Nonfiction

 Greetings!

Please click on the title below for a detailed Q&A with writer/blogger C.M. Mayo about the writing of my book, Word Warrior.

Sonja D. Williams on Writing “Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom”

September is Richard Durham’s birth month. He would have been 98 years old on September 6^th.

To honor Durham’s birth and to celebrate the publication of Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom this month, I wanted to feature the following excerpts from two early chapters from in book.

Enjoy!

Rural Wandering

 “Izzy!”

Silence.

“Izzy, where are you!?”

Only the whisper of the wind moving through magnolia leaves disturbed the quiet.

Izzy Durham was nowhere to be found. Again. The energetic toddler was exploring as much of the land around his family’s house as his young legs would take him. But one of his older sisters was not amused. She could never find her brother when she needed to, like when their parents expected them back in the house.

“All I remember is looking for him all the time,” Clotilde Durham Smith explained. “Being a boy, I guess he would wander around…He started that early in his life.” Although Clotilde was only two years older than the sibling whom she and other family members called Izzy, Clotilde saw herself as his protector – the big sister who needed to make sure that her younger brother was OK.

Izzy was just fine.

In his wanderings, this inquisitive child who entered the world on September 6, 1917 as Isadore Durham – this mischievous young boy who would become the probing journalist, innovative dramatist and astute political analyst known as Richard Durham – was soaking up his environment, learning how to observe and dissect the world around him.

During the early 1920s, Isadore’s world was ripe for exploration. The Durham home sat on 80 acres of verdant farmland just outside the town of Raymond in Hinds County, Mississippi. Fruit from the farm’s sticky-sweet peach, pear and fig trees provided fodder for the canning jars of Chanie Tillman Durham, Isadore and Clotilde’s mother. The children’s father, Curtis George Durham, cultivated the farm’s cotton and cornfields.

Chanie and Curtis George Durham as photographed during the 1940s

In 1923, Izzy’s parents decided to move away from their Mississippi’s farmland in order to seek better opportunities in the northern state of Illinois.

Chicago

Five-year-old Isadore and his siblings got ready to leave the only home they’d known for a place they’d never seen.

Someplace called Chicago.

This somewhere place had already captured their mother. Four months earlier, Chanie had moved to Chicago to find their new home. She sent for her children once she found a suitable place.

So on a warm day in late August 1923, Isadore, Clotilde, baby Caldwell, Winifred and Marie loaded their bags full of clothes and toys onto their father’s horse and buggy. Curtis carried his children to Jackson where they would catch the Illinois Central (IC) Railroad’s Chicago-bound train…

When the train finally lurched to a stop in Chicago, Chanie scooped up her children – likely wide-eyed with excitement. The children probably pelted her with questions as they took in one unfamiliar sight after another. Undoubtedly, Isadore eyed Chicago’s gigantic brick, concrete and iron structures, taller than any tree on his family’s farm and grander than any building he’d ever seen.

All around him, a hurricane of humanity whizzed past; more people than he ever knew existed. Izzy saw a body of water – Lake Michigan – so blue and expansive that it seemed to touch the sky.

And on the paved streets of this strange place, clanging buses, his mother called them “streetcars,” screeched by like roving beasts, swallowing up people and flying down roads busier and wider than any he’d ever walked.

What a thrilling, intimidating new world!

In short order, Izzy and his siblings stood in front of what they must have perceived to be a towering structure.

Built during the 1890s, this three-story, light gray, limestone and brick building, attached on both sides to two identical structures, sat on an unpaved street eight miles south of downtown. Chanie guided her children up seven stone steps that led to a small stone porch. She opened a heavy front door and led her kids into a tiled vestibule.

They were home.

 

After exploring their three-story home’s first floor,

Isadore and his siblings likely ran through the kitchen’s back door and bounced down the steps into a fenced-in, grass-filled yard. The kids must have wondered why their yard looked like a pebble, a tiny afterthought compared to the sprawling acres on their Raymond farm.

Once they reentered the house, Chanie guided her children up to the second floor. She told them that for a short time they could use only two of that floor’s four bedrooms.

The home’s white owner still lived there with her daughter, although they were preparing to leave. Many whites reacted to the waves of black migrants flowing into Chicago with a definitive action.

They moved – distancing themselves as much as possible from the perceived threat of these new residents.

After reading these excerpts, I hope that you’ll be inspired to spend time more with Isadore Richard Durham in Word Warrior.

