Ishmael Reed on the

Miltonian Origin of The Other

By ISHMAEL REED

Last weekend, in one of our posts celebrating The East Village Other, Ed Sanders wrote that poet Ted Berrigan may have named the alternative newspaper after the Rimbaud line “I is an Other.” Mr. Sanders acknowledged, “Another account has Ishmael Reed coining the name.” In the comments, EVO editor Peter Leggieri wrote that Allen Katzman (who founded the paper along with Dan Rattiner and Walter Bowart) “always gave the impression that he had suggested the name ‘Other.’” After citing the reasons, Mr. Leggieri wrote, “However, if the question of origin came to a vote, I’d probably pull the lever for Ishmael Reed.” Here, now, is Mr. Reed himself, on his role in shaping The East Village Other.

Ishmael Reed, 1967 / Isamu Kawai 

 

My receiving a job as the editor of a newspaper in Newark, N.J., led to the origin of The East Village Other. I worked a number of temporary jobs from the time I arrived in New York in the fall of 1962 until I left for California in the summer of 1967. One of those jobs was that of  a pollster for The Daily News. So when I went to the Department of Labor to get a temporary job, after the poll was completed, I was informed of an opening for a reporter for a new newspaper in Newark.

I had written for a newspaper in Buffalo called The Empire Star, edited by the great A.J. Smitherman, who was the target of mob violence during one of the worst riots in American history, the Tulsa riots of 1921, which left 300 blacks dead.

Smitherman believed in armed self-defense against lynching. After an interview with the investors, it was decided that I would be the editor of a newspaper that I named Advance. Although I had watched the production of a newspaper using the old linotype method while working for the newspaper in Buffalo, I hadn’t a clue about offset printing.

Walter Bowart was a bartender at Stanley’s, which was our hangout. It was owned by Stanley Tolkin who was a patron of the arts and our benefactor.

Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images John Wilcock (at left), Allen Katzman (in striped shirt), and Walter Bowart prepare a layout on Aug. 25, 1966

 

During the summer of 1965, Walter and I developed a friendship. Walter always reminded me of a leading man in a Western movie. He was also a painter, one among many painters located on the Lower East Side, some of whom were abstract painters; others were using technology. Bowart was a collagist.

Both Walter and I had cut-and-paste minds. While attending the University of Buffalo, I was influenced by Nathaniel West’s short work, a collage in writing, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell” (1931) and Erich Kahler’s “The Tower and the Abyss” (1957), a book about discontinuity, translated by W.S. Merwin.

So I paid Walter to come up with a model for Advance. I went to his loft to see the result. It was something unlike anything that I’d ever seen – suitable for an exhibit of Neo Conceptual art at the Whitney, but not for a community newspaper. He called the philosophy behind the paper pata-realist. But before I could utter my criticisms, he said, excitedly, “Hey, why don’t we start a newspaper down here?”

I was skeptical, but agreed to sit in on a series of meetings. During one meeting, there was a discussion of a name for the paper. Walter wanted to call it The Joint. I suggested The Other. I’d just read Carl Jung’s introduction to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” where he referred to Milton’s Satan, the revolutionary Satan, as the “Other.” And that’s what we were: Cultural outsiders, who were not native New Yorkers; people who had ambivalent attitudes toward the city where we hoped to make our reputations as artists. We saw comic books as art, and now a newspaper that was a work of art. Walter took his painter’s style to the newspaper.

Bowart needed a writer to assist him. I was working in Newark and wasn’t available and so I introduced Walter to poet Allen Katzman. We hung out a lot together. He worked at a place called The Ninth Circle, where I met Norman Pritchard, the poet, for the first time. Allen Katzman and I use to go to literary parties. We were part of Panna Grady’s salon at the Dakota, where we ran into Ralph Ellison, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin and others. At Norman Mailer’s one night, he insulted Mailer’s wife. Mailer’s friends – boxing champions, including Archie Moore – surrounded us. I got him out of there. “Allen,” I said, “This is not the place to make a stand.”

He was a disciple of William Carlos Williams.

On the night of the newspaper’s release, I was in Newark and so I asked Penny Shaiman – my girlfriend at the time, who was studying art history at NYU – to help Sherry Needham to pass out copies of the newspaper to patrons in restaurants and bars. She used to run into Ed Sanders at the school library. He was studying Egyptology. She now runs a gallery in Seattle and is an art dealer.

