A life worth celebrating

It must have been a pretty formative experience for an eleven-year-old:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment ... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran

The running took the writer of these words to Paris. There, according to a French scholar, Pap Ndiaye, she made an unexpected discovery:

When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time…at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation … no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people

Much later in her life, she took part in the 1963 March on Washington and spoke from the same platform that Martin Luther King used to make his ‘I have a dream’ speech. Among other things she told the quarter-million strong crowd:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

So there you have it – her name. Josephine. Josephine Baker, in fact, as she’s best known, from the surname of one of her husbands, though originally she was Josephine McDonald.

She was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. A singer and dancer, she got into the chorus line at a couple of New York shows before travelling to Paris in 1925 and getting a real break. She starred first in the ‘Revue Nègre’, the Black Review. The very title reveals that France was hardly free of racism. Baker danced near-naked there and in other reviews, including the Folies Bergères night club, playing to, but also poking fun at, stereotypical white views of black women. Still, at least the racism, as Ndiaye makes clear, didn’t expose her to violence or deny her service in restaurants and hotels.

Josephine Baker, 1930
She really did have a pet cheetah

In any case, those performances turned her into an international superstar and the first black woman to land a starring role in French films. ‘I became famous first in France in the twenties,’ she would say, and the country that made her feel safe and allowed her to shine became her home of choice. Her best-known song, ‘J’ai deux amours’, ‘I have two loves’, was dedicated to her love of her country and of Paris. She took out French nationality, renouncing her US citizenship to do so.

Nor was her relationship to her adopted country a one-way arrangement. During World War Two, she served France just as she’d benefited from it: she worked as a spy, passing information about troop movements and military preparations that she was able to gain thanks to her freedom to move, as an international celebrity, in some elite circles. When northern France was occupied, she moved to the southern, unoccupied area, living in a chateau where she stored weapons for the French resistance, provided shelter for its fighters and for Jews escaping persecution, and continued to collect and pass on any intelligence she could.

When that part of France fell too, she moved to North Africa, where she provided entertainment to troops at concerts to which she offered free entrance.

Her wartime service won her the Resistance Medal awarded by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre from the French military and the Légion d’Honneur, France’s top honour, awarded to her by Charles de Gaulle.

Baker in French Air Force Uniform, 1948

She also adopted twelve children from around the world, bringing them up in different religions, to prove that kids could live together harmoniously despite ethnic and religious differences.

She never gave up fighting for the rights of black people back in the United States, as her presence at the March on Washington shows. But she could never live there again, infuriated as she told the crowd that day at the contemptuous behaviour to which the colour of her skin exposed her. She fell on hard times at the end of her life, but was taken in by her friend Grace Kelly, the film star turned Princess Consort of Monaco.

She died in 1975 and was buried in Monaco. In 2021, she became only the sixth woman to be honoured by a tomb in the Panthéon in Paris, reserved for the greatest figures France produces. Her grave remains in Monaco, but a casket containing earth from places where she’d lived, including St Louis, Paris, the south of France and Monaco, was brought with full honours to the Panthéon, and a plaque set up to her.

Why am I writing all this today?

Because she was born on 3 June. So today I’ll raise a glass to what would have been her 119th birthday. And I thought I’d share that moment with you.

Nancy and Bobby: what leadership looks like

On 11 December 2018, Donald Trump tried to ambush the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, by turning a photo opp at the White House into a political debate in front of the cameras.

Pelosi was having none of it. In a few well chosen sentences she demolished the President, even mentioning the need to avoid a ‘a Trump shutdown’ of government. That riled the president who rose to the bait. If he didn’t get the funding for his precious border wall, he knew just what he was going to do.

I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government. I will take the mantle.

She had entirely wrong-footed him.

Trump meeting his match

He has, as usual, changed his tune since. Far from taking ‘the mantle’, he now denies all responsibility for the shutdown, blaming the Democrats instead. But today Pelosi is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and she can keep the pressure on him. The first step has been to pass a finance bill with no money for Trump’s wall, putting the onus back on the Republicans to keep the shutdown going.

