richardmurray

The Cellist states something few state, London has no toll to get into the city so when they did congestion pricing that was the first toll into London. New York City is full of tolls. And the comparisons to Singapore which is a wealthy city state, or stocklhom which is the only city in a low populace country full of natural resources, are dysfunctional to new York city which is the largest city in a country with over three hundred million people. And Oren Barzilay admitted that EMS workers live in shelters, they are not on welfare, but they don't make enough to live outside the shelters. ... What are my points? 1) no two places in humanity are financially the same. Applying governmental policy to two different places will never yield the same result. 2) the true financial condition of cities isn't in mayor's speeches or investments in stadiums. It is in the quality of life to the lowest wage workers. Eric Adams suggest New York City is financially flying high, then if so why not pay the emergency medical service workers more? why not make congestion pricing void for them? You claim to have money earned but you don't use it , can only mean you are hoarding it. when governments do that, it means illegal money transactions in the bureaucracy. Congestion pricing and the Broadway community By Roberto Araujo New York City PUBLISHED 2:18 PM ET Dec. 30, 2024 Broadway musician Mairi Dorman-Phaneuf plays the cello in the Broadway musical “The Great Gatsby." She drives into Midtown Manhattan from her home in Hartsdale, New York. “We lived in Inwood before we bought this house, and we spent, the idea was to be able to take the Metro-North, which we did up until the pandemic. We always took the train,” Dorman-Phaneuf said. “But then in the pandemic, the trains home went away and they still haven’t come back. So even though I wish we could be taking the train, on a weekday, there were just, there’s a train at 10:30, and then there’s a train at 11:44. So if we get done at 10:35 at work, the next train is 11:44, and that means I’d get home at 12:40,” she said. "And that's just untenable, you know, to have to wait an hour for a train." In a statement, the MTA said, “Schedules are based on current ridership data of more than 200,000 daily riders who use Metro-North. As Metro-North’s ridership continues to grow, the railroad is constantly monitoring ridership patterns and trends to see what future adjustments may be necessary.” https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/on-stage/2024/12/30/congestion-pricing-and-the-broadway-community official link https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/on-stage/2024/12/30/congestion-pricing-and-the-broadway-community?cid=share_clip Drivers react to day one of congestion pricing By Noorulain Khawaja Manhattan PUBLISHED 2:14 PM ET Jan. 05, 2025 Some New Yorkers thoughts to Congestion pricing https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2025/01/05/drivers-react-to-day-one-of-congestion-pricing The Port Authority tolls will increase alongside congestion pricing https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2025/01/05/port-authority-tolls-increase-alongside-start-of-congestion-pricing Local EMS union encourages workers to request reassignment out of congestion relief zone Local Union 2507 sent a notice to their members that included a reassignment request form. Heather Fordham Jan 3, 2025, 10:30 PM Updated 2 days ago The local union that represents the city's EMS and paramedics is now encouraging their members assigned to stations in the congestion relief zone to request reassignments. Local Union 2507 sent a notice to their members that included a reassignment request form. The union represents 4,100 emergency medical technicians and paramedics that travel from all parts of the city — and even outside of the state, to be on the city's front lines. Under congestion pricing, those who live outside of 60th Street in Manhattan will have to pay a toll beginning at $9 for cars during peak periods in order to get to stations located in downtown Manhattan. Union president Oren Barzilay said Friday while they fought for exemptions and discounts at public hearings, ultimately, they were not included in the groups eligible. "My men and woman, they live in their cars, they live in their families or friends' houses. They sleep on couches, they sleep at stations because they can't afford to go back and forth every day. This will more than likely be the nail in the coffin, they will likely resign, or demand to be transferred to another station," Barzilay said. Barzilay did not have an exact number, but said some workers have already submitted reassignment forms and they expect the number to increase once the toll goes into effect on Jan. 5. “Mark my words, it will likely have a large, negative impact on public safety that will soon enough lead to a rush by Albany and City Hall’s countless and well-paid government funded spin doctors to point the blame and fingers at each other, as they always do. Actions speak louder than words and this tax is a lose-lose for the FDNY EMS and public safety,” Barzilay added. https://brooklyn.news12.com/local-ems-union-encourages-workers-to-request-reassignment-out-of-congestion-relief-zone IN AMENDMENT murders in NYC 375 in 2024 390 in 2023 shootings in NYC 1091 in 2024 1150 in 2023 New York Ctiy has ten million people , ten percent is one million, one percent is one hundred thousand. a tenth of one percent is ten thousand. a hundredth of one percent is one thousand Piror Entry https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11402-economiccorner005/

@Pioneer1 haha @ProfD sometimes:) yeah owning other human beings allows for grander levels of egalitarianism in government

@ProfD in south america/africa/asia people are bartering alot, when you said humans you meant citizens/residents of the usa right? I hope so i think those who are tricked out o their funds in the universal basic income will potentially be the labor class you speak thus by your own words humanity can't do away with money , if human organization becomes impossible @Pioneer1 of course because all systems can be abused to gain profits, remember genocide is first, slavery is second , those two are the first two elements of the usa, and what do they teach? take advantage to others no matter what. so financially that means extort wealth no matter what, an unwritten law. excellent question. it will be state laws, remember the usa has a long history of state laws varying widely and an issue like this will be state law. Colorado can make a law for to adjust the universal basic income based on time spent in colorado or which state someone is coming from, this is who abortion works now. It may seem messy but you may not know but the usa was like this for alot of its history. The federal age, if you will from the late 1800s to 2000 wasn't how the usa usually operated state to state.

@Pioneer1 they have a set of fortune cookies @ProfD their jobs:) their job is to get elected, the tenure is the kickback:) @Pioneer1 we, who is we? we? who is we? could of, would of, should of... yeah. But I will always argue this situation is what black leadership from circa 1865 in majority, not marcus garvey, not the black panthers, not malcolm, but most black leaders including mlk or frederick douglass or web dubois or obama were talking about. a situation where individual black achievement can occur. But not communal black achievement.

@ProfD well, the problem is the global marketplace. Remember, the resources of wealthy countries is intertwined, no government today that is militaristically powerful has a totally internal marketplace. so, making the cost of things low will require an alignment that militaristically can't exist at the moment. @Pioneer1 your correct, all systems can be abused, remember the first lotto in the usa was in new york state and it was sold to the voters as a way to help schools but that is not where that money goes so... can universal basic income be abused? yes . will each of the fifty states in the usa utilize universal basic income the same? no. And like health insurance/pension plans it will be a state by state variance that will financially be important to mention. @ProfD universal basic income is welfare, it is socialism, it is stimulus checks, those three truths is why it has detractors who support fiscal capitalism rigidly as a system or those who have this idea of the merit of labor in fiscal capitalism, which opposes revenue earned absent labor wage or market trade. This is why I mentioned the usa debt and the connection to military power side universal basic income. In fiscal capitalism, giving money absent a market action means debt increase so it will be an annual increase. But again, it has to happen cause the labor market, globally, no longer has the quantity of jobs to support the idea of the labor market being opportune enough to support the human populace as a whole or in one government. I argue, from a usa perspective, the first blow was the end of enslavement in the usa, as absent enslavement plus the an ever largening policy of immigration you create a populace with labor needs that can't be sustained. The first part of the second blow was the exodus of jobs in the usa starting in the 1950s. When the usa started allowing jobs in the usa to exist outside the usa, it harmed the domestic labor market extremely. The goal was to offer carrots to governments absent any labor market during the war between the usa + ussr, and it succeeded in regaling more governments, but it was harmful domestically, and the action by getting the japanese to give japanese auto jobs to usa citizens wasn't enough of an offsetter. The second part of the second blow came alongside the first part and that was the mass ownership of farms. yes, mass ownership of farms allowed for controlled food production to generate food for the ever growing populace, aside price control for produce. But, it also killed the one place that allows in fiscal capitalism a labor intensive affordable place for the masses and that is the individual farm, the family farm. Urban life can not offer the labor opportunity for expanding populaces like farms. The attempt with franchises hasn't worked and wasn't going to. The house on a farm can be upkept by wood from the trees on the farm. You can pay a person through food they help make and a room if you own the farm. Urban life doesn't yield to that. The third blow was the fiat currency, this allowed the usa to make money for its own purposes which served to free the usa from obtaining mineral wealth through violent means to maintain its advantage in the usa+ussr war, but the usa didn't use the financial power to finance infrastructure, schools, small business while using it to support failed large industries or businesses, the airline industry/the automotive industry/the weapons makers/ the internet firms later on/ the real estate industry later on/ the banking industry later on , all saved by the fiat currency. Which has never been used for infrastructure effectively, add on the end of benchmarks later and less use of the fiat currency to build up locally. So.. the usa has financially guided itself to a situation where it needs socialism/expanded welfare/stimulus checks to maintain its financial balance. financial mismanagement