The appearance of the newspaper was stunning.

I wrote a few articles for the newspaper, one of which was a blast at the owner of The Metro, who’d hired some plainclothes thugs to monitor blacks who attended poetry readings there. He’d previously threatened musician Archie Shepp and his “Goldwater for President” sign in the window was meant to be a red flag for blacks. One night, one of them attacked Tom Dent, the leader of our magazine Umbra (one of the most important literary magazines to be published, though it gets ignored because the media, when covering the Lower East Side of the 1960s, bond with those who resembled their journalists and their tokens.) It was at Umbra workshops where the revolution in Black Arts began.

I went to Tom Dent’s aid and was punched. Penny and I left the Le Metro Café and halfway home I turned and went back. Poet Walter Lowenfels was reading. I told Walter that if he continued reading I would never speak to him again. The café emptied out and that was the end of the readings there. William Burroughs, who was scheduled to read the following week, cancelled. After a weekend of searching for other places, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, where readings might be held, Paul Blackburn and I asked the then rector, Michael J. C. Allen, whether we could hold readings at St. Mark’s Church.

That was the beginning of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Joel Oppenheimer ran the poetry workshop; I ran the fiction workshop. If you check out the St. Mark’s Poetry website, none of this is mentioned, another example of how the black participation in the counterculture gets expunged from the record.

After I resigned from editing my Newark paper, as the investors wanted it to become a mouthpiece for the local government, which was a criminal operation, Walter asked me to write for The Other. I chose to begin my first novel, “The Free-Lance Pallbearers.”

I was sharing rent with choreographer Carla Blank who was a rising star in the Judson Church post-modernist dance movement. Her classic, “The Wall Street Journal,” a dance based upon a collage score, was revived in 2009 by Carla and Robert Wilson as part of their collaboration about their work with Suzushi Hanayagi, called “KOOL.”  She was in contact with South Asian and Japanese artists. I introduced some of these international artists to The Other. Carla contributed a couple of collages, so did my friend, the late John Harriman. The great cartoonist Mary Wagner was also a contributor. When my first novel was published, Allen Katzman gave the book a great send off.

I was one of those featured on a record that Walter produced called “The Electric Newspaper.” Walter and I worked on a project called International Mind Mining, but nothing came of it. I took the idea west, where I founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a multicultural service organization for writers and sponsor of The American Book Awards, now in their thirty-second year.

Walter hooked up with Timothy Leary and got off into drugs. I think that was a turning point in our relationship. One night he slipped a tab of mescaline into my glass of orange juice without my knowledge. After this creepy act, our relationship became strained.

I left New York in 1967 and on the basis of having written “Pallbearers” obtained a 35-year teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley. Mike Gold compared California with a sanatorium. After the turbulence and excitement of New York, I needed one. With the fame accompanying The East Village Other, Walter went uptown. On one occasion, Carla and I had dinner with him and the rich woman whom he married. Actor Rex Harrison’s ex-wife served the dinner.

I saw him and Allen Katzman a couple of times after that. Carla and I had dinner with Walter and his wife in Tiburon. Timothy Leary was one of the guests. Allen Katzman and his girlfriend at the time, the painter Carol Alonge, came to visit us in California. I visited them at Westbeth in New York. As soon as I stepped over the threshold the lights went out. Allen laughed. “That’s Ishmael,” he said. “Powerful.” He and his daughter were killed in a car accident in 1985. Allen was on the way to becoming a major American poet. Someone sent me a poem by his daughter. I saw Walter Bowart in the 1990s when I read from my work at the University of Arizona at Phoenix.

And finally at Long Beach, when I was the guest of Malauna Karenga, Walter and an associate made a videotape of my reading.

Walter Bowart was a restless, troubled genius. A visionary. An iconoclast. His idea of the anarchic-technological utopia influenced my second novel, “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.” He was a fan of Buckminister Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. He invented the New Journalism when he hired poets and novelists to write stories and features and lifted cartoons to the status of an art form. His mind belonged to the future, but he also could be small minded and petty. They’re all deceased now — Sherry Needham, Allen Katzman and Walter Bowart — but when I think of them, my family, it brings me back to those days in the 1960s: The music, the cheap rents, food, the energy and excitement, the buzz of something new. What lovely days those were!  We were all young, experimental, ready like Muhammad Ali, our hero, to shake up the world. It remains to be seen whether we Others succeeded.

