Super Bowl 48: Bring It On!

Even if you are not a football fan, join with me in this moment. The Super Bowl in 2014 -- God willing and the creek don't rise -- will be in the new Meadowlands stadium, with shared hosting by New York and New Jersey. Granting this locale the game represents a return to some kind of reality: A game in late January or early February does not have to be played in Florida or some other sunny clime. If it snows during Super Bowl 48 in our outdoor stadium, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! These big guys can play real football in all climates. They don't need coddling in guaranteed sunny weather. As NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg said, "This isn't beach volley ball. It's football, for god's sake!"

I'm sure other bidders on the game were looking at dollar signs. But we are, too. This region should make billions on the game. And players and thousands of fans and tourists alike will benefit from all that we have to offer -- the vices and the virtues, the wild side and the tamer side, our multiculturalism and, of course, the culinary variety that will take their breath away (but hopefully not too much of their waist sizes!).

The Reputed End of Law and Order: The Original

I am a big fan of crime dramas, none more than Law and Order and its various spin-offs. I have identified with it because of its “ripped from the headlines” plots and its use of New York City – my New York City – as parts of stories. For me, it was like a parlor game sometimes to identify exactly where a scene had been filmed. Sometimes scenes were filmed in my Harlem neighborhood.

Think of some of the issues tackled: domestic violence, wilding, forced female circumcision, adoption of black children from abroad to turn them into indentured servants, youth violence, a late night murder in a fast-food restaurant, gay-bashing, racial demagoguery. Even though each episode was preceded by a caveat that the story we were about to see was complete fiction, we aficionados knew differently.

The current cast in this 20^th season includes S. Epatha Merkerson and Anthony Anderson. But over the years in recurring roles or cameos or bit parts, black actors on the show have included Richard Brooks, Jesse L. Martin, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Rooker, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Beals, Ludacris, Edwina Findley, Ernie Hudson… And the list goes on. So do a number of careers. I get a kick out of reading the biographies of actors in theater; if they’ve been in New York for any length of time, it’s almost impossible that they did not do at least one episode of Law and Order. Indeed, two current Tony nominees, Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson, in Fences, are Law and Order alums.

I never watched Lost, so I didn’t care about its finale. Nor did I watch Friends – mainly because none of the main characters as a I discerned from People magazine would have been my friends. So I didn’t watch that finale. And I certainly did not watch Seinfeld, a self-proclaimed show about nothing when I was too busy to take time off for nothingness. So I didn’t get caught up in the hype of that finale.

But I do care about the end of Law and Order. Tonight’s episode will be only one hour. So I have a feeling that sometime in the future there will be a proper send-off. If Chuck gets a two-hour season ending episode, then certainly Law and Order deserves more than a one-hour finale to a 20-year run.

Haiti

So much is supposedly being done in and for Haiti. But how much is really having an impact on the survivors of the January earthquake and its aftershocks?

City Limits in New York has this new piece: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4000/after-the-quake-rebuilding-haiti-from-brooklyn

AOL has this about Sean Penn’s work: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sean-penns-hardest-role-yet-haiti-camp-manager/19479788 - Sean Penn

CNN’s Soledad O'Brien has been vigilant even as much of the world press has turned to other matters, great and small.

Shakira has been there and plans to build a school.

The Haitian Times is going full speed ahead with plans for its Haiti Festival next month.

But I still think the government of President Preval is asleep, to put it in words that won’t offend my mother. He cannot wait for his term to be over in February. Of course, there might be another coup.

Gerald Boyd

I've just begun reading his memoir -- actually a combination of a memoir and a tribute by people who helped flesh out his story because he died in 2006 before finishing the book.

Boyd rose to the top ranks of the New York Times: managing editor, the No. 2 man, with a good chance of becoming No. 1, the executive editor. But along came that jerk Jayson Blair. Gerald -- and the executive editor -- lost their jobs. As they should have for a number of reasons. But they were ultimately the scapegoats. A whole lot of corporate folks at the Times should have fallen on their swords, including the publisher.

