by white officers. . . .This would have been a revolution indeed, and at a stroke would have disposed of British accusations of hypocrisy. But it was precisely because . . . "such a measure will produce the Emancipation of a number of those wretches and lay a foundation for the Abolition of slavery" a huge loophole was included. In view of the "inconveniences" that the measure would cause the two Southern states, they would reserve the ultimate power to judge its practicality. The bitter conflict between North and South that would poison the new republic was there from the very start.

The outcome was predictable. When the black regiment was debated in the South Carolina House of Representatives at the end of August 1779 it managed to secure just twelve votes out of about seventy-two, even with the British virtually at the gates. "It was received with horror by the planters."

[By spring 1780, black pilots found British frigates a way over the sandbank guarding Charleston harbor.]

Governor Rutledge . . . made an offer of South Carolina's neutrality for the duration of the war in return for the preservation of the social order, meaning slaveholding society. In May the American garrison surrendered, delivering to the British more than five thousand prisoners.

Photo: Shoreditch mural (1).

BEFORE THIS TIME ANOTHER YEAR

Listen to BEFORE THIS TIME ANOTHER YEAR by Bessie Jones and Group.

It's just a house game, you know -- a fun game, to play in the house.

"Many 'fun' games are concerned with attempts to make another player 'show his white teeth.' But 'Uncle Tom,' though it somewhat resembles other, better-known games, has a plot line and a bitter hilarity all its own. It is an uproariously funny game while it is being played, but afterward you realize what you've been laughing at. Southern black children do not have to search far for the models they satirized in this game.

Here is Mrs. Jones's description of how it is played:

There's a crowd of children setting round in a place and you get you some little sticks or things and call them nails. You come around to the children and then you knock to this one's door just like you were at the door, you knock.

They say, Who is that?

You say, Old Man Tom.

They say, What you want?

You say, I want to sell some nails. How many pounds you want?

And they'll tell him one or two or three, and he'll let 'em have one or two or three of those sticks . . . or whatever it is. And then he goes to the next one and say the same way, and on and on. Then he'll go away and stay off for a little while--he may change while he's out there, dress all kind of funny ways, you know--put on old crazy ragged clothes or a funny face or old funny hat or anything, you know. Then he'll come back and knock again.

They say, who is that?

And he say, Old Man Tom.

They say, What you want?

He say, I want you to pay for my nails, please.

(He say it in a funny way, like he was so hongry and tired, you see.)

And they say, I can't pay.

And he say, You can't pay?

They say, I can't pay!

And he say, like he's crying, You ain't going to pay Uncle Tom?

And you're not supposed to laugh or not even smile, just be hard at him, and Uncle Tom have to do all kind of funny things to make you laugh. And if you laugh, then you got to give him the nails back, you see. He got to do all kind of cutting up, dancing and jumping around making ugly face and all the time asking, 'You can't pay? You ain't going to pay Uncle Tom. Poor Uncle Tom, you can't pay? and all that kind of funny way. . . . It's always who can be so hard, you know, and won't laugh, why he'll be Uncle Tom the next time."

Photo: Martin's guest appearance (4).

SHEEP, SHEEP, DON'TCHA KNOW THE ROAD

Listen to SHEEP, SHEEP, DON'TCHA KNOW THE ROAD by Bessie Jones and the Sea Island Singers.

When I was a little girl, I thought Jim Crow might have been a bird, because it was "going down to the new ground," and they always shoot them birds out of the corn. "New ground" is ground where the trees have been cut off, but it's never been planted in. So that was what I understood at the time, that was my idea. But we don't know what the old folks meant, we sure don't.
John Davis: I don't believe the old folks knew what they were talking about their ownselves. Anyway, they didn't tell nobody. . . .