Ishmael Reed’s latest novel is “Juice!” published by Dalkey Archives, which he illustrated with his cartoons. He is the editor of “Konch” available at ishmaelreed.com.

For more on “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” read about the exhibition here, and read more from EVO’s editors, writers, artists, and associates here.

GO HERE TO VIEW

ARETHA CONCERT

FEATURING RAY CHARLES

Aretha Franklin Recorded live on Mar 7, 1971 at Fillmore West (San Francisco, CA)

1. Respect 3:57

2. Call Me 4:55

3. Love The One You're With 4:38

4. Bridge Over Troubled Water 7:31

5. Share Your Love With Me 4:03

6. Eleanor Rigby 2:39

7. Make It With You 4:53

8. Don't Play That Song 3:39

9. You're All I Need To Get By 4:47

10. Dr. Feelgood 8:06

11. Spirit In The Dark 15:36

12. Spirit In The Dark (Continued) 9:22

13. Reach Out And Touch (Somebody's Hand) 4:47

Black History Month Selection::

Tanya Stephens

So we’ve come a long way from the chains and the cane fields….A long way from the back of the bus…
Shoulda brought along a little map for the travelling, seems we’ve come a long way from us…
Squander our money waiting on reparation, never make plans for retirement day 
Who’s to be blamed for our lack of preparation now we done spent every dime of our pay on big pimping, flossing every dollar we’ve got on the much less fortunate Small thinking got us bound tighter than the chains that we try to forget….

Tell me now Malcolm, do we hurt your pride?
Can you hear me now Rosa, was it worth the ride?
Can you see me now Marcus we’re still not unified, no we’re not… 
So tell me now Martin, is this why you died?

So we’ve come a long way from picking cotton, many never thought they’d live to see the day when Bush pick Rice, But if all you’ve become is another house nigga baby tell me was it worth all the sacrifice? Get outa my way while I climb to the top now but be sure to catch me if I fall from grace Cause heaven forbid if what i chase should reject me. You know i’m gonna need a warm black embrace. We used to stack guns, prepare for revolution - Was the only way of getting wrong put right - Now we think all our problems  can be solved with shooting - And we’ve forgot why we started to fight

So we belittle we bredda so we can seem bigger, Now we so damn proud fi call we self ‘nigga’ , And being a bad man is good thing, Now being a good man is a bad thing. So it’s rich or poor, black or white….Sit and be trampled or get up and fight?
After so many years it’s still hard to adjust Even when the front is empty we still move to the back of the bus….

Tell me now Malcolm, do we hurt your pride?
Can you hear me now Rosa, was it worth the ride?
Can you see me now Marcus we’re still not unified, no we’re not… 
So tell me now Martin, is this why you died?

The Kalahari Review is an African-eccentric magazine interested in material exploring Africa and Africans in unique and avant-garde ways. We are looking for stories that have not often been told but should be – through voices that have not yet been heard - but should.

We hope to push the limits and expose the world to aspects of Africa not often shown - both the positives and the negatives. We are interested in pieces about and from Africans living abroad as well.

Please take the time to enjoy the content of the site and get a feel for it before submitting.

Because this is a web-based publication there are no word count restrictions.

Compensation is paid on publication.  

Thank you for being a part of the project and good luck.

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Additional recommended viewing and reading to help give you a feel of the level and feel of work we are looking for before before submitting - 

The New Yorker

Granta

The Paris Review

Guernica

More Intelligent Life

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All submissions should be emailed to: editor@kalaharireview.com  

Fiction, Poetry, Essays, and Humor Pieces: Should be sent as a PDF or WORD attachment and should be accompanied by a proper query letter in the body of the email. Please include your contact details including full name, postal address, e-mail and telephone number in the body of the query letter. 

Photos, Art Work and Cartoon Portfolios: Should be sent as a PDF, JPG. or PNG attachments and should be accompanied by a proper query letter in the body of the email. Please include your contact details including full name, postal address, e-mail and telephone number in the body of the query letter. (Note: this area particularly the publication is interested only in avant-garde content. We are not interested in ordinary wildlife or landscapes. Portraits will be considered if they have a unique quality to them.)

