You know how you just happen to key in on something or someone for no apparent reason? This morning, I keyed in on Eartha Kitt. Just felt like looking up her bio, as I had included her song "Santa Baby" in my "Christmas master mix" of songs to play in the house for today. Well, she died today, at age 81, of colon cancer. Just found out.
Kitt came from troubled beginnings, to become one of the first bonafide black sex symbols who crossed over to white America, including via her role as Cat Woman in the Batman television series in the 1960s (starring Adam West and Burt Ward.) Unlike Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne, whose sex appeal to white America was considered threatening in a slightly earlier era (which is why Max Factor was hired to create a makeup that would darken Ms. Horne's skin,) Kitt boldly asserted her sexuality. Orson Wells, with whom she apparently had a brief relationship, famously called her "the most exciting woman alive." Kitt was one of a kind, and an international sensation. Though the majority of her career took place before I was born, my mother, who was in her generation, loved her (though Lena Horne was her all-time favorite actress,) and we watched the "Batman" re-runs when I was a kid. Plus she was hilarious in "Boomerang," doing a clever "cougar" send-up of her sex kitten past. She even crossed over to my kids' generation, via her role as the voice of Empress Yzma in "The Emperoror's New Groove," as well as the "Emperor's New School" cartoon series. Kitt was also a risk taker, openly opposing the Vietnam war, and being blacklisted for it, and advocating for children. From the New York Times Obit:
Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959) with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances, including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first Emmy nomination.
For these performances Ms. Kitt very likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.
At 8 she was sent to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt would be beaten, run away and return. By her early teenage years she was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.)
Here's Eartha singing "I want to be evil" in 1962:
Here's "Santa Baby", circa sometime in the 60s:
Here's Eartha, who performed in 10 languages, singing "C'est si bon" in 1962:
Here's "Extra special guest Eartha Kitt" in an episode of Batman, also from the 1960s:
Watch more episodes here. And someone has put together a terrific compilation of Kitt photos here.
Rest in peace, Eartha. You were a rare talent!
Kitt wasn't the only Christmastime passing. Among what I'm sure are many others, playwright Harold Pinter also died, on Christmas Eve. Godspeed to the families.
J.C. Watts. And thankfully, his ostensibly non-partisan news channel won't be playing stupid music videos and cheezy re-runs of old black sitcoms. Good for you, J.C.! |
Half of all murder victims in the U.S. are Black, according to new Justice Department statistics. This despite Blacks making up just 13 percent of the U.S. population. Something serious, and frightening is happening in pockets of the urban Black community, and its time we, as a country, and in our neighborhoods, confronted it.
Two interesting takes on the state of Black talk radio: one ... two ... BTW, Don Cheadle should get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Petey Greene in "Talk To Me." I was going to say more, but I'll leave it at that.
This morning, we had on the morning show a guy called Anthony Hervey, who has written a book called "Why I Wave the Confederate Flag, Written by a Black Man: The End of Niggerism and the Welfare State." It was, to say the least, interesting. Hervey asserts that the flag of the Confederacy does not represent racial subjugation or slavery, and that the U.S. flag has also been waved by racists, so therefore he can proudly unfurl the former. We never could get him to explain how he squares the history of slavery, the treasonous secession of the Confederate states, who fought under that banner, or the Confederacy's stated goal of creating the first nation in which the inferiority of Blacks was enshrined in its very fabric, or why his decision to wave the flag wouldn't overwhelm whatever arguments he's making in the book (he says he wants to talk about poverty, lack of educational progress, and other social ills.) In fact, we had trouble getting him to answer any of our or our listeners' questions directly.
My impression was that Hervey is a congenial, intelligent, educated man (although he did describe being tried for some manner of student loan fraud, which he said was trumped up to silence his views). But his lack of understanding of (or unwillingness to admit to) the causes of the Civil War was pretty disturbing given that he took the time and trouble to sit down and write a book headlined "Why I wave the Confederate flag." Also, the book cover is so provocative, that I suggested it make it difficult to take his other arguments seriously (Hervey's head is superimposed over a wall to wall flag the cover.)
Every time we do a topic on the Confederacy or the South, I feel at pains to re-argue the point -- which should be self-evident to most Americans by now, that the Civil War was, at base, a war about slavery.
