It was a bit risky using a Janet Jackson video as a way to emphasize how Southern culture permeates the public imagination. The idea was to make connections between this and Kimberley Phillips' own emphasis on how African American migrants from Alabama took the South with them when they headed to Cleveland in search of a better life after the First World War. There, led by courageous African American men, and especially women, they established a working class vision of freedom. The Future Outlook League (FOL), a labor and community group founded by John Holly, a man, from Tuscaloosa, eventually had more 10,000 members across the state. With the Great Depression and a second World War as a backdrop , both local whites and the black elite were troubled by the seeming backward, expressive "Southern" ways of Holly and the FOL. This organization was a force most could not ignore between 1935 and 1952. Holly, among other things, urged black Clevelanders to not shop where they could not work. Their determination led to jobs in the service and transportation sector for many African Americans. Their success poses tensions with the early organizing efforts of white and blacks, some in biracial unions, in Bessemer and Birmingham during the late-19th and early-20th century. Interestingly, that which local whites and the black middle class feared in Cleveland - Southern expression - remains a key way that many, artists included, hone in on the richness in American culture. To this point, the students picked up on some of this culture in Janet Jackson's "Someone to Call My Lover" video. Aaron noticed the "rural landscape" and "pond baptism" at the start of the video. Also attentive to landscape, Roosevelt observed how Jackson danced in a jook joint "in...[the] fields of nowhere." Shanece was also struck by the baptism scene, but also by the children jumping on a mattress outside, revealing the poverty, but also the joy and sense of community in black Southern life. Kalynn detected New Orleans in the video, perhaps because of the musicians, but also because of the appearance of a pet alligator, which brought to mind swamp life. Alexis honed in on the jook joint's refrigerator, which seemed to indicate one way dancing bodies could "cool down" in the South's often sizzling climate. Tiffany also saw community in the dancing bodies, something she felt was in "align[ment] with the generational movement discussed in the Phillips reading." Finally, Lauria focused, among other things, on the priest in the baptism scene. In him she observed, as did Phillips, how the South "puts a lot of emphasis on religion." Perhaps because half the class is from Alabama, most were aware that Jackson's mother, Katherine, hails from Barbour County, Alabama, which is in the southeast quadrant of the state where Creek Indians once lived. Next Monday, we turn to Thomas Sugrue's study of Detroit to better understand how black bodies in cities became less associated with jobs and more associated with racialized poverty after World War II.
Page from Kimberley Phillips' study on black urban Cleveland.
As I prepped for this coming Monday's class, I was struck by Kimberley Phillips' thoughts about an image appearing in her study on African Americans in Cleveland. In her book, which is this Monday's reading, Phillips captures how the image tells a story about the migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North during the first half of the twentieth century. She was especially drawn to the African American man who surfaces as a sort of pedestal in this image, and thus this story (as if the accomplishment of the militant African American working class she describes was entirely dependent on masculine strength). This drawing, which is housed at Cleveland's Western Reserve Historical Society, made me think of the Afro-Brazilian civil rights posters recently critiqued by the students in this class for an April 23 exhibit at the University of Alabama. Like the Afro-Brazilian posters, the image here shores up the gains to be had when an oppressed group unites to create new change. But, unlike the Afro-Brazilian posters, this sketch does not draw attention to the degree to which African American women helped create change in Cleveland (see one example of the way women are included in the Afro Brazilian story in the image to the right of this blog). The students will learn more about the gender issue as it relates to black struggle and other things including the formation of the Future Outlook League, an organization that was active in Cleveland between the years 1935 and 1952. Some of its members were migrants were from Birmingham and Bessemer, Alabama. Hence, Cleveland was known then as "Alabama North." One aside: as Phillips tells us, little is known about the above sketch. The same is true of the Brazilians posters in question, which were found in the attic of a West Virginia home (of all places). Brazilian scholar Amilcar Pereira will present a lecture on these posters prior to April 23's exhibit. Please stay tuned for more details.
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