Feature Articles, News Articles, Profiles, Exposés, Conversations and Interviews: Please attach your pitch letters as a PDF or WORD attachment. Please include any photos or graphic illustrations that you feel would help your pitch. Please include your contact details including full name, postal address, e-mail and telephone number in the body of the letter.

 

 

Note: Please thoroughly check your submissions for proper formatting, grammar and punctuation. Gross errors in these areas will seriously damage any works consideration for publication. 

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PROPOSALS Proposal Deadline Extended to March 19, 2012       The seventh Performing the World (PTW) conference will be held in New York City, Thursday, October 4 through Sunday October 7, 2012. International, cross-disciplinary, conversational, experiential, and practical-critical, PTW has come over the decade to play an increasingly important role in supporting and expanding "the performance turn" around the world. If you practice and/or study performance as a means of individual, community and world transformation (or want to), PTW is for you. The theme of the last PTW, held in 2010 and attended by over 500 people from dozens of countries, was, "Can Performance Change the World?" The depth of the challenges facing humanity two short years later have led the conveners of Performing the World to recast the question for the 2012 conference as, "Can Performance Save the World?"   Deadlocked governments, protracted wars, dysfunctional education systems, and a deepening global economic crisis with no apparent solution have become the norm. At the same time, the activity of performance (and playing and pretending and creating...), as an alternative to the cognitive- and/or faith-based "solutions" of traditional ideology, continues to spread both at the grassroots and in the university, with the non-ideological, improvisatory movements struggling to embody this trend. PTW is looking for proposals, be they for panels, workshops, performances, demonstrations, installations, etc., that address this question, "Can performance save the world?" from a multitude of perspectives, including but not limited to:   Does performance contribute to people seeing/being in the world in new ways? Can we perform our way to ending poverty? Performance and community building and sustainability The interface of theatre performance and performance in daily life Performance and learning Performance and youth development, in school and out Performance and the Elderly Performance, play and therapeutics The relationship of performance to physical and emotional healing Health and the performance of medicine (East and West) New model of community health and human rights What is creative conversation and how can it take place in polarized (and violent) environments? The role of theatre and performance in war and conflict zones What is play and its role in human creativity and development? The social context of creativity When "reasoning" and "argument" fail, what then? Performance and the creation of history Does knowing get in the way of performing? The role of cognition/reflection in performance The performance of language and the language of performance Performance and organizational culture The role of performance in politics and revolution Does it take pretending to make change real?   We envision Performing the World 2012 as a marathon "performance of conversation" with people from all over the world - scholars and researchers; educators, therapists, social workers, youth workers; doctors and other health workers; theatre, applied theatre and other performance artists; social activists and community organizers; business leaders and philanthropists; film, video and media creatives; and others.   The sponsors of Performing the World 2012 are the All Stars Project, Inc. and the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy. PTW will be held at the All Stars Project's performance and development center on 42nd Street in New York City.   Proposal submission forms are available at www.performingtheworld.org   Proposals are due March 19, 2012.   Conference Fees before July 1, 2012:            $235 (US) after July 1, 2012:               $275 (US) [NOTE: There is no one-day rate.]   A key part of the Performing the World experience is the person-to-person connection - the building of new relationships with people from around the globe. If you need a place to stay during the conference, our International Host Committee will make every effort to find you one in a home of a New Yorker. Forms are available on the website. Additional information about the conference, and forms for registration, housing and financial aid can be found on the website, www.performingtheworld.org. For any questions please contact conference producer Diane Stiles at 212-356-8412.

CO-SPONSORED BY THE EAST SIDE INSTITUTE AND THE ALL STARS PROJECT, INC.

Guidelines

Scape is currently open for fiction, poetry

and art submissions.

 

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Simply put, Scape is a fantasy, science fiction and horror e-zine with a young adult (YA) focus.  We seek the best new short YA speculative stories, poetry and art.  We also publish news and reviews on books, movies and trends in the speculative YA world.

STORIES AND POEMS

‘Scape’ for us means a lot of things. DreamScape, spaceScape, cityScape, mindScape, eScape…

All Scape fiction and poetry must contain a speculative component. We’re into sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, magical realism, hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, alternate history, supernatural, myth and legend, post-apocalyptic, dark, light and all shades in between. If you can imagine it, we’ll consider it. That being said, to catch our attention you’re going to need to bring something fresh and edgy if your story features well-worn ideas such as vampires or time travel.