It’s wonderful to see such gutsy and principled leadership in a world that is sadly short of it. Let’s hope Pelosi stays as firm as she promises to. It’s time that Trump had a lesson in the kind of treatment he can expect from a real leader.

I felt for Pelosi and Schumer in that White House meeting. At my own far less exalted level, I’ve also had the experience of talking to a hostile audience. Funnily enough, I find those sessions the most exciting and the most memorable. Generally, I present to customers, and if one of them attacks me, there’s no question of responding in kind. I have to be strictly polite, even deferential. It’s a fascinating challenge to stay that way while giving absolutely no ground.

The best outcome from such a confrontation is to see the critic, or critics, change their position and end up supportive or at least neutral towards us. That isn’t always possible, in which case the aim has to be to win the support of the rest of the audience that is watching the debate. If they leave concerned – even apologetic – for their colleague’s behaviour, and open to my arguments, then I’ve done as much as I could in the circumstances.

Now, Pelosi wasn’t going to win Trump around. Or even the Trump cult followers watching on TV. But she could hope that her performance would consolidate the backing of her base and win the support of some neutrals. That is the way to beat Trump and at the moment she seems to be handling the campaign superbly.

Sometimes, though, as I’ve suggested, one can actually change minds in an audience. And thinking about that reminded of one of the most remarkable instances of leadership I’ve seen in my lifetime, which indeed changed the minds of many of those listening.

On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. That evening, Robert Kennedy, brother of the murdered President, who had not long previously announced that he was running for the Democratic nomination himself, was due to speak to a rally in Indianapolis. It was being held in a strongly African-American neighbourhood. Kennedy’s advisers and relatives, even the police, told him he should not go, such was the anger in particular amongst the black population. The police had even had reports of young black men with weapons seen near the venue for the speech.

But, as I’ve mentioned before, Kennedy went anyway. He spoke from rough notes he made in his car. And he made what is arguably the best speech of his career. He started, unhesitatingly, by going straight to the news he was breaking.

I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Bobby Kennedy breaking the bad news

It’s worth listening to the speech, if only to hear for the visceral moan from the crowd when he spoke those words.

Kennedy had made a point of not speaking about his brother’s death in public before. But that night he made an exception.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

Abie Washington, a young man in the crowd, then only 26, told the Washington Post fifty years later:

I was upset, to put it mildly. I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.

But as he listened his feelings changed.

My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?

That night, there were race riots in 100 cities across the United States. In Washington DC alone, a dozen people were killed. But in Indianapolis, there was nothing. The crowd went home after Kennedy’s speech.

That’s the leadership we need today. I hope Pelosi can provide it. And others too, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman elected to Congress, or indeed Beto O’Rourke who ran a barnstorming campaign for the Senate in Texas, coming closer than anybody might have expected to unseating Ted Cruz.

In Britain, we need it in the Labour Party, but that’s going to need a major change at the top.

Still, at least we can admire Pelosi. Or that extraordinary speech in Indianapolis. And hold up as a model the leadership offered by Bobby Kennedy.

Who was dead, himself the victim of an assassin, only 63 days later.

Arguing about black actors

There’s an entertaining transatlantic argument going on about whether it’s appropriate for black British actors to play African Americans.

Rather a lot of those actors have been working in the States. There they’ve picked up roles requiring an American accent, and have been performing them rather well. For instance, Chiwetelu Ejiofor playing the American free black sold into slavery in Twelve Years a Slave. Or David Harewood as a senior CIA executive in Homeland. Most remarkable of all, David Oyelowo playing that most iconic of figures, Martin Luther King, in Selma.

David Oyelowo in Selma
A Brit playing MLK? Horror. Heresy. Blasphemy

Among African American actors this development has, it seems, bred a degree of resentment. The Guardian quotes Samuel L. Jackson questioning whether Daniel Kaluuya was the right actor to play an African American in an interracial relationship, in Get Out.

