Today is the birthday of Hubert Harrison. I just completed Jeffrey B. Perry’s 760+ biography of his life from 1918 to 1927, and I highly recommend this book.
On Wednesday, April 29th, 2021, Abdus and Jacquie Luqman hosted me on THE CYPHER series on Luqman Nation to talk about this book. I was most interested in how biographer Jeffrey B. Perry wrote about Marcus Garvey’s 1922 arrest. This arrest represents a watershed moment Harrison’s philosophy that became more hostile to nationalism; and it was a watershed moment in Harrison’s personal life. I highly recommend reading this biography.
This memoir “Just As I Am” by Cicely Tyson is a A MUST READ. I am grateful I had the opportunity to read and discuss this book over the course of seven weeks, reading three to four chapters each Saturday from February 13th to April 3rd. Our participants included Sandi Gilliard, Sojourna Collier, Sharon Gordon, Anthony Thomas, Briana Cannon, and my mother.
There are two persistent themes in the performances of Ms. Tyson and in this memoir: one, the important work one must do to de-program their subconscious programming that a white supremacist society has programmed into them; and two, the need to maintain strong Black family kinship. She writes in her second chapter of her parents: “the relationship’s strongest connective tissue was their shared sense of faith and family” (13). Of the necessity to de-program oneself from white supremacist subconscious programming, Ms. Tyson writes in the fifth chapter “In all of my childhood, King Kong was the only film I saw at the cinema, and Mom regretted choosing that one. At nights, I’d wake up howling from a nightmare. I didn’t step foot in a [movie] theater again until the 1972 premiere of Sounder” (59).
In our first book discussions on February 13th and 20th, we found most profound a point Ms. Tyson made on page 97: ‘her daughter [Ms. Tyson] had unknowingly repeated the very familial pattern she’d longed to end.” I believe every parent should sit down with their teenage children and read ‘Just As I Am’ by Cicely Tyson with them and talk about how to end destructive familial patterns and build new constructive ones. She was promoting the second theme here.
On Saturday March 6th discussion we discussed the memoir from chapters 11 to 13, where she mentions her first TV role. One of our participants was Sojourna Collier whose work is Emmy nominated. Sojourna told us about the storyline of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, which is about a single dad. We saw the scene in Ms. Tyson’s first TV role, which was the series called The Courtship of Eddie’s Father which she got a chance to perform in because of her professional relationship with Jimmy Komack whom Bill Haber introduced her to. In this scene, she plays a woman whom Eddie is dating who questions his preconceived ideas about what a woman should know. Although he is not interested in football, Ms. Tyson’s character is in fact interested in football. Bill Haber would later go on to produce the stage play Thurgood initially starring James Earl Jones, that later starred Laurence Fishburne. Ms. Tyson also credits Haber for supporting her over the past forty years.
On Saturday, March 13th, we talked about chapters 15, 16, and 17, and she discussed the commercial success she encountered ever since performing in the film Sounder. She mentioned that this was the first time that she became a “headliner.” I thought that her work in Sounder most promotes the strength of the Black Family. In the most pivotal scene that I showed in this class, I chose to show the scene where Paul Winfield’s character reprimands his son for not going to school because the son wanted to make up for lost time. When he reprimands him, he runs away, and before Paul Winfield’s character chases him, Cicely Tyson’s character Rebecca explains to him why spending time with his father was more important than going to school. This is a powerful scene. She promotes the second theme in this part.
On Saturday, March 20th, I was so glad to have my mother join this conversation about the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth chapters. My mother informed us that Prince Harry’s father was the brother to Margaret, who once married Lord Snowdon, who took the photo of Ms. Cicely Tyson on the book cover. We also saw powerful clips of Ms. Tyson’s work in Sounder and in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Her devotion to Mr. Pittman in the scene we saw promoted the second theme mentioned earlier.
On Saturday, March 27th, we discussed at length what Ms. Tyson wrote about her appearance in the film The Women of Brewster Place based on the novel by Gloria Naylor. Her scene with Robin Givens playing Kiswana is I THINK HER BEST WORK IN ADDITION TO HER WORK IN THE FILM “A HERO AIN’T NOTHIN BUT A SANDWICH.” Her work in both films promotes the second theme about the importance of family.
In our last conversation about the last three chapters of this memoir, we talked about how Ms. Tyson’s work promoted the building of a conscious African centered family. We saw a clip of the film The Marva Collins Story where she defends her teaching style that promotes a culture of reading against a parent who thinks she is doing too much. We saw a clip of the film Bustin’ Loose with Richard Pryor, where she tries to get a loan for the house she is using to educate her students but is encouraged by Richard Pryor’s character to continue securing this space. We saw a clip of the film based on Alice Childress’s novel A Hero Ain’t Nothing But A Sandwich where she relates her own child’s drug abuse with the drug abuse of other Black people in her community. She is promoting the unity and strength of the Black family here. In this discussion, we appreciated her point at the end of this memoir that “Centuries of abuse have taught us to regard one another with disdain, to treat ourselves with the same contempt plantation owners once held for us” (397). She dissolves all negative comments that come from a self-hatred with this comment. I am grateful to have finished this memoir with an awesome reader like Anthony Thomas. You can watch our last discussion here with the password: eb6b*6&1 -RF.