"Probably, to begin with, 'Jim Crow' was a bird, as Mrs. Jones and Mr. Davis suggest, but during the late 1820s the name became attached to a young white actor, Thomas D. Rice, who had invented a stage characterization of the 'jolly, carefree' plantation slave. . . . 'Jim Crow' thus developed from a dance imitating the motions of birds and hunters, and quite possibly magical in nature, into a commercial caricature. No wonder the term, when used in political context, has a bitter taste today."

Photo: Martin's guest appearance (3).

LITTLE JOHNNY BROWN

Listen to LITTLE JOHNNY BROWN by Bessie Jones.

If you know how to clap and what you're clapping for you can come right right out with the song. . . . You're supposed to have your music come out even with you singing. . . .

Here's how it would go if you were doing it at home:

FORM: Ring of players standing and clapping; one player in the center.

"Mrs. Jones's concern with timing showed here with her insistence, during play, that the "comfort" (comforter) be spread down on the fourth line of the verse, so that there would be no awkward time gap to be filled in by the center player. . . ."

Little Johnny Brown, Spread your comfort down (Center player walks around the ring)

Little Johnny Brown, Spread your comfort down (Center player spreads handkerchief out)

Fold one corner, Johnny Brown (Center player folds one corner per line)
Fold another corner, Johnny Brown
Fold another corner, Johnny Brown
Fold another corner, Johnny Brown
Take it to your lover, Johnny Brown (Center player dances over to partner)
Take it to your lover, Johnny Brown
Show her your motion, Johnny Brown (Center player "makes his motion")
Show her your motion, Johnny Brown
Lope like a buzzard, Johnny Brown (Center player does the buzzard lope)
Lope like a buzzard, Johnny Brown
Give it to your lover, Johnny Brown (Center player hands handkerchief over)
Give it to your lover, Johnny Brown
Give it to your lover, Johnny Brown (New player takes over)

Here's how awesome it looks on youtube:



(I would remiss if I didn't mention that earlier this summer Stu recorded and shot Sam Amidon (with Valgeir & Nico) doing a cover of this tune for Stu's East Village Radio show. Great taste, even if the effect ends up being a little different... )

Photo: Martin's guest appearance (2).

YOU BETTER MIND

Listen to YOU BETTER MIND by Bessie Jones and Group.

From "Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage," by Bessie Jones & Bess Lomax Hawes.

"Mrs. Bessie Jones was born in Dawson, Georgia -- a small black farming community -- and grew up like thousands of other girls of her time in the rural South. She started to work when she was still a child, helping out her big family; she chopped cotton, planted potatoes, watched out for her littler children, took her schooling when her family could spare her and as it was offered.

Balanced on the edge of real poverty all her life, she learned how to amuse and entertain herself and others. Music -- especially singing -- is not only one of the least expensive art forms; it is also one in which you can participate while you are doing something else.

I remember a hundred games, I suppose; I would say a hundred because there are so many of them. We had all kinds of plays; we had house plays, we had outdoor plays. Some of the plays have songs, some have just plays -- you know, just acts or whatnot . . . in my time coming up, the parents they would have quiltings and they would have songs they would sing while they were quilting and we would listen at those songs. And we would have egg crackings and taffy pullings and we would hear all those things -- riddleses and stories and different things. That's why I'm so loaded. . . . And then I has a great remembrance of those things, that's another thing about it.

Bessie Jones, "loaded" as she was with games and songs and her own particular and irrepresible joy in living, got married and moved to her husband's home, St. Simon's Island, one of the long strong of coastal islands that edge the Eastern shoreline of North America. There she met the Georgia Sea Island Singers. . . . The Singers, dedicated to the preservation of the old musical ways of their forebears, were so impressed with Mrs. Jones's buoyant personality, extensive repertoire, and experienced singing style that they invited her to join their group; she became one of the only mainlanders so honored. Mrs. Jones, in her turn, felt at home with the Singers' dignity and with their pride in their African and Afro-American heritage -- the same kind of dignity and pride that had been so carefully taught her by her own parents and grandparents."

Photo: Martin's guest appearance (1).