Scape’s YA focus doesn’t mean we want ‘dumbed down’ or ‘censored’ stories. Quite the opposite. YA for us is broadly defined. It means fiction that is relevant, meaningful and of particular interest to young people. We’re not putting a specific age bracket on ‘young people’ and we aim for our publication to appeal to the ‘young’ and ‘young at heart’ alike. Obviously, we won’t publish stories containing gratuitous violence and/or sexual content. Equally, we are not a children’s literature outlet. We recognise that many themes relevant to young adults will acknowledge sexuality or aggression. We won’t discount stories with these themes as long as they are well written and the sensitive issues are dealt with intelligently.

We’re rather partial to two things:

1. Stories that make us think. Not stories that slap us in the face with a preachy, holier-than-thou message, but stories with subtext. Tales that we want to read twice or three times to really figure out. Well-realised characters facing situations that prompt us to question ourselves. Stories with something to say.

2. Unusual settings: unique worlds, fresh takes on the future, geographic and cultural contexts that aren’t often featured in fantasy and sci fi (eg. Asia, Africa, Oceania).

So, prepare to give us new settings to explore, 3D characters to love and hate, and plots and themes that push the envelope.

Still not sure? Check out Scape team member Morgan Dempsey’s article  ‘What Makes YA?’ over at Broad Universe, or Pam Macintyre’s article ‘Speculation or Formula?’ in Issue 1 of Scape.

ART

We only publish art that is related to Scape fiction.  We’re therefore always looking for artists, working in various media, who can illustrate Scape stories.

Images may be portrait or landscape orientated. However, all portrait images must have a 670 x 360 pixel section that is suitable for display on the Scape homepage.  Images must be provided in jpg, gif or tiff file types.

If you are interested in illustrating for Scape, please e-mail our Art Director, Rebecca Ing, for further information, including a short bio and a link to examples of your work.

 

THE SPECIFICS

The following guidelines apply:

Short stories: Up to 8,000 words (no minimum word count).  Bear in mind that the longer your piece is, the better it needs to be.

Poetry: Up to 100 lines (soft edges).

Art: We are looking for art across varied media to illustrate Scape stories.  See above section for further details.

Reviews: If you wish to submit a book for us to review, please query Scape’s editor first, with ‘REVIEW REQUEST’ in the subject line. Please include author and publisher details in your query. If we are happy to proceed, we will provide you with a mailing address to where a review copy of the work can be posted.

All submissions must be your original work.

We do not accept fan-fiction or any works that are derivative in nature.

 

PAYMENT

All payments are paid on publication via PayPal only.

Short stories: One (1) cent U.S. per word for original short stories, with a U.S. $10 minimum payment.

Poetry: Flat rate of U.S. $25 per poem.

Art: Flat rate of U.S. $25 per illustration.

We hope to increase our rates in the future.

 

RIGHTS

For fiction and poetry, we claim first-printing English language world exclusive electronic rights for 90 days from publication. After the 90 days, you are free to sell your work elsewhere. We hope you will allow us to continue to display your work on the website, but this is not a requirement. You have the right to request your work to be removed from our site after 90 days.

For art, we ask for non-exclusive electronic rights. This means you are able to sell your work elsewhere at any time, as long as the buyer knows it is non-exclusive. Please note: art will remain displayed on the website in our issue archives.

 

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

All stories and poems must be submitted in .doc or .docx format (we will accept .rtf though this is not our first preference) via e-mail to:  submissions (at) scapezine (dot) com.

Submissions should be made in standard manuscript format, but we don’t mind if you use Times, Arial or other easy-to-read fonts. If you don’t know what SMF is, check out this example.

Our maximum response time is 90 days, though it is usually less. We will also announce submission status updates on Twitter. Please query if you haven’t heard from us after 90 days from making your submission, or if we have indicated that all submissions past the date you submitted have been sent responses. We do our best but e-mails can sometimes go astray.

Sorry, no multiple submissions. That is, please send only one story or poem at once – make it your best.

Sorry, no simultaneous submissions. If you have already submitted your work elsewhere, please wait until you hear back from them before submitting to us.

We do not consider unsolicited reprints.  However, we will occasionally seek to reprint stories that have specific resonance with our mission.