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Universal Basic Income is coming, fiscal capitalism with modern technological capabilities deletes the need for physical toiling human labor, in regions in humanity that have the militaristic power + natural resources to maintainthe technological capability. But what are some general problems? Giving money allows for those, like telemarketers, like similar scammers to acquire large profits. How can they be stopped absent a level of legal criminalization to such activities that is absent in the financially wealthiest governments. No modern multiracial populaces has a consistent legal or administrative history of providing any service equally to individuals regardless of their race: gender/phenotype/age/language/edutation level/health/financial value. So how can universal basic income? The ability of the usa to raise its own debt or generate more debt for itself absent a fear of debt collection by its military power allows for a severe abuse in its general populace The prime problem i see in the Black populace in the usa, the phenotypical race made up of Black: DOSers/Caribbeana/Africana/Asiana/First Peoples, is the belief from many Black people in the usa that black people, not non blacks , are inadequate or irresponsible or something similar to have Universal Basic Income. For Black DOSers this comes from the legacy of enslavement and the minority of Blacks circa 1865 who were able to overcome white terror who suggested all black people could overcome said white terror but lacked something to do it. Finland’s universal basic income trial made people happier—but not employed By Charlotte Jee February 11, 2019 A trial where unemployed people in Finland were given a basic income for two years did not get them into work—but it make them healthier and happier, according to initial results. [ https://julkaisut.valtioneuvosto.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/161361/Report_The Basic Income Experiment 20172018 in Finland.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y OR https://1drv.ms/b/c/ea9004809c2729bb/ETkUV74BKBlJrvXrruWIjFcBkmRyuTzQGqIF8iPqGMceOQ?e=O5jIJI ] The experiment: From January 2017 to December 2018, 2,000 unemployed people in Finland received an unconditional monthly payment of €560 ($634) instead of their usual unemployment benefit (a similar sum). The goal was to see if this would help them get back to work. The pilot found that basic income recipients were no more likely to find work than a control group who did not receive the payments. However, they reported significantly better overall well-being. A final report on the trial will be released in 2020. Universal basic income: The idea [ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/06/20/141704/basic-income-could-work-if-you-do-it-canada-style/ ] is to give everyone the same monthly income, regardless of means. It’s a concept that’s grown in popularity in recent years, as part of thinking around how to combat job losses and insecurity caused by automation. It has also been tested in Canada, Namibia, India, and other countries. [ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/27/103611/universal-basic-income-had-a-rough-2018/ ] Is that it?: Inevitably, the results from Finland raise questions about whether UBI works. However, it’s worth pointing out that the data only covers 2017, the first year of the trial, and it’s questionable whether focusing solely on people who are unemployed can really qualify as a “universal” basic income. We’ve got extra data to work with, but the debate is far from settled. by Charlotte Jee URL https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/11/66119/finlands-universal-basic-income-trial-made-people-happier-but-not-employed/ LINKED IN THE ARTICLE ABOVE Basic income could work—if you do it Canada-style A Canadian province is giving people money with no strings attached—revealing both the appeal and the limitations of the idea. By Brian Bergsteinarchive page June 20, 2018 Dana Bowman, 56, expresses gratitude for fresh produce at least 10 times in the hour and a half we’re having coffee on a frigid spring day in Lindsay, Ontario. Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. She’d also save by visiting a food bank or buying marked-down items near or past their sell-by date. But since December, Bowman has felt secure enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. She’s freer, she says, to “do what nanas do” for her grandchildren, like having all four of them over for turkey on Easter. Now that she can afford the transportation, she might start taking classes in social work in a nearby city. She feels happier and healthier—and, she says, so do many other people in her subsidized apartment building and around town. “I’m seeing people smiling and seeing people friendlier, saying hi more,” she says. Jim Garbutt sees moods brightening, too, at A Buy & Sell Shop, a store he and his wife run on Lindsay’s main street. Sales are brisker for most of what they sell: used furniture, kitchen items, novelties. A Buy & Sell Shop is the kind of place where people come in just to chat—“we’re like Cheers, without the alcohol,” Garbutt says—and more and more people seem hopeful. “Spirits are up,” he says. What changed? Lindsay, a compact rectangle amid the lakes northeast of Toronto, is at the heart of one of the world’s biggest tests of a guaranteed basic income. In a three-year pilot funded by the provincial government, about 4,000 people in Ontario are getting monthly stipends to boost them to at least 75 percent of the poverty line. That translates to a minimum annual income of $17,000 in Canadian dollars (about $13,000 US) for single people, $24,000 for married couples. Lindsay has about half the people in the pilot—some 10 percent of the town’s population. The trial is expected to cost $50 million a year in Canadian dollars; expanding it to all of Canada would cost an estimated $43 billion annually. But Hugh Segal, the conservative former senator who designed the test, thinks it could save the government money in the long run. He expects it to streamline the benefits system, remove rules that discourage people from working, and reduce crime, bad health, and other costly problems that stem from poverty. Such improvements occurred during a basic-income test in Manitoba in the 1970s. People far beyond Canada will be watching closely, too, because a basic income has become Silicon Valley’s favorite answer to the question of how society should deal with the massive automation of jobs. Tech investors such as Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, are funding pilot projects to examine what people do when they get money with no strings attached. Hughes’s Economic Security Project will pay for 100 people in Stockton, California, to get $500 a month for 18 months. Y Combinator ran a small-scale test in Oakland, California, last year; beginning in 2019 it will give $1,000 a month to 1,000 people over three to five years, in locations still to be determined. This momentum figures to keep building as AI and robotics make even more inroads. Legislators in Hawaii are beginning to study the prospects for a basic income. The lawmaker who has led the effort, Democrat Chris Lee, worries that self-driving cars and automated retail checkout could be the beginning of the end for a lot of human labor in Hawaii’s service-based economy. If machines can handle tasks in tourism and hospitality, Lee says, “there is no fallback industry for jobs to be created in.” But there’s an important difference between that vision for a basic income and the experiment in Ontario. The Canadians are testing it as an efficient antipoverty mechanism, a way to give a relatively small segment of the population more flexibility to find work and to strengthen other strands of the safety net. That’s not what Silicon Valley seems to imagine, which is a universal basic income that placates broad swaths of the population. The most obvious problem with that idea? Math. Many economists concluded long ago that it would be too expensive, especially when compared with the cost of programs to create new jobs and train people for them. That’s why the idea didn’t take off after tests in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s largely why Finland decided not to extend a small basic income trial. If any place can illuminate both the advantages of basic income and the problems it can’t solve, it will be Lindsay. The town is prosperous by some measures, with a median household income of $55,000 and a historic downtown district where new condos and a craft brewery are on the way. But that masks how tough it is for a lot of people to get by. Manufacturing in the surrounding area, known as the Kawartha Lakes, has declined since the 1980s. Many people juggle multiple jobs, including seasonal work tied to tourism in the summer and fall. Technology is part of the story too: robots milk cows now. Basic income as a social equalizer The Olde Gaol Museum is indeed an old jail, but it’s also a showcase for things that reveal the texture of Lindsay’s history—uniforms that nurses from town wore in France during World War I; tools and maps used by railway workers when this was a hub for eight railroad lines; 19th-century paintings by a local artist who depicted the timeless regional pastimes of canoeing and fishing. When curatorial assistant Ian McKechnie gives me a tour, he stops and plays a lovely tune on a foot-pumped organ called a harmonium that was made in Ontario more than a hundred years ago. McKechnie, 27, has worked at the museum for seven years and is devoted to it. Unlike his previous job, when he was briefly a laborer at a goat cheese factory, it offers a chance to be creative and connect with many people in the community. He doesn’t just give tours: he researches and organizes exhibits and writes supporting materials. But on the day we meet, the museum is not paying him to be at work, and therein lies a story about why he and the Olde Gaol’s operations supervisor, Lisa Hart, both signed up for the basic income. The museum gets almost all its revenue from grants, and one just expired. The manager of the museum recently left, and so it falls largely to McKechnie and Hart to keep things going until another grant comes in. Even when it does, these won’t be lucrative jobs—perhaps $20,000 a year for McKechnie’s. They could find positions in the area that pay more, but both would much rather continue their labor of love at the museum. Leaving now might undercut its momentum toward a more sustainable future, which could include a new cultural center that would connect the museum with a local art gallery. Thanks to the basic-income trial, both can afford to stay on with the museum. And in the meantime, Hart says, she will no longer put off buying new eyeglasses. The basic income “allows you to spend time on something that’s valuable,” she says. “It’s very sad to walk away from something where you’re valued and doing something meaningful for the community because it just can’t pay you a lot.” This highlights an intriguing aspect of basic income: it functions in different ways for different people. The way Hart describes it, it’s fuel for cultural development. For Dana Bowman, who might now take classes in social work and regularly volunteers at a community garden, it’s a food subsidy, an educational grant, and a neighborhood improvement fund all in one. For a married couple who own a health-food restaurant that barely covers its costs, it’s a small-business booster. A man who hurt his back working in a warehouse told me he hoped it could augment his employer’s disability payments. A student who was about to graduate from a technical college and had a job lined up said he planned to use the extra income to pay down school loans and start saving for a house. For McKechnie, the basic income is something broader: a social equalizer, a recognition that people who make little or no money are often doing things that are socially valuable. “It gives one the assurance that the work you’re doing is not in vain, even though you’re not working in a bank or doing other things that are considered part of a career,” he says. Even if a basic income turns out to be a flexible and efficient government program, it’s not clear that it would be a great way to respond to technological unemployment. Over and over again, people in Lindsay told me it won’t reduce people’s demand for jobs. As a practical matter, the Ontario trial doesn’t pay enough to eliminate most people’s need to work or to rely on family for support. But even if a richer payout were feasible, that wouldn’t change the philosophy of the program. Basic-income supporters want to improve the odds that people will take better care of themselves and their families. They want a humane and dignifying way of helping people who simply can’t work. But they also argue that most people generally want and expect to work. “It’s not supposed to be welfare for people displaced by technology,” says one of the basic-income advocates, Mike Perry, who runs a medical practice in Kawartha Lakes. Moreover, while giving poor people money helps them, it still leaves urgent and difficult questions unanswered about the impacts of automation and globalization. What will it take to ensure that entire regions aren’t left far behind economically? What can be done to boost the supply of good, steady jobs? Basic income “is only the beginning,” says Roderick Benns, former vice chair of the Ontario Basic Income Network. “It’s not just ‘cut a check and get on with building the corporatocracy.’ We have to ask what else we are doing as a society to get people to reimagine what they can do with their lives.” Benns, the author of several books, grew up in Lindsay. Until recently, he and his wife, Joli Scheidler-Benns, lived three hours away, but the pilot is so important to them that they moved back so he can chronicle it in a new publication called the Lindsay Advocate and she can do research for her PhD on the subject at York University. After Benns describes how basic income should augment job training and other social programs, Scheidler-Benns, who is originally from Michigan, nods and then adds: “I don’t see how it could work in the US.” After all, she says, Canada does many other things to strengthen its safety net and reduce inequality. For one, it has universal health care. School funding in Ontario is primarily allocated at the province level rather than being heavily dependent on local property taxes, as it is in the US. Canada also traditionally spends about 1 percent of its GDP on workforce-development programs, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s about half of the proportion in other advanced countries, but it still dwarfs the US figure, which is about 0.3 percent. Funding a different mind-set Tony Tilly is the outgoing president of Fleming College, which specializes in preparing people in Kawartha Lakes for careers in both white-collar work and trades. About half the students don’t come right from high school; they’ve already been in the workforce and hope to learn a new skill. He supports a basic income because he thinks it could help people break out of poverty that has beset their families for generations. But even if the program continues past the three-year trial period, Fleming’s essential challenge would remain: how to prepare students for a world in which more and more tasks are being automated. Fleming is still priming its graduates to work in traditional strongholds of the regional economy: jobs tied to the environment and natural resources, infrastructure development, mining, construction, and government. But the school is trying to instill a different mind-set from the one students had when Tilly became its president 14 years ago. They now get more emphasis on so-called soft skills: teamwork, problem-solving, personal interaction. Above all, he says, they need to know “not only how to do some particular job but how to contribute overall to the success of an organization, whether it’s a manufacturer or a provider of social services.” If the basic-income plan works as expected, Fleming might get even more students than it otherwise would. Dana Bowman could be one of them. It’s been years since she last had a paying job, as a receptionist. She has been on disability for a variety of ailments, including skin cancer and arthritis. But she feels she is up to doing some part-time work. In 2015, two years before the basic-income trial, Bowman asked a case worker if she could get help paying for transportation to a Fleming campus that offers classes in social work. The official said that would lead to cuts in other benefits Bowman relied on. The message Bowman says she got was: “You’re unemployable. You’re not worth investing in.” In contrast, the basic-income plan ensures a minimum for her without micromanaging how she spends it. For every dollar that recipients earn above the minimum, their payout from the province will be cut by 50 cents, but no one is made worse off by working. Even being able to consider that prospect, Bowman says, has been good for her. “I don’t feel ‘less than.’ I feel ‘equal to.’ Not feeling guilty walking down the street, thinking, ‘I didn’t do enough today,’” she says. “People want to do something. People aren’t inclined to do nothing.” by Brian Bergstein URL https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/06/20/141704/basic-income-could-work-if-you-do-it-canada-style/ Last Edition https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/11377-economiccorner004/ Tool Deviantart Dreamup prompt: diamond italian renaissance door constructed by Lorenzo Ghiberti explaining Universal Basic Income artstyle dreamup aspect ratio 3:4 prompt strength 20 negative prompt : dull, poor lighting, multiple images,uneven