I tend to wonder what that movie would have been with an American brother who really feels that.

The suggestion is that to play the African American well, you need to have experienced his suffering. Otherwise, you might be unable to express his being adequately. However, the Guardian quotes David Harewood as claiming that:

… he and other black British performers are able “to unshackle ourselves from the burden of racial realities – and simply play what’s on the page”.

In other words, they act.

This reminds me of the conversation Laurence Olivier reportedly had with Dustin Hoffman, when Hoffman mentioned he’d stayed up three nights to prepare for a scene of exhaustion in Marathon Man. Olivier replied, “why don’t you just try acting?”

The story is probably apocryphal – it apparently comes from Hoffman himself, and he says his claim to have stayed up three nights wasn’t true anyway – but the point is a good one. You can actually play Martin Luther King without being Martin Luther King, or American, or indeed, I suspect, even black – if you’re an actor.

Another of Jackson’s Guardian comments caught my attention. He said of Kaluuya:

Daniel grew up in a country where they’ve been interracial dating for 100 years.

It’s quite flattering to know that, among some African Americans at least, Britain has a reputation for being open on racial matters. Indeed, the suggestion that it has been for rather a long time. It’s almost enough to give Brits a smug sense of anti-racist superiority. At least, until we remember why those black British actors go looking for good roles in the States.

They just don’t get them in Britain.

It’s Martin Luther King day in the United States, a nation which even a man with a dream like his, could hardly have imagined would have a black President within half a century of that great speech.

Not of course that it really does. Funny how we all accept that someone who’s half black is black, whereas the fact that he’s half white doesn’t make him white.

In any case, in the Presidency of Obama, it seems appropriate to mark Martin Luther King with a few thoughts about the first ever black head of state, in that part of the Western world that used to be considered the preserve of whites.

That head of state was not Obama, though like him he was part black. Which made him, like Obama, entirely black, of course. Black ancestry, it seems, is just far more powerful than white, so the slightest trace of the former wipes out any effect that could have been exerted by the latter.

The earliest white state with a black ruler was the newly created Italian dukedom of Florence, rich financially from centuries of banking, culturally from being the cradle of the Renaissance. And the black leader, back then in the sixteenth century? The first Duke, Alessandro de’ Medici, nicknamed ‘Il Moro’, the Moor.

He was, it seems, the son of a Medici Pope, Clement VII.

The son of a Pope? I hear you gasp. Yes, yes, those were lax times. Catholic priests were sometimes less than irreproachable in their sexual behaviour, hard though that may be to believe these days.

I say ‘it seems’ he was the son of that Pope, because he was passed off as the child of a different Medici so he could be treated as legitimate. These days, people tend to treat that story as no more than a smokescreen.

And his mother? A mixed race serving woman in the household.

In other words, a great Florentine family was indulging, nearly three centuries earlier, in the same practices as Thomas Jefferson applied in Virginia, when he fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings. They were light enough in complexion to pass for white, but naturally, like Alessandro and Obama, they were black all the same.

Alessandro de Medici, the Moor
Remember, a bit black is black

Things didn’t work out too well for Alessandro. Seems he suffered from Bill Clinton syndrome and couldn’t turn down the opportunity for a sexual adventure if one presented. His cousin, Lorenzino (popularly known as Lorenzaccio, and the ‘accio’ ending in Italian never means anything good), invited him over to enjoy the favours of his sister (Lorenzaccio’s, not Alessandro’s). And then bumped him off. 

Sad. At least Obama seems well above all that kind of stuff. Shame Clinton wasn’t. What a presidency his might have been, without all that impeachment mess.

Still, these are gloomy thoughts Americans shouldn’t be contemplating on a public holiday. Have a great MLK day, cousins across the pond. Have a dream in his tribute. And a ball.

Dreading the half century

The date comes inexorably closer: in just over a week, on 22 November, we’ll be marking the half century since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

It’s going to be agonisingly painful. The worst is going to be watching so many people mouthing platitudinous tributes, though we know that they wouldn’t vote for him in a month of Sundays, if they had the chance.

