Jazz, Culture, and Race in the New Deal Era
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This, then, is the end of [the Negro's] striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois' words at the start of his best-known work are remembered for bringing to a close his definition of African American double-consciousness. Less attention has been paid to his use of the curious phrase "kingdom of culture," in a place where "nation" or "society" might have sufficed. Of course, The Souls of Black Folk subsequently validates Du Bois' choice of words magnificently, showing that various components of black culture—including music, religion, education, and political activism—connect and interact to help define the entire continuum of a people's shared learned behavior. Nevertheless, Du Bois' concept of African American activism was narrowed rhetorically in Souls through his emphasis on the education of the Talented Tenth; and in the decades after the book appeared in 1903, his colleagues in the Niagara Movement and the NAACP also tended to couch the struggle for black civil rights mainly, if not exclusively, in terms of legal reform.
It is this narrow definition of civil rights activism that Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff challenges in Black Culture and the New Deal, a book that seeks to locate aspects of this activism in theater, literature, radio performances, and motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s. In this kingdom, as it were, African Americans were petitioning the "king" (that is, the white ruling class) through a wide array of strategies and messages, within the confines of a highly discriminatory culture that operated by custom as well as by Jim Crow laws. [End Page 156] Court Carney's Cuttin' Up, by contrast, provides a detailed description of the lay of the "kingdom"—the businesses and the electronic media through which a captivating new music with black origins, jazz, could fashion messages of striving and confrontation. Taken together, these two books aim to provide a new visualization of both the contours and the processes of the kingdom of Jim Crow American culture in the early twentieth century—or perhaps of two kingdoms, the white and the black, the hegemon and the challenger. At their best, the books illustrate how daringly and successfully black popular artists and writers were able to alter aspects of American culture, ranging from the prevalence of African American faces in mass-produced media to the image of the Old South in the historical imagination. These successes suggest that, despite the slow pace of legislative and judicial reform in the 1930s and 1940s, the aging Dr. Du Bois could have been encouraged by the political impact of developments in music, drama, radio, and the movies.
The two books are most similar in their confident handling of the mass media of these decades. Carney's first chapter recounts the history of ragtime and the blues, the predecessors of jazz, while its successor delineates early jazz in New Orleans. After these prefaces, Cuttin' Up explores the dissemination of jazz through recordings, radio, and motion pictures. The bulk of Sklaroff's study is less systematically focused on the impact of media. It begins with background on African Americans and the New Deal and the history of the Federal Theater Project. Subsequent chapters, though, intensify their coverage of media, first with a history of publishing by the Federal Writers Project; then with a chapter on Joe Louis' World War II exploits on radio and the movie screen (as well as on armed services tours); and concluding with a study of African Americans in wartime Hollywood films.
Carney begins his treatment of media with...