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Happy Perihelion , happy new year During the perihelion the earth is closest to the sun and the sun actually appears smaller and smaller in the sky till the midyear, the aphelion in which the sun then gets bigger and bigger in the sky photo citation https://www.flickr.com/photos/benheine/31614749540/ 2024 work list literal list https://rmnewsletter.substack.com/p/2024-art-list-rmnewsletter list with image previews- scroll under the Cento https://rmnewsletter.over-blog.com/2024/11/12/01/2024-rmnewsletter.html

good luck!! https://www.bedsidereading.com/vote.html

@ProfD well, Black people in the usa, are still mostly Descended of Enslaved but from circa 1865 a very large percentage of financially affluent blacks personally rejected the influence of our enslavement to whites in the condition of blacks or non blacks in the usa, and that population's percentage among the fiscally wealthiest black people has only grown over the century and a half plus. Then you add the black immigrants who were never enslaved or descended from those enslaved immigrants into the usa and you get the environment. It isn't that black people are allowing slavery to become a distant memory, in my offline talks with various black people, all know of slavery in the usa. But, it is the relationhship they have to the usa. Black people from the caribbean, africa, south america, south east asia, india, have a positive relationship at the core to their relationship to the usa. Unlike me, a DOSer whose relationship at the core to the usa is negative. I only exist because of slavery. My forebears didn't want to leave africa, they didn't want to be enslaved, they didn't want to come to the american continent. I don't think comprehension is the issue, it is relationships and I end with , it isn't bad that some black people have a positive relationship to the usa. The DOSers are a people, all other black people in the usa don't need to be us,I assume your a DOSer too... BUT it is clear DOSers need a more internally focused position concerning our forebears enslavement or our unique relationship to the usa because of it. Interesting choice, thank you for answering... very expensive, very holistic as well, I wonder the others answers

@Troy Ok I will go question by question No on two counts. one i don't view the sentiment of the black populace in the usa in congruence to the sentiment of the non black populace. I restate, For me, the usa never had and doesn't have a singular public sentiment. It has various sentiments, and the one from the non black tends to be touted as representing the whole. The second count is the black populaces condition to each of the stated: panthers for self defense, Nat turner, neely are not equal. Nat Turner was at a time when most in the black public in the usa were enslaved to whites in a straight physical way while oppressed as illiterate, blockaded from opportunity, terrorized by the legal system citizens. During the Black PAnthers for self defense the black public in the usa went through the initial molding of individual achievement by blacks in white spaces while communal destruction of blacks by white bureuacraices. A trend that would continue and persist to this day in the Descended of enslaved branch of the black public in the usa. During Neelys time the quantity or black immigrants, in the black public in the usa and the perspective to the usa most of them share creates a modern black public in the usa that has embraced the idea of the human citizen in the black populace itself. I don't know if you saw local new york city news, but the black woman who was in the train car when the murder of neely occurred boasted how she felt so endangered, more than the other non blacks giving testimony. [to a later question i had an offline multilog about that] The black public in the usa is not the same through the times you mentioned in important ways in my eyes and sequentially their sentiments can not be equal in my eyes, beyond rhetoric or advertised claims. no I think neely was angry at his personal state in this oppositional legal space, ala the usa, plus i think neely needed financial help. Being upset at the condition of one's black individual self or the black populace while considering white power while being in need financially in general is the most common condition for black people from the thirteen colonies to today in the usa. I should had asked you what you meant by mental health. Some argue giving someone a hug is mentally healthy. Some argue talking to someone civilly is mental health so depending on how you define mental health i will probably have to write a correction. But I don't know what you mean but I answered anyway. Any black person who was raised in a big city who feels that way, as I stated earlier i recall the black woman who championed her fear in local news and i first felt it toward her while thinking of other black folk, offline connections, who I have multilogged the issue of relating to other blacks in urban environments with. I apologize for not having the link but I recall in this forum a post where this was discussed between members of aalbc and i stood apart from you and pioneer plus others on this issue. Well... to be blunt, in this forum, we all discussed this already. I know black people who were murdered by cops form 1970s to 1990s and were not in illegal activity. But no one personal was murdered by another citizen that i know of. and in harlem. Harmed yes. Attacked? yes. but not murdered. Now I hear of murders every day. I think Pioneer 1 was the one who debated with me, we discussed this issue of crime in the black populace of nyc, he stands firmly aside you. If it wasn't pioneer i apologize. It may have been Profd or someone else. Forgive me. But, I recall i stood alone on my philosophical side of the fence to you Troy plus the majority of the activie forum members in the post in the past. If you ask me, do more people die in nyc than any small town or city in the usa? I will answer yes. If you ask me, Do some large cities of comparative size around the world have less illegal acts or injuries between residents or citizens than nyc? yes, though people rarely input the fact that the development of nyc has always been of dysfunctional congestion and i speak from manahatta with the lenape and the white europeans coming in. NYC has a heritage of accepting large populaces pushed into it and then people in nyc complaining that the dysfunctional compression leads to negativity. To the street, we all talked about this. I wish i could remember thename of the book plus the book reviewer for a new york times book review; a black man who was raised in east harlem who boasted how his black church going relatives came out with guns everyday and i know black people offline who lived in that area and said it wasn't like that. Who called the reviewer or author a liar on their position. What is my point? I am not trying to regale. I have a friend who lost someone they know to black on black violence in the city. So I can accept that , maybe, most black people in nyc or big city black populaces live in hell and black people like me are a minority maybe even extreme minority but I am not going to lie and suggest my experiences amongst black people in nyc were akin to a supposed majority. @ProfD Why not? see the one word i didn't see anyone use , including me, was slavery. As a lover of history the odd thing about slavery in the usa, is, the heritage of slavery in the usa is older than the usa. the heritage of slavery in the usa is stronger than fisal capitalism or individual liberty. and yet, so few black people use the word slavery, including me it seems. Maybe if black people start from slavery as the base heritage in the usa then all crimes, injuries to others, makes sense. Capitalism can be ruthless. But Slavery is a greater sinner. And Slavery is the heart of the usa, at least historically. The first peoples in the usa on the east coast were enslaved out of existence alot of times. i think the usa's inequal treatments, its tribalism, make perfect sense when you embrace slavery as the core statian ideal, not individualism, not fiscal capitalism, slavery. Slavery doesn't require fiscal capitalism or communism or monarchism. Slavery doesn't require individual rights or collective allowances. And wherever slavery exist you have the enslavers who abuse but you also have the enslaved who are angry...And I will end with one clear point, even in the time of the roman empire it was clear that the queen of the gauls could be a free woman while the gaulish peoples are completely enslaved. so having black billionaires or presidents doesn't mean the larger black populace isn't enslaved, in some fashion. @Pioneer1 just a thought question and i open up to @ProfD or @Troy Do you think big cities in the usa need to be broken up? I comprehend fully well the city governments and real estate industry and others will never accept such a thing but this is a thought experiment. But if you were a city council member and your vote meant the city will pass a law to break itself up into parts as near to internally homogeneous as possible, would you sign it?

@ProfD we will see. Just in case you didn't read this is from the new york post article Kawam, who was originally from Toms River, said her memories at the public school were participating in freshman and sophomore cheerleading and that her secret ambition was “to party forever.” She signed off her biography thanking her parents “for everything.” Kawam was one of three students who earned the superlative of “million dollar smile” and “most punk,” according to the outlet. ... Toms River resident Olga Corpion had purchased the house Kawam’s mother once lived in and said she met Debrina shortly after Corpion moved into the neighborhood in May. “She said, ‘Hi, my name is Debrina, and I want to go see my mom. My mother lives here. I want to talk to her,’” Corpion told The Post. “She looked like she was in her 50s, so right away I assumed she was not well, because she didn’t know her mom had moved. “I’m in shock that she was standing right here and then I found out she died so horribly.” I am not sure whites will use this as a rallying call to blockade illegal immigrants because the white populace today in the usa has so many immigrants. The immigration act led to a growth in immigrant populaces in the black /white/first peoples populaces that we see playing out today. Schrumpf has white asians/white arabs/white latinos/white women/white men all these people are used to abusing blacks in the usa/negros in latin america/kalo in india/aswad in muslim lands/kokuchin in east asia, but a non black attacking a white is treated as an individual crime in said regions. The parts of her identity that the new york post proclaims so loudly with love I find interesting as I have heard offline black people, especially elders or church folk or black donkeys or elephants, speak so ill to other black people for. her secret ambition was to party forever. Wow, I have never seen the masses of the black populace in the usa ever support a black person with such a statement. Damn non blacks, black people tend to never be supportive of black people with such a statement. And funny how the white man they spoke to said she was ill but not mentally ill again, funny how black people are the most willing to call their own mentally ill in the usa. But as you said, we will see where this leads.

@Pioneer1 + @ProfD good points , but I found the following image, is supposedly of Debrina Kawam citation https://nypost.com/2025/01/01/us-news/debrina-kawam-photo-of-nyc-subway-passenger-burned-to-death/ My issues are 1) the whole mental illness issue is a masquerade for an old media narrative that many in the black populace have claimed to other black people for over one hundred and fifty years. You guys know the history. MAny black people called NAt Turner crazy. I can tell you for certain that many Black people , especially from the damn black church , called the panthers for self defense mentally ill, malcolm suggesting violent retribution mentally ill. The mental illness claim from black people to black people is as old as the end of the war between the states to modernity. Do some black people in the usa have a mental imbalance? yes, as do some whites. But most black people cited as mentally ill have simple come to violent conclusions, and those blacks who have not, for years have championed the idea of getting other black peoples minds set to right. 2) this is a white woman? If any black person questions the truth of whites+ black allies of white treating blacks uniquely in a negative way amongst the non white european populaces, the people of color, here is the proof. IF Zapeta calil was black, not mestizo, Eric Adams would be championing his mental illness claim to high heaven, not immigration. And my support is mass shootings. 99% of all mass shootings are non blacks, and you never hear mental illness claims, especially from the black elected officials, black church or black people in forums like this that talk about mental illness so much. The MAGA people come from a tradition of whites complaining about blacks, not whites complaining about non blacks. White asian/mestizos/other whites are all free of their mob ways. @Pioneer1 well said , the idea that being financially poor is better outside cities is an insult. Small towns can not help the horde of homeless who have always existed in NYC, and have no ways to assist. The people who can leave NYC effectively are not the homeless, not the people of the street, not the people in projects. I know quite a few people who have left nyc from guiliani to now, all black, but none were homeless, none lived on the street. Working poor, yeah ok. Retiree yeah ok. Some people who could afford but just left, yeah ok. All of them lived in a tenement or brownstone or co op in some fashion. Yes, NYC is becoming pricier but, in defense, NYC was always congested with poor. again, i have alot of problems with people who have lived in NYC and tend to speak of it falsely. NYC has a density over three times great as california while having a smaller city boundary. I argue NYC has always been the safest city in the usa, the problem is that, it's populace is so big, the human reality means you get negative incidents, but these are always uncommon things. And for the record I know the subway, i have definitely seen homeless people that look , unfortunate in many levels. But I never felt fear while I also have seen many people on the subway act like they can't handle the existence of said homeless people. And I have always said, and i repeat, if you live in a big city and you don't comprehend a big city is not a town it is not a suburb it is not a place where you can live like you own a house on your own land next to a village then you, not the homeless, need to leave the city. Silwa is a dramatist. NYC had more violence in times past than the 1970s. People like silwa will never admit that nyc's problems in the 1970s all stemmed from the government itself, starting with the nypd. The NYPD flooded all majority non white european regions in the city with drugs, getting a financial cut of it all , while complaining about the condition of said regions while NYC was defunding all the infrastructure programs that existed when said regions were mostly white european, from repairing projects to funding public schools. And even with the NYC government manuacturing instability, woe, harm, negativity, the city was still mostly peaceful, a testament to the human, not churches, not the silvwa's of the world. Eric Adams himself talks about the condition of the community so much but he wasn't beaten by homeless people or drug dealers, he was beaten up by law enforcement.

