How an Election in Chicago Could Shape Harlem

Recently, several outlets reported that when President Barak Obama's second term ends, the Obamas' will move to New York. The Obama Presidential Library and Museum will not follow, but function as a kind of concession prize for for Chicago, Michelle Obama's hometown.

 

Of course, means Columbia University's campaign to instead build the Obama Library and Museum in Harlem is dead. Well, not quite.

Late last year, The Chicago Tribune reported that a certain Ivy League university which sometimes describes itself as a Harlem institution and other times Harlem-adjacent, did more than promise prime real estate to the Obama Presidential Library. In one of just a few public statements about the library and contest to house it, Columbia University officials hinted that a deal to situate the Obama Presidential Library and Museum in New York would also include some sort of post-White House role for both the Obamas at Columbia University.

So, it's a given that the library will come to New York. Well, not exactly. 

When the Obama Presidential Library and Museum Foundation promised earlier this year to reveal the Obama Library's location by the end of March, the political tea-leaf readers, public prognosticators took that date seriously. Over the last few weeks, the low din of Obama library location chatter has entered the relm of the hard to ignore.  But, in the final hours of March, its one other tidbit included in a March  Chicago Tribune editorial that appears to get at the truth. There will be no final Obama library announcement -- not in Chicago, not in New York -- until the results of the mayoral run-off election in Chicago become clear.

Here's why.

Chicago's embattled Mayor, Rham Emanuel, used a significant share of his nearly-depleted political capital to exact a promise from city officials. Chicago will turn over 20-acres of prime city parkland to the group behind the Obama Presidential Library and Museum on the condition that the group agree to build the facility on that same Chicago park site. But Emanuel, who angered many of the city's black and Latino voters this year by closing schools and making other cuts to the city's budget, is facing a serious run-off challenge. 

Emanuel remains the front-runner in Chicago's mayoral run-off. But at least one reputable polling outfit found evidence that Emanuel's campaign has ignored a large and fast-growing part of Chicago's electorate, Latinos. And, that same poll found, that 6 out of 10 Latino voters in that city have indicated that they plan to support Emanuel's opponent. If they do, Jesus "Chuy" Garcia could become the city's next mayor.

And, that could change everything for the Obama Library. Garcia opposed Emanuel's parkland deal for months before changing his position earlier this month. But most Chicago politics watchers described that switch as less of a genuine change of opinion than a strategic bit of political jujitsu, an effort to keep Emanuel from turning a vote for him into a vote for building the the Obama library in Chicago. 

To be clear, Garcia is the long-shot candidate. But if he won, it seems, the park deal and the library would, at best, become less certain. Harlem's own, Columbia University, could easily become a strong front-runner. 

Publicly, Columbia has remained tightlipped about its Obama Library plans, if the school gets the nod. The school has said only that any Obama Library would likely go up on the school's Manhattanville Campus, a long-planned university expansion that stretches deep into West Harlem between   129^th and 133^rd, from Broadway to the Hudson River. 

In the formal proposal Columbia submitted in its bid to build and house an Obama Library and Museum, a Columbia officials did promise to build a facility that could provide a, "dynamic platform," for scholars, researchers and even the Obamas to, "engage," in the "most vital issues of the day." In essence, little became clear.

Columbia University officials have refused to share publicly where an Obama Library and Museum would sit, how high it would rise, how traffic -- human and vehicle -- would be managed and what, if any, jobs or economic activity the project could bring to Harlem.  

Still, in Harlem, it's worth noting that by the close of business March 31, no Obama Library announcement had been made. So, it seems, the predication that the  group behind the Obama Foundation will put off making a decision until the early April election results are in has become just about the only thing anyone can say about the Obama library with certainty.

Janell Ross is a journalist who lives in Harlem. 

***Update: Rahm Emanuel wins second term as Chicago mayor..http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/07/politics/chicago-mayoral-runoff-results-rahm-emanuel-chuy-garcia/index.html

Holiday Returns Home to Harlem and the Apollo

In November 1934, a seasoned Chitlin-Circuit comedian shoved a terrified 19-year-old New York City transplant toward the center of The Apollo Theater stage. Dressed in a cheap white satin dress thick enough to hide no flaws, it wasn't long before a woman seated in the Apollo's notoriously discerning and expressive audience spotted the singer's knees. They were shaking violently, almost rhythmically. 

