Brooklyn Ron

Pulitzer Prize, David Blight, John Hope Franklin - and Let’s Not Forget Les Payne

Wow and yesterday I finished the last chapter of this 900 page book by David Blight on Frederick Douglass. It ranks with David Levering Lewis’s series of books on W. E.B. Du Bois, which left me in awe.  And now a Pulitzer for it.

 

What’s meaningful is not just that Blight is a Yale Historian but that I met him several years ago at the home of the late pioneer of modern American journalism Les Payne. Les’s childhood buddy, Dr. Walter Evans, a physician, put his earnings into collections of black history items, including copious archival materials, which captivated David Blight and enriched his magnificent dive into America’s racial history. Notable also is that the last time I chatted with Blight was when he came to give the John Hope Franklin lecture at Brooklyn College last year. The extraordinary (and late) John Hope Franklin in the 1950s raised hopes for a new birth of equity in the American academic world as he became the chair of the history department at Brooklyn College. But the lifting of hopes did not last. Hope (oh the poetry) went on to other colleges and the topic of diversity, or the lack of it, survives into a new century as a revealing reality of our lives. 

 

Congratulations  to all and that means you, too, Les Payne.

 

 

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/david-w-blight

BrooklynRon at VIDA Democratic Club

Stupid me. I should have been looking at the camera. But, hey, nothing wrong with signing a copy of the book! Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright, in front, had invited me to give a Black History Month talk at the Saturday meeting of VIDA (The Vanguard Independent Democratic Association). VIDA is the very strong political club in Bed-Stuy. The gentleman standing, retired City Councilman Al Vann, is the founder of that now historic, though still strong, club. I’ll have to remember her name but I believe the lady next to Al Vann is the head of the membership committee of VIDA. There were many scores of attentive people from the community at that meeting, listening and asking questions about politics. Notable, of course, is that Assemblywoman Wright is the current political descendant of Bertram Baker, known to me and many now as the “Boss of Black Brooklyn.” Very meaningful also is that former Councilman Vann was once the community’s Assemblyman, and so he also is a descendant of the Boss. In fact, give that Vann was an Assemblyman and a district leader, he could be called Black Brooklyn’s second Boss. Very notable to me was that while we were there that morning, in walked this lady whom I knew as a little girl. Her dad was in Bertram Baker’s club and he later became a State Supreme Court Justice. That was Judge George Wade. And the little girl who walked in Saturday was his daughter, now State Supreme Court Justice Carolyn Wade! Life is crazy.

New York Mag Once Promoted the ‘Good in Gentrification.’ Now We Literally See it at Night in the Lights That Landlords Put Outside Gentrifying Complexes, Like Here, NE Corner of Midwood St. and Flatbush Ave., Lefferts Manor

This is Funny. Former Congressman Ed Towns Remembers Bert Baker (Boss of Black Brooklyn) Coming into His (Towns') Office Almost Half a Century Ago:)

Remembering Judge William Thompson

DAILY CHALLENGE FRIDAY, JANUARY 11, 2019

 

By RON HOWELL

 

[photo caption: Bertram Baker in 1965 with Assemblywoman Shirley Chisholm, state Senator William Thompson and an unidentified officer of the Brevort Savings Bank. Courtesy of author’s family archives.]

 

 

Judge William C. Thompson started on the road to great accomplishments in the 1950s. He initially was a protégé of Bertram Baker, who in 1948 broke Brooklyn’s longstanding racial barrier by becoming the first Black person elected to public office in the borough’s two-century history.

 

Baker was 50 years old at the time of his election and “Willie” Thompson was among the stream of then-young, ambitious Black lawyers who began seeking Baker’s advice and support. Some of those lawyers wanted to become elected officials themselves, just like Baker. But those flush with their law degrees dreamed of sitting on high benches, which Baker could never do because he wasn’t a lawyer.

 

Thompson would become both, holding office as Brooklyn’s first Black state senator, then winning a seat on the City Council and finally becoming an appellate judge.

 

“Boss of Black Brooklyn” paints a picture of Bert Baker as a tough guy who tussled with Brooklyn’s Irish Democratic leaders, from the 1920s and on through the successive decades of his career.