We regret that we cannot provide individual feedback/comments on all submissions. If we do not accept your work, it just means that it wasn’t appropriate for us at that particular time.

Please do not submit any new work until 7 days after you receive an acceptance or rejection.

Any submissions not adhering to the above guidelines will be deleted without response.

Kai Davis - “Fuck I look like”

All hail Kai Davis for this poem. Even today, being black and smart in Western education systems means you exist through a prism of contradictions. The price for not being a stereotype is being questioned by black peers who don’t understand why you treat Education like a competitive sport, and white peers who also consider you an anomaly. At the epicenter of it all is the inferiority context bread into black people and the superiority complex bred into white people since the social construct that is race was established. Kai Davis refuses to subscribe to what society thinks she should be and for that I salute her.  

Finding Beauty in a Booty

In an excerpt from Brothers (& Me), Donna Britt writes about trying to accept her looks.

• By: Donna Britt | Posted: February 19, 2012

From Brothers (& Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving: 

We think of "black history" as the triumphs and challenges of past centuries -- slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement. But history is more intimate than that, as much about yesterday as 1965. Because every woman frets about whether she'll be embraced or rejected for her looks, black women's history can't exclude our feelings about our beauty -- or our perceived lack of it.

In Gary, Indiana, in the 1960s, my girlfriends and I in junior high knew that boys mattered most in the world. And what did boys want from girls?

Fine-ness. Beauty is tricky for every girl. But for African-American girls when black was just being acknowledged as beautiful, the complexity felt downright calamitous.

In seventh grade, I was bussed to a mostly white high school for "racial balance." Each morning, black girls boarded the bus whose best features seemed luckier than mine: 

Shawn had satiny skin. Sharon had gorgeous legs. Gayle's hair was a wavy waterfall. 

I had a big butt. 

An ass is an asset too primitive for sonnets and too sexual to sentimentalize -- especially when sex is the scariest thing in the world. Or so the yellow dress -- whose swingy skirt barely hid the obstreperous rear beneath it -- taught me. That morning, I'd put on the dress and felt like a Disney princess with whom a boy might topple into love. Walking to school, I saw an appropriate-aged youth approaching. I smiled. He smiled back. 

Then he patted my behind. 

I froze. The boy kept walking, but his message was clear: My "beauty" was a booty -- a coarse attention-grabber that brought out the beast, not the best, in guys. It would be decades before Sir Mix-a-Lot's seminal rap, "Baby Got Back," and proudly "bootylicious" babes like Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez acknowledged what guys' reactions showed me every day: 

My big behind had as much impact as other girls' more lauded eyes, hair and breasts. But in the 1960s, flattering, body-focused adjectives -- stacked, voluptuous -- were bust-related. My most noted feature never rated public mention, so having a great ass by black standards seemed shameful. 

Yet I couldn't help noticing: The half-dozen Caucasian features Negroes had been brainwashed into worshipping didn't include small booties. I knew dozens of boys who admired "redbone" black girls whose long locks and golden skin resembled white girls'. 

Not one preferred a tiny white-girl butt. 

Was a well-rounded rear the one African feature so profound in its effect that even racism's scalpel couldn't excise it? Or was booty-love like real estate: Location, location, location? Irrevocably tied to sex, black women's generous lower-body upholstery gives them a nature-provided cushion for life's most powerful act.

But I was 13. Longing to offer boys the sweetness of my face and heart, I was stuck with a butt whose swaying -- literally behind my back -- shouted all manner of luridiness.

I mean, wasn't it bad enough that I was already grappling with black girls' hair issues? For kinky-haired black girls in the 1960s, fighting, taming and despising our hair was a full-time occupation.

I realized this at Emerson, where I marveled at the fearlessness with which white girls swam and showered during gym class -- and then proceeded wet-haired to class! Black girls routinely wore two swim caps into the pool, and showered with head coverings impenetrable enough to pass federal HazMat requirements. We'd seen photos of  "Afros," proud, nappy halos worn by formidable women in distant, major cities. But in our real world, most girls had two painful options still in use today: A press-and-curl or a perm, both offered at the local "beauty parlor" where "beauticians"  had ultimate power over their clients: Life-or-death -- or cute-or-ugly, which was the same thing.