I was unable to find the stageplay book. I imagine someone has it somewhere. But if I ever get it I will share it in this work. This isn't the first african american stageplay, my book of old stageplays have many that are older and that were popular. But Shuffle Along did have a sensation especially among whites that is underrated. Well, enjoy the images. Shuffle Along (1921) Posted onMarch 16, 2008by contributed by: Anthony Duane Hill Shuffle Along, a musical comedy by composer Eubie Blake and lyricist Noble Sissle which featured an all-black cast, was the most significant achievement in black theatre of its time. Shuffle Along opened at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., in late March, 1921 for two weeks. It was later performed at the Sixty-third Street Theatre in New York City, New York in May, 1921. Promoters and theatre managers were skeptical at first as to whether white audiences would accept a colored musical because no black show had been successful on Broadway in over 12 years. The musical mélange became an instant hit because of the energetic, vivacious, torso-twisting dancers that gave birth to the speed shows that were to characterize black productions thereafter. It also won the distinction of becoming an actor’s show during its more than its 200 performances. It proved that white audiences would pay to see black musical comedies on Broadway. Among the cast were Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, Paul Floyd, Lottie Gee, Gertrude Saunders, Roger Matthews, Mattie Wilkes, Lawrence Deas, and Adelaide Hall. The plot centers on the characters Sam and Steve who run for mayor in Jimtown, USA. If either one wins, he will appoint the other his chief of police. Sam wins with the help of a crooked campaign manager. Sam keeps his promise to appoint Steve as chief of police, but they begin to disagree on petty matters. They resolve their differences in a rousing, humorous 20-minute fight scene. As they fight, their opponent for the mayoral position, Harry Walton, vows to end their corrupt regime, underscored in the song “I’m Just Wild about Harry.” Harry wins the next election as well as the girl and runs Sam and Steve out of town. Recording companies marketed all of the 18 song from the show including “Love Will Find a Way” and “I’m Just Wild about Harry” (which became President Harry S. Truman’s campaign slogan in 1948) “Gypsy Blues,” “I’m Cravin’ for That Kind of Love,” and “Shuffle Along.” The landmark production renewed the public’s interest in black theatricals and marked a decided turning point in the history of black entertainment in the United States. It introduced to the Broadway stage a black chorus of partially garbed “girls” in the style of the white “Follies.” Because of the show’s popularity, the entertainment profession witnessed the return of black musical comedies to Broadway on a regular basis. url https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/shuffle-along-1921/ The 1921 sheet-music cover for “Love Will Find a Way.” Listen to a version of the song from the 1952 revival here. CreditMusic Division, The New York Public Library ‘Shuffle Along’ and the Lost History of Black Performance in America By John Jeremiah Sullivan March 24, 2016 Ninety-­five years ago in New York, a journalist named Lester Walton bought a ticket to see a much-­buzzed-­about new show, a “musical novelty” that had opened about a week before at the Sixty-­Third Street Theater. Or the Sixty-­Third Street Music Hall, as it was more properly called. A kind of multipurpose performance space, not very big, not very nice, “sandwiched in between garages,” Walton wrote, and “little known to the average Broadway theatergoer.” You could rent the place for the night. It had philosophical lectures, amateur violin recitals and religious meetings, and during the day it showed silent movies: “ ‘Pudd’n Head Wilson,’ with Theodore Roberts, tomorrow.” But on this evening — and for many months to come, as it turned out — the stage belonged to an all-black show called “Shuffle Along,” a comedy with lots of singing and dancing. A problem: The music hall had no orchestra pit, and this show needed an orchestra. It needed space for the band, which happened to include a 25-year-old musician known as Bill Still, later to become the famous composer William Grant Still, but in 1921 a mostly unheard-­of young man from Arkansas, switching among the six or seven instruments he taught himself to play. The production was forced to rip out seats in the front three rows to make room. These were people used to improvising. Among themselves, they referred to the show as “Scuffle Along.” Les Walton, the journalist in the audience that night, was also a theater man. In St. Louis, a city he left behind 15 years before — and where he got his start as America’s first black reporter for a local daily, writing about golf — he had somehow come to know and collaborate with the legendary Ernest Hogan, a.k.a. the Unbleached American, an early black minstrel and vaudeville comedian who (by some historians’ reckoning) was the first African-­American performer to play before a white audience on Broadway. Walton and Hogan wrote songs together, and it was Hogan who first brought Walton to New York, as a kind of business manager. Hogan was not so much unbleached as the opposite of bleached. He was a black entertainer who painted his face — with burned cork or greasepaint (or in emergencies, lampblack, or in real emergencies, anything black mixed with oil) — to make it appear darker. Or at least to make it appear different. In one picture of Hogan, from the 1890s, he looks more like a sock puppet, wearing a clownish pointed cap. The blacks-­in-­blackface tradition, which lasted more than a century in this country, strikes most people, on first hearing of its existence, as deeply bizarre, and it was. But it emerged from a single crude reality: African-­American people were not allowed to perform onstage for much of the 19th century. They could not, that is, appear as themselves. The sight wasn’t tolerated by white audiences. There were anomalous instances, but as a rule, it didn’t happen. In front of the cabin, in the nursery, in a tavern, yes, white people might enjoy hearing them sing and seeing them dance, but the stage had power in it, and someone who appeared there couldn’t help partaking of that power, if only ever so slightly, momentarily. Part of it was the physical elevation. To be sitting below a black man or woman, looking up — that made many whites uncomfortable. But what those audiences would allow, would sit for — not easily at first, not without controversy and disdain, but gradually, and soon overwhelmingly — was the appearance of white men who had painted their faces to look black. That was an old custom of the stage, going back at least to “Othello.” They could live with that. And this created a space, a crack in the wall, through which blacks could enter, because blacks, too, could paint their faces. Blacks, too, could exist in this space that was neither-­nor. They could hide their blackness behind a darker blackness, a false one, a safe one. They wouldn’t be claiming power. By mocking themselves, their own race, they were giving it up. Except, never completely. There lay the charge. It was allowed, for actual black people to perform this way, starting around the 1840s — in a very few cases at first, and then increasingly — and there developed the genre, as it were, of blacks-­in-­blackface. A strange story, but this is a strange country. Ernest Hogan died not too long after bringing Les Walton east to New York, but Walton maintained his interest in the theater and songwriting and had managed a theater in Harlem, the Lafayette. A progressive theater — it was the first major venue in New York to desegregate its audiences, i.e., to let blacks come down from the balcony and sit in the orchestra seats — and Walton worked hard to put serious black theater on the stage. At the same time, he had been making a name for himself as one of the first black arts critics in America, writing for The New York Age, a black newspaper. (His life would get only more interesting — over a decade later, Franklin D. Roosevelt named him an American minister to Liberia.) That evening, he went to see “Shuffle Along” on assignment. It was late May. That week, the Tulsa race riots had erupted more than a thousand miles away. A white mob torched one of the most prosperous black neighborhoods in America. Walton had already seen the show, with more or less the same cast. He had caught it in Philadelphia a month or so before, near the end of a long road tour meant to shake out the performers’ nerves and generally get the production battle-­hardened for New York. And he loved it — he saw it several times in the end. Which is surprising, maybe, given his interest in serious black theater and in ennobling the black community (in 1913, he campaigned to have the “n” in the word “Negro” capitalized as a matter of journalistic style), because “Shuffle” wasn’t exactly forward-­thinking on race. It broke boundaries, no doubt, but mainly through its success, and by having great pop tunes. Otherwise, it was a blacks-­in-­blackface production. Walton even mentions that there were “more than the usual number of comedians under cork in one show.” There was, however, an area in which the show genuinely pushed things forward: romance. In “Shuffle Along,” two black people fell in love onstage, and Walton wanted to see how a white audience would handle this. He came to the music hall expressly for that reason, he told us. The theater he had gone to in Philadelphia, the Dunbar, was a black place. Now, Walton wrote, he was “curious to learn if ‘Shuffle Along’ would find its way into the category of what is known, in the language of the performer, as a ‘white folks’ show.’ ” Could the production, in other words, manage to be both black enough to have “it” and at the same time white enough to make loads of money? Specifically, Walton wanted “to observe how the white people in the audience took to Roger Matthews, the tenor, and Lottie Gee, the prima donna, singing ‘Love Will Find a Way.’ ” What he expected to see was not rage or revolt but something more ambiguous, an occasional discomfort passing through the room, and perhaps at certain moments a holding-­back too, on the part of the cast. “White audiences, for some reason,” Walton wrote, “do not want colored people to indulge in too much lovemaking. They will applaud if a colored man serenades his girl at the window, but if, while telling of his great love in song he becomes somewhat demonstrative and emulates a Romeo — then exceptions are taken.” Black sexuality was dangerous. Walton was among the first critics of “Shuffle Along,” our first eyes on its original production. His response to the show was positive — “Speaking as a colored American,” he wrote, “I think ‘Shuffle Along’ should continue to shuffle along at the Sixty-­Third Street Theater for a Long Time.” And when he went back in October, he celebrated that the show was now “in its sixth month” at the music hall, assuring readers that the fact would be “pregnant with historical significance” for anyone “conversant with the ups and downs of colored theatricals” and all “the abortive, yet well-­intended efforts of the past.” But Walton’s response was complicated too, or shadowed by something. Facets of the show must have made him uneasy, just as the black-­on-­black romance had made some of the whites in the crowd uneasy. “Shuffle” seemed at times to have one foot stuck in the mire of a murkier racial past, even as it strode boldly forward with the other. Dancers in ‘‘Shuffle Along’’ performing ‘‘Bandanna Days.’’ Josephine Baker is sixth from the right.Credit...Eubie Blake Photograph Collection/Maryland Historical Society Savion Glover slouches a little. It’s not the slouch of an old man, not stiff — or the diffident slouch of a young one, for that matter — it’s somehow part of his movement, closer maybe to how boxers crouch, but relaxed. It suggests a body that’s resting slightly because it’s about to burst into motion, which he kept doing throughout the morning (this was late last summer). If the slouch was noticeable, it could have reflected the fact that Glover, the genius child at 42, had been spending hundreds of hours bent forward and pacing around like this, staring down at other people’s feet. For the last few months, he’d worked pretty much exclusively as a choreographer and would stay in that role for months to come as he conceived and staged a wildly ambitious revival of “Shuffle Along,” one of the most significant musicals of the 20th century. He would not appear onstage for this show. Except maybe, it was rumored, for a sort of cameo. There was one dance he liked so much he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stay away from it entirely. We were in a rehearsal space at the New 42nd Street Studios in Manhattan. A long open room with extremely high ceilings (productions have to be able to wheel in huge Broadway props sometimes). Giant windows at the front looked out onto 42nd Street, but no one looked out of them. It was dark and gray and pounding rain that day, as hard as I had ever seen it rain in New York. The noise of it made a strange effect when the dancers were actually dancing, because the sound of all their tap shoes was also loud, body-­shaking, so the two different thunders, theirs and the storm’s, were mixing and fading, creating illusions, and when the tap would stop abruptly, the rain outside for a second seemed like an echo or a rumbling of it. This happened most often when Glover would spot a mistake or something in his own choreography that he didn’t like and clap his hands to make everything quiet. In front of him in three rows, 15 or so of the most gifted young singer-­dancers in the country would come to an abrupt stop. Their eyes watching him were hard to look away from. Awe was there, but equally something that couldn’t afford to be awed, that was having to pay too close attention and was too professional to indulge it, and the two registers chased each other across their faces. To sit five or six feet away made a person want to reel back decades of career choices and become the world’s most passionate talentless tap dancer. Glover would slide forward into the crowd of dancers toward the person or group of people whose steps he wanted to change. Big loose dreads, tight V-neck T-shirt, tap shoes, sweats. He would stop and flash out some blazing routine. “Like that, like that,” talking while he danced. “Not da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-DA. It’s da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-DA-da-da.” The changes often seemed less rhythmical than mathematical. At tap’s higher levels, a dancer can hit an ungodly number of beats per second, so the variations of pattern that are potential in just two or three seconds’ span can quickly jump beyond a normal person’s ability to follow. “We have seven, so you’re actually coming in on the two.” The dancers picked up Glover’s minuscule tinkering within two to four tries. Some could do it right off. In particular, one young woman, a 22-year-old from Texas named Karissa Royster, had clearly been recognized by the group as having a Rain Woman knack for memorizing Glover’s choreography. She would watch it, do it, then sort of drift around the room repeating it. Everybody’s hands floated at their sides. On his side on the floor with his elbow cocked and his palm supporting his head lay George C. Wolfe, whose idea this production was. Wolfe is a big old deal in the theatrical world — winner of two Tonys, for directing “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” as well as “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” which revolved around Savion Glover’s talents, telling the saga of African-­American history by tracing the evolution of tap. It was an implausible-­sounding idea that succeeded wildly. The show kicked off a renaissance of interest in a form that Glover himself describes as “almost lost,” birthing a generation of what he called, with no modesty but no inaccuracy either, “Noise/Funk