bloodygranuaile

For book club this month, we decided to read Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture (1920-1940) by Lorraine Elena Roses, a study of the Black art scene in Boston during the interwar period. It's a bit more academic than many of the other books we've read in this book club, but not overly so.

The book seems very thorough but is not very long, for the unfortunate reason that there's not a lot of surviving records about a lot of the arts projects that the Black population in Boston was involved in during this time period. The Black population in Boston was also very small in the interwar period, but that didn't stop them from producing quite a lot of art. The educated black elite in Boston was even smaller, which meant that much of the Black arts scene was organized and sustained by a relatively small cast of influential families. Two women's clubs, founded as relief groups for Black troops stationed in Massachusetts before being shipped off to fight in World War I, were especially important drivers of art initiatives, carefully navigating Boston's institutional segregation to occasionally cross the color line in the high arts. Black Bostonians discusses Black Bostonian's contributions to newspapers, theater, visual arts, music, and literature, as well as the institutions that facilitated these contributions, from private writing clubs to the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program to employ theater workers.

While the overall pattern is a bit depressing -- short periods of brilliance and successful artistic output, soon crushed by larger political forces -- the discussion of the works is quite interesting and there's an abundance of intriguing personal stories. Some of the editorializing rubbed me a tiny bit the wrong way; Roses' discussion of William Monroe Trotter carries a distinct tone of disapproval that he neglected his high culture training in favor of dedicating himself to public political protest, which she seems to find a bit embarrassing. I think he sounds friggin' awesome, and if he thought getting arrested and running an inflammatory newspaper were better uses of his time than "high-culture activities" then he gets to think that. He was a principal organizer on the protests against Birth of a Nation showing in Massachusetts, which is rad. (The movie aired anyway, and sold out repeatedly, because Boston is racist and disappointing.)

The relationship between the Boston scene and the Harlem Renaissance that was going on in New York is portrayed as complex, with New York providing both inspiration and a sense of rivalry, somewhat related to it being bigger with a much larger Black population, but also related to the fact that Broadway was there. (Still is, I believe.)

I'm not sure how much of the art discussed in the book is actually still available for consumption. Some of the visual art certainly is; the plays, on the other hand, don't seem to be ones that are still staged, and Roses assures us that a lot of the ones by the older generation would sound pretty goofy and Victorian to modern audiences if they were. This does exactly zero to make me not want to see a staging of The Trial of Dr. Beck; in 2018, as in 1939, "There's always room for a good murder trial in the theatre."

I think we will have an interesting discussion this weekend, especially if I can brain enough to pull together some halfway decent questions.