 

But there are those who say when Baker met the end of his line in the late 1960s, it was his one-time acolyte “Willie” who helped bring him down.

 

Thompson almost literally stormed out of Bertram Baker’s United Action Democratic political club in the late 1960s. In professed anger, he began lending his contacts and knowledge to Baker’s rivals.

 

He effectively declared himself to be his own boss, and he knew that nothing would be more insulting and offensive to Baker than that. On the surface, the clash had to do with Baker’s decision to cross party lines and support a Black Republican in a minor local contest.

 

But, to me and others who knew them both well, the fight between the two power brokers was grounded in a collision of extraordinary egos. As Baker aged out of politics, a career he always called “the game,” the younger Thompson grew more powerful.

 

At one point, Thompson almost catapulted into big-time national exposure. In 1968 he gained the backing of Democratic Party bosses in a bid to become Brooklyn’s first Black member of the United States Congress.

 

Things were looking very good. But when the ballots were all counted, he came up with a measly .06 percent of the 13,000 votes cast, and he thus lost to a brash Black Brooklynite who called herself “unbought and unbossed,” an up-and-comer named Shirley Chisholm.

 

Interestingly, Baker, Thompson and Chisholm all had roots in the old British Caribbean. Baker and Thompson, in fact, traced their ancestry to the two-island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. Baker immigrated from Nevis in 1915, when it was a British colony.

 

Thompson’s parents came from St. Kitts in that same immigration wave. As for Chisholm, her parents were from another British colony, now the independent nation of Barbados.

 

In saying, as I have, that Judge Thompson was part of our Greatest Generation, I have in mind that he, like my father and like so many of the then-young men who knocked on Bertram Baker’s United Action Club door, was a World War II veteran, and he was one with acknowledged distinction.

 

— Ron Howell is an award-winning journalist and author of "Boss of Black Brooklyn: The Life and Times of Bertram L. Baker" (Fordham University Press).

 

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Bill de Blasio, Arthur Eve, Leecia Eve and Me

Re: Billy Dee’s State of the City address - I’m sitting among hundreds of electeds and community organizers and (I’m sure) lobbyists and Billy Dee lovers, and I finally decide to ask the cool lady next to me what she did. And - 😮 whoa - it was Leecia Eve, daughter of the upstate historic politician Arthur Eve. It was my first time seeing her in person - after all those pix and tv and radio appearances in her bid last year to be AG. She was thrilled when I gave her a copy of “Boss of Black Brooklyn: The Life and Times of Bertram L. Baker.” She wants someday to write about her dad, now 85. Like many sandwich gen folks, Leecia puts care-time in with her parents. Bert Baker, who was my grandad, turned 121 years old this month. (Rest in Peace:) He’s still caring for me. Leecia said - and she was right - that someone above had us sitting next to each other. All through the campaign last year, I wondered about her relationship with her dad, who went to the Assembly representing Buffalo in 1967, as Bert Baker was ending his many decades in Brooklyn politics. She knew about Bert Baker, as I knew about Arthur Eve. Weird but so pleasant. I hope we stay in touch. Leecia seemed genuinely happy when Tish James - who won the AG race and is now the AG - stood up and waved to all, to much, much applause.

JACQUELINE CUTLER - giving Daily News readers a review of Colin Broderick’s “The Writing Irish of New York.”

She says so many Irish-Americans saw generational success as being a published writer. Read them but make sure you stand back, because stinging lines can jump from Malachy McCourt’s fingers. For instance, even citing others, Malachy seems motivated by need to hear “ouch!”

 

Speaking of which, I’ve heard people refer him as Malarky. Ouch again!

 

Cutler notes how Malarky “fondly quotes George Bernard Shaw, who wrote ‘critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They see it done, they know how it’s done but they can’t do it.’’” Ouch!

 

Fuck a baseball bat or a gun. Ain’t no fighting like writing!

https://www.nydailynews.com/features/ny-fea-irish-writers-newyork-history-20190106-story.html

Beware Men Like Dick Cheney, More Dangerous Than Donald Trump

I believe that Dick Cheney was more dangerous to the American people and to the world than Donald Trump has shown himself to be, so far. Step back a decade. I had readied my soul to prefer Dennis Kucinch over Barack Obama in 2008. That was because Kucinich had vowed to see Dick Cheney prosecuted for war crimes committed as Vice President under George Bush II.

