I first learned of Paul Robeson when I was 15 years old. I was in Temple University’s Paley Library helping my father with his research, and I was looking for something to read in my free time. I found his autobiography, Here I Stand. I started asking questions in my classes about why Robeson had been blacklisted by the US government, causing my teachers some discomfort. At Princeton University, I met his cousin and had an opportunity to meet him, but I was told that his health was greatly diminished, so I declined. Even before Princeton acknowledged its native son, the impact of Robeson and his family on the town was evident. His mother’s monograph on the history of the black community of Princeton was still available, and his father’s church, Witherspoon Presbyterian was and still is and active part of the community. Through the efforts of a coalition led largely by Princeton student Adrien Wing, (who is now an internationally-renowned law professor) a street and community center was named for him. Unfortunately, he died in 1976 without the acknowledgment that he deserved.
Although I concluded that Robeson was sadly naive about the dangers of Stalinism, I found his talent, intellect and dedication to human rights inspiring.
This isn’t my favorite documentary of Robeson – it doesn’t recognize that not all of his critics were self-serving, for one thing — but you hear his words and voice, and that’s a good thing. I was fascinated by this clip about baseball great Jackie Robinson’s testimony against Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities committee.
I am partial to the documentary narrated by Sidney Poitier that focuses more on Robeson’s stage and concert work, including his groundbreaking performances of Othello. His meticulous preparation for his performances included learning the original languages and studying the cultural context of the music he sang. I remember a clip of him explaining to an interviewer about how doing this in preparation for Othello affected his pronunciation of certain words
That film also traces his transformation of one of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River in an affirmation of the struggle for human rights:
Here he is doing that amazing final monologue from Othello
Here is Robeson in a scene with actress Elizabeth Welch, “The River of Dreams.” I don’t know the film, but I’m guessing it must have been made in England, where Robeson could escape the stereotypical parts offered by Hollywood.
There are lingering questions about some episodes of Robeseon’s life — especially, whether his reputed 1961 suicide attempt and subsequent psychiatric hospitalization was really a CIA assassination attempt. His son, Paul Jr., thinks it very likely. Here’s a photo I took of Paul Jr when he spoke about his father at Princeton University. (I think it was during the fall semester of 1977, which would have been not long after Robeson, Sr.’s death.)
Here is Robeson, Jr. explaining to Democracy Now! why he thinks his father was most likely drugged.
You’re gonna need to read this, but it won’t be on Amazon
The National Academies Report on a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking sounds dry, but its implications will be fascinating to watch. The monograph is a write-up of a 2009 gathering of computing experts that considered the emerging understanding of computational thinking and its implications for education. A follow-up workshop this month will consider the challenges of teaching computational thinking in more detail. I’m pleased to say that my colleague Ursula Wolz is one of the discussants. Ursula is the PI on our Broadening Participation in Computing project, the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers. Her leadership on the IJIMS project has been creative and visionary, and it’s exciting to see it have an impact on the direction that computing education and practice will take in the future.
The European Enlightenment fostered ideals that still animate democratic societies, but those ideals were freighted with received notions of white supremacy and patriarchy. This presentation traces the ways in which those ideas affected the development of the norms and practices of American journalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 1903 publication of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk is considered a watershed in the history of American arts, letters and politics. Du Bois (1868-1963), then a sociologist at Atlanta University, offered his theory of “double-consciousness” – the notion that black Americans are deprived of agency and self-awareness because survival in a racist society requires that they constantly police themselves to remain acceptable to their oppressors.
A lot has been written about Souls of Black Folk and the contemporary relevance of Du Bois’ argument. The best literary and rhetorical analysis, as far as I am concerned, is still Arnold Rampersad’s Art and Imagination of WEB Du Bois (Harvard University Press, 1976.) Rampersad situates Souls within the context of Du Bois’ evolving framework for thinking about race, which rested on several key tenets:
People of African descent are one people, with great internal diversity.
Colonialism and slavery had a defining impact on African peoples in ways that bind them together despite their diversity
Contrary to Hegel, et. al, African-descended people are contributors to history (this conviction grew over time. At the time of Souls, he identified spirituals as an indication of the capacity for cultural contributions.) African-descended people have made strides in the years since slavery.
