These days in February

The federal practice of setting February aside to laud the myriad achievements of black Americans is 45 years old this year (2021's BHM focus is "Black Family: Representation, Identity and Diversity," by the way) though the concept is much older. The first iteration was proposed by Carter D. Woodson, the historian known as "the father of black history" in 1926 as Negro History Week.

Despite popular belief that February was chosen because it is the shortest month (and the coldest, Chris Rock reminds us, "just in case we want to have a parade"), the early Negro History Weeks ran from February 12 to February 20, to span the respective birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. At the risk of white-centering, it must be said that Lincoln's birthday has a special place in black history. The NAACP was founded on its centennial anniversary in 1909. The litigating and relitigating of Lincoln's commitment to civil rights is ongoing, gallons of ink and digital bytes have been spilled trying to prove the intentions in Lincoln's heart when he did what he did. Was he a calculating faux-abolitionist who was forced into meaningless Emancipation Proclamation (which freed no one!) by the realities of the war or was he a secret freedom fighter who understood the symbolic power of that document? Do his words at the start of the war ("If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it," he wrote to Horace Greeley in 1862) and his ill-advised plan to expel black Americans to Africa, South America and the Caribbean undo any positive gains that his later achievements may have made? By remaining as enigmatic, complicated and ambiguous as ever, Lincoln is for me the most American of American presidents, an imperfect, errable pragmatist who was willing to dabble with autocracy to save the Union and who, like this country, stumbled towards progress under intense pressure. In his novel Juneteenth, the great Ralph Ellison sums Lincoln up perfectly by writing "He was baptized in many streams."

Negro History Weeks were adopted in major cities across the country and the practice expanded to a month in the wake of the midcentury Civil Rights Movement. In 1976, President Ford federalized it. Michel Foucault, the postmodern philosopher whose influence (if not his name) is palpable in today's woke thinking, would say that this is not progress at all. Growing a meaningless gesture from a week to 28 days over the course of 50 years hardly does anything for the overrepresented black Americans in prison, or the achievement gap or dearth of black-owned businesses. And he's right, if you consider those things equivalent. I don't know if Black History Month has any tangible benefits for the day-to-day lives of black Americans but I treat it not too differently than I do that other February holiday, Valentine's Day. If you only celebrate your relationship once a year, it probably isn't on too strong a footing, but there's nothing wrong with an extra reason to put it front and center. As Ford said, Black History Month is "the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history." That will always be necessary.

The list of contributions both great and small are too many to list. The ironing board all of us have in our homes was invented in 1892 by a woman, Sarah Boone, who was born a slave. The refrigerated trucks that are delivering the precious COVID-19 vaccine across the world was invented by Frederick McKinley Jones in 1940, just in time to win the war for America by keeping food, blood and other supplies cold. When those trucks, or any vehicle, brake at a yellow light, they have Garrett Morgan, the first black man to own a car in Cleveland, Ohio, to thank. By inventing the three-light stoplight (previous versions simply had red and green), it is impossible to calculate how many lives Morgan saved. I could go on, because so do the contributions. If America is a great country, it is on the strength of its multi-culturalism, which has benefitted nearly every aspect of our global accomplishments, despite arduous resistance and violence. Bayard Rustin, a under-regarded figure himself despite having refused to give up his seat on a segregated bus years before Rosa Parks, staged sit-ins before the students of Greenboro, North Carolina, and having been an aide to both A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr., planning the March on Washington of both of their behalves, explained "We are all one—and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way.” We have been learning it the hard way for an awfully long time.

In school, every February the music room would be decorated with black figures of American music. I remember clearly the pencil drawings of laminated paper that read "Duke Ellington" or "James Brown" along with biographical information. The musical contributions of black Americans is staggering and the legends that populate my elementary school room walls have been joined by several who have emerged since I was a child (the great new podcast, Black Girl Songbook, does an excellent job of giving credit where it is due) and I would always gravitate to the Scott Joplin poster, a figure that I have grown to believe is the most underrated musician in the history of American music. I could make you a list of artists you've never heard of like Florence Price or William Grant Still who are more than deserving of serious attention but you've heard of Joplin—like John Phillip Sousa he is a genre unto himself—yet he is glossed over as an historical footnote, smoothed out of his contributions to the history of music, assimilated as harmless, forgettable.