babies.” The show had paid a deep and very explicit homage to the black American cultural past and to Glover’s own teachers in the tap field, both the mentors he’d known in life, like Gregory Hines, and the ancestors, the inventors and innovators, people like Bill (Bojangles) Robinson or Ulysses (Slow Kid) Thompson, a spellbinding dancer who performed in the original “Shuffle.” He got his nickname from his ability to perform wild dance moves in completely credible-­looking slow motion, which audiences had just become familiar with through the movies. Also here, in the corner opposite where I sat, stood Daryl Waters, who worked on the music for both “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Noise/Funk.” And starring in this show — although she wasn’t there that day, except as an energy — was Audra McDonald, the powerhouse actress-­singer and Winner of Six Tony Awards, a phrase that has begun to trail her name like a title. Billy Porter and Brian Stokes Mitchell were here — both Tony winners as well. It was a supergroup of black Broadway and designed to be such. At a moment when the conversation about blacks and how they’re represented in American entertainment is as fraught as it has been since “The Birth of a Nation,” this bunch had undertaken to put one of the sacred relics of black theater back in front of the public. There was an inescapable sense that they’d be letting down more than themselves if they failed. An unfair pressure to put on anybody. Also an exciting one, for the people involved. I kept thinking of one of those movies where they’re trying to lift something out of the desert, some buried archaeological monument, and everyone’s wondering if the ropes will hold. Maybe it will fall and shatter. “Shuffle Along” is often called the first successful all-black musical. It wasn’t that — there was a prehistory, 20 or so years earlier — but in between the two pulses had come the Great Migration and the Great War. The list of names alone, of those whose careers “Shuffle” hatched in the original show and later productions, is enough to establish its influence on American theater and song as they played out over the rest of the 20th century: Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Nat King Cole, Florence Mills (one of the greatest who ever lived, said those who heard her sing). Langston Hughes said more than once that “Shuffle Along” was the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. In order to deal with the crush of patrons, the city had to alter the traffic pattern around the theater, turning a stretch of 63rd into a one-way street. It was a supernova. An argument could be made (has been made, by the scholar David S. Thompson in his unpublished “Shuffle Along in Theatrical Context”) that the reason chorus girls, or the stereotypical chorus girls in your mind, dance jazz is “Shuffle Along.” As Wolfe told me, “It introduced syncopation into the American musical,” meaning syncopation but also meaning blackness. Not blackface but black faces. Well, blackface too. Florence Mills in various costumes.Credit...White Studio/Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library The original “Shuffle” run lasted something like 500 nights, a record, they said, and it toured in different forms for years. There were spinoffs. It was announced that the pioneering blues singer Mamie Smith would appear in a show called “Struttin’ Along.” Nineteen hundred twenty-­one: the year of “Shuffle Along” and the year Mamie’s “Crazy Blues” became the first true black pop success. Before that, prehistory. After that, everything. The most famous song from “Shuffle,” “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” is one everybody can still hum. We may not know why we know it, how we heard it (from an old musical? a frog in a cartoon?), but it percolates somehow. Harry S. Truman used it as the theme song for his presidential campaign in 1948. A song written by African-­Americans used as a presidential campaign theme — it would take until Barack Obama’s candidacy for that to happen again. (Bob Dole used “Soul Man,” but that shouldn’t be allowed to count somehow.) It’s questionable whether Truman even knew who wrote it. By 1948, the song’s origins had been scrubbed. Although “I’m Just Wild About Harry” was originally a love song, the Harry character in “Shuffle Along” is also running for office. He wants to be “Mayor of Jimtown.” But even to write those two sentences, I’ve had to make it sound as though the show had more of a story than it did. The plot of the first “Shuffle Along” was mainly to allow an excuse for the singing and dancing. That was one of the first things Wolfe mentioned when I asked about “creative challenges” he encountered in dealing with the source text. It was the day after the rehearsal, and we were at the Music Box Theater on 45th Street, where the new production will be staged. Irving Berlin made that theater famous. The interior was beautifully baroque-­looking and on the intimate side size-wise. Music-­boxy. Wolfe stood on the stage and admired the empty seats. Lots of them, and very empty. “Look at those boxes,” he gasped. The boxes were elegant. Creative challenges? “The book,” he said, meaning the script, the nonmusical part of the show. “Terrible book, bad book. Everybody knows it’s terrible.” Because it was racist? “Because it was bad.” (And, it seems to me, because it was racist, or racially offensive;a typical line: “You ain’t got no business being no mayor and you knows you ain’t, what you talking about being mayors.”) What was a black director doing even messing with that in 2015? Wolfe said he cared less about the Major Historical Significance of the 1921 show and more about an attitude that he saw as having been present at the beginning of the “Shuffle” story, when the team that put the production together was touring the country, or first getting ready to stage the show in Manhattan. There was a “purity” to that scene, he said, using the last word I ever thought I’d hear about the origins of “Shuffle Along.” In what sense did he mean? “In the sense that they didn’t have time to have a full awareness of what they were doing.” Full awareness, as in, the politics of it? “Yes,” he said. “They weren’t savvy that way. They were too busy being creative.” He’d said “savvy” but had also meant “self-­conscious.” “They lived,” he said, “inside that pure love of wanting to do the thing you do, the part of me that gets into show business.” But weren’t they also having to deal with all sorts of racism, even inside the world of the theater, especially inside it sometimes? “Yes,” he said, “but they were trying to figure out how to make America work for them. It was, How do I keep pushing against this thing in order to be what I need to be?” He asked it with a real urgency that made his chin quiver. It was clearly not an abstract question for a gay black man from Frankfort, Ky., who had conquered Broadway. Nor an arbitrary one in the context of Wolfe’s career. In approaching “Angels in America” 23 years ago, he first keyed into the notion of “performance of self” that runs through the play. It was, he said, “something I understand from having been raised a Negro.” The tradition of blacks-­in-­blackface was sparked, according to one account, by the circus impresario P.T. Barnum one day in the early 1840s. He had a white kid in one of his shows, a boy by the name of Diamond, who specialized in what was called Juba or Juber dancing. Also “patting Juba.” That meant African dancing, plantation dancing. Expressive, complex, physically taxing. In Juba, you drum on your body, slapping your chest and knees and the soles of your feet. Certain familiar Celtic elements had been mixed into it over the decades and centuries, most obviously the percussive effect of hard-­soled shoes on a wooden floor, which could work as a drum during the dance (think clogging). It was with Juba as inspiration that blacks and Irish-­Americans created what we call tap. Or rather, that’s the kind of simplistic explanation that an actual dance scholar would quibble with every word of, but it’s trueish. So, Barnum had this Irish kid, John Diamond, doing Juba dancing in his shows. And Diamond would dance in blackface. Patting Juba was seen as a black thing, even if there were Irish and Scottish tinges, so Diamond performed it that way. But one day, around 1841, Barnum found out that Diamond had (supposedly) been dishonest in some financial dealing. Diamond, knowing that Barnum’s wrath was coming, ran off. And now Barnum was without his Juba dancer. Not just any Juba dancer, but the second-­best in the world. A newspaper’s depiction of Juba performing at Vauxhall Gardens in London in 1848.Credit...Illustrated London News Yes — there was one better. A boy even younger than Diamond. They called him Juba, that’s how good he was. Outside the circus tent, in a tavern or a theater, he and Diamond would compete against each other in challenge matches. They had teams of supporters. People gambled. It seems Juba hardly ever lost. “He defies all competition on ‘the light fantastic,’ ” they wrote in Boston. One of the first times the word “tap,” as a technical term of dance, showed its head was in an advertisement for a match, where we are told a judge will be present to “count the taps.” The only problem with young Juba, from P.T. Barnum’s point of view, was that he was black. The spectators wouldn’t accept it, or the laws and civic codes wouldn’t permit it, or Barnum himself just couldn’t deal with it. But here is where his cynical genius comes in. He decides to paint Juba black. Same burned cork, same curly black wig. He looked just like Diamond. But people went even more nuts for Juba. He was better. We don’t know the real name of Juba, the first great American tap dancer, and may never. The encyclopedias say William Henry Lane, but the lone source for that is a white theatrical agent turned journalist turned amateur historian named Thomas Allston Brown, who was not the type to use footnotes, and who anyway did not enter the entertainment world until years after the supposed Lane was dead. Brown’s other two sentences on Lane are anti-­factual. They include the statement that the dancer “married too late” to a white woman, which is a strange thing to say about a man who by most accounts was dead before he reached 30. They also include the claim that in 1852, Lane’s skeleton was placed on display at a music hall in Sheffield, England, but in truth he was still dancing in London in 1852, before he vanished as thoroughly as it is possible to vanish. There is slight reason to suspect that his real name may have been Redmond, though whether that was a first or last name, we cannot say. In any case, the question is academic. He was known as Juba. Prince Juba, Master Juba, Little Juba and Juba the King of All Dancers. The encyclopedias say he was born in Providence, R.I., around 1825, but an English journalist who interviewed him for The Manchester Times in 1848 — the only journalist who ever spoke to him and wrote about him, as far as can be determined — stated clearly that he was born in New York in 1830, a date that corresponds better with later reports of his age. The Providence theory may have sprung up because the band of minstrel musicians with whom he had toured earlier in his career, the Georgia Champions, formed in that city. When Juba’s great success in England was noted in a Providence paper in 1848, the article made no mention of his having been from there, only that he “formerly gave exhibitions of his skill in this city, at the ninepenny entertainments.” But he had done that in every city on the East Coast. Juba came up performing in the interracial underworld “halls” in the Five Points neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. That’s probably where Barnum discovered him. He played banjo and tambourine too, but those who saw him said he was the greatest dancer they’d ever witnessed, like Charles Dickens, who in his “American Notes” remembered having watched Juba dance in New York City. Dickens had written under the pen name Boz, so when Juba went to London in 1848, under the sponsorship of a white blackface minstrel named Gilbert Ward Pelham (the leader at that time of the Ethiopian Serenaders, with whom Juba also toured), the young dancer was billed as Boz’s Juba. The coverage he received from the English press from 1848 to 1852 is almost exhausting to follow, it grew to be so extensive, mostly ecstatic in its praise. All we know about him is that he was a brilliant dancer — an artist, not just an athlete — and that he was the first black entertainer to perform before large crowds of whites in a context that transcended the informal. He was onstage. The explosiveness of his new “tap” style allowed him to cross over. “Not to be irreverent about it,” said the early minstrel S.S. Sanford in 1874, but “he was the ‘John the Baptist,’ preceding by a few years the Jubilee Singers of Tennessee, who are now before the public with the full chorus of songs.” In the only semi-­naturalistic image we have of Juba performing, his face is coal black. In the one (cartoonish) picture of the Ethiopian Serenaders that includes him, he is indistinguishable from the others, from the white men. They are all painted the same. Only a caption tells us which is him. He’s holding a tambourine and looks about to jump up and start dancing. When the rehearsal was over, I spent an hour with Glover in a little side room off the rehearsal space. He was on his lunch break. His meal, which he devoured, was from a Caribbean place. Energy food — goat meat, mac and cheese, yams. He had at least four more hours of pacing and dancing to do after this. He was going to burn it all into nothing. A cakewalk in 1903. CreditAmerican Mutoscope & Biograph Company/Library of Congress He had a laptop out and was showing me clips he had watched for inspiration after being asked to choreograph the show: the Nicholas Brothers skipping across tabletops in “Stormy Weather” (the sequence that Fred Astaire is said to have called the greatest dance number ever filmed, a superlative that, when you watch the scene, seems like an obvious thing to say). Then some eerie old footage of a “cakewalk,” from an early black vaudeville performance, one of the few that were ever filmed. The women in the clip wore high-­collared Victorian dresses, the men black tailcoats. The cakewalk was a dance, created by slaves in imitation (some accounts say in mockery) of the white minuet. In one common iteration, the dancers would form two lines, one of men, one of women, then the couple at the end would link arms and promenade down between the rows of clapping hands. Each couple was expected to do something distinctive. Some would dance; others would simply present themselves. It was not unlike vogueing. Nor “Soul Train.” Also, while we’re defining things: vaudeville. That’s the world of “variety” shows, mixed shows made up of several brief acts, that dominated the American entertainment world during roughly the half-­century that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, from, say, 1880 to 1930. The format grew out of minstrel shows and medicine shows. A white vaudeville lineup would often feature one black act, called, counter­intuitively, a “white act.” Lester Walton had the same dynamic in mind when he wondered if “Shuffle Along” could make it as a “white folks’ show.” Glover asked if I’d seen the recently identified Bert Williams footage, from 1913. Williams — there was a name to conjure while discussing the history of blacks-­in-­blackface shows. It was easy to articulate his relationship to the tradition: He was the pinnacle of it. Williams made art from behind the blackface mask. At the same time, he was haunted and wounded by having to wear it. W. C. Fields claimed to sense “a deep undercurrent of pathos” in Williams. His masterpiece was the song “Nobody,” a nihilistic ditty one of his characters sang to himself when the penny-­tossers walked away, a sort of song-­monologue, as weird and dark, you might sense, when Williams introduced it in 1906 as it sounds today. There could have been no Sam Beckett without Bert Williams. His