Nonfiction

April is National Poetry Month. And Richard Durham was a poet who loved the freedom of expression this art form provided.

“I think it’s the highest form of writing,” he once told a reporter.

So in honor of this month and to see an example of Durham’s poetic voice, the following poem was published in Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, edited by writer Arna Bontemps.

Dawn Patrol

Night creeps over the city;

Streets spangle with kilowatt pearls,

Lights splatter over seas of shadows

Damning the flood of darkness.

Drunken night,

A hobo bowed over a bar of time,

Brooding over a black bottle of stars

Blinking like beer bubbles,

Soon comes the police patrol of dawn,

Night slowly staggers away

And then the day.

—Richard Durham, 1941

Durham’s mother came from a hardscrabble family of sharecroppers.  They struggled to earn a living on the Mississippi farmlands they planted and harvested, trying to get out of the ongoing debt the family incurred. Probably inspired by the stories Durham’s mother told him about the “cropping” life, he wrote the following poem:

Cotton Croppers

A citron sun, a ghost of gold,

Pours thick heat down on the field.

Heat burst the bolls and floods the air

Where ragged croppers, like patches in a cotton cloud,

Dot the billowy acres,

Bag the bolls, swell the sacks.

Plod the rows; pick the cotton.

 

Wading through the turbid waves unable to feel

The glory of day for the hell of heat!

And to a winding road snaking besides the field

They have but to lift their eyes to see,

Unworried over the sun, the cotton,

The plight of the pickers,

Comfortable cars rolling by the road,

Touring through the heat

Plowing through the air.

—Isadore Richard Durham, undated

 

Happy National Poetry Month!

 Richard Durham highly respected women.

“He was a feminist,” claimed one of Durham’s long time friends – singer, songwriter and activist, Oscar Brown Jr. “Before there was any National Organization for Women or anything like that,” Brown added, Durham’s scripts advocated “equal pay for equal work” for women. Brown said that in Durham’s award winning Destination Freedom radio drama series (1948-1950), “his characterization of Harriet Tubman or of Sojourner Truth, extolled the virtues of black women.”

The following audio excerpt comes from Durham’s August 15, 1948 “Truth Goes to Washington” show about abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Durham considered his script about Ida B. Wells to be one of Destination Freedom’s best. Durham described Wells, a fearless and outspoken journalist, as:

 “A stormy woman. Restless like a river and a tongue like a flamin’ sword.” Durham’s Wells believed that “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” and that a freedom that “allowed the bigoted or the powerful to restrict the freedom of others was no freedom at all.”

A vociferous anti-lynching campaigner, Wells left behind a treasure trove of writings. Therefore, Durham said that he took the “least dramatic license” in documenting her life, and he hoped his radio listeners would connect with Wells’ story of struggle and triumph in a man’s world.

“A good dramatist [tries] to make an audience feel something,” Durham explained. “That’s why the hero has to be intelligent. Whether it’s a woman like Ida B. Wells or [noted educator and activist] Mary Church Terrell, they must appear [to be] very intelligent . . . then people will identify.”

Durham continued championing women’s rights during the 1950s while working as a writer and organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), one of America’s most progressive labor unions.

Black women and white women were noticeably absent from top UPWA policymaking positions. And women suffered from salary inequities. UPWA local president Addie Wyatt said there was at least a fourteen-cents hourly difference between the pay for men and women. That “differential” disappeared by the late 1950s, progress Wyatt attributed to UPWA’s International Office and Dick Durham.

“Dick seemed to have known the kind of struggles that a little black woman like me would have fighting against the white giants,” Addie Wyatt said. He “was there to encourage you, but also to feed you with information that you’d need so that when you spoke or you wrote you’d have the facts and figures there to work with. So I was always impressed,” Wyatt concluded, “because he was not fearful of our struggle. He embraced it.”

Throughout his lifetime, Richard Durham continued to advocate for positive social change for women and men and all people seeking freedom, justice and equality.

MY BLOG

For this first post, I’d like to take you back to the mid-1940s.

During the World War II years, Richard Durham had earned a deferment from military service because of a long-standing medical condition. He stayed in Chicago, working as a reporter for the popular, black-owned and operated Chicago Defender newspaper. But like thousands of other Americans during that war, Durham regularly wrote to his friends and younger brothers stationed at army or naval bases around the world, updating them on events large and small at home.

And his writing – conversational and evocative – often bounced off the page, demonstrating Durham’s ability to transport his readers into his world.  His lyrical writing revealed his poetic roots.  Durham had fallen in love with poetry as a teenager and some of his early poems were published in local publications.

In an undated letter to his brother Earl, Durham reported on a concert he had recently attended featuring one of his favorite artists. The letter was probably written during a Christmas holiday season, since Dick told his sailor brother that he was glad Earl had received the fruitcake he’d sent. “They say the older fruitcakes get the better they taste. I wouldn’t know, though,” Durham added.  “Never kept one long enough.  Now for the main dish.”

Dick went on to describe a night in Chicago’s Civic Opera House where “people overflowed into the bandstand and many didn’t get in.” The sold out crowd was ready to party to the sounds of the Edward “Duke” Ellington Band. Duke and his long standing, hard playing band members divvied up portions of Ellington’s “Black and Tan Suite,” and they treated eager listeners to one of Ellington’s new compositions, A New World A ‘Comin. Durham thought that the long, beautiful piece was almost “otherworldly” with a “strange, subdued, joyful quality about it.” He missed however the swinging, danceable rhythms found in older Ellington hits like The Mooche or Echoes of the Jungle.

Durham wrote:

I kept waiting for an old-fashioned, round house, gut-bucket,
dirty-dozen, call-the-cops, pass-the-whiskey-quick type of jump
[tune] like Stompy Jones!
Many a jitt [jitterbug] was holding his breath waiting for it to come.
Many a cat was ready to jump into the bandstand and [dance a] Suzy-Q
where Tchaikovsky had been played the night before.
A mob of hep-chicks wanted to scream, Hallelujah!
But [Ellington] didn’t try for it.
He was shooting after different game.
He didn’t want to “bounce,” he wanted to be beautiful.
And he was.
But I wish…

Please come back for more Richard Durham gems next month.

Twenty-five years ago, a first-time collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution and National Public Radio began airing on hundreds of NPR affiliate stations throughout America.

Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions  was an ambitious series of 26 hour-long documentary programs. It explored 200 years of black sacred music, including spirituals, ring shouts, lined hymns, jazz, and gospel.

The series also featured the insights of music creators, performers, listeners, and historians who could place African American sacred music traditions within the social, political, and cultural context of their times.

Mahalia Jackson and The Mighty Clouds of Joy. The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Paul Robeson and Mary Lou Williams. Kirk Franklin and Take 6 were just a few many artists featured in the series.

Conceived and hosted by Smithsonian Institution curator, artist, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellow Bernice Johnson Reagon, Wade required an intensive, five-year-long fundraising, research, and production journey of commitment. Wade eventually won a Peabody Award and other awards of distinction.

My article, “Wade in the Water: The Making of a Groundbreaking Radio Documentary Series,” was just published in the exciting inaugural edition of the Univerisity of California Press’, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture.  This article describes Wade’s production journey from the vantage point of an insider – I served as the series’ associate producer. And this piece provides a personal reflection on the making of a series that would set the standard for future long-form, NPR-based music documentary productions.

So I invite you to read, listen to and enjoy these love letters to African American sacred music in all of its many forms!