The Martin Duberman Reader (22 page)

Yet even during the worst of his pain, Lincoln recognized that he remained “influential,” saw clearly enough that “Balanchine can be ably and efficiently influenced, if it is sufficiently indirect, flattering, and if the suggestions are validly imaginative. What my role would have been had I not been, as now, disappointed, I have, now, no idea. As a matter of fact I thought hardly at all of what I'd do, imagining only consecutive and charming collaboration.” Yet instead of holding to his decision to be “cold-blooded” and coolly aloof while concealing his resentment, Lincoln in fact lurched quite quickly in the opposite direction, turning his anger inward, blaming himself for all that had gone wrong, indulging in an orgy of lacerating self-recrimination and a humiliating outburst of apologetics.

It was as if he couldn't manage to sustain an emotional middle ground, couldn't simply acknowledge where he may have made some mistakes or come up short, even as he justifiably held to account
those who'd evaded their own inadequacies by trying to blame them on him. Instead he tended to lurch between fierce denunciation and savage self-blame. Always a man of extremes, he dealt all his life in hyperbole, crudely lashing out at others or holding himself infernally culpable and damned. What he called his “demons” rarely allowed, in personal relations as well, for a cool appraisal or for more than a fleeting sense of inner peace. . . .

Good news came from Dr. Geyelin; after examining Balanchine over the winter, a surprised Geyelin announced that it “might be the case to refute the old idea one could not get well from TB while in New York and working.” All of which helped to dissipate months of gloomy apprehension and backbiting—though hardly ushering in an uninterrupted reign of harmony and sunny satisfaction. The School of American Ballet was, after all, a newborn; as with most infants, peaceful interludes were all but guaranteed to give way to some rude wailing and sudden spitting. Within weeks of the general rapprochement, Eddie was sitting Lincoln down for yet another lecture about his shortcomings and a renewed insistence that he go to see his analyst. “You aren't exactly mean,” Eddie said, “but your nervous jumpings-about and your shortness with people gave a bad impression.”

Dmitriev, having picked up on Lincoln's infatuation with the dancer Harry Dunham, decided to have the conversation that Lincoln had long been “dreading.” He “couldn't understand Americans,” Dmitriev announced to Lincoln when the two were alone one day. “He'd been here five-and-a-half months and he'd only met pederasts: Eddie and I never went out into the country, etc., with young girls: ‘Were all Americans queer?' ” Lincoln told Dmitriev he was right: “We are the nation of the great intermediates.” (Lincoln had been reading Havelock Ellis.) “I was not apologetic or ruffled,” Lincoln wrote in his diary, “but resentful at the arrogance with which he stated his position of . . . limitless normality.”

Where Dmitriev could be openly abusive, Balanchine could be coolly dismissive. As Lincoln wrote in his diary, Balanchine
could be “suggestible in small doses, in cafeteria intervals,” but “a formal conversation tires him.” After one talk between them about legal and financial matters, Lincoln could feel “Balanchine's slight contempt” and it left him all “loose and worried” and prone to nightmares; in one bad dream, “Balanchine a murderer; myself shipwrecked. Disaster and guilt all around.”

During the winter of 1934 Lincoln and Balanchine did have at least a few discussions involving “creative” issues. What Balanchine primarily wanted from Lincoln was not creativity or collaboration but small-task efficiency—and large sums of money. Lincoln was perfectly willing to sweat and toil in the trenches, and did so prodigiously, but efficiency at niggling detail work wasn't well suited to his offhanded nature, his baronial sense of consequence, and his stirring dreams. Being relegated to treadmill routines amounted to an insulting misreading of his temperament and talent, of his high intelligence and genuine artistic sensitivity. Lincoln had envisioned himself as sitting at the helm of an ocean liner, not working the ropes on the assisting tugboat. Feeling unappreciated and underutilized, he turned increasingly to the ego-soothing pursuits of writing (“My bitterness against Balanchine and Dmitriev conveniently keeping me in my room”), lecturing, and socializing. . . .

