Inspired all the time either work of these young scholars. A day that farah came to speak to our class, the work were studying was pain, which is already one of my favorite books. It was so moving because i realized while she was giving us this wonderful guidance, the first time id been taught literature by a black person, besides my mother who was of course my first instruction in reading and writing but its one of those moments that if you like should be marked and i want to extend my gratitude for that, and you continue to inspire me. Thank you so much. Thats the great joys of teaching, you dont know who is sitting out there in terms of this extraordinarily talented young writer who i would read it many years later without knowing that she was one of the students in the class. So its really lovely to think it also for being here tonight. I wanted to ask farah to share with us the introduction of harlem nocturne. Is really a beautiful way she brings these women onto the page pics i would just read, find my way around, the prologue. New york back in and they came. One came as a child brought by immigrant parents, the other two came as the women seeking freedom to themselves and are. They were shaped by the city. The movement of their bodies, their style. They walk, they looked and listened they gave to the city but they danced, wrote, set to music. They came. New york told that anything was possible, golden there was no boundaries. There were. Of the city welcome them, students, teachers and entertainers as residents they were not always received with enthusiasm. So at some point they all lived in harlem, the black mecca on a migration of black people from the caribbean and the American South from the antiblack violence that erupted among other parts of the city, and the entrepreneur energies of africanamerican risked develop. Harlem, raise capital but eventually the immigrant stock move to another historic black neighborhood, in brooklyn. Harlem who wanted to live anywhere else if given a choice if i would have chosen harlem that they wouldve liked having the choice. Each in her own way protected limitations based on the life and her people. Meanwhile, helping to build a city within a city, a playful black and brown faces, speaking a multitude of languages, living icon living love, making love, making new people. It was a city of three rhythms and bebop changes, a city of weary brown faced children and adults some enraged, others resigned, a city that danced the lindy hop, and african isolationism. [applause] so i would love to know what was your first introduction to these women and their art . The book is about three women. Pearl primus, Mary Lou Williams, composer, and ann petry, the writer. I was introduced to each of them at various stages. I take my first introduction to ann petry was as a student, as an undergraduate at harvard many years before sharifa got there. I started reading ann petry been. Her books are being reprinted for the first time. Largely due to the efforts of a generation of black women scholars. So i encounter first as a College Student and not really in a classroom on my own, then as a graduate student laid on. She was the one who i think whose work i had the most sustained and lungs relationship with. And i actually had the opportunity to meet her and get to know her before the end of her life. The dancer choreographer i think i first encountered through the works of books by people like Langston Hughes and sort of picture books that would tell me about these wonderful women who are getting photographs of them before i knew who they were. A book like brown sugar was a way of getting to know her as a figure before actually knew her as a dancer and choreographer. And Mary Lou Williams, i didnt know although i grew up in a household where i first encountered many of the jazz greats as a child. I did not encounter Mary Lou Williams until i was an adult. And it was during the time when i started study more about womens contributions to jazz music, aside from people like billie holiday. And so i sort of discovered Mary Lou Williams, the latest of the three women and but also fell in love with the im biased. Is not women plan critical im sort of in love with all of them. And what was the moment when you realized you wanted to tell their stories . Fascinating question. I actually discovered, thought about telling their stories here at the center. I was a fellow web of the book but these ideas were sort of born when i first moved to new york around 2000, 2001. There were a couple of Small Projects that i was engaged in and they did a researcher at the schaumburg. One of those projects was ive been commissioned to write some notes for the reissue of a lena horne cd, and being an academic i completely over researched notes and thought oh, this is a really interesting error, and all three of these women are very important in this period. And so i had a whole cast of characters, and they were the three who survived the brings out the cast of characters. And can you talk a little bit about the time period . I think it is an interesting moment that gets lost in a lot of our popular imaginations of harlem and black political moments. Because it comes after the harlem renaissance. It comes after when wer we arey engaged with the art of the great depression. It comes before the rise of prominent voices before the Civil Rights Movement its launched in a powerful way to spend your right. I think its one of those sharifa and i were talking about this, harlem is kind of counseling always exciting so you can open in the struggle to get and put your finger there and youll find something worth our attention. And certainly you did that with your work in terms of a contemporary moment. But the 40s were fascinating, youre right, everything is overshadowed by those harlem renaissance people. They are so glamorous and talented and so beautiful, eloquent that they tend to overshadow everything. But the 40s were really vibrant period. You interest coming out of the depression, theres a lived of prosperity. The wa board is raining, and its also appeared of the second great migration. So