Cultural Exchange

pg 477
GUIRA - percussion instrument made of aluminium and embossed with hundreds of tiny bums. Guiras produce a dry husky bark when played with a metal scraper comb.

LEONTYNE- Mary Violet Leontyne Price, opera singer. As Scanlon points out, a black woman who made it big in a white genre.

LIEDER - simple folk melody with uncomplicated harmony and independent accompaniment.

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LEONTYNE, SAMMY, HARRY, POITIER, LENA, MARIAN, LOUIS, PEARLIE, MAE - Leotyne Price, Sammy Davis Junior, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Pearl Baily, Gracie Mae. Black American singers, actors, musicians. Household names in white America.

GEORGE S. SCHULYER – Black journalist and author of “Black No More”. His attack on the New Negro Movement and his support for inter racial marriage made him a target of Hughes essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) in which Hughes claims that a black person saying I want to be a poet, not I want to be a black poet, is saying he wants to be a white poet and is therefore a traitor to the movement.

MOLTO BENE – Italian – Very good.

MOUNT VERNON – there are dozens of Mt Vernon’s in the USA. I’m going with the planned community near New York which offered genteel land ownership to urban renters. I take to mean upwardly mobile. Out of the ghetto.

RALPH ELLISON - African-American writer, whose novel INVISIBLE MAN (1952) gained a wide critical success. He used racial issues to express universal dilemmas but avoided taking a straightforward political stand. "Literature is colorblind," he once said. Many artists of the Black Arts movement rejected Ellison for his insistence that America be a land of cultural exchange and synergy.

VESPUCIUS - Florentine navigator who explored the coast of South America; America was named after him (1454-1512). I take this as a rebuke of Ellison, ranking him on the level of the colonizer, Vespucius

ARNA WENDELL BONTEMPS - writer in the Harlem Renaissance.

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SHALOM ALEICHEM - Hebrew greeting. Peace.

JIMMY BALDWIN – James Baldwin, writer noted for his novels on sexual and personal identity, and sharp essays on civil-rights struggle in the United States.

GHANA GUINEA – “Some 10 million Africans were sold into slavery between the 1500s and 1800s, bartered by their own tribal kings and chiefs to European traders for such novelties as gunpowder, alcohol and mirrors. Many were held in castle dungeons along the West African coast before being marched out to slave ships that sailed for the Americas and Europe.”

ORNETTE - Ornette Coleman the revolutionary saxophonist who created "free jazz”

Kwame NKRUMAH, foremost proponent of Pan-Africanism in the latter half of the 20th century.

NASSER- Gamal Abdul-Nasser became president of Egypt in a 1952 military coup referred to as the 1952 Revolution. Nasser was responsible for the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Agrarian reform, and socialist policies that brought the vast majority of Egyptians out of poverty.

ZIK AZIKIWE – president of Nigeria who brought Nigeria out of colonialism.

KENYATTA - On June 1, 1963, Mzee Kenyatta became the first Prime Minister of self-governing Kenya.

TOURE - Toure is known as the Bluesman of Africa because of his highly distinctive blues style that's a cross-mix of the Arabic-influenced Malian sound with American blues reminiscent of bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Big Joe Williams.

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DIXIECRATS - The States' Rights party, also known as the "Dixiecrats," was a rump party that split off from the national Democratic party and ran candidates in the 1948 presidential election.

DR RUFUS CLEMENT - Atlanta University President Dr. Rufus B. Clement elected first black member of the Atlanta Board of Education; in 1954, Clement becomes chair of the SRC Executive Committee.

GEORGE, ZELMA WATSON (1903-1994). black diplomat, social-program administrator, musicologist, opera singer, and college administrator
“After moving to Cleveland to study African American music at the Cleveland Public Library, she wrote Chariot's a Comin!, a musical play based upon her research of this subject. She went on to headline in The Medium, an opera by Gian-Carlo Menotti, at Karamu Theater. People consider her to be one of the first Black women to assume this typically White role.
In the 1950's Zelma George served on national government committees during the Eisenhower administration: she was a good-will ambassador and an alternate U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1960-61. On a return trip home from lecturing at Bethune-Cookman College, she stopped in Orlando to visit relatives. During a delay at their airport, she took a seat in a waiting room and was approached by a police officer to leave the room: "Get out you Yankee trouble-maker or I'll throw you out!" She responded angrily to the room of 75 people:
"I am a United States delegate to the United Nations. Not long ago I returned from a round-the-world lecture tour at the request of the State Department. I was trying to create for people in foreign lands an image of my country as a land where all men are created equal and freedom is everyone's birthright. Is there no one in this room who will stand up for me now?"
There was no one who spoke up for her”.

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FAUBUS – Orville Faubus, segregationist Arkansas governor
EASTLAND – James Eastland, segregationist Mississippi senator
PATTERSON – John Patterson, segregationist Alabama governor.

DEAR OLD DARLING WHITE MAMMIES – “These lines invert one of the stereotypes white racists used to support the ostensible benevolence of segregation. They also remind us that in the segregated south white families depended on black servants to maintain their own internal structure” ( Scanlon)

CULTURE IS A TWO WAY STREET. This harkens back to the title, cultural exchange, a term that is usually meant to imply a two-way exchange of cultural understanding. This section of the poem shows us that although black entertainers and writers have been successful in white America, they do so on white terms. A real two way street in which the segregationists become the servants of black families is unthinkable.

the one thing I could make nothing of was "THE TOLL BRIDGE AT WESTCHESTER" Maybe someone can help me here.