How It Feels to Be Free (Yap Films, American Masters Pictures, ITVS, Chicken & Egg Pictures, documentary Channel [Canada], Fremantle, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 19) in honor of the Juneteenth holiday, and just because it had been in the backlog for a while and I wanted to dig it out, I ran my husband Charles and I a quite interesting DVD of an American Masters show called “How It Feels to Be Free.” Directed (and presumably written) by Yoruba Richen based on a book called How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement by Ruth Feldstein, the two-hour documentary profiled six Black women performers who were alive and active in the 1960’s and took an active role in the civil rights movement. They were Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier, though the show acknowledged at least one woman who preceded them and put her career on the line to tell the truth about her people and the racism that afflicted them: Billie Holiday. The show also mentioned Paul Robeson (a political as well as artistic mentor to Lena Horne) and the Café Society nightclub in New York in 1939, which was owned by a shoe magnate named Barney Josephson. Josephson asked legendary record producer John Hammond for help finding talent for his club, and Hammond agreed on one condition: Café Society would be fully integrated. Billie Holiday introduced her famous anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” there (with a band that included at least one active Communist, trumpeter Frankie Newton), and also on the Café Society bill were Lena Horne and singer-pianist Hazel Scott. (Scott is not profiled on this show but there is a spectacular clip here of her sitting at two pianos, playing one with her right hand and the other with her left.) The documentary was especially interesting when it discussed the way these great Black artists were torn between the demands of the white entertainment industry that they be “glamorous,” “beautiful” and non-threatening, and their own consciousness that the anti-racist struggle was reaching a boiling point in the 1960’s and they needed to be part of it in whatever ways they could.

Lena Horne was the first Black performer to sign a long-term contract with a major movie studio, MGM, from 1942 to 1949, though during that time she made only two movies, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, in which she actually got to act. In all her other films she’d just come on and do a song or two, which was deliberate on MGM’s part because distributors in the South could easily cut her numbers from the films. Richen tells the story of how Lena Horne lost the role she most wanted – Julie Laverne, half-Black second lead in the Jerome Kern musical Show Boat – though she gets it a bit garbled. Horne actually sang Julie’s big number, “Can’t Help Loving That Man,” in Till the Clouds Roll By, a 1946 MGM biopic of Kern (not the 1946 MGM revue film Ziegfeld Follies as Richen states here), and producer Arthur Freed put her in that film as a sort of elaborate screen test for Show Boat, but when he wanted to cast Horne as Julie MGM’s distribution department went ballistic. They pointed out that no Southern theatre would show the film with Horne in it, and eventually white Southerner Ava Gardner played the role (with white jazz singer Annette Warren as her voice double). Ironically, the makeup Gardner wore to look credible was something called “Egyptian Blend No. 5,” which Max Factor had invented to make Horne look believable as a Latina (a brief idea of Louis B. Mayer’s that got scotched when Horne refused to go along with it and insisted she would fulfill the contract, but only as the African-American she was). One great story about Lena Horne that wasn’t included here, though it could have been, was that in 1952, three years after she’d completed her MGM contract and walked out of movies because she could make more money on stage in nightclubs, she was offered a gig at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. At the time Black entertainers in Vegas weren’t allowed to stay or even hang out in the hotels where they performed, so they had to stay either in cheap Black-only motels or in private homes. Horne insisted as a deal-breaking contract term that she be given a room in the Flamingo to stay in for the duration of her engagement, and when she was told Blacks were not allowed to stay at the Flamingo, she said, “Why not? If I’m good enough to sing on your stage, I’m good enough to sleep in your bed.”

Abbey Lincoln was originally presented as a Black sex kitten live and on records, but that changed abruptly when she started a relationship with jazz drummer Max Roach (they married in 1962 but divorced in 1970), who used her on his socially conscious albums like We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960) and Straight Ahead (1961). The latter got slammed by Down Beat reviewer Ira Gitler, who denounced Lincoln as a “professional Negro,” which led to a recorded debate involving Lincoln and Gitler in which she pointed out to him that as an entertainer who performed in public for a living, and as a Black woman, she could hardly not be a “professional Negro.” We Insist! Freedom Now Suite consists of five songs, including an opening track called “Driva Man” about slavery and the way Black women could be forced into sex with their white owners and overseers and they had no right to say no because they were literally property. The album also features Lincoln doing the same sort of wordless “extended vocal” singing for which Yoko Ono later became famous (or infamous). In the 1960’s Lincoln made an independent film called Nothing but a Man that was a love story between a working-class Black man and a Black woman who was a schoolteacher and the daughter of a minister. She also started wearing the so-called “Afro” or “natural” hair style in public, which itself became a subject of debate because it didn’t fit at all with what Black entertainers were supposed to look like.