theres this influx of new people coming and i found that it was very exciting. Its the savoy, the lindy hop, the birth of bebop to its victory at malcolm x is writing about when he first comes to harlem in the autobiography of malcolm x, so its before they become the icons they are walking the streets of harlem. And so the 40s is a fascinating for me, a fasting period and unlike any other periods that have come before and sort of paving the way for what would come later. I thought it was worthy of pag pages. Just the work of these women, how does it follow on what im thinking of the support was given to her work follows the model and patronage in a way, or the institutions that ann petry was working with. Could you talk about that lineage that made their work possible, with its many artists and writers, political . Absolutely. I think they were, not just my women, i think they are of a generation when we think of the 20s you can think of relationship of patronage with black artists and often think of individuals who are individual patrons or who are making access to certain publishing houses and things like that available. I think in the 40s what you get our people who are much more selfconsciously politicized, not that the earlier moments arent, but these are people, artists who are coming of age in a period where there is, theres a kind of activist momentum, and they see themselves a part of that momentum. So that the institution is not so much individuals were offering patronage to them but there are institutions that are providing venues and places for them to publish and places for them to perform. Many of those institutions actually, out of sort of more radical sensibilities in the 1930s. There are artistic organizations or publications but the census as having a kind of social action mission. What about the political consciousness of these women . They unfold in different ways. You talk about that in the book, someone like Mary Lou Williams, she does consider herself an activist. And ann petry put some distance between the more traditional, the signing of her work as political. Absolutely. I wanted to show, one of the reasons why while i was never in debt and to decide on three is i wanted to arrange an engagement in different art forms, but also i wanted to show a kind of continuum of Political Engagement and involvement. So someone like a young dancer was a student at Hunter College who joined various kind of political organizations while shes a student, and is probably the most what we think of as conventionally radical of the three actually joins the Commons Party for a while, and so that helped to shape her analysis of the world. So that would be summerlike ann petry is a writer who is surrounded by people who are radical political activists and respects and admires and defends them when they come under assault, but also keeps her distance and doesnt join she doesnt join organizations. She wont call herself a marxist or economies. She has sort of a left leaning sensibility that she doesnt like to be labeled or boxed in in a particularly big and she is very active. Shes engaged in various forms of activism, and then someone like a Mary Lou Williams i think this is, you know, her interest is always how can she be of assistance to people who are in need . And sometimes that might be people or in need because of the poverty, and it might be to individual acts of philanthropy or supporting activities, or mib fellow musicians were having issues with drug addiction and she becomes kind of a one woman rehab center or something. So they all have, they fall along a continuum and that brought to a sort of what we think of as a political consciousness two very different means. And how has that been expressed in the work . I was looking is a hard thing to find but i did find something. I have a dance background actually and all it ever felt was relief, talk about fantastic leap. But im thinking about something where you talk about different kinds of movement. Pearl primus physically as a mover. The movement in music, a piece of music, a movement through letter a work and then Action Movement that people found themselves engaged in, or living alongside, if not directly. How does the work itself express that, or shy away from . If they keep them separate . Thats a good question and a difficult one. One of the things ive tried to stress is that even though they are political agents and they are involved and see themselves as above a certain kind of political work, all of them are first and foremost artists. And their art forms and they defined differently, but that they really are trying to find ways for the expression of their creative ideas. And so it finds its way into work, and for someone like pearl primus, she starts taking dance lessons at a place called the new dance group, which was founded to use dance as a way to cultivating a search and certain have social activism. So shes already engaged in that process. She is creating dances, both that sort of narrow the stories and struggles, the difficulty of like people but also celebrates the joy of black people. She tries to create a Movement Vocabulary thats informed by whether its a dance the people in trinidad during carnaval, or sharecroppers in south. She is really creating a kind of dance vocabulary that tells the stories. And she, dance is a way of educating people about the expense of african descent. Ann petry, i think it really does come it comes about in the forms that she chooses but in some achieve writing with intent to social realism, you know, mode, but she also i think most importantly, people whose stories she chooses to go. She doesnt come from an elite she comes from a fairly unique background but she chooses to tell stories about working class and working poor people. And to try to give a fully fleshed portrait of them and their struggles. So in that way that shades apart. And with mary lou, its a little more complicated but i think that she tries, you know, she is free much invested in making sure that there is a certain history of black music in particular, that black music carries with it a kind of archive, and