Next month, my biography of writer Richard Durham will be published and ready for you to enjoy. Talk about excited!

In the following audio sample from Durham’s award-winning Destination Freedom radio series about accomplished African Americans, a Chicago-based doctor named Ulysses Grant Daley (played by actor Fred Pinkard) gets ready to perform an emergency, and at the time rare, open-heart surgery on a patient suffering from a life-threatening heart wound.

As I wrote in Word Warrior’s Prologue (and included in full below), after hearing dramas like this:

I couldn’t move from my chair. I wanted more.

Flipping the cassette tape to side B, I pressed the machine’s play button and sat back. Amazing! I thought when the second show finished. Those episodes from a radio series called Destination Freedom were captivating and surprisingly fresh, even though they had been produced nearly 50 years earlier.

I soon discovered that these and other Destination Freedom episodes proved that however limited, black Americans produced or starred in some fascinating, or as in Durham’s case, downright revolutionary radio broadcasts during the racially segregated and blatantly discriminatory America of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

In fall 1994 I had just started working as a writer/producer for the Smithsonian Institution’s Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was project – a 13-part series exploring the legacy of African Americans in radio. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. housed a unit that produced award-winning radio and television documentaries about the American experience. Black Radio’s production team, headed by series creator Jacquie Gales Webb, hoped to continue the Smithsonian’s record of broadcast excellence.

Starting in January 1996, our weekly half-hour Black Radio programs aired on more than 200 noncommercial radio stations nationwide. Later, XM Satellite Radio carried the series.

Of the five shows on my producing plate, I felt the most trepidation about the one exploring African American contributions during radio’s “theater of the mind” heyday of the 1930s and ‘40s. Blacks were rarely featured in local or national dramatic broadcasts then. So the more information I unearthed about Destination Freedom, the more I was struck by this series’ lyricism, dramatic flair and fiery rhetoric.

African American writer Richard Durham created this series in 1948 and served as its sole scriptwriter. A master storyteller, Durham seductively conjured aural magic, inventively dramatizing the lives of black history makers. And Durham used his desire for universal freedom, justice and equality to inform his storytelling choices.

But just who was Richard Durham?

Durham had died in 1984, so my interviews with his wife Clarice, actor/singer Oscar Brown, Jr. and writer Louis “Studs” Terkel provided salient insights. Durham appeared to have been an astute, Chicago-based writer who employed poetic, hard-hitting prose to entertain, educate and promote positive social change.

He stood behind his convictions, even when the consequences of his actions caused him emotional pain, financial hardship – or both.

Durham’s life was drama itself; full of unexpected twists and turns, of creative invention and reinvention. A few historians, like J. Fred MacDonald and Barbara Savage had explored the significance of Durham’s Destination Freedom dramas. Yet I wondered why no one had written a book-length account about the totality of Durham’s contributions and advocacy.

Dare I write such a book?

Durham’s story certainly fascinated me. His accomplishments reinforced my own belief that the media, in all its incarnations, should serve a higher purpose than just mindless diversion. So after the Black Radio series ended, I planned to work on Durham’s biography. Unfortunately, other documentary projects monopolized my time.

I also continued teaching in my academic home, the Howard University Department of Radio, Television, and Film. Appointment to an administrative position in my department eventually forced me to sandwich research for this book into spring or summer breaks, and other far too fleeting time frames.

Still, a Howard University-sponsored research grant in 2002 enabled me to start immersing myself in Durham’s world. Later, a 2009 Timuel D. Black Short-Term Fellowship in African American Studies sponsored by the Vivian G. Harsh Society enabled me to spend a summer in Chicago. I practically moved into the Woodson Regional Library, home base of the Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature where Richard Durham’s papers reside.

Finally, a sabbatical from my university during the 2010-2011 academic year allowed me to make significant progress toward the completion of this book.

I have strived to faithfully represent Durham’s writing and his life, and I hope that you will be equally as inspired by his compelling story and activism.

To celebrate what will be Richard Durham’s 98th birthday and Word Warrior’s arrival, please come back next month for more book excerpts.

“There are two things I have a right to—liberty or death. One or the other I mean to have. I shall fight for my liberty.”

Sixty-seven years ago, Richard Durham wrote the lines above for his Independence Day script about famed abolitionist and Underground Railroad activist Harriet Tubman.

