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Katherine Dunham's Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Constance Valis Hill
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Extract

The man who truly loves his country is the man who is able to see it in the bad as well as the good and seeing the bad declaim it, at the cost of liberty or life. (Katherine Dunham, Prologue to Southland)

In 1951, at the dawning of a decade that would be known by some for its suffocating conformity and political intolerance, Katherine Dunham created Southland, a dramatic ballet Americana about what was by then the century-long practice of lynching. In the program notes to the ballet that premiered at the Opera House in Santiago de Chile, Dunham wrote, “This is the story of no actual lynching in the southern states of America, and still it is the story of every one of them”. She spoke the Prologue onstage, in Spanish:

Though I have not smelled the smell of burning flesh, and have never seen a black body swaying from a southern tree, I have felt these things in spirit.… Through the creative artist comes the need to show this thing to the world, hoping that by exposing the ill, the conscience of the many will protest.”

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , Fall 1994 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1994

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References

Notes

1. Dunham, Katherine, “Program: Southland in Santiago de Chile, World Premiere, January 1951,” in Kaiso! Katherine Dunham: An Anthology of Writings, ed. Clark, Veve A. and Wilkerson, Margaret (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), 118.Google Scholar

2. Ibid.

3. Unidentified writer in Commentary cited by Litwack, Leon F. in his introduction, “The Nifty Fifties” in Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, ed. Littleton, Taylor D. and Sykes, Maltby (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 2.Google Scholar

4. Clark, Veve and Wilkerson, Margaret, eds., “Dunham, The Woman: Perspectives,” in Kaiso! Katherine Dunham: An Anthology of Writings (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), 5.Google Scholar

5. Martin, John, “The Dance: Tropical Review,” The New York Times (September 26, 1943): section II, 2.Google Scholar

6. Dunham, Katherine, “Thesis Turned Broadway,” in Kaiso!, 55.Google Scholar

7. Martin, John, “Schoolmarm turned siren or vice versa in Bal Negre at the Belasco,” The New York Times (November 17, 1946), section II, 9 Google Scholar; “Torridity to anthropology,” Newsweek (January 27, 1941), 62; Pierre, Dorathi Bock, “Cool scientist or sultry performer?” Dance Magazine (May, 1947), 11 Google Scholar; “High priestess of jive,” in Katherine Dunham, Scrapbooks: Clippings, Programs and Photographs (Volume 5, 1937–1949), New York Public Library Dance Collection.

8. Smead, Howard, Blood Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), xii.Google Scholar The Tuskeegee Institute conservatively reports that between 1937–46, two hundred blacks were rescued from threatened lynchings, twenty-one blacks alone in 1946, in Crimes of Lynching: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948), 50.

9. The January 1944 lynching of an unnamed fifteen-year-old Negro youth in the Suwannee River, and the quadruple lynching of Roger Malcolm, Malcolm's wife, George Dorsey and Dorsey's wife in Georgia, Monroe on July 20, 1946 are cited in Crimes of Lynching: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948), 10, 50.Google Scholar

10. Pearl Primus, telephone interview with the author, March 23, 1993.

11. Primus in 1944, quoted by Bragiotti and cited in “Pearl Primus: Rebuilding America's Cultural Infrastructure,” by Barber, Beverly Hillman, in African American Genius in Modern Dance, ed. Myers, Gerald E. (American Dance Festival, 1992), 10.Google Scholar

12. Talley Beatty, telephone interview with the author, July 2, 1992. Beatty was one of the nine original dancers in Dunham's dance company. Southern Landscape was created after Beatty left Dunham to form his own group.

13. “Miss Dunham's Comment to the Louisville Audience at Memorial Auditorium, October 19, 1944,” in Kaiso!, 88.

14. Julie Robinson Belafonte, interview with the author, April 14, 1993. “People forget,” writes Agnes DeMille about Dunham, “Now people can go anywhere, stay anywhere, but in the thirties and early forties, it was terrible for blacks, particularly on tour…every city she went to posed the same problem: how should she house and protect her company and keep them out of dreadful rooming houses and filthy hotels.… The dimensions of this persistent problem and the amount of trouble it caused her have never been discussed, but they were significant” (Portrait Gallery [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990], 45).

15. William H. Chafe writes that any program that deviated from a one hundred percent conservative Americanism might have been attacked as reflecting a Moscow party line: “If you believed in civil rights, you were critical of America's racial customs and therefore an ally of those who, from abroad, also criticized American racism” (The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 108).

16. Duberman's, Martin Paul Robeson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)Google Scholar provides adetailed account of Robeson and the 1949 Peekskill riots.

17. Dunham, Katherine, interview with the author, January 29, 1993, East St. Louis.Google Scholar

18. Clark, Veve, “Katherine Dunham: Method Dancing or the Memory of Difference,” in African American Genius in Modern Dance, 8.Google Scholar

19. Hughes, Langston, in The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950, by Zangrando, Robert (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 204.Google Scholar

20. On February 2, 1951, the seven black defendants known as the Martinsville Seven—Joe Henry Hampton, Howard Hairston, Booker Millner, Frank Hairston, John Taylor, James Hairston and Francis Grayson—were executed at Richmond, Virginia, for allegedly having raped a white woman. On May 8 of the same year, Willie McGee was executed by the state of Mississippi, after having been convicted of raping a white woman, Mrs. Willamette Hawkins. Though evidence indicated Hawkins forced McGee into a relationship he later tried to sever, once the charge of rape had been raised, Mississippi was incapable of legitimizing the concept that a white woman sought a sexual relationship with a black male. The racist stereotype of the black rapist served to justify execution of black defendants who had been convicted in trials that mocked proper judicial procedures. Shapiro, Herbert, White Violence and Black Response (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988)Google Scholar documents the chilling details of McGee's trial and execution. Dunham remembers following the news of the trials which lasted from 1949–51. By March of 1950 the seven youths, who were convicted in Virginia on January 8, 1949 were in the midst of applying for a change of venue, the details of which are documented in “Hampton v. Commonwealth,” 58 South Eastern Reporter, 2d Series, 290.

