Sen. Estes Kefauver had warned the American public of a national crime syndicate several years before it surfaced at Apalachin. During his committee’s climactic hearings in New York City in March of 1951, the impact of his investigation was vastly magnified by a novel medium. The sale of television receivers had boomed during the previous year; the proportion of New York City-area homes with sets had jumped from 29 percent to 51 percent. The hearings, broadcast live, became the first major television event. Viewers looked on by the tens of millions. New York’s Consolidated Edison had to add an extra generator to power all the sets. Stores were deserted during “Kefauver hours” and swamped when the committee took its noon recess. “Never before had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter,” Life magazine said.
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January 2011
TWO EXCELLENT RECORDINGS OFFER a sense of what transfixed the Jubilees’ first audiences. The first is the recently issued compact disc Rise, Shine: Fisk Jubilee Singers Live in Concert . Its performers are the musical descendants of the original troupe, though it is now a student choir, and it can be ordered by calling the Fisk Alumni Office at 800-443-2586. The other is Been in the Storm So Long: Spirituals, Folk Tales and Children’s Games From John’s Island, South Carolina , on the Smithsonian/Folkways label, which gives the listener an idea of the raw material from which the Jubilees fashioned their arrangements and renditions.
IN THE LATE 1860S BLACK STUDENTS excavating the grounds of a Nashville freedmen’s school called Fisk University made a grim discovery: heaps of chains and manacles from Porter’s Slave Yard, where African-American men, women, and children had once been bought and sold. The students did not let these relics of their bondage lie buried but instead sold them for scrap iron. With the proceeds they bought Bibles and spellers, turning the instruments of their enslavement into the agencies of their liberation.
In the fall of 1871 the Fisk Jubilee Singers would use the same alchemy to rescue their school from oblivion. Impoverished, bedraggled, they would take the secret hymns of their bondage and not only “sing up the walls of a great university” but teach the world about the dignity and educability of black Americans.
His first memory was of a green lampshade in his father’s study. His second was of fury and frustration. His mother, father, and older brother, Win, were going up from the Stanford University campus, where he’d been born, to San Francisco, where the fleet was. He, considered too young to make the trip, was being left behind. He didn’t exactly know what the fleet might be—he suspected it was a cool, delicious drink—but he wanted it. It was the Great White Fleet, stopping in San Francisco Bay on its way around the world in the spring of 1908.
Twenty years on, it’s hard enough to recall Ted Kennedy as a serious presidential threat; harder still, with this year’s primaries effectively over by mid-March, to imagine a sitting President and his main challenger for the nomination fighting all the way from January in Iowa to August’s convention in New York. But the noxious mix of double-digit inflation, a gas shortage, and his own earnest leadership had left Jimmy Carter so vulnerable that a summer 1979 California poll showed Ted Kennedy getting nearly 60 percent support in a three-way nomination race with Carter and Jerry Brown. The President’s answer to this news was uncharacteristically forthright and fiery: “I’ll whip his ass.” Kennedy proved to be one political problem Carter understood how to attack.
Naturally I was excited at the prospect at having lunch at the White House with the President of the United States. Very few eleven-year-olds get to do that. I told my friends at Pelham Day School in New York, and they wanted to hear all about it when I got back.
The President was Herbert Hoover, a long-time associate of my father. It was after the 1932 election but before the inauguration of his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, that I traveled to Washington, along with my father, Perrin Galpin, and my older sister, Penny. At the White House we were ushered in to see President and Mrs. Hoover. My father shook hands, my sister curtsied, and, flustered, so did I.
There were just the five of us for lunch in some private dining room, and the menu had been specially chosen for children: spinach with a poached egg on top. I don’t remember what was talked about, but I suspect it was nothing important.