record of the song sold more than a hundred thousand copies, making him the first black recording artist ever to do so. The film reels were retrieved from the MoMA archives in 2004. George Wolfe had taken the cast on a field trip to view them. They represent the oldest surviving fragments of a black feature film, part of a very early and almost completely forgotten African-­American filmmaking scene that sprang up before World War I but left no physical traces, mainly because of the extreme fragility (and inflammability) of the old film stock. This footage was more than rare — it was a peek through a keyhole many had assumed was forever blocked. It showed another cakewalk, this time from an outdoor celebration, a “field day.” Williams himself makes up half of one couple. His beautiful partner for the walk laughs delightedly at him. His shoes flap, he walks oafishly on his heels. His smile is inwardly pleased, sublime. Williams was Bahamian-­born, a strikingly handsome man when he wasn’t in cork. He grew up in Florida and California. In San Francisco, in his late teens, he fell into the medicine-show world. Around 1893, he joined a troupe called the Mastodon Minstrels, and it was while performing with them that he came to know a fellow cast member named George Walker, a young man from Kansas who was to become his closest friend and creative partner for nearly 15 years. Williams and Walker — the black theatrical world at the start of the 20th century is unimaginable without them, and so is “Shuffle Along.” When Williams and Walker started out in the 1890s, they were billed as “two real coons” who did “buck dancing.” But as the decade progressed, their ideas found some range, and they started producing musical comedies. In 1900, they did “Sons of Ham,” a sort of variety-­farce, full of “oddities hard to describe.” It boasted a “carload of special scenery and electrical effects,” as well as “a chorus of handsome colored girls, 30 in number.” Besides that, it featured “a company of picked talent,” among whom was one Aida Overton. Walker fell in love with her and married her, and she became Aida Overton Walker, the greatest black actress in America before the First World War. Her “Salome” dance took over New York for about a year, around 1912. In the new “Shuffle Along,” Wolfe has Audra McDonald’s character, Lottie Gee, reminisce at one point over having shared the stage with Aida Overton Walker and a piece of singing advice she received from this mythic woman. Some of the Williams and Walker shows were enormously popular. In fact, most of the claims that are made for “Shuffle Along” — that it was the first black Broadway show, or the first successful one — are really true of earlier Williams and Walker productions. Their 1907-9 show “Bandanna Land” played for capacity houses on tour and at the Majestic Theater at Columbus Circle, a much more legitimate “Broadway” house than the Sixty-­Third Street Music Hall could ever aspire to be, and those audiences included, according to a much younger Lester Walton, “hundreds of white theatergoers.” Bert Williams and George Walker. Their 1903 production of ‘‘In Dahomey’’ was the first full-length black musical to open on a main Broadway stage. CreditSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library George Walker, Bert Williams and Aida Overton Walker in “Bandanna Land” in 1908. CreditSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Aida Overton Walker, George Walker’s wife, whose ‘‘Salome’’ dance was a hit in 1912. CreditSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Williams and Walker were so successful that they changed the profile of black entertainment in America, vastly for the better, but also in ways that pushed up against boundaries. A forgotten incident from their “Policy Players” tour of 1899-1900 makes clear how real the tensions were. The show was booked to run at the Grand Opera House in Washington, but according to a newspaper report, the manager of the house had objected to Williams and Walker’s having an “orchestra leader who was a colored man.” The musicians, it was felt, wouldn’t like to see “a black director.” The New York Morning Telegraph of Nov. 18, 1899, ran a startling headline, “WILLIAMS AND WALKER, SENEGAMBIAN COMEDIANS, CAUSE TROUBLE,” on top of its report: Not so long ago they were content to fill a place upon the vaudeville stage at rapidly increasing compensation. But since then they have been advanced to a position at the head of their own company, and they are now beginning to tell managers of theaters how they want things conducted during their various engagements. . . . [One] kick that arose was upon the question whether colored people should be admitted to all parts of the house, or should be restricted to the balcony and gallery. The manager of the theater took a positive stand this time, and said he would close his doors rather than violate the rule against letting Negroes occupy the orchestra chairs. When Williams and Walker found they were really “up against it” they receded from their position, and consented to go on. . . . The report concludes menacingly: “These young men are likely to wake up with a start some morning.” Williams often remarked that although he was proud of having made people laugh for many years, he wanted to show that he could make them cry. But his and Walker’s ambitions for their material grew during that first decade of the century. When their “In Dahomey” debuted in 1903, they advised audiences to read a book about Ethiopia before going to see it, so they’d understand what was happening. Critics began to complain that they were no longer black enough. No longer blackface enough. In trying to be intellectual, the comedians had left behind what made them fun. This reaction elicited from Walker a remarkable, slashing reply. He told The Toledo Bee (this is in Camille Forbes’s excellent “Introducing Bert Williams”): “There is no reason why we should be forced to do these old-time nigger acts. It’s all rot, this slap-­stick-­bandanna handkerchief-­bladder in the face act, with which Negro acting is associated. It ought to die out, and we are trying hard to kill it.” Walker said that 110 years ago. The cast of “In Dahomey” in 1904.Credit...The archives of Robert Kimball It’s only with that “slap-­stick-­bandanna handkerchief-­bladder” ringing in our ears that we can understand what Williams and Walker were up to with “Bandanna Land.” One of its songs became a hit, the unbelievably cloying “Bon Bon Buddy (The Chocolate Drop)” (Mamie Smith covered it when she was still a struggling vaudevillian; on YouTube you can hear a white singer named Billy Murray doing it a year after it came out, in 1908). By singing about the old mammy days, when don’t you know, nobody minded a bit being called “chocolate drop,” Williams and Walker were laughing back at the white audiences who were laughing at them — with an irony that said out the side of its mouth, Are they actually buying this? — and at the same time they were laughing with the black audiences who came to see and hear them. And at the same time they weren’t laughing at all. It was a delicate balance, but they maintained it for a decade. A white critic wrote about “Shuffle Along” around the same time Lester Walton did — the reviews were just days apart. The man’s name was James Whittaker. He lived in New York and was working as a music critic for The Daily News and then The Daily Mirror — where he would work until the end of his life, dying only after the paper folded in the early 1960s, and where he was remembered by former colleagues as having been “a large man with a crown of white hair, favoring vests and double-­breasted suits.” I can’t help pausing to watch him turn the corner onto 63rd Street and walk toward the theater. Pictures suggest he favored black, dark ties. He had fought in the war as an artillery man, and before that spent most of his teens in Europe, in Leipzig and Paris, studying with tutors. He was once considered a gifted child pianist. None of the strangers passing on the street would have guessed he was romantically lucky (he had a dour and unfortunate face that involved a triple-­threat combination of double chin, cleft chin and underbite) — but he was married to one of the most beautiful women in America, the actress Ina Claire. People whispered that she married him so he would chirp like a cricket about her in the papers, praising her performances. But she insisted that it had been for love. They are together, she and Jimmy. They take their seats. Afterward, Whittaker would have seen her home and gone to the office. He wants to file the review that night so it can run in the morning editions: Negro humor is better in print or in the synthetic face of Frank Tinney than coming from the mouths of the originators. Fifty Negroes have banded together into a musical comedy company which is playing to white audiences in the Sixty-­Third Street theater. “Shuffle Along,” as it is named, makes brave attempts to entertain the white folks in the intervals between its gorgeous songs. It subscribes to the musical comedy formula that, when you are not singing a song, you must be acting a joke. But racial genius grips the cast and you when the songs begin. At a grand piano in the orchestra pit sits Mr. Eubie Blake, composer of all the music. He is surrounded by fifteen helpful harmonists. Miss Lottie Gee or Roger Matthews comes down to the footlights and sets a metronomic foot to beating a rhythm. It travels down the expectant spine of Mr. Blake and into his and his helpful fifteen’s fingers. In two semi-­quavers you are quivering to the same magic that has set all these spontaneous musicians to reeling melodiously. You may resist Beethoven and Jerome Kern, but you surrender completely to this. It is perhaps fortunate that there are dead intervals between the songs of “Shuffle Along.” Because some of the music is as insidious and heady as absinthe. Josephine Baker, noticed for her dancing, found her way into the chorus line of ‘‘Shuffle Along.’’ She performed in the show’s traveling production before going on to fame in Paris, dancing what was called a Danse Sauvage while wearing a skirt of bananas. CreditLucien Walery, via Wikimedia Commons A scene from “Shuffle Along Jr.”, a shortened revue by Eubie Blake. CreditThe archives of Robert Kimball Florence Mills, Roger Matthews and Lottie Gee in “Shuffle Along.” CreditThe archives of Robert Kimball Whittaker’s opinions, at least that night, were dubious, racist and smug. But he was paying some kind of attention. And in one fundamental respect, he agreed with George Wolfe about the show: that the book, the comedy, didn’t work. But Wolfe’s problem, in trying to resurrect “Shuffle,” wasn’t as simple as what Whittaker prescribed. He couldn’t just throw away the talking and leave the song-and-dance bits. He’d end up with a vaudeville show. No, the very innovation that Williams and Walker had introduced — the reason their productions were so important to Broadway and black theater and the creation of “Shuffle Along” — was that their shows had a new kind of coherence. It would seem very loose to us, but it was different from vaudeville, closer to drama. Their musical comedies were musical, but they were also comedies, meaning they were plays. This isn’t reading backward onto their work a kind of artistic ambition it didn’t possess, but rather echoing what the new generation of black critics were saying at the time, when “Shuffle” came out. This is what Lester Walton was saying in 1921 and what he was trying to make happen at the Lafayette Theater. Joshua Henry as Noble Sissle and Brandon Victor Dixon as Eubie Blake in the new revival of “Shuffle Along.”Credit...Lyle Ashton Harris for The New York Times Wolfe’s solution has been to build a kind of historical box around the set pieces. This new show would be unlike any of the previous revivals (1932 and 1952), most of which were failures, some of which never even made it to the stage. It wouldn’t be a revival. Wolfe had in mind instead a transformation. He wanted to do not “Shuffle Along” but the making of “Shuffle Along” (official title: “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed”). He would tell the story of the original creators and cast and how they pulled it off — complete with a character (played by Brooks Ashmanskas) who gives voice to various white outsiders, people who commented on the original show, among them H.L. Mencken and Carl Van Vechten. Interesting approach, you say, sounds great. But to make it work, you couldn’t stint on the dancing and the songs. Those were what made the show go: syncopation, fire, artistry. They couldn’t be saved with historical buttressing, or even historical reimagining. They had to happen in the here and now, and they had to be authentic and good, or else — bomb. Meanwhile, no matter what you did, some seams were liable to show. You couldn’t bring the show into the future and preserve it at the same time and do each perfectly at every minute. But that, I suppose, is when it becomes good to know Savion Glover. It never hurts to know Scott Rudin, either. Unless it actually hurts because he has just thrown a cellphone at the back of your head. Rudin is the notoriously temperamental producer of major movies who has never let go of his love for the New York theater, or his investment in it. You would be silly to pretend as if he weren’t part of the reason that this show has the very best, the laughably best, of everything: Ann Roth, the queen of costume designers (“Midnight Cowboy” and “The Book of Mormon”), is sitting here trying to work out how you design a jazzy, feminine-­heeled shoe that can be tapped in as hard as Glover needs without coming apart; Jules Fisher is working on the lights (he lit “Hair”); Santo Loquasto is on scenic design (three Tonys). And yet, that Rudin’s machinations helped to make it possible, to assemble all that talent and power in the service of resurrecting a crucial piece of African-­American history, reminded me of an uncomfortable fact, namely that Rudin was caught two years ago in the Sony email hack making racist jokes. Or borderline racist. I believe the official terminology landed on by the news media was “racially insensitive.” Rudin and the co-­chairwoman of Sony at the time, Amy Pascal, were trading messages, and they somehow got onto the question of President Obama’s taste in movies, throwing out such recommendations as “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Ride Along,” the buddy-­cop movie that stars Ice Cube and Kevin Hart. It was the kind of joke that if you saw it on “Saturday Night Live,” you might have laughed. Movie night at the Obamas’, curated by Mitch McConnell. For two rich white people to be typing it back and forth, no doubt from the backs of chauffeured cars, was ignorant and tasteless at best. Rudin and Pascal issued public apologies. She lost her job, but only Rudin can fire Rudin. Was his backing of the new “Shuffle” in part an attempt at karmic balancing, or more crassly, damage ­control? You could point to “A Raisin in the Sun,” which he produced in 2014. In a way, the question itself is racist, given that the new show was an idea cooked up by Wolfe. He was going to find someone to back the production, especially given the other people he could recruit. Still, Rudin was at the helm, part of another old story and history — Jewish producer, black talent, a zone of cultural interface that has exerted tremendous force in American culture and made beautiful things happen and always been messy and uneven. Whatever lay behind the scenes, the fact is the production would be responsible for a truly magical bit of casting: Audra McDonald in the role of the singer and original “Shuffle Along” star Lottie Gee. The dance that Glover had said he might have to sub in for one night, after the show goes live — what he actually said was, “I might have to tie the one doing it to a chair and go out there and do it myself” — is a duet between a male dancer and McDonald. I watched her rehearse the piece at the beginning of this year. It was the first time I’d been in a room with an actual diva. There was a space-­heater quality to her