"Second only to my family, the Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige," Boyd wrote. But after Jayson Blair, a black guy, a youngster really, was revealed as a fraud, a plagiarist and a drug addict who kissed ass to make himself fit in with the old boys' club that made success possible at the Times, Boyd, a black guy, was blamed. This is what he wrote about the bosses he had cozied up to all those years: "With its fundamental principles in jeopardy in the wake of the Blair Affair, the Times did what its leaders thought was best for the franchise. Their message to me, however, was that I had intentionally jeopardized the franchise, something I would have found akin to drowning my own child."

Only after he was ousted did he recognize -- or at least acknowledge -- something I knew when I left the paper in 1993, "a potent dose of racial animosity, which was there all along, of course, but far more sinister than I allowed myself to believe." He'd come a long way from being what his former wife and his colleague at the Times describes as "the black militant on the University of Missouri's Columbia campus" in the 1970s.

Ask book stores for the book. It's My Times in Black and White and it is not published by one of the major houses. So ask for it.

Farewell, Lena. Farewell, Evelyn.

You know Lena Horne’s name more than you know Evelyn Cunningham’s, but they are both sophisticated ladies you’d like to have had a good ol’ Southern breakfast with as they regaled with sometimes ribald stories about hard times and rebounding from hard knocks. Oh, did they leave a lot of folks “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (Lena’s song)!

Lena Horne, 92, Brooklyn’s own, died on Mother’s Day. Evelyn, 94, a native of Elizabeth City, N. C., who made Harlem her home, beat Lena through the Pearly Gates less than two weeks earlier, on April 28. Obviously there to scope the place out and then to interview Lena on deadline before graciously showing her around.

A teenaged Lena performed in Harlem’s Cotton Club, described by Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times as “the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters.” Hollywood in the 1940s, where she could work but not live without the intervention of influential people like Humphrey Bogart, wanted her to be some exotic woman with no obvious black identity. She did what she had to do, including kick butt, before bolting. And in the 1960s civil rights struggles she, like Harry Belafonte, was up front and center. She was triumphant in a 1981 one-woman show on Broadway, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”. She won a Tony Award and a couple of Grammy Awards for that – and the admiration of a younger generation or two.

Halle Berry is the latter day Lena Horne with the benefits of what Lena Horne achieved in a life that made her high yellow features, as they were called back in the day, a blessing as well as a burden. Back in 2002, when she became the first black woman to be awarded the Best Actress Oscar, a very emotional Halle said: “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me: Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

At age 80 Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody. I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

So true, too, of Evelyn Cunningham, a star journalist at the Pitttsburgh Courier when it was one of the premier crusading black newspapers that black train workers helped smuggle into the South. She downed whiskey with John Wayne because he was already drinking when she arrived for an interview. She had stories of covering presidents from Harry Truman on. She worked as a special assistant to Nelson Rockefeller when he was New York’s governor and later the Vice President under President Ford.

Wall Street, Time Warner, the civil rights movement, countless college students and my Harlem dining table are the beneficiaries of Evelyn Cunningham. She taught Dick Parsons, now head of Time Warner, how to dress when he thought being “fly” was the thing while interviewing for an internship with Governor Rockefeller in 1970. He wore a suit that was creamy yellow with purple highlights. She concluded, as he recalled at a memorial service for her at Harlem’s St. Philip’s Church: “That boy is rough, but he’s going somewhere.” After the job interview, she pulled him aside and said: “Boy, who told you you looked good in that suit?” She took him shopping and got him something respectable in the government and business worlds in which he has soared.

When he was fourteen and already a loudmouthed civil rights activist, Al Sharpton, then the Brooklyn youth director for Dr. King’s Operation Breadbasket, led a delegation of youth to protest outside the governor’s office. After a time someone came out and told Sharpton that Mrs. Cunningham, someone he had never heard of, wanted to speak with him inside. When she asked what his group sought, he was still pretty much in the hollering mode. She interrupted to say: “I think that eventually you will get to a point.” And as he continued doing his best mau-mauing, she said: “Young man, you’re not going to scare me. I know Fidel Castro, and I knew Malcolm X.” She taught him how to focus his issues so those who wanted to help had a list to add to their agendas and make the most of their face time with people with power and influence. Even into her later years she met annually with Bruce Llewellyn, a major businessman who died in April, and presented him with a list of causes she wanted him to support.

