Josh White's "Trouble" from 1940 continues the theme:
- Well, I always been in trouble, 'cause I'm a black-skinned man.
Said I hit a white man, [and they] locked me in the can
They took me to the stockade, wouldn't give me no trial
The judge said, "You black boy, forty years on the hard rock pile."
Trouble, trouble, sure won't make me stay,
Trouble, trouble, jail break due someday.
Wearin' cold iron shackles from my head down to my knee
And that mean old keeper, he's all time kickin' me.
I went up to the walker and the head boss too
Said, "You big white folks, please see what you can do."
Sheriff winked at the policeman, said, "I won't forget you nohow,
You better come back and see me again, boy, about 40 years from now."
Went back to the walker, he looked at me and said,
"Don't you worry about 40, 'cause in five years you'll be dead."
Trouble, trouble, makes me weep and moan
Trouble, trouble, every since I was born.
Trouble, trouble, sure won't make me stay,
Trouble, trouble, jail break due someday.
I rail against the culture of victimization as much as anyone: it is time for Americans of all races, creeds and colors to take responsibility for their own lives and avail themselves of the (more or less) level playing field the civil rights movement of the last fifty years has yielded. BUT let us not forget for one moment the fatally real circumstances against which the civil rights movement ultimately successfully fought. Every avenue of redress was against blacks: the law, social structures, the threat of vigilante violence. Imagine living in such a world.
Even the nation's capital was home to such thinking, as Leadbelly's "Bourgeois Blues" from 1944 makes clear:
- Me and Martha were standing downstairs
Bossman said "Don't want no colored people here"
Lord it's a bourgeois town ...
Home of the brave, land of the free
I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord it's a bourgeois town ...
White folks in Washington they do know how
Throw a man a nickel just to see him bow
Lord it's a bourgeois town ...
Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but he was deeply sensitive to the realities of our segregated, racist past and he demonstrated that sensitivity in thought word and deed. It is no longer acceptable for a political leader to fail to apprehend the ramifications of our "discredited" past, to have at least spent a moment or two in empathy with an entire class of people, Americans, fellow citizens, who were excluded from the full taste of sweet liberty for almost 100 years after they were ostensibly granted freedom and equality.
Article comments
1 - Stuart Filler
Possibly:
Andy Razaf wrote "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue".
Re: "Strange Fruit": "It was written in the mid-1930s by a New York City public school teacher, Abel Meeropol, who was at that time a member of the American Communist Party, and who later became better known as the adoptive father of the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg..."
Re: "Bourgeois Blues": I like this song, about the "bourgeois town," Washington DC but not excluding the one I live in, but I am conflicted about the authorship. I allow that Ledbelly wrote some of it, but confess that I see a buddy like Seeger coming up with the line "Home of the brave, land of the free, don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie"--but what do I know?
Stuart
2 - Professor Zero
Great article!!!