I Only Went to Small’s Paradise Once, But….
R. Martin Oxman
Dedicated to the potential of J and B

I recently met a darling couple from San Francisco. They’re so sweet. And I pray that what I say here won’t do a single thing to take away from our friendship, whatever their politics might be….

They’re not of the same race as the maniacal Joe Lieberman, by the way.

Hey, I’ve got a question for ‘ya. What do the folks below have in common?

Zora Neale Hurston

Claude McKay

Carl Van Vechten

Langston Hughes

Paul Robeson (I actually had a dream of him delivering the “punch line” below to me.)

Richard Bruce Nugent

Eubie Blake

Angelina Weld Grimke

Sterling Brown

Arna Bontemps

Alain Locke

W.E.B. Dubois

Marcus Garvey

Augusta Savage

James Baldwin (On many a night in Harlem his voice warned me about people like the figure in the “punch line” below.)

Billie Holiday

Besse Smith

Fats Waller

Aaron Douglas

Charles Alston

Okay, twenty’s enough.

Wrong Answer: They are all “members” of the Harlem Renaissance.

Correct Answer: None of them, and hardly a soul — no one?* — from that period between WWI and The Depression in Harlem — if alive today — would vote (let alone campaign) for Barack Obama.

That’s the punch line, directly above. I hope it knocks you out… of whatever Black Hole you might be in, delivers you….

R. Martin Oxman can be reached at headburg@yahoo.com. *The author admits that he might be wrong with regard to ten out of a thousand, albeit not respecting the talented tenth. If you don’t know why he chose to include Lieberman above, you really need to get with it. And, if that’s the case, you could do a lot worse than to start with http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18224.
That should prepare you a bit for… Elaine Brown (http://www.elainebrown.org/), www.derrickjensen.org, http://www.monbiot.com/, and Devinder Sharma, Mike Davis, Ward Churchill et. al. These are people you can trust on all counts. Let’s say, enough counts. Quite a rarity. Remember, when you jump to other articles on this site… each and every piece was penned with particular audiences in mind… for very specific purposes… and not knowing those contexts could easily make the work very off-putting.