The 707 Steps

There are 707 steps between the African-American Cultural and Historical Museum at Seventh and Arch and the National Museum of Jewish History, just north of Fifth and Market. I know, because I made the trek as part of the inaugural brunch of the joint exhibition "Building Bridges". At least 707 my-size steps, walking carefully over icy pavement after our worst sleet storm in years. Years ago they wouldn't have seemed so far apart, not the journey between so treacherous. But groups change, and the intellectual weather conditions shift.

Black and Jew in America have never seemed so far apart, and sliding further away from each other. Blatantly anti-Semitic black professors at the City College of New York and the fracas more recently at Kean College in New Jersey have highlighted this terrible fissure. And even the two premiere black scholars of our generation--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of African American Studies at Harvard; and Cornel West, the Princeton thinker--have been quite up front about calling dumb anti-Semitic black "dumb spades."

In an inevitable downside of affirmative action academia, for every brilliant Gates and West, there will be a dozen panicky mediocrities in over their heads. The same was true of mediocre white professors--of which I knew legion. The difference was that they didn't have to measure up to an overt political agenda; all they had to do was blend in with the reigning piffle and nobody hassled them. (Most of them were too busy covering up their own mediocrities!)

But people who worry about the intellectual health of our country are especially concerned now about how the mainline black politicians are making separate peaces with Louis Farrakhan. We've come a long long way since the Jewish writer Joel Spingarn and the black philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois collaborated in 1909 to found the NAACP at Niagara Falls. For decades, black and Jew were the exemplary Americans, working together to exorcise the curse of racism from the troubled American soul. No more. Or at the very best reading of where we are now--much less.

Those 707 steps between the AACHM and the NMA-JH seem like miles and miles. Yet never have there been more high-powered efforts to fight back against the forces of intellectual darkness. In late January, Eatonville, FL, was the site of the 50th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. A festival with a high-caliber line-up: Gates, West, Ishmael Reed, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison. And just this past month, Philadelphia was home to the 10th Celebration of Black Writing, one of Larry Robins' Moonstone celebrations.

And look at the veritable efflorescence of black celebration in Philly this winter season: The Horace Pippin retrospective at PAFA, the African American folk art exhibition at PMA, the Elijah Pierce show at Moore, and of course the "Bridges and Boundaries: Two Peoples Face to Face"--an unprecedented collaboration between the African American and Jewish cultural communities in this city.

"Face to Face: Photographs by Don Camp and Laurence Salzmann" runs through April 17 at the Jewish Museum and is splendid. Camp has chosen to highlight several "families" in the black community--the term family being extended to include religious as well as intellectual connections. Salzmann has paired whites and blacks in duologues: I hope his photo texts will be published in a book. It's the first egalitarian format since Studs Terkel to really get at the issues.

"Bridges and Boundaries," through March 13, at the African-American was organized by the Jewish Museum in New York with the cooperation of the NAACP. It would be a must see if only for the art it has assembled: Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn, Robert Gwathmey, Romare Bearden. But it also explores in detail and with great subtlety the changing relationships between black and Jew in America in the 20th Century. The exhibit heads west to Chicago come spring.

Even the recently concluded Barnes Foundation triumph in Paris has its African-American side: Barnes was Horace Pippin's first patron, and he was doing things like organizing a black choral group along with his lecture on the centrality of Afro-American artistic experience as early as 1936 at Central High.

I had always thought that his putting Lincoln University in charge of his collection was a mean-spirited but understandable put down of Penn and PMA for their insolence and isolation from the real problems of Philadelphia. Maybe partly, but mostly because of his deep friendship with Dr. Horace Mann Bond, the most famous president of Lincoln (and the father of civil rights activist Julian).

My only cavil about all this activity is that it might take the place of changes in daily behavior. Thinking and feeling deeply once a year is very much like the Church-on-Sunday Syndrome--sin six days a week and get pious once. The L.I.R.R. rampage and the Schuykill Rush Hour Murder remind us forcefully that there are time bombs out there, waiting to explode. These pathologies have been a long time coming, and they won't be ameliorated over night. America, the land of premature ejaculators who want everything fixed right now must learn to be patient. And it must not e diverted by symptoms.

Ishmael Reed wrote a brilliant Op-ed piece for the New York Times (Jan. 15) that I urge everybody to track down and read. (The Inquirer ran a contemptibly shortened--and sanitized--version.) Reed makes an incontrovertible case for the true causes of violence in the upper middle class elites running the country. Billions of dollars of drug money are laundered by "respectable" banks whose presidents are usually heard leading the church choir on Sundays.

In my own version of American development, our current troubles started back in the Jacksonian era, when the Eastern Ivy League elite saw that truly egalitarian democracy would cut their perks and began to create shadow institutions which have really run the country ever since. Reed nails them, once and for all. There will be no racial justice in America until there is economic justice.

You can't dump people in concentration camps without barbed wire (a.k.a. North and West Philly) and expect them to be Jeffersonian. My Country Tis of Thee, sweet land of Malarkey. And a lot of the culture-pushers may cop out if they see that redistribution of income is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for our renewal.

By all means attend these excellent celebrations of Capital C Culture, but remember it's the small c culture of everyday living that sets the tone and spirit of a civilization. Our small c culture is a mess today because the elite has never led properly. They've covered their asses. Which is quite different. And insufficient.

"Hazard at Large" from Welcomat, March 9, 1994