Lincoln felt that he, more than Balanchine, knew what might be most special about
“American
dancing,” about what he called the “unique, indigenous, and creative style of American dances, choreographers, and composers.” “Instead of setting a stereotype of remoteness, spectral grandeur, and visionary brilliance,” he wrote in an April 1938 column in
The Nation
, “Americans are volatile, intimate, frank. . . . The most important thing about American dancers is the retention of their amateur status and their nearness to the audience . . . the frontier spirit of spontaneous collective entertainment, where everybody got up and danced as they could, still persists. But with a difference. Our dancing artists have selected and amplified all that is most useful in the amateur spirit to make of it a conscious and brilliant frame for their individual theatrical
projection”—and he explicitly included not merely ballet or modern dancers but also the can-do “hoofers” Fred Astaire, Paul Draper, Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Powell, Buddy Ebsen, and Ray Bolger.

“Volatile, intimate, frank” were shrewd if contestable definitions of the American essence (certainly in dance, “energy” and “athleticism” might just as easily serve), yet at the very least Lincoln had put his finger on some recognizable, canny half-truths, and throughout his life he'd continue to hone his definition of “American.”

—from
The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein
(2007)

It was raining and hot when the Zinn family arrived in Atlanta in August 1956. It immediately struck them that this felt different from a typical New York summer evening. Though late in the season, the air was still redolent with the sweet smell of the city's famed magnolias and honeysuckle. Having grown up amidst cramped, urban grit and gridlocked crowds filled with noisy humanity, the quiet of Atlanta felt strange, even a bit unnerving. Plus it was obvious at once that this wasn't similar to the diverse mingling found in New York. Here there was black and there was white, and skin color everywhere determined location and expectations. Atlanta in 1956 was nearly as rigidly segregated as it had been at the turn of the century—and that included public transportation, water fountains, theaters, and libraries.

Spelman College epitomized what was true of the city as a whole. Though near Atlanta's center, Spelman was an island apart. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence—topped in part with barbed wire—surrounded the campus; Howard joked that it looked like “they were trying to keep the students in rather than intruders out.” The campus itself was an attractive collection of mostly
nineteenth-century red-brick buildings. For the first year, the Zinns lived in a poor white district in Atlanta, then moved on campus into the first floor in the back of MacVicar Hospital, the college infirmary, the apartment overlooking the tennis courts. In 1956, the student body consisted entirely of young black women—it wouldn't be until 1960 that a trickle of white undergraduates would begin to arrive—and the faculty was about one-quarter white. The school's mission officially remained what it had been since its establishment by two white New England women in 1881: to graduate carbon copies—“sedate, quiet, careful”—of young white ladies from a genteel finishing school, with their capacity to pour tea gracefully.

Most of the students' routine was lockstep: the day began with each making her bed, cleaning her room, attending breakfast neatly dressed, and going daily to chapel at 8:00
A.M.
When leaving the campus, students had to sign in and out, to be accompanied by at least two other students, to wear stockings, skirts, and dresses, and to carry gloves and a purse. Young black men from Morehouse College (of which Martin Luther King Jr. was an alumnus) and graduate students from Atlanta University Center (AUC), a consortium of six colleges—both directly across the street from Spelman—were allowed to come calling but only for one hour; Spelman women, however, could not visit male apartments. Occasionally there would be strictly chaperoned dances, but no male student was ever allowed to enter a Spelman woman's room, and she was given exactly fifteen minutes to get back to her dormitory after a dance ended. She had an unyielding curfew every night of 9:00
P.M.

Only some two hundred thousand African Americans were enrolled in college in the 1950s (there were thirty times as many whites), and about half of that number were in all-black or predominantly black schools. The black colleges essentially survived on crumbs, receiving only 2.7 percent of state money for higher education and a mere 0.66 percent of federal funds. Howard found that some of his students, coming as they did from segregated secondary schools, were ill-prepared for college, though hungry for knowledge. Ironically, it was some of the “worst” colleges that (according
to Howard) produced “some of the finest youngsters in the country—courageous, idealistic, informed”—those who in 1960–61 would spark the black civil rights movement.