On July 4, 1948, Chicago-based actors Weslyn Tilden, Oscar Brown Jr., Fred Pinkard and Janice Kingslow breathed life into Durham’s “Railway to Freedom” script for his Destination Freedom radio series. Every Sunday morning from 10-10:30, Durham’s Destination Freedom episodes featured dramas about contemporary and historical African American heroes and heroines in fields as diverse as sports (Jackie Robinson and Jesse Owens), politics (Adam Clayton Powell and Reconstruction-era Congressman Charles Caldwell), education (Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune, and entertainment (Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong).

In “Railway to Freedom,” Durham let his Harriet Tubman character narrate her own story:

Harriet:  (On cue. Listening, intense, with depth, warmth and slight touch of the mystic.)

I’m Harriet Tubman. I lived in the shadows out of sight of

the light of Liberty. I heard their voices call out to me in the

dark. . . They were the voices of slaves. They were the voices

of my people. When I heard them earth moved under me.

Rockets burst in my head. They were the voices of God!

(Quieter.) I—was Moses.

At the beginning of the show, Tubman is a young slave, growing “wild like a weed” on a Maryland plantation. One day a fellow slave runs past her, trying to escape from the plantation. Tubman blocks their owner’s attempt to catch the fleeing slave. The owner threatens to hit her with the heavy iron bar he’s holding if she doesn’t move.

Durham’s Harriet states: “I was afraid, but I wouldn’t move. I wouldn’t move! I saw him lift the iron bar. Then his hand struck down!” Tubman collapses. Ethereal sound effects indicate her semi-conscious thoughts. “The earth moved and rockets burst in my head,” Tubman says. Durham returns often to this earth/rocket metaphor, using it to represent the painful headaches, seizures, and loss of consciousness Tubman endures for the rest of her life because of her owner’s blow.

Once Tubman emerges from her wound-induced coma, she fervently desires freedom. She becomes fascinated with the Underground Railroad, a clandestine network of secular and religious organizations and individuals—black and white—who serve as the railway’s conductors or agents. They secretly provide food, shelter, or financial assistance to escaping slaves—the railroad’s passengers.

Tubman eventually rides the Underground Railroad to freedom. However, she quickly realizes that she wants family members and other slaves to taste the sweetness of liberty. Or as one of Durham’s Underground Railroad conductor characters says to Harriet:

Levi:   Now and then one comes our way who’s got that flame

burning not just for his freedom, but for his brothers,

sisters, friends.You burn that way…you felt you would

fight until the last slave was freed. Slavery is war and you

would have no peace until the war against it is won.

Tubman becomes an Underground Railroad conductor, and her numerous liberation trips back into and out of the South are rife with danger. Tubman and her passengers could be caught and dragged back into slavery at any turn. While the exact number of slaves Tubman spirited away is in dispute, she courageously led many of her people to freedom.

So on this Independence Day, and for the month of July, we celebrate Harriet Tubman’s freedom fighting legacy and Richard Durham’s dramatic tribute to it.

With great sadness, I wanted to write about the profound senselessness, heart-wrenching tragedy, and frightening injustice of the events of the evening of June 17, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. On that night, members of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church were exercising their right, their freedom, to come together to worship God.

The church’s bible study members and their pastor unknowingly welcomed a white stranger with murderous intentions into their midst; a killer apparently motivated by the toxic combination of racial hatred and irrational thought. After worshiping with the church members, the stranger put down his bible and picked up his concealed gun, killing nine African American adults in the process.

Last week’s tragedy was not the first time that this AME church experienced adversity. Back in 1822, white Charleston residents burned the church down because of their anger over a foiled slave revolt organized and led by Denmark Vesey, one of the leaders of the church. Vesey was a former slave who paid for his freedom after winning money in a lottery.  Rather than moving north, Vesey stayed in Charleston and slowly but doggedly organized a revolt that reportedly involved nine thousand co-conspirators – men and women intent on fashioning their own path to freedom from the prison of American slavery.

The revolt was compromised before it could be implemented.

But as writer Richard Durham found while digging through the records that survived Vesey’s lengthy trial, Vesey remained committed to freedom even as he was sentenced to death for his revolutionary actions (see my April post). And perhaps in light of the deaths in Emanuel AME Church this month, Vesey’s declaration “until all men are free the revolution continues” resonates today with a slight variation;

Until all men and women can live free of the tyranny of racial and religious hatred, the fight for justice and the need for compassion for all humanity must continue.