Strategies and policies for making progress should be built upon empirical evidence, not faith or ideology. That requires a cadre of trained and educated leaders, ergo, the “Talented Tenth“
Rampersad said that if “Huckleberry Finn” is regarded as the seminal work in American literature, “Souls of Black Folk” has the equivalent place in African American literature. Subsequent generations have had good reason to use it as the point of departure from which to articulate their own views of the African American experience. Agree or disagree, one has to reckon with it.
In a new monograph, The Soul-less Souls of Black Folk: A Sociological Reconsideration of Black Consciousness as Du Boisian Double Consciousness Paul Mocombe appears to argue that WEB Du Bois’ Hegelian articulation of the black experience really was about the desire of elite black folks to be accept by elite white folks. He says Du Bois relies on essentialist biological and cultural notions of race that were prevalent among 19th century intellectuals and steeped in white supremacy. Aspects of his critique are familiar, but his analytical framework seems new and inventive.
I’m not sure I’m going to agree with Mocombe’s assertion that Du Bois was in thrall to scientific racism. I’d say Du Bois struggled with them, trying to find an alternative framework that met the scientific standards of that day. (Mia Bay’s essay, “The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race: The Philadelphia Negro and Nineteenth-Century Science” from WEB Du Bois, Race and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) speaks to this brilliantly.
Still, I’m putting Mocombe on my summer reading list, and I’d love to know what Dr. Rampersad thinks of his thesis.
Let’s face it — I’m an old-school dog who has spent the last 14 years trying to learn new-school tricks. I suck at writing SEO-friendly heads. I keep wanting to go old-school.
Now understand, I’m a magazine writer, not a newspaperwoman, so the only real newspaper-style hed-writing I’ve had to do is from my time at the Bell Labs News in the 1980s. I’m talking about where my brain goes when it comes time to write a headline.
I love heds with puns. I love those old Wall Street Journal-style multi-deck heds. (I love to write “heds.”) I love the way good headline writers create a voice fo their papers that shouts from the newstand. You would never confuse a New York Daily News hed with a Wall Street Journal hed.
I remember great heds the way people remember great movie lines. Here’s one I learned about when I was in journalism school. It’s from the New York Daily News. It concerns the story of a young woman from Denmark who came to the US on a tourist visa to marry her American fiance. Tragically, he died just before the wedding. She wanted to remain in the US, but the immigration authorities were not sympathetic. The Daily News front page screamed:
US orders Danish to go
It’s crass, I know, but you’ve got to admit, it’s funny, and it’s informative, if you’re reading it as a human. It’s what you expect from the Daily News. But it’s not terribly SEO-friendly, is it? No solid keywords to match the bots’ metadata -” immigration”, perhaps, or maybe “wedding tragedy.” Bots aren’t very punny. (Then again, Copyblogger says that the SEO crowd goes about that whole keyword thing the wrong way, anyway.
On the other hand, that hed is short enough to be twitter-friendly. But it’s not the kind of hed I’m prone to writing. As much as I appreciate the craft that goes into writing heds for a good tab, I’m a broadsheet kind of girl. I’d rather read a sonnet than a limerick.
Oh, and another thing — I love the kicker. If I ever get around to writing my own Wordpress theme, it will be a newspaper theme with a kicker for each hed.
What’s a kicker? It’s a clever short hed that goes over the main headline. Here’s a good example:
SCARLET FEVER
World ready for ‘Gone with the Wind’ sequel
That’s craft, right there. “Scarlet Fever” is a nice double entendre. It gives you a sense of the intensity of fans’ enthusiasm for the movie. (That enthusiasm is lost on me, I confess, since I consider that book and film to be a soft-core piece of racist propaganda, but I digress.) The main hed tells you exactly what the newspeg is. It’s like haiku, but more purposeful.
Then again, maybe I’m just being old and whiny, and I need to just put on my eyeshade and get back to being disciplined about writing twitter-friendly heds that sing.
Here is my 2005 tribute to one of those pioneers, Dr. Edna McKenzie (who became a newspaper reporter about the time that that video below was created. Here is the transcript of her interview for the documentary, Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords:
While most of this blog is devoted to my research in computational journalism and trends in journalism education, I occasionally do some storytelling of my own. This blog picks up where my other blogs, Professor Kim’s News Notes (http://professorkim.blogspot.com) and The Nancybelle Project (http://kimpearson.net/nancybelle.html) left off.