The atmosphere seemed airtight to the Zinns, both on the Spelman campus and in the city of Atlanta. But in fact by the time they arrived, entrenched conventions had been challenged on several fronts. Black Atlanta in the early 1950s was marked, unlike most Southern cities, by a significant number of black-owned businesses and organizations, an elite that had managed to clear a narrow footpath between the prickly brambles of segregation. Representative figures of that generation, like the minister Martin Luther King Sr. or the attorney A.T. Walden, had built up at least minimal, behind-the-scenes contact with the white establishment.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education
had declared segregation in the nation's schools unconstitutional. Hope was initially high in black communities across the country, but under the double lash of “liberal” white detachment and Southern white hostility, that hope was soon dashed. President Eisenhower publicly stated his disapproval of the Supreme Court decision and made no effort to enforce it. Nor did Congress, dominated by influential Southern Democrats, pass a single enabling law. Instead of white schools throwing open their doors posthaste to black students, white Citizens' Councils, determined that desegregation never happen at all, rapidly spread fear through the South. And their threats were not rhetorical: when the Montgomery bus boycotts began in 1955, the leaders' homes were bombed; when the brave Autherine Lucy attempted to enter the University of Alabama, she was greeted by an angry mob, and three days later, on trumped-up charges, was expelled.

Soon after Howard arrived in Atlanta in 1956 and began to know his students and to mingle generally in the black community, he recognized that surface politeness toward whites concealed strong feelings of indignation; the brutal murder of young Emmett Till by white vigilantes the year before the Zinns arrived pushed that anger up several notches. This suppressed rage had sometimes
broken through the crust in the form of individual acts of resistance, usually punished severely. The coordinated action that had produced victory in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP's) court battles, strongly suggested that group organizing was the prerequisite for successful change.

Even before Howard's arrival, Atlanta had seen a few earlier victories in the long struggle for desegregation: the 1940s had marked the end of the white primary, the hiring of black policemen (though only to patrol black neighborhoods), and the opening of the city's golf courses at certain hours to blacks. As Howard would often say, the accumulation of such small victories, usually accomplished by people who never make it into the history books, is a necessary precursor to a more widespread upheaval.

Few of the young black women at Spelman had ever had a white teacher, and it was predictable that they initially greeted “Mr. Zinn” with polite shyness. But thanks to his warmth, his down-to-earth style, and his obvious lack of racism, the students quickly realized that they had a friend in Howard. During his first year at the college, he became faculty advisor to the student-run Social Science Club, where issues of the day were discussed and debated and where Howard made clear his view that the injustice of segregation should be confronted head-on, though nonviolently.

In January 1957, a mere six months after arriving, he suggested a visit to the Georgia state legislature to observe its workings firsthand. The group of thirty included a few male students from Morehouse—one of them named Julian Bond, who the Zinns would come to know well—and their white apartment neighbors, Pat and Henry West (he taught philosophy at Spelman). No intentional disruption was planned, merely observation. But when the group went to sit in the gallery, they were confronted by a sign marked “Colored,” designating a small section. The contingent conferred and decided to sit instead in the largely empty “White” section.

That produced an immediate uproar from the floor of the legislature. Members stood in their seats and shouted up at the miscreants,
while the Speaker grabbed the microphone and yelled, “You nigras get over to where you belong!” Police quickly appeared and escorted the group out into the hall, where they again conferred and—the mass upheavals of the civil rights struggle hadn't yet begun—resentfully decided to return to the “Colored” section. At which point the Speaker called up to them through the microphone: “The members of the Georgia state legislature would like to extend a warm welcome to the visiting delegation from Spelman College.” As long as the rigid separation of the races remained intact, so did white Southern graciousness.