Nina Simone originally was a nightclub singer and pianist who sang and played mostly the same songs other people did in those gigs – my mother had her first album on Bethlehem Records and it opened with an uptempo version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo,” a slow-paced version of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” (a Walter Donaldson song Eddie Cantor had introduced in blackface in the 1930 movie Whoopee!), and her first hit, a cover of “I Loves You, Porgy” from George Gershwin’s Black-themed opera Porgy and Bess. Then Simone, like Lincoln, got caught up in the civil-rights struggle and started writing original songs like “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Mr. Backlash” and the awesome “Four Women” that explicitly denounced racism. She also performed at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (often referred to as the “Black Woodstock” and featuring two acts that also performed at Woodstock, The Chambers Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone), reading an incendiary poem by David Nelson called “Are You Ready?,” calling for Black-on-white violence. (Lincoln and Roach also performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival, but their footage was left out of Summer of Soul, the 2021 documentary by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.) There’s a brief interview segment with Simone in which she recounted her meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., in which she told him flat-out that while she admired what he was doing, “I am not non-violent.”

Diahann Carroll seemed poised for Broadway stardom in 1961, when she appeared in No Strings, composer Richard Rodgers’ first show after the death of his long-time collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II for which Rodgers wrote lyrics as well as music for the songs. Critics hailed her as the only reason to see the show, and she won a Tony Award for it, but as with so many other Black performers (including the other five women profiled in this film), stardom eluded her because there weren’t enough roles for Blacks on which to build a career. She got her second big break in 1968, when white Southerner Hal Kanter, who’d previously produced the TV version of Amos ‘n’ Andy and the early 1950’s sitcom Beulah, which cast Hattie McDaniel as (what else?) a maid, created a TV series called Julia which cast Carroll as a middle-class Black nurse raising her son as a single parent after her husband is killed in a war. Julia became a hit but also raised controversy by Black critics who disdained its sanitized version of Black urban life and said the show didn’t offer “a realistic depiction of Black people.” Carroll replied to that criticism by telling a TV Guide interviewer, “Show me a TV show that offers a realistic depiction of white people.”

The other two women on the show, Cicely Tyson and Pam Grier, were the only ones still alive in 2021 when this film was made, and both talked in different terms about the challenges they faced as actors as well as being dark-skinned in an era in which most “crossover” Black artists were relatively light-skinned (from Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway to Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln and Johnny Mathis; a previous PBS documentary noted that of all the Black performers who found white audiences in the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, the only dark ones were Louis Armstrong and Nat “King” Cole). This actually reflects a weird internal racism that pervaded the Black community in the U.S. in which Blacks classified themselves as “yellow,” “brown” or “black,” with the “yellow” ones considered superior (blues singers like Blind Willie McTell, Big Bill Broonzy and Helen Andrews sang songs about this trichotomy, and the 1934 film Imitation of Life was about a light-skinned Black woman who “passes” for white; ironically, in 1934 the part was played by light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington and in the 1959 remake she was played by white actress Susan Kohner). Tyson achieved stardom (and an Academy Award nomination) for Sounder, in which she played the matriarch of a Black family who is forced to work her ass off to keep their farm going, but she lost the Oscar to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret (possibly because she had competition from another Black nominee, Diana Ross for the execrable alleged Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues). She also became notoriously picky about what roles she would take, wanting to avoid anything that came too close to reinforcing the old stereotypes of what Black women were like.

Pam Grier made her mark in the short-lived so-called “Blaxploitation” genre of the early 1970’s, in which Hollywood, desperate for films that would bring back audiences to the big inner-city theatres left over from the 1920’s and 1930’s in neighborhoods that had since been abandoned by whites fleeing to the suburbs, started making cheap action movies featuring mostly Black casts. There’s an interesting film clip here of Cicely Tyson denouncing these movies that were Pam Grier’s stock-in-trade as demeaning and reinforcing stereotypes of all Black people as either drug dealers, drug addicts or both. Grier achieved legendary status as the first Black woman action hero in films like Coffy and Foxy Brown (both of which I’ve seen; they’re terrible movies but Grier’s bad-ass acting alone makes them watchable), and decades later writer-director Quentin Tarantino, in a nod to the grind-house movies of his youth, cast Grier in the title role of his 1997 film Jackie Brown. Grier’s success in action roles challenged not only Hollywood’s racism but also its sexism, yet despite her popularity, her career faded out when the Blaxploitation craze ended abruptly in the mid-1970’s. How It Feels to Be Free also features interviews with more recent Black women, including Alicia Keys (who also co-produced the film) and Halle Berry, who finally became the first Black woman to win the Academy Award for best actress in a leading role for Monster’s Ball (2001) and who talked about how Hollywood occasionally opens itself up to stories about people of color – and then just as suddenly, tightly closes itself again. Like virtually all stories about the African-American experience, How It Feels to Be Free (which closes with a clip of Nina Simone singing the song that gave the film its title) is a weird cross of how-far-we’ve-come and how-far-we-still-have-to-go; it’s a monument both to the persistence of racism and to the progress we’ve made, albeit temporary and all too easily reversed, in fighting it.