The Messenger, one of the early literary magazines of the Harlem Renaissance.
Randolph wore another important hat. Less than a year earlier, he formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the nation’ s first predominantly Black labor union.
As the day’ s final speaker, Randolph followed Mayor Kendrick, Herbert Hoover – the U. S. Secretary of Commerce and future president – and Secretary of State Frank Kellogg to the podium.
“ In this period there are three great, outstanding problems, the problem of peace between nations, the problem of peace between races and the problem of peace between labor and capital,” Randolph told the audience, which by the time he spoke had been reduced sharply by the long program and a heavy downpour of rain.
But for the nation’ s 11 million Blacks, it was the“ problem of the color line,” which W. E. B. Du Bois warned the nation about a quarter century earlier, that was most troubling as the United States celebrated its 150th anniversary.
became the first full-run, all- Black show on Broadway. The jazz musical, which launched the careers of Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker had 504 performances, all of which permitted integrated seating in the theater’ s orchestra-level. That was a major breakthrough for Broadway theaters, which up to then had only allowed Black people to sit in the balcony.
“ Shuffle Along” changed that. It also ignited the Harlem Renaissance – and put a spotlight on the growing acceptance by Whites of Black music – especially jazz.
From the Jazz Age of the 1920s to the“ Swing Era” of the 1930s and 1940s, performers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and band leaders like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, reached across the color line that once separated America’ s music styles.
The musical genre they created crossed over this country’ s color line and became a popular American export.
In the 1930s, Black athletes also rose above the stereotypes of Black inferiority. Eighteen Blacks competed in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, and won 14 medals. Four of them went to Jesse Owens, who despite that great accomplishment became – along with other Black members of the U. S. Olympic team – the subjects of a racist rumor about their anatomy.“ In private conversation the Germans tell each other that the Negro race is extraordinarily adept at running because of a certain peculiar conformation of their bones,” The New York Times reported on August 7, 1936.
The success of the 18 Black Olympians was a great athletic showing for the United States against athletes from Germany, its soon-to-be enemy in World War II. Although these Black athletes achievements might have earned them greater respect in some areas of the United States, they still encountered persistent racial discrimination when they returned from Germany.
On December 26, 1936 – just four months after his Olympic victories
Ironically, as the managers of the sesquicentennial required Blacks who volunteered for its 5,000-member chorus to practice apart from White volunteers, the color line in music elsewhere in the United States was beginning to fray.
Five years earlier, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle created a major blurring of the color line when their musical,“ Shuffle Along,”
Jesse Owens
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