True, the war wasn't fought in order to end slavery -- mainly because that would have requried the Union to start the war. In fact, the Southern states began seceding from the Union almost immediately upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican Party had been building a case to allow the ignoble institution to wither on the vine for years (and Lincoln himself had said as much during his famous "House divided" speach in 1858. By February of 1861, 3 months after his election, seven southern states had seceded, starting with South Carolina. The cause: the various Southern Parties (whigs, Democrats, etc.) who had opposed Lincoln, also opposed the idea of making the newly added western territories into "free soil" states. They wanted Kansas and other territories admitted to the Union as slave states, in order to preserve Southern domination of the Congress. And both North and South understood that if the new states admitted to the Union were free states, eventually, slavery was a goner.
In the presidential election of 1860 the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln as its candidate. Party spirit soared as leaders declared that slavery could spread no farther. The party also promised a tariff for the protection of industry and pledged the enactment of a law granting free homesteads to settlers who would help in the opening of the West. The Democrats were not united. Southerners split from the party and nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky for president. Stephen A. Douglas was the nominee of northern Democrats. Diehard Whigs from the border states, formed into the Constitutional Union Party, nominated John C. Bell of Tennessee.
Lincoln and Douglas competed in the North, and Breckenridge and Bell in the South. Lincoln won only 39 percent of the popular vote, but had a clear majority of 180 electoral votes, carrying all 18 free states. Bell won Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia; Breckenridge took the other slave states except for Missouri, which was won by Douglas. Despite his poor electoral showing, Douglas trailed only Lincoln in the popular vote.
Lincoln's election made South Carolina's secession from the Union a foregone conclusion. The state had long been waiting for an event that would unite the South against the antislavery forces. Once the election returns were certain, a special South Carolina convention declared "that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the "United States of America' is hereby dissolved." By February 1, 1861, six more Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union.
Less than a month later, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. In his inaugural address, he refused to recognize the secession, considering it "legally void." His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. But the South turned deaf ears, and on April 12, guns opened fire on the federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. A war had begun in which more Americans would die than in any other conflict before or since.
And while Lincoln didn't wage the civil war to end slavery, two years into the war, he wound up using emancipation, of slaves in the rebelling states, as a lever to try and end the war, and keep the union together.
The Confederates themselves, meanwhile, made clear that slavery, racial discrimination and white supremacy were enshrined in the very fabric of their "new nation" (a point which also bellies another Hervey belief, shared by other African-Americans, I'm told, that Black soldiers fought on the side of the Confederacy in the war:
The very accurate point made then by opponents of this legislation was, as one Georgia leader stated, "If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong." Southern newspaper editors blasted the idea as "the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down," a "surrender of the essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization."
And what was that "essential and distinctive principle of Southern civilization"? Let's listen to the people of the times. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, said on March 21, 1861, that the Confederacy was "founded . . . its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical and moral truth."
What was the "very doctrine" which the South had entered into war to destroy? Let's go to the historical documents, the words of the people in those times. When Texas seceded from the Union in March 1861, its secession declaration was entirely about one subject: slavery. It said that Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" - were "the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color . . . a doctrine at war with nature . . . and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law." ...
And yet, you hear Southerners, mostly White, but occasionally Black, like Hervey, insisting that the Civil War was about something else -- "taxation without representation", "Northern aggression", etc.) -- but not slavery. You'll hear that, as Hervey said on the show today, most Southern Whites couldn't affort to own slaves, Lincoln failed to free all of the slaves in territories outside the rebellius South, etc. Again, that's just historical junk:
Finally, these modem non historians say that slavery couldn't have been a main cause of the Civil War (never mind the words of Alexander Stephens and the various declarations of secession), because most of the Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves.
As modern historians such as Pulitzer Prize-winner James M. McPherson point out, the truth was that most white people in the South knew that the great bulwark of the white-supremacy system they cherished was slavery, whether or not they personally owned slaves.
"Freedom is not possible without slavery," was a typical endorsement of this underlying truth about the slave South. Without slavery, white nonslaveholders would be no better than black men.
Precisely.
I'll reiterate, that I found Hervey to be a quite charming person. He made coherent arguments on issues of poverty, race and what he called the "decadence" of present day Black culture. But then, knowing that Hervey believes such erroneous things about American history makes his arguments that much harder to take in. I suggested he might want to write his next book without the Confederate flag on the cover. He wasn't very receptive.
My friend and mentor James T hipped me to this article from this Saturday's Palm Beach Post. A great read, about a different time for African-Americans...