presence in the studio. She was sort of dreamily sashaying around one hip at a time, chewing her cheek, looking up, into her head. When the scene started, she was captivating to see do her thing. I tried to break down what was technically different about it, what it was in her performance — even now, early in rehearsals, in a room — that made you think of the word “elevated,” that she was elevating everything. It was the cock of her head, the intensity of her gaze. But not really. Those were just effects. Not long before the show was to debut, I had a chance to speak with McDonald about her character, Lottie Gee, a woman who fascinated us both, it emerged, because she was so unknown despite having once been humongously famous. I was interested for reasons having to do with private musical-­­historical preoccupations, while McDonald was interested because she’d been entrusted with embodying Gee onstage in front of tens of thousands of people, but we had a frustration in common. Gee is one of those figures — one of the countless, when you’re talking about this world of early black music and dance — whose biographies begin with phrases like “Details remain obscure.” With digging, she can be recovered somewhat. More than most. She was a star. I sent McDonald everything I was able to find. It was still spotty, but when there’s nothing, every little item in a small-town newspaper is a mountain. Lottie Gee liked to tell people that she was from Kentucky — and it’s true, she grew up in a house in Newport, Ky. — but Newport is a satellite town to Cincinnati, and that’s what she was in reality, a Cincinnati girl (like Mamie Smith, who grew up an all-­but-­literal stone’s throw across the Ohio River from Gee and would probably have known her as a girl). Around 1905, she got her start singing with a jubilee choir, one of the dozens of choral troupes that formed in the wake of the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ global success. From there she went into musical theater: Cole and Johnson (they were another of the important teams, like Williams and Walker). She was a chorus girl, a “dancing pick” (a “pickaninny,” in blackface). But she had something, a “presence of mind” onstage, that got her noticed by Aida Overton Walker. The great one took Gee on as an understudy and protégée, and her career took off. But what McDonald zoomed in on, in the documents about Gee, was how much the woman had already been through and sacrificed before “Shuffle Along.” “I think about the fact that she was 35 when she got the lead,” McDonald said, “and had already clawed her way through vaudeville. I realized: She was 35 when she made her debut. An ingenue at 35. Talking about being in the chorus all those years, wanting to get to the front. And the fact that she was always so impeccably dressed. There is a pain, and the sense that she’s going to miss an opportunity, and that she’s trying to desperately stake her rightful claim on what is hers.” McDonald stopped short of reading Gee as a character to pity. Gee had an extraordinary career. She worked with Sidney Bechet and Doc Cheatham and was a mentor to Josephine Baker. She lived into her 80s, remaining much loved and respected in the arts community of Los Angeles, where she died in 1973. She was, somehow — impossibly, criminally — never recorded. Neither was her “Shuffle” co-star Florence Mills, who was according to most witnesses one of the great stage singers of her age. Gee’s obituary mentions that “she popularized such melodies as ‘Love Will Find the Way’ and ‘I’m Just Wild About Harry’ in the Miller-­Lyles, Sissle-­Blake production ‘Shuffle Along.’ ” McDonald singled out one facet of Gee’s personality — her “diva” qualities, like frequently canceling shows for illnesses real and imagined, for instance — as having been the thing that “frightened” her when taking the role. She didn’t relate to that, she said, and worried that as a result she’d be superficial or performative in her representation of how a diva behaved. It was when she understood that the diva, as a type, operates principally out of fear, that Gee’s behavior opened up to her somewhat. For an actress who has gone public, as McDonald did a couple of years ago, about her own past struggles with depression and a youthful suicide attempt, there’s no way it didn’t feel personal to read about Gee’s own episodes of mental instability. Gee once had a huge nervous breakdown on a ship on the way to China. She spent at least a year recovering in a sanitarium in California. She also seems to have suffered from what today would have been considered severe phobia. An unusual article that appeared in The Boston Herald in 1922 describes her behavior on opening night, the first night of the epic run of “Shuffle” in New York. Gee is quoted: I used to be an awful superstitious little fool. The least little thing I did made me quake, because somebody or other had once told me something dreadful would happen to me as a result of it. If I sneezed on a rainy day I’d never see a sunny one. Well, my life was simply a bundle of “ifs” and nerves. So one day I decided I’d had about enough of that kind of thing. It was getting too great a hold on me and I simply had to overcome it. And I soon had the opportunity. The night we opened at the Sixty-­Third Street Music Hall, New York, I did something that even the least superstitious of persons has a sneaking little belief in — I broke a mirror. Now the act is almost irreparable, but they do say that if you quickly pick up the pieces of the broken glass and look in them three times over your left shoulder, the spell is somewhat broken and no ill luck can happen. Which is what I started frantically to do. But just in time I caught myself. No, I said, I will not do it. That moment was one of the biggest in my life. I simply let the mirror lie there. “What I’m realizing about her,” McDonald said, “is that I don’t have to go searching as far out, to find the roots of her character, as I thought I would. It made me weep, I so identified with her.” “Shuffle Along” was such a mammoth success — and became a minor industry so quickly after opening — that it seems as though it must have lasted forever, but the original gang of creators who put it together split up less than two years after it opened on Broadway. This was the falling out between Sissle and Blake (the writers of the songs) and Miller and Lyles (the writers of the book). It came down to money: The songs were making a lot of it, through recordings and sheet music. The book wasn’t making much of anything. Miller and Lyles thought everything should be split down the middle; Sissle and Blake disagreed. Some of the cast went one way, some the other, some wandered off. By the end (the last “true” “Shuffle” performance happened on June 23 in Atlantic City), relations were so strained between the two sides that some people walked offstage during “Auld Lang Syne.” Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake in an ad for their musical ‘‘In Bamville,’’ which was renamed ‘‘The Chocolate Dandies’’ before opening in New York in 1924. They wrote the music for “Shuffle Along.” CreditThe archives of Robert Kimball The vaudeville comedy duo Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, who wrote the book for ‘‘Shuffle Along’’ and appeared in blackface in 1921. CreditSchomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library The four creators of “Shuffle Along” in a publicity still in 1921. CreditThe archives of Robert Kimball By 1930, Gee had gone back to vaudeville. She was in Baltimore with a show called “Harlem Vanities.” An anonymous (tragically anonymous) reporter with the local Afro-­­American caught up with her and did the best article ever written about her, one of just a couple that bring you close. She was in her mid-40s at that point. To read the article after having despaired for months of ever knowing anything about her was like having her spirit show up at a séance. Although she can still hear the plaudits of Broadway and the music halls of Europe ringing in her ears, a memory that many a performer would love to cherish, pretty diminutive Lottie Gee, star of many musical successes, puckers her lips and pouts because she has never tasted any real happiness. “You’ll think me dreadfully old-­fashioned and trite when I say that home and children are the only things in the world that can bring a woman supreme happiness,” declared Miss Gee between puffs on a scented cigarette, “but that is true, and the older a woman gets the more she realizes it.” ... “Married?” she asked in answer to my question. ... “If you won’t insist upon knowing his name, I’ll confess that I was married once — to a musician, but we parted before ‘Shuffle Along,’ long before anybody ever heard of me. All my later successes have been empty affairs. But why worry about that?” She flickered the ashes from her cigarette with an air of nonchalance. ... “How do I like Baltimore?” she repeated, the smile disappearing suddenly from her face. “Oh, Baltimore is all right, I guess, only I hate to play here because it always brings back unpleasant memories. It was here many years ago that we parted. No, I don’t care for Baltimore.” When I spoke with McDonald about that article, I said something that gave away an assumption I’d made, namely that Gee is talking about her first husband at the end of this interview, when she says, “we parted.” She was married — three times, in fact, before she died — but this would have been her first husband, a musician named Wilson (Peaches) Kyer. But McDonald stopped me. “I think she’s talking about Eubie there,” she said. Meaning Eubie Blake, the songwriter for “Shuffle Along” — the real love of her life, people said. You think so? I asked. “Yes,” she said, “Eubie was from Baltimore.” That was true. Kyer, on the other hand — the man to whom she was still quite married when she and Blake started getting together — was from Philadelphia. Thirty-­four years later, a reporter tracked down Eubie Blake and asked him about Lottie Gee. It was 1964 in The Pittsburgh Courier. “ ‘Lottie?’ Blake responded. ‘Well, Lottie hasn’t been doing so good. Her health seems to have gone bad on her. Of course, she’s 78 now, you know.’ ” The answer suggests that he kept in touch or at least kept tabs on her. As for the fact that he knew her age to the year (she was born in 1886), it speaks for itself. “I will always believe,” she told that interviewer in Baltimore back in 1930, “that if Miller and Lyles and Sissle and Blake had stuck together, the colored stage would have been entirely different.” As for the pioneers Bert Williams and George Walker, their story would end with all the pathos Williams had hoped for. Sadly, horribly, it was toward the end of the “Bandanna Land” tour — and in the very midst of performing “Bon Bon Buddy” — that Walker had his first stroke. He had not been well for some time. Syphilis: It struck a number in the theatrical generation that came before “Shuffle Along.” They were all working very hard and having an enormous amount of fun, and there was no such thing as penicillin when you caught the dreaded “bad blood.” There was an arsenic-­based remedy, which could be effective, but it was arsenic-­based. As he sang the song, Walker began to sing “in a thick-­lipped manner” and forgot the lyrics. Soon after that, his career was over, and soon after that his life. Williams went on after Walker’s death to a whole third phase in his career, starring in the Ziegfeld Follies. There, too, he broke racial barriers. His would-be co-stars threatened to quit; they didn’t want to appear on the same bill with a black man. The director told them, “I can replace every one of you, except the man you want me to fire.” The power Williams evidently had — of making people laugh whether they wanted to or not — afforded a kind of protection. In those last years he grew more famous than ever but was mostly doing shtick. In the end he, too, suffered an onstage collapse. He was in a show called “Under the Bamboo Tree.” He went down in Detroit. The audience mistook his fall for a gag and was laughing as they carried him off. I was tempted to read his death, at least as it related to “Shuffle Along,” as a tragedy. He had fought to open doors: Others would enjoy walking through them. But this turned out rather beautifully not to have been the case. In 1947 (more than 25 years after the show debuted), the composer Noble Sissle remembered in a guest column for The New York Age that it had been only “the great heritage left by Bert Williams and George Walker” that “had made it possible for F.E. Miller, Aubrey Lyles, Eubie Blake and myself to birth ‘Shuffle Along.’ Few people know, but Bert Williams playing in Ziegfeld Follies and [being] the only Negro playing Broadway at that time was literally a father to the four of us during the birth of ‘Shuffle Along’ and gave us every blessing and advice at his masterly command. None came more often than he to see our show or laughed more heartily or applauded it more vociferously.” John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer for the magazine and the southern editor of The Paris Review. url https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/shuffle-along-and-the-painful-history-of-black-performance-in-america.html Cast of Shuffle Along White Studio/©NYPL for the Performing Arts Black History on Broadway: Celebrating the Legacy of Shuffle Along The groundbreaking musical revue was the first all-Black musical hit on Broadway and helped to usher in the Harlem Renaissance. By Marc J. Franklin February 23, 2021 Following a tour through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Shuffle Along made its groundbreaking Broadway premiere May 23, 1921. Making a home in a multipurpose performance space, the musical played a record 504 performances at the 63rd Street Musical Hall. More than just another show on Broadway, Shuffle Along helped to usher in the Harlem Renaissance, showcasing the excellence in Black culture through Black art. Additionally, the production marked the first time the orchestra of an audience was integrated on Broadway. Featuring music by Eubie Blake, lyrics by Noble Sissle, and a book by Aubrey Lyles and Flournoy Miller, the revue tells the story of two corrupt men running for the mayor of Jimtown, though the plot was a loose device to showcase the singing and dancing from the cast. Though it featured Black performers in blackface, a racist but common tradition that provided an avenue for Blacks to perform onstage in the 19th century, the musical marked the first time Broadway featured a production entirely written, directed, produced, and starring Black artists, notably providing a launching pad for Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, and more. Shuffle Along returned to Broadway in 1933, 1952, and most recently in 2016 with a George C. Wolfe-helmed revival. Featuring a retooled book by Wolfe, the adaptation presented the original 1921 musical while detailing the events that catalyzed the songwriting team. Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed played 38 previews and 100 performances before closing July 24, 2016, earning 10 Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. The revival starred Audra McDonald as Lottie Gee, Brian Stokes Mitchell as F.E. Miller, Billy Porter as Aubrey Lyles, Brandon Victor Dixon as Eubie Blake, Joshua Henry as Noble Sissle, Adrienne Warren as Gertrude Saunders/Florence Mills, and Amber Iman as Eva/Mattie Wilkes/Madame-Madame alongside Brooks Ashmanskas, Phillip Attmore, Darius de Haas, Afra Hines, Curtis Holland, Adrienne Howard, Kendrick Jones, Lisa LaTouche, J. C. Montgomery, Erin N. Moore, Janelle Neal, Brittany Parks, Arbender Robinson, Karissa Royster, Christian Dante White, Joseph Wiggan, Pamela Yasutake, and Richard Riaz Yoder. The production featured scenic design by Santo Loquasto, costume design by Ann Roth, lighting design by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, and sound design by Scott Lehrer with stage management by Lisa Dawn Cave and J. Jason Daunter. URL https://playbill.com/article/black-history-on-broadway-celebrating-the-legacy-of-shuffle-along

