Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

264 // THOMAS CRIPPS
the new medium of soundfilm in a rich cycle of Black musical performance so
prolific that Variety gave it a headline—"Colored People in Many Short Talkers."
Murray Roth's Yamacraw (1930) was typical in its stylized, sentimental treatment
of the Black squalor of the "New South" that drives a young Black man (Jimmy
Mordecai) northward to an urban life that tested his character in other ways—the
ways of the street and the saloon. As it often did, Jewish Variety praised these
shorts, finding Yamacraw "a jazz symphony of Negro life that is arresting in movement
as well as dramatic in idea." 19
Moreover, as though the onset of the Great Depression had thrust them
together in common cause against still more burdensome economic forces, Blacks
and Jews in Hollywood seemed to march in step. Perhaps they followed a course
that various social critics have noticed. That is, from their inventory of cultural
options they selected mutually satisfying tactics arising from a loose alliance of
like-minded "conscience-liberals." As disparate observers as the Italian Marxist,
Antonio Gramsci, through the liberal capitalist critics, John Kenneth Galbraith
and James K. Feibleman, have found that times of crisis provide moments
in which the oppressed and their allies may rebargain the terms of their social
status. 20
Certainly this alliance seemed emergent during the Great Depression. Not
only did the decade begin with the cycle of Black performance shorts, including
Duke Ellington's Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) with its wry treatment of a downand-out
composer and the dancer who hoofed so that he might live to compose,
but it carried onward to 1935 when Ellington's Symphony in Black (1935) boldly
evoked African American history in four movements: the "middle passage,"
oppressive toil, religious epiphany, and the urbane jazz age.
Moreover, Blacks participated. Briefly, until his early death, the Black writer
Wallace Thurman enjoyed a contract with a Hollywood studio. In 1933, John
Krimsky, one of the producers of the film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones,
insisted on diluting the playwright's primitivism by asking James Weldon
Johnson of the NAACP and his brother, Rosamond, to contribute a prologue. In
it, Jones (Paul Robeson), the Pullman porter whose hubris led him to a Caribbean
crown (and a tragic death), is given a pastoral Black past rather than a tomtom
beating in his breast as the psychologically plausible motive for his rise and fall. 21
Such gestures earned Black attention, contending with Black concerns such
as that of the Black movie pioneer, Bill Foster, who fairly shouted at James
Weldon Johnson that "If the Negro wants Big Pictures of Negro life today they
[sic] will have to produce them himself {or risk others']., .controlling the
Equipment [and] then the door will be closed." Muse, on the other hand, thought
"Hollywood's not prejudiced; they'll buy anything that's successful," to which
Johnson added a corollary that whites so far had handled Black material adequately
because of a Black "reluctance., .to see what they consider lower phases of
Negro life." Indeed, after the Black congressman, Oscar DePriest, saw Hallelujah!
he insisted that African America stood "on the threshold of civic and cultural