In her 80s she insisted on walking the mile or so from her apartment building on Riverside Drive to mine for potluck dinner and, more importantly, to talk to young people I’d gathered there. If I had not run the CNN profile of her, they would never have known what she had accomplished in such a life well lived. But even without that visual backdrop, they were mesmerized and inspired. “Her zest for life was contagious,” Mayor David Dinkins, a former neighbor on Riverside, said of her at the memorial service at St. Philip’s.

She was never an invisible woman, and she made sure that a longtime neighbor, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, will not soon be forgotten. It is because of Evelyn and her cohorts that a beautiful memorial by Elizabeth Catlett is there across the street from their apartment building on Riverside Drive. Check it out, reflect, refresh, renew your vows to be well and to do good.

The President and this oil spill

Please see my latest posting on The Root, which I hope you will follow as one of your main sources of news and information.

http://www.theroot.com/views/slow-down-mr-president

Please support theater!

Denzel Washington, Viola Davis and Mykelti Williamson are in a limited-run revival of August Wilson’s drama, Fences.

David Alan Grier is one of the leads in David Mamet’s intense comedy/drama, Race.

And there is Fela!, a musical based on the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late Nigerian performer and political activist.

Closer to home for many of you is Through The Night, written and performed by Daniel Beaty. It opens at the The Riverside Theatre, 91 Claremont Avenue at 120^th Street in Manhattan on May 7. The special guest for opening night’s post-performance community dialogue is Bill Cosby. This is the official description: “Six African American males, ages 10 to 60, discover their power through one extraordinary event.” Beaty promises to “give voice to this community of men, those who love them, and what it means to be black and male in America.” In addition to Mr. Cosby, those scheduled to participate include Ruby Dee, Sonia Sanchez, Malik Yoba and Donnie McClurkin. General admission tickets are $20. For reservations, call 212-870-6784 or do it online at www.theriversidetheatre.org.

Except for concepts like Tyler Perry’s Madea, or Oprah’s involvement with a Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, we blacks get a deservedly bad rap for not supporting works that have something to say about our experience in the U.S.

Dorothy Height

Fox News chose not to cover the homegoing services for Dr. Height, even though -- or maybe because -- President Obama was one of the eulogists.

But this is what he said, and we should not forget Dr. Height, the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a pioneer in so many areas during her 98 years on this earth. She helped integrate the YWCA in Harlem in the 1930s. That's when two of my great aunts were involved in the YWCA, so I'd like to think they were involved with her efforts. She was the lone woman at the table when the big men of the Civil Rights Movement were organizing the March on Washington in 1963 and when major legislation -- public accomodations, voting rights, etcetera -- became the laws of the land.

"Look at her body of work," the President said. "Desegregating the YWCA. Laying the groundwork for integration on Wednesdays in Mississippi. Lending pigs to poor farmers as a sustainable source of income. Strategizing with civil rights leaders, holding her own, the only woman in the room, Queen Esther to this Moses Generation -- even as she led the National Council of Negro Women with vision and energy, vision and class.

"But we remember her not solely for all she did during the civil rights movement. We remember her for all she did over a lifetime, behind the scenes, to broaden the movement’s reach. To shine a light on stable families and tight-knit communities. To make us see the drive for civil rights and women’s rights not as a separate struggle, but as part of a larger movement to secure the rights of all humanity, regardless of gender, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity.

"It’s an unambiguous record of righteous work, worthy of remembrance, worthy of recognition. And yet, one of the ironies is, is that year after year, decade in, decade out, Dr. Height went about her work quietly, without fanfare, without self-promotion. She never cared about who got the credit. She didn’t need to see her picture in the papers. She understood that the movement gathered strength from the bottom up, those unheralded men and women who don't always make it into the history books but who steadily insisted on their dignity, on their manhood and womanhood. She wasn’t interested in credit. What she cared about was the cause. The cause of justice. The cause of equality. The cause of opportunity. Freedom’s cause.