this is the last of the 2024 rmnewsletters. For the perihelion in 2025 will post my 2024 art summary, and my 2024 image . To that end, please tell me which of my works in 2024 you like the best? and now... this editions content RECENT WORK The eighty-fourth of the Cento series. Hakim’s Annulary Protection Holiday Card 2024 Princess Candace in THE GREAT ORIGINAL CHARACTER SNOWFIGHT The Vial of Woe's stillness Trilog Nativity COMMISSIONS - my craft or work for sale DATES - astrology, astronomy, or other temporal notes IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR : Economic Corner 002+003 ;The Statian sequel to Journey To The West ; Holmes vs Doyle ; Radionovelas URL https://rmnewsletter.substack.com/p/12292024-rmnewsletter 12/29/2024 RMNewsletter by Richard Murray What fictional story has your favorite snowball fight? Read on Substack

@Croocked T happy holidays

From munasheabson a member of the Black Artist of Tumblr community [ https://www.tumblr.com/communities/black-artist-on-tjambler ] I don't want fireworks, I want a slowburn. by The Wholesome Baddie Dating culture rushes us to define what we're doing but in reality, I don't really care. Just treat me well. The rest will come later. Read on Substack MY COMMENT good honest prose, nice:) Your not the first I heard say the speed of relationships needs to slow down. I do wonder if part of the problem is the speed of human connectivity on the internet influences non electronic human interaction

@ProfD your correct to the lack of knowledge to the details of the usa government, but I will defend the usa populace. First, the usa had many movements of engaged populaces in its past and those movements were always stymied in such a way, the government didn't change the way the people wanted or needed and after the failure, people lost the desire to keep trying and needed significant time to get the desire. Second, the usa had civics courses in public school for that reason but civics courses were and are no longer funded by the government itself. Third, while many in the usa like to say the usa demands people be engaged more than the parties of governance I have always found that argument dysfunctional and say the parties of governance , who spend million in advertising every year, never seem willing on spending their money to inform so... I argue the modern condition you refer too was inevitable in the usa.

@ProfD of course and with the end of earmarks it made lobbying even more powerful

@Pioneer1 because immediately after carter lost the 1980 election to ronald reagan iran freed them. So what you are asking is why didn't the democrats publicly accuse the republicans of a form of treason. Well that accusation has to be proven in a court of law and with reagan as president, meaning head of the armed forces which include the fbi + cia who all had a role in iran, i doubt reagan was going to allow such a thing. under national security and as the head of the executive branch or armed forces, reagan could stop any inquest. And remember as well, in 1980 the republicans won all the congress, house + senate , so...your not only asking why the donkeys didn't accuse the elephants of cheating under a reagan administration, that the military loved, that police loved. But also being in minority in the house or senate. Yes , the congress isn't impotent but one of the results of the war between the states circa 1965 is the presidency from lincoln onward is more powerful than the congress. That is what destroyed the Whigs party which became the Republicans. The whigs believed the presidency/executive branch shouldn't be too powerful but the power of the presidency catapulted in that war and has only gotten stronger. Empires tend to be this way, as they grow in power the positions of singular power grow. By the time of reagan, it is too powerful to be attacked in such a way from the legislative branch. Mitt Romney signed it but the massachusetts affordable care act had to happen. the state of massachusetts before romney had set up laws that made massachusetts have drastic changes starting in the 1980s. so something had to be done. The funny thing about healthcare in the usa, is it has always been a for profit enterprise , as an industry stemming from the days of enslavement. so, thus both affordable care acts. MAssachusetts + USA is because people in the usa want healthcare bu the industry is settled and very powerful. Obama didn't wait for it, but the reality is, pelosi was in congress and like in massachusetts, which is supposed to be liberal, many elected officials oppose universal healthcare even though the general populace say they want it and it goes down to how universal healthcare by default will force hospitals/doctors/insurers to change their financial models extremely.

RECENT WORK The eighty-third of the Cento series. Two Kung Fu - the poetry version of Journey to the South COMMISSIONS DATES IF YOU MADE IT THIS FAR The Minor Collective Kool and the Gang and fans Skettel from Moon Ferguson "Swordfight" 2024 Parties of Governance in the USA post 2024 URL https://rmnewsletter.substack.com/p/12222024-rmnewsletter

@Troy nice share, in my opinion studies have value plus worth whie i still feel each individual should heed their own individual reactions when it comes to health

Yeah I admit, I am a jeffrey wright fan too, I can't think of a performance of his I didn't like, I like his commissioner gordon , agent in syriana, he was hilarious in shaft:) you killed my brother:)

That is very cool @Troy I think you once said in here you know Regina Brooks personally offline, whenever you can tell us about the project, do tell