For a press-and-curl, my beautician swathed me in plastic, washed and dried my hair, and set a heavy brass "pressing iron" over an open flame. When the comb smoked, the beautician grabbed sections of hair, greased them and -- as I sat stiff as a mannequin -- pulled the comb through to straighten them. Next, she fired up a clattering curling iron, creating rows of curls she combed into a style that lasted as long as I avoided rain, humidity or sweating. Fidgeting resulted in a black forehead burn, and a week of inventing hairdos that hid it.

Perms held other risks. The beautician applied gobs of harsh chemicals -- amusingly called "relaxer" -- to my hair, combed it through and calculated how long she had before the increasingly hot glop on my head ignited. Dashing me to the sink, she'd wash the stinging goop down the drain -- hopefully without clumps of my hair clinging to it.

Six weeks later -- or two with a press-and-curl -- I endured it all again. When I griped, Mom offered her favorite black-hair maxim: "Beauty knows no pain."

Except for the psychic kind. Life shrinks when water is your enemy. The briefest rain-shower could flatten your perm, making you resemble the sodden ghoul that emerged from Naomi Watts' TV in The Ring, or morph your press-and-curl into a pickaninny's mop. No wonder huge numbers of black women never learned to swim.

Worse was knowing that making your hair pretty -- or even acceptable -- was so difficult that your "gift" of beautiful hair was inauthentic. Like my decidedly African butt, my hair was one more thing that suggested something was immutably wrong with the beauty I offered the world.

In truth, black girls' hair wasn't all that got pressed. Day after day, doubts were pressed into our consciousness about whether we could be beautiful.

Millions of us have yet to excise them.

Reprinted from Brothers (& Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving, by Donna Britt. Published by Little, Brown and Co.

For Women Under 30,

Most Births Occur

Outside Marriage

 

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times / 

Amber Strader, of Lorain, Ohio, described her pregnancies as largely unplanned, a byproduct of relationships lacking commitment. 

 

By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: February 17, 2012

 

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there.

Meanwhile, children happen.

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.

By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Still, the issue received little attention until the publication last month of “Coming Apart,” a book by Charles Murray, a longtime critic of non-marital births.

Large racial differences remain: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.”

Fifty years ago, researchers have found, as many as a third of American marriages were precipitated by a pregnancy, with couples marrying to maintain respectability. Ms. Strader’s mother was among them.

Today, neither of Ms. Strader’s pregnancies left her thinking she should marry to avoid stigma. Like other women interviewed here, she described her children as largely unplanned, a byproduct of uncommitted relationships.

Some unwed mothers cite the failures of their parents’ marriages as reasons to wait. Brittany Kidd was 13 when her father ran off with one of her mother’s friends, plunging her mother into depression and leaving the family financially unstable.

“Our family life was pretty perfect: a nice house, two cars, a dog and a cat,” she said. “That stability just got knocked out like a window; it shattered.”

Ms. Kidd, 21, said she could not imagine marrying her son’s father, even though she loves him. “I don’t want to wind up like my mom,” she said.

Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support. “Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and self-development,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.

Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of relatives. The girl’s father has other children and rarely lends a hand.

“I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep,” Ms. Mercado said.

Watch the Premiere of

Melissa Harris-Perry's

Groundbreaking

New MSNBC Show

This morning marked the premiere of MSNBC's newest show, Melissa Harris-Perry, featuring host (you guessed it) Melissa Harris-Perry. As Jennifer Pozner wrote in an article for AlterNet earlier this week, Harris-Perry is now "the first black progressive woman to ever solo-host her own news and politics show on a major corporate TV news outlet."

This couldn’t be more welcome—or more unusual. Think Hannity’s all-male cable cabal was an isolated case? Sadly, no. According toThink Progress, men outnumbered women by a nearly 2-to-1 margin last week in all debates about contraception on MSNBC, CNN, Fox and Fox Business. The twitterverse seemed shocked to learn that female experts were sought out as commentators only 38 percent of the time on a story about women’s health. As a media critic, I was surprised, too—because that’s actually a higher percentage of women’s voices than typically heard across all news categories, not just in stories involving women's bodies.

The hour-long show kicked off at 10am Eastern today and will also run on Sundays in the same time slot. Today's guests include Baratunde Thurston, Chloe Angyal, Dorian Warren, and Toure. Wish the show's team luck, and follow MHP Show news on the show's new blog.

Update: Watch the whole premiere show below.