Samuel with his Peace Corps employers Three weeks into his service for me and my fellow Peace Corps Volunteer David A., and serving as a cook and house-cleaner in a bush town of the Central African Republic where we were teaching at the local high school, my servant Jacques asked for a 1,000 CFA advance (roughly $4 American) on his monthly salary of $26 to pay for his children’s school fees. I gave him the money promptly and with no fuss. Jacques was so grateful that he made

One of the weaknesses of the Harlem Renaissance was that its producers were frequently reliant on white money to give them the space to create their art. Only sixty years out of slavery and further handicapped by the ferocious repression of an expanding Jim Crow structure, the African American minority could hardly be faulted for its lack of wealth or the weakness of its cultural institutions. However, that did give whites who decided to take up Black causes or knowledge or h

Eric Warlond's Tropic Death, a masterpiece detailing the lives of Black laborers in the Caribbean and Panama. When civil rights activists incubated the upwelling of Black writing and creativity as a calling card for social equality in the 1920s, the “movement” originally bore the label of the Negro Renaissance. The Renaissance fizzled in the 1930s and was only resuscitated historically as a result of the African American awakening of the 60s and 70s engendered by the Civil Ri

There are places that you leave and they go on There are places that stay but decay If you have left and don’t return, then they remain embalmed, unspoiled . . . yours. Bouar, a prefectoral seat in the western highlands of the Central African Republic, remains … in a ruined state. I couldn’t go back, even if I wanted to – the political turmoil and vanished infrastructure make such a return impossible

Paramount ad for Ma Rainey's lesbian anthem, "Prove It On Me Blues," 1928 Our story begins with a B side, specifically the B side of a 1925 record of a blues banjo player, Papa Charlie Jackson. The song was called “Shake That Thing” (nobody remembers the A side) and became a surprise hit, covered in that year and the next by eight different recording artists, including Ethel Waters. Waters’ star was rising, and her version, recorded for Paramount, bid fair to become the compa

Photo op at Peace Corps/Washington welcoming Moroccan dignitaries and Peace Corps staff. Three of us are queer. Can you guess which ones? In 1983 I was having a drink at the DC Eagle, the city’s most prominent leather bar and was talking to a tall mid-30s man in full motorcycle regalia. When I found out he worked for the President’s communication office, I asked him how his office felt about gays in their midst. “How can you have an opinion about something that doesn’t exist?

I came out to my doctoral dissertation advisor under unusual circumstances. It was August of 1988, the seventh month of my residency at the University of Dar es Salaam, where I was researching and writing on East Africa’s most famous playwright, Ebrahim Hussein. As an American with an uncertain but growing grasp of Kiswahili, I was a recognizable figure on campus – all the more so because I was sponsored by a popular Tanzanian professor in the Department of Literature, Joseph

The shoga of the East African coast, a man accepted as a member of women’s society, did not emerge from a vacuum nor from the imposition of outside influence. She was born from the long encounter between Bantu-speaking Africans and Muslim traders from the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike medieval Christianity, which not only condemned “Sodomites” but sought to prosecute and exterminate them, the posture of classical Islam was categorically different. Liwat [anal intercourse between

In "The Texas Branch," Robert traces his paternal family's deep roots in 19th-century Texas — from his great-grandfather Moses Haas, a Prussian immigrant in San Antonio, to the remarkable Levi family of Victoria, whose patriarch Abraham built the largest state-chartered bank in Texas. The essay spotlights Leo Napoleon Levi, a trailblazing Jewish lawyer and B'nai B'rith president, while reflecting on the insularity, contradictions, and quiet defiances woven through generations

Robert examines two parallel "Atlanta Compromises" — Booker T. Washington's famous 1895 bargain accepting segregation in exchange for economic opportunity, and the unspoken accommodationism of Southern Jews, who sought safety by assimilating as loyal Southerners and avoiding controversy. Through figures like Judah P. Benjamin and Leo Frank, he reveals how both communities navigated survival under hostile white power by silencing dissent.

Aimee Semple McPherson preaching at her Angelus Temple, Los Angeles My mother once told me that her mother, Jeanette, had named her Amy after the celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. I didn’t give this statement much thought at the time, but it would have been odd that my conflicted Jewish mother had inherited something from a Pentecostal evangelist. When I did think about it, however, I figured that religion had nothing to do with Jeanette’s choice. In Jeanette’s wo

In 1920, Perry Bradford, a Black composer and publisher, had the crazy idea that African Americans would buy music recorded by Black artists and musicians. He convinced Okeh Records to shellac a vaudeville and cabaret singer from Harlem named Mamie Smith backed by Black jazz musicians. “Crazy Blues” proved to be a smash hit. Within two months of release, it had sold 75,000 copies. Record company executives (all white) woke up. There was a market here! Money to be made! And so

Americans with a moderate knowledge of musical history know about the minstrel shows that originated in the 19th century—how could they not? Some of them might even be aware that the Black musical reentered and transformed the Broadway stage during the 1920s. But there is this gap from the last decade of the 19th century to the 1920s where only fragments of Black musicality (ragtime, the cakewalk) flicker through the imposed amnesia of the time. Why? Take a deep breath and re

It's funny how you can live in a society whose wealth was built upon the slave trade and not be aware of it even though the legacy of the trade is layered in the language, social relations, and racialized prejudices of the present-day population. No, I'm not referring to the American South. I'm reflecting on the time I spent learning about Swahili language and culture on the East African coast. My introduction, through a two-month intensive Swahili language program for gradua

Marion Michelle with FIAF colleagues, 1957 I've written elsewhere of how my cousin Marion Michelle probably made cinematic history filming the first guerilla documentary, Indonesia Calling, for the famous Dutch filmmaker, Joris Ivens, in 1945. This was well before I was born. Marion was the same generation as my mother—they were first cousins—although of course we were cousins as well. Since 1950, Marion had settled as an expatriate in Paris. I lived in Paris on two different

Cotton Club dancers circa 1930s This is a still from a British Pathé newsreel, filmed sometime during the 1930s of dancers at the Cotton Club. Up until the advent of the internet, it would have been impossible to find this episode titled "Harlem (AKA Harlem, New York)." Although the footage, long since recovered and incorporated into every Harlem Renaissance history, is now recognized as a unique and invaluable moving image window on Harlem during the waning days of the Renai

Year one of the Harlem Renaissance

Robert Philipson discusses his experience learning Swahili

In 1924, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer, music critic, and promoter of African American cultural art forms, met Langston Hughes at a Harlem party. "Kingston" he called him in the journal he kept at the time, but when he met Langston a second time as the winner of the first poetry contest sponsored by a Black magazine, Langston’s recital of “The Weary Blues” knocked him off his feet. Then and there he committed to getting Langston's first book of poems accepted by his own pu

In January of 1975, I was lying on top of a water tower in the middle of Africa. It was a fine, warm night. A full moon had scrubbed the sky of its spangle of stars. Stretched out next to me was a handsome African man, one month younger than I. His name was Yves D-, a Central African English teacher at the high school that used to be serviced by the defunct water tower, which served as our perch. We were both stoned on grass I had purchased over the Christmas break in Bangui,