 

In disclosure, I’ll say that several (four) years before that historic year I had hung out with Kucinich, while he was in New York City campaigning for the presidency then. He was down to earth, seeming like a friend, and we had two notable things in common. One was that he had gone to a Jesuit high school and, having done that myself, I could see things in him without looking. The other was that he was a vegan and so was I; and I had known of no other elected officials (he was a congressman from Ohio) who shunned meat, fish or dairy.

 

Cheney lied and gained money from his evil backroom maneuvering to get a babydoll-like George Bush II to invade Iraq, leading to millions of deaths, unnecessary deaths, and to a shift in the world reality that presented dangers still threatening.

 

Yes, I write this after we went to see the movie “Vice,” the title of which, with Cheney as its reference point, made me say, I’m in. And those others at BAM, from their reaction when the film was over, clearly felt the same way.

 

So how does a man like Dick Cheney come in life to do what he did, withiut punishment and even, it could be argued, without being seen?

 

Quotes are laced across the screen through the film, a very significant one coming near the beginning:

 

“Beware the quiet man. For while others speak, he watches. And while others act, he plans. And when they finally rest, he strikes.”

 

https://youtu.be/jO3GsRQO0dM

 

Project Muse: ‘Boss of Black Brooklyn’ is a story about a forgotten time and place

I really like this summary of Boss of Black Brooklyn. It’s on the Project Muse website:

 

SUMMARY

Boss of Black Brooklyn is above all an interesting readable story about an immigrant’s struggles and achievements in the century of American greatness. It’s about the external and internal struggles of the man who in 1948 became the first black elected official in Brooklyn, New York. It’s a story about a person, place and time that have been forgotten, cast into the dustbin of history. This is true even as Brooklyn today is one of the most popular destinations in the world. The population of Brooklyn is changing rapidly as newcomers from Europe, Australia and around the United States flock there to begin new lives. Curiously, the newcomers will embrace this book even as much as the old-timers who identify with the viewpoint of the author and the principal subject of the book. That’s because so many of the newcomers, even as they displace the old-time residents, are educated, progressive and curious about the past. This story is therefore for them as well as for those who carry a love for the old black Brooklyn that is fading in their hearts. Beginning, as it does, at the end of the nineteenth century, Boss of Black Brooklyn, carries in its innards the character of a place that for many is the heart of the America that emerged on the world scene in the mid twentieth century, the place of dreams. Boss of Brooklyn, in its final chapters, also tells us of the era when the earlier dream began to fade and central Brooklyn was called a ghetto, with all the disparagement implied in the term. Now, once again, things are shifting demographically. And the dreaminess of the transformations is felt in the book’s main character, its subject, Bertram L. Baker. There is a satisfaction in the reading of the story, because we see the empowering nature of family.

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/63030

Review of Jacqueline Butler Gilliam’s Memoir, “Trailblazer,” About Being a Pioneer Black Journalist

Today’s Sunday book review is about Dorothy Butler Gilliam, who broke a color/gender barrier at the Washington Post more than half a century ago. Her memoir is “Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journallist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America.” She fought extraordinary odds in her life. In applying to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (from which she eventually graduated) an interviewer noted on her application that she was “very dark skinned.”

 

It’s striking that perhaps my favorite memoir by a journalist was written by my friend Jill Nelson who wrote, yup, for the Washington Post. Jill’s book was titled “Volunteer Slavery” and I was struck by its honesty in recounting her personal and professional experiences. The reviewer here for “Trailblazer” was Jacqueline Cutler, who last week told the News’ readers about “Boss of Black Brooklyn: The Life and Times of Bertram L. Baker.” I’d love to ask Jacqueline Cutler to come to Brooklyn College and tell students what it took in her life to get a dream job like that. Go, Jacqueline Cutler.

 

(Note: Interesting. The review has Gilliam’s birth surname as Baker.)

 

photo: 1962, Harry Naltchayan, Washington Post

https://www.nydailynews.com/features/ny-fea-dorothy-butler-gilliam-book-20181229-story.html