Not of course that they’d have that chance today. No one with Kennedy’s track record with women would even get a look in for a run for the White House, let alone winning. Kennedy’s behaviour in this respect would leave Bill Clinton looking like a shrinking teenager at a school dance but, with a complacent press, JFK sailed right on through all of that whereas poor old Bill got impeached for his pains (well, Hillary’s pains, not to mention Monica’s).

Of course, Bill wasn’t just paying the price for a quasi-JFK-ish inability to keep his flies zipped. He was also paying for Richard Nixon’s opponents who had the gall to impeach him. The guys on Nixon’s side of the aisle had never forgiven the way Tricky Dicky was treated, and were chomping at the bit for a chance to get their own back.

Jimmy Carter was far too decent to give them the pretext, so they had to wait for Bill. And did he give them the opportunity they wanted. In spades. You could almost see them mouthing the words ‘we’re going to get us a piece of Democrat President.’

None of them see the irony that the action against Nixon was for a major offence: abuse of power, betrayal of his oath to uphold the constitution, a breach of a 200-year old principle that no one, not even the highest office-holder in the land, is above the law.

Clinton’s offence was serious, but essentially domestic.

These characters clearly can’t see the implications of equating the actions of a man who subverted the very nature of US government with those of a philanderer. Sad. I wonder if anyone could explain to them what it says about their own side?

The heirs of those guys are in the Tea Party now, and I dread to hear them praising another, murdered Democrat. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ll have the decency to keep their traps shut.

On the other hand, they are the Tea Party, so they probably won’t.

There’s nothing new about all of this. Right and left of the US likes to speak highly of many other dead presidents. Jefferson, for instance, or Lincoln.

You think anyone in the Tea Party would vote for either of them if they came back and ran for office today? Free thinkers? Committed to Liberal principles? Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, for Pete’s sake. Can you imagine the shutdown there’d have been if the Tea Party had been around when that particular bit of big government was going through?

I at least will be commemorating the anniversary on Friday week with sorrow. Losing JFK, above all to such a despicable act, left the world a sadder place. But I have to confess that he isn’t the Kennedy I miss most. That honour goes to the man I fear is the best president the US never had, his brother Bobby.

Three Kennedy brothers.
Was the greatest the smallest?

We’ll never know how he would have performed as president. But I still feel he deserves that accolade, if only for one event in his tragically short life. 

On the day Martin Luther King was murdered, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency in Indianapolis. He learned of the death as he was travelling to a rally deep in an African-American district; many of his aides felt it would be too dangerous to proceed with the plan, but he insisted.

He gave no campaign speech but informed his audience, many of whom hadn’t heard the news, of what had happened, to its howling dismay. He didn’t flinch but went on to make a brief call for peace which included the words:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

There were riots that night in over a hundred US cities, but not in Indianapolis.

Now there’s a man whose absence we should still be regretting.

I have a nightmare

It’s so quaint, isn’t it, that Britain continues to be a monarchy? The pageantry, the millennial rituals. And now with a baby too. It makes you feel all pink inside.

We’re about to see another glorious aspect of this enchanting tradition re-enacted. It’s called ‘royal prerogative’, and doesn’t that sound grand? It doesn’t mean the right of the queen to travel around the West End of London in a gilded coach, and devil take the traffic. It means that there are certain things the queen can do, as sovereign, without being answerable to parliament or having to consult it.

One of those things is to take the country to war.

Now she doesn’t actually exercise that royal prerogative herself these days. Instead, it’s delegated to the British government acting in her name. So Tony Blair was able to take us to war in Iraq on the basis of royal prerogative and David Cameron could do the same, any day now, in Syria.

And why not, after all? That initiative of Blair’s went so well. Iraq is now fully pacified, fully democratised; the fact that 66 people were killed this very morning by terrorist action in the capital is of course regrettable, but things are never perfect; and the fact that the nation is now little more than a puppet of Iran’s merely proves… well, I don’t know what it proves, but it proves something, and certainly not that the intervention was less than the stunning success George ‘Mission Accomplished’ Bush claimed.