In a way, assimilation is what Joplin would have wanted. Ted Gioia, in his book Music: A Subversive History, suggests that pop culture is a process of continual assimilation. How else can you explain that Elvis Presley, once so dangerous you couldn't show his bottom half on television, was invited to the White House not 25 years later? The corporations now known as the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were once edgy provocateurs. Paul McCartney once wrote a song that a serial killer felt was a personal message directly to him, these days that's Sir Paul McCartney to you. The process continues. Last year's "W.A.P." will be soon be a Kidz Bop favorite.

Music is inherently sexual (Darwin would say we developed it after the mating calls of a bird) and music in American culture has been even more so. More than 100 years ago, white songwriters like George M. Cohan and Hughie Cannon may not have used the explicit language of Cardi B but there was no mistaking what their songs were about. Censors and virtue defenders were lax about such promiscuity because the piano sheet music for such songs depicted dark bodies doing the canoodling and necking. The title page of Cohan's "The Warmest Baby in the Bunch," an "Ethiopian Ditty" (whatever that means), features too mintrelesque characters along with tawdry lyrics. Cannon's "Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey," which is audacious enough to invoke adultery, avoided scorn by making it clear that it was a black couple doing the cheating. Black music was (and in many ways still is) hyper-sexualized when Joplin came onto the scene. Ragtime, his signature genre, gets its name from a slang word for a raging, orgiastic party and "The Maple Leaf Rag," perhaps his signature tune, takes its name not from any arborous source, but from The Maple Leaf Club, a house of sin in Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin cut his teeth as a performer. In 1900, a magazine wrote that ragtime was impairing the "brains of the youth to such an extent as to arouse one's suspicions of sanity." Another journal warned that the music was "symbolic of the primitive morality and perceptible moral imitations of the negro type. With the latter, sexual restraint is almost unknown."

Joplin, who must have had some inkling of his genius, had to push against these prejudices both financially and artistically. Despite the media disdain (and the fact that it's damn difficult to play), "The Maple Leaf Rag" was a huge seller of piano music and Joplin was able to negotiate the royalties, a rare accomplishment, yet he wanted the respectability he was due. He wrote what is for my money the finest American opera of all time, Treemonisha, instilling the work with a sense of tradition and grandeur that is positively Wagnerian. Sexism in opera is a topic of another newsletter but you won't find it here, with it's title character a headstrong black woman fighting for her community. Joplin's other opera, A Guest of Honor, about Booker T. Washington's invitation to the White House by Teddy Roosevelt, is lost to time. The idea of an entire opera by Gershwin or Bernstein simply vanishing is unthinkable. As Gioia writes, "At his death in 1917, he was remembered, if at all, as the exponent of a lowbrow style of music suitable for honky-tonks and bordellos." I'll update that to say at the time of the centennial anniversary of this death, he is remembered, if at all, as the exponent of a dated style of music suitable for specialist clubs and period piece soundtracks.

This is a shame. Is the music dated? Yes, but so is Bach and we still deride pleasure from the Baroque period, whose contrapuntal intricacies are no less complicated than Joplin's. I'm not a musicologist but I hear no less of the icy emotionalism that has branded Schubert as the greatest songwriter of all time when I hear this beautiful serenade. The work of Chopin, also largely for solo piano, is no more sophisticated than this waltz. And unlike Bach and Chopin, Joplin had the dramatic chops for opera. Treemonisha, itself missing Joplin's original orchestration, was never staged in Joplin's lifetime. It had its world premiere in 1972 by the Morehouse University music department. It's professional premiere was in 1976 by Houston Grand Opera. That was also the year Joplin won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. And it's the year Ford instituted Black History Month. Perhaps those things are unrelated. I'm not so sure.