that she tries to make sure that that history is in the sort of contemporary popular music that shes playing and its also kind of informing its moment as well. It tries to shape its moment. So in this way i think their social engagement, you know, you can see it or feel it in their art, but they arent sacrificing sort of their creative expression for the sake of the politics or the social consciousness. What i ask you a question about ann petry that i think, in your book it really gave me relief because you describe the world in harlem and its some of the world will be on onesixteenth street including the art center. Its just that moment of giving address of whatever it is, onesixteenth to. I felt like this and that in the existence of the Committee Arts center in the street . Thats one of the Big Questions about the choices that she made. I have a theory but its only a theory. Ann petry writes the novel from people dont know, the street is published in 19 free sex, its about a female character named rudi johnson urges separate from her husband. She has a little boy. Shes struggling to make ends meet. Is a very kind of commune, desolate view of what her possibles are. And ann petry herself is a much engaged in a much more vibrant and diverse harlem than the one that she represents in the novel. So this arts center, for instance, which were just talking about produces and is a place where children can come and learn various forms of visual arts and various harlem artists are involved in a. Ann petry excuse me, Ruby Anderson have access to that end never had access to any of the churches. So in some ways i think it could be a critique that ann petry is insisted on telling a certain kind of story that she plans out certain possibilities, wasnt there with the people who live in harlem. On the other hand, i think, and this is where, i think she is fully aware that theres so many people in harlem during her time that even though the sources resource are able to dont necessarily know the art able, that they dont have access to them, that they arent able to take advantage of them and that we cant take our eyes off of those people who are sort of an activism. Sometime would assume anything she wants to shed the light. I think the real paradox in her work. In terms of what you choose represent and what you dont, something someone told me when my book came out was people of a certain class in harlem feel like it didnt represent them. I wont going into any details of that, but you can read between my lines. I understand and i think that was can you probably can identify with ann petry. Was a criticism she got also. We think about, you talked about the difference between a harlem renaissance and this period, when we think about the harlem renaissance, the books that were most champions were books that represented the better class of negroes, literally what they were called. And so ann petry in a generation of writers were not representing that version of harlem life of black life, and a consistent criticism at the time of, particularly from the africanamerican press, that she is not representing the best of the race, so to speak. Im sorry to hear that you had to deal with the same thing, but theres a long history of that kind of critique. And what about the other women speak with one other thing i was was fascinated by what i did the research was that i, sometimes you these assumptions you bring to a project. And so i assumed, oh, this is interesting, all of them were working during this period, and because they are black women they probably are not getting any attention for their work. And thats why so many of us dont know about them today. And what i discovered here at the schaumburg reading through microfilms, not everything was online yet. Was that i was wrong. And that all of them actually got a tremendous amount of attention for their work. Ann petry was widely published, i mean widely reviewed in books, the black press and the Mainstream Press and the pearl primus was the darling of the nude times dance critic. A very powerful man at the time, Mary Lou Williams had a radio show, had her long work premiered at townhall. So they actually had a great reception, reception that i really, i could have imagined that they had. And then they sort of fall off of the radar later on. Within the recession theres a variety of responses to them. So some people were celebrating ann petrys work. Some people in the black press are saying, oh, its too downtrodden to some people in the left press would say its not revolutionary enough. Because she doesnt provide a political without. So theres a variety of responses, but at least the work is being attended to service in which we all want to so they get the recognition at the time. One thread that goes through the book is big event, the victory at home and abroad for civil rights at home and the victory against fascism abroad. Its something that all three women encountered and reflect upon and it made me think about the Different Levels of their political system. Theres a superb local Community Based concerns and the of them, the about the situation in america generally and then global. I wanted to talk more about their work, contemporary movement, and then also the global, local movements. I think of the three, at that particular time, of the three pearl primus is probably most articulate about a kind of understanding about global issues, particularly as they relate to people of african descent. Most vocal about seeing the war against segregation, you know, or the fight against segregation, and this is kind of the height of jim crow so theyre fighting against jim crow. But she absently sees that not only as a fight, that is a fight that is necessary for democracy in the united states, and a fight that is necessary for democracy, you know, kind of against fascism abroad, but with her she also always is cognizant of whats going on in the caribbean and was going on in africa before she even visits africa. She comes out of a household that is her family, they arent cardcarrying and, they are aware of the guardian movement. Shelby has this kind of International Global