I see no reason to assume that intervention in Syria will achieve anything else.

Of course, it wouldn’t actually matter if the government gave up royal prerogative: with a docile parliament and a pliable opposition leader, there’s little doubt it would get the authorisation it needed to support the military action already decided upon. Decided in Washington not London: the American War of Independence may have made the US independent of Britain, but it has left Britain entirely dependent on the US.

So on this day, the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech’, we’re faced with the depressing spectacle of a US President poised to take not just his own country but France and Britain as well, into another military adventure in the Middle East.

In King's footsteps? Or just Dubya's?

Perhaps we ought to add a line to that great speech, to bring it up to date: ‘I have a dream… that some day a black President will be sitting in the White House, and will drag his allies into another senseless war, just like his lamentable white predecessor did.’

Personally, I have a nightmare.

A nightmare that fifty years from now Britain will still be taking its most dangerous decisions on the basis of a mechanism centuries out of date.

A nightmare that at that time the ‘democracies’ will still be reaching for military means as the first resort, rather than the last, for confronting their political problems.

A nightmare that a woman in the White House, like a black man, will behave as badly as any of their white male predecessors, proving in the saddest possible way that Dr King was right, and no race (or gender) is to be preferred over another.

Unforgettable moments

Certain moments are iconic. And it’s become a received expression to sum them up by saying ‘you’ll never forget where you were or what you were doing' when the event took place.

‘You’ll never forget what you were doing when Kennedy was shot.’ That was probably the moment that enshrined the saying in our culture. And indeed if you’ve been around long enough, the Kennedy assassination – the first one, John F.’s – is very much that kind of brutally unforgettable event. Followed within five years by Martin Luther King’s and the second Kennedy shooting, Bobby’s.

But this kind of event isn’t limited to bad news, or indeed to the United States. In 1989, there was the fall of the Berlin Wall, and little more than a year later, the release of Nelson Mandela. Who could forget those young people, perched on top of a symbol of division and death, chipping away at the concrete of the wall with their hammers? Who could forget that proud but jailworn figure walking down a driveway to freedom?

Glorious moments forever seared into our memories.

Now we’ve had another one.

I was saying to myself just the other day, ‘I’ll never forget what I was doing when I learned that Aung San Suu Kyi was released.’ That frail figure with the warm smile and the message of forgiveness and reconciliation. Just what the world needs in these times of terrible division and tension. A little Burmese grandmother carrying today’s torch of hope for better things – the best news we’ve had for ages. If only she’s allowed to carry on.

And yet. And yet. When it comes to the expression itself – can I really remember what I was doing when all those things happened?

The clearest memory I have of all of them is when I learned of the assassination of John Kennedy. I can picture the scene in detail, playing with my brother and being told by a visitor. Except that the memory is of a weekend morning and the event actually took place on a Friday and, by our time in Europe, in the evening. So I have a brilliantly clear memory which is completely wrong.

As for King and Bobby Kennedy – no idea what I was doing when I heard about their deaths. Even the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela: I remember watching the news coverage, I remember the excited discussions, but the precise moment when I first heard? No trace. Complete blank.

And I hardly dare admit it, but I can’t remember what I was doing when I learned that Aung San Suu Kyi was released, even though that was just a few days ago.

‘You’ll never forget what you were doing.’ Sadly, that doesn’t seem to apply to me. It may of course just be my memory. Or maybe it’s just another one of those received expressions that aren’t to be taken too literally, like ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ (I’ve had a few and, far worse, I’ve given a way a few, to people who have promised the earth in return and delivered nothing).

I suppose it isn’t the truth of the expression that matters so much as the truth of the thought behind it: it’s the events themselves that are burned into the memory. Certainly I won’t forget those devastating assassinations in the sixties. Equally, I’ll treasure those glorious moments of hope rekindled – after all, I need them as antidotes to the terrible killings.

As for where I was and what I was doing – well, frankly, who cares?