21. Dunham dancer Lucille Ellis recalls that Southland was produced by special arrangement with the Symphony of Chile and performed on the company's day off. Dunham arranged to have the theatre open, prepared a special concert of three premieres (Southland and two shorter dances) and invited the audience through special invitation. “It was regal—the Embassy and all the dignitaries were there,” said Ellis in a telephone interview with the author on June 8, 1993.

22. “Program: Southland in Santiago de Chile,” in Kaiso!, 117.

23. The singers in the chorus included Freddye Marshall, Gordon Simpson, Milton Grayson, Ural Wilson, Claudia McNeill and Delores Harper and acted as what Dunham described as a “Greek chorus” reflecting the action in song and mime.

24. The program, prologue and scenario for Southland is reprinted as “Program: Southland” in Kaiso!, 117–120. Details of the ballet were recounted during the author's interview with Katherine Dunham, January 29, 1993 in East St. Louis; Ms. Dunham described the action of the ballet while playing a tape of DeStefano's musical score. Unless otherwise indicated, descriptions of the ballet come from this interview with Ms. Dunham.

25. Katherine Dunham, unpublished script for Southland.

26. “Method dancing” is aptly termed and elaborated on in Clark's, Veve “Katherine Dunham: Method Dancing or the Memory of Difference,” in African American Genius in Modern Dance, 5–8.Google Scholar

27. Ricardo was literally swung by the neck onto the stage; Dunham remembers on opening night, “He was dying for air and choking,” because the stagehand forgot to put on his harness.

28. Lucille Ellis, telephone interview with the author, 8 June 1993.

29. Based on the 1943 poem by Allan, Lewis, the song “Strange Fruit” was made popular by Billy Holliday; Lillian Hellman's best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944)Google Scholar dealt with the topic of interracial sex and romance, not rape, and caused a sensation.

30. Dunham, Katherine, “Program: Southland” in Kaiso!, 120.Google Scholar

31. The character of the blind man in the Santiago production was played by a Haitian priest by the name of Sisemone, who also drummed for Dunham's dance company.

32. After the chorus's dirge, the music changes back to jazz, but in a minor key. Dunham says, “It was never perfected, they should do what they're doing but with an understanding of the futility of their situation. It should have hatred in it, like the knife that showed it.”

33. Ibid. Julie Robinson Belafonte adds that “the character of the blind man is one of searching for answers.”

34. Katherine Dunham, interview with the author, 29 January 1993, East St. Louis.

35. Unless otherwise indicated, all remarks by Katherine Dunham in this section are from her interview with the author, 29 January 1993, East St. Louis.

36. Theoharis, Athan, Seeds of Repression (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 16.Google Scholar

37. Bowers, Claude G., The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929), 309.Google Scholar Bowers (1878–1958) was American ambassador to Chile from 1939–1953.

38. Gilbert Bloch, , L'Humanité, January 10, 1953 Google Scholar; Maggie, Dinah, Le Monde, January 12, 1953.Google Scholar

39. Katherine Dunham, unpublished letter to Bernard Berenson, February 1, 1953.

40. Ibid.

41. Ellis, Lucille, telephone interview with author, 8 June 1993, Chicago-Albany.Google Scholar

42. Ibid.

43. Belafonte, Julie Robinson, interview with the author, April 14, 1993, New York City.Google Scholar

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ellis, Lucille, telephone interview with the author, 8 June 1993.Google Scholar

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. Incidents with the State Department that Dunham related during her interview with the author on January 29, 1993 are substantiated by Beckford, Ruth in Katherine Dunham, A Biography (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1979), 58–62.Google Scholar

50. Katherine Dunham, unpublished letter to Bernard Berenson, October 12, 1955.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. See Ellington's, Duke “Notes on the State Department Tour” in Music Is My Mistress (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 305.Google Scholar

54. Dunham, Katherine, unpublished letter to Berenson, Bernard, February 1, 1953.Google Scholar

55. Dunham, Katherine, A Touch of Innocence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 66.Google Scholar

56. I am very much taken with Cone's, James H. argument, in his discussion of the Blues, that it is only through the “real” or “disclosed” in concrete human affairs that a community can attain authentic existence, and that “insofar as the Blues affirm the somebodiness of black people, they are a transcendent reflection on black humanity,” The Spirituals and the Blues (New York: Orbis Books, 1972), 113.Google Scholar

57. Dunham, Katherine, unpublished letter to Berenson, Bernard, February 1, 1953.Google Scholar

58. Dunham, Katherine, in Aschenbrenner, Joyce, Katherine Dunham: Reflections on the Social and Political Contexts of Afro-American Dance, Dance Research Annual 12 (Congress on Research in Dance: 1981): 7.Google Scholar

59. Dunham, Katherine, in Lanker's, Brian I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989), 28.Google Scholar