Making Black America: "Through the Grapevine" (McGee Media, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I put on KPBS for two fascinating documentaries, one on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Making Black America series called “Through the Grapevine,” and one a Frontline show called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War.” The official PBS description of Making Black America says the series “chronicles the vast social networks and organizations created by and for Black people – beyond the reach of the ‘white gaze.’ Professor Gates sits with noted scholars, politicians, cultural leaders, and old friends to discuss this world behind the color line and what it looks like today.” One of the most interesting aspects of the show is how it dramatizes how integration was a double-edged sword for the Black community. Gates’s thesis is that, out of necessity, Black communities built up their own institutions and professional networks – there were Black bankers lawyers, doctors, realtors and the like serving an exclusively Black clientele, and despite the ruinously low-paying jobs to which Black people were relegated to, they nonetheless funded Black-owned businesses and created something of a Black middle class. Gates discusses the importance of rent parties not only as a way of raising the money to pay one’s rent that month but as what we now call networking opportunities for Black businesspeople.

I hadn’t realized that rent parties were sufficiently well established that they were sometimes advertised in Black newspapers (the fact that there were Black newspapers, and enough Black businesses to support them, is an often overlooked fact of the history of African-American culture), and the entertainers featured would include huge stars like James P. Johnson and Thomas “Fats” Waller. Gates even included a scene dramatizing a rent party and had a Black pianist playing a quite credible version of Johnson’s “Carolina Shout,” which Gates explained was the competitive piece for pianists working the rent-party circuit, the piece you had to prove you could play to be taken seriously as a musician. Johnson himself did an interview with Tom Davis that was published in Jazz Review magazine (albeit a few years after his death, since he passed in 1955 and Jazz Review didn’t start publishing until 1959) in which he said, “In the years before World War I there was a piano in almost every home, colored or white, The piano makers had a slogan, ‘What is home without a piano?’ It was like having a radio or TV today, Phonographs were feeble and scratchy. Most people who had pianos couldn’t play them, so a piano player was important socially. There were so many of them visiting and socializing that some people would have their pianos going day and night all day long.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the Henry Louis Gates documentary on Black life in America in the decades between the start of the Great Depression in 1929 and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 was its discussion of the gambling game, called either “numbers” or “policy,” that originated in the Black community and became a najor source of income for the people who ran it. Among the numbers kings Gates profiled was William “Gus” Greenlee, who ran the game in Pittsburgh and parlayed his earnings from it into a lavish lifestyle that impressed many Black Americans into thinking that they too could live the American dream and become rich through hard work. Greenlee started a jazz club called the Crawford Grill which featured many top artists, including Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell and white pianist Bill Evans. He also endowed a basebal team in one of the two Negro Leagues (even for someone of my age who remembers when the word “Negro” was the principal non-racist, non-pejorative way to refer to Black people, it’s still shocking to hear that term used seriously the way it is in archival clips) called the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and built a ballpark for them to play in.

Greenlee also rented a white baseball field, Comiskey Park in Chicago, for the first all-star game featuring exclusively Black players, and the event drew a sell-out crowd from people all over the country. Alas, the Negro Leagues were a casualty of initegration; once African-Americans could see Jackie Robinson and other players who looked like them in the major (white) leagues, the Negro Leagyes lost their audience as well as thier raison d’etre, and they folded almost overnight. Ironically, baseball was the first of the big-ticket sports to integrate but now has the smallest following among African-Americans; as football took over from baseball as “America’s national pastime,” most young Black athletes sought to excel in football or basketball rather than baseball.

The film also profiled one of my personal heroes, Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the law school at the historically Black Howard University (named after Oliver Otis Howard, who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was supposed to help newly freed slaves become full Americans but was plagued from the get-go by budgetary limitations and the racially motivated opposition of Andrew Johnson, who took over as President once Lincoln was shot and killed) in the 1930’s. Most of the lawyers who worked on Brown v. Board of Education, including Thurgood Marshall, Spottswood Robinson and Robert Carter, trained at Howard. Houston and his successor, William Hastie, turned Howard’s law school into a sort of clinic for civil-rights litigation. I know about Charles Houston from Rockard Kluger’s Simple Justice, his magisterial history of Brown and the other cases that were attached to it as they moved through the lower courts and to the Supreme Court.

Gates also told the story of the attempts by the Communist Party, U.S.A. to organize sharecroppers in the South, and mentioned that one of the volunteers and activist in that movement was a woman named Rusa McCauley, who would later take the name Rosa Parks and kick off the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott that launched the grass-roots civil rights movement and started the career of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was picked as the community point person for the action because as a minister he would have clout in the Black community. Rosa Parks is usually portrayed as an accidental heroine who just happened to be in the right (wrong) place at the right time, but when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the Black section of a bus to a white passenger, she was 42 years old and already a veteran civil-rights activist.

I remember when I saw the 1959 film Imitation of Life, one of the most moving parts of the movie occurs after the faithful Black servant of the white protagonists dies, and when they go to her funeral they meet a whole group of Black Americans that were part of her social circle, but the whites who employed her had no idea they existed. That is what Gates was getting at in this documentary; in order to support their community and each other through the ordeal of being Black in America, they created their own parallel institutions that flew under the white radar and gave African-Americans a rich and deeply fulfilling social life and sense of community. It’s nice to be reminded that Black people were not just victims; they had a deep, moving and powerful cultural heritage of their own and one that has become part of the world’s community, especially via music. Just about all the popular music of the 20th century and since has its roots in the African-American community – and especially in the Afridan-American church. If you don’t believe me, just listen to on2e of the great gospel singers – Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Marion Williams, Cassietta George or, in the modern day, Mandisa – and you will hear the roots of all blues, jazz, R&B, soul and rock ‘n’ roll.