"One little broad in the front row shouted, 'Look, she's dancing and singing at the same time,'" Billie Holiday would later write about that nerve-wracking moment in her memoir, Lady Sings The Blues. The sheer terror of Holiday's first time on The Apollo stage quickly transformed to a moment of bliss. Harlem, it seemed, loved Billie Holiday's voice.  

Today, on what would have been Holiday's 100th birthday, Apollo Theater staff installed a permanent sidewalk plaque just outside the famed 125th Street performance space bearing Holiday's name. The plaque quite literally situates Holiday, her music and her legacy just to the left of Stevie Wonder, above Little Richard and to the immediate right of Chaka Khan in the Apollo's Walk of Fame. But, the plaque, first unveiled Monday, also serves as a symbol of just how widely recognized and, in many circles, revered Holiday's uncanny legato phrasing, her  "thin" and "piercing," wail of a voice, her white dresses and those gardenias in her hair have all become. 

Holiday, the woman who had been terrified to take Harlem's best-known stage, is not just an almost unquestioned fixture of Harlem arts history but, an essential part of the broader American musical cannon. 

On Monday, moments before Holiday's plaque was unveiled, Apollo President and CEO, Jonelle Procope, described Holiday as a woman with a, "one of a kind voice with influence that has spanned generations." Holiday, she said, was an artist who utterly altered the American cultural landscape.

"Everything about Billie, from her voice to her trademark gardenia, was just deeply felt," Procope said to a gaggle of reporters, bloggers, and downtown, young blonde public relations types uptown to commemorate Holiday and jazz singer Cassandra Wilson's latest CD, Coming Forth By Day. 

The CD includes a series of reimagined Holiday covers delivered by Wilson's own distinctive voice. On Friday, Wilson will perform for the first time at The Apollo, making the Holiday tribute either an extremely well-timed coincidence graced by the gods of American capitalism, or, more likely, a shrewd bit of cross promotion. Also out this week: a 20-song collection of Holiday's recordings and a tribute CD featuring Jose James, covering Billie Holiday hits. 

Born Eleanora Fagan to a 13-year-old mother and a 15-year-old father in Philadelphia, then reared in a Baltimore brothel before becoming a child victim of sexual assault and later, a, prostitute, almost nothing about Holiday's early years suggested she would become the kind of American whose birthday would be commemorated on the pages of major national publications or the stuff of celebration in establishment Harlem. But, a move to New York with her mother in search of domestic work and The Great Depression changed everything. 

In need of a job at a time when even some of New York's rich could no longer employ multiple women to scrub their floors, Holiday thought she might find work in one of Harlem's then thriving night clubs. 

There was just one problem. Holiday couldn't dance. But, she could sing. 

In short order, a failed dance audition lead to a series of long-term, uptown and downtown singing gigs. During an extended run at Cafe Society, the Greenwich Village night-club, Holiday first took to wearing gardenias in her hair and sang the haunting anti-lynching protest song Strange Fruit,  according to her obituary in the New York Times.

By 1947, Holiday had reached what she would later describe as the peak of her commercial success -- earning about $250,000 in just three years, or $2.6 million in 2015 dollars. Then in May 1947, law enforcement officers stormed her New York apartment. 

Privately, Holiday's life had long been punctuated by physically abusive and financially exploitive relationships. Her biographers would later speculate that Holiday's decisions and addictions to mind-numbing substances like heroin were rooted in her unquestionably traumatic childhood and the need to quiet understandable anxiety. 

Publicly, some critics - black and white - already disapproved of Holiday's late-night, unabashedly man-loving lifestyle. Brash and pioneering, Holiday wasn't a musician who, during her lifetime, ranked high on the respectability scale so carefully watched by blacks concerned with racial uplift and more specific efforts to secure African American human rights. And, Holiday had even been bold enough to memorialize her lifestyle when she covered the 1920s blues number, Ain't Nobody's Business.  But the drug possession arrest, guilty plea and sentence (one year in a West Virginia federal facility providing a crude and early version of drug rehabilitation treatment) made even Holiday worry about her relationship with the country's publicly puritanical audiences. 

The drug arrest made it clear that the drinking, the drugs, the abusive men Holiday may have been singing about in jest were real and ugly features of her life. And, it created a professional and financial crisis. 

The drug conviction cost Holiday her cabaret license, a document needed to work in most of New York City's night-clubs. Without one, Holiday's options were limited to massive performance spaces and physically and emotionally-taxing tours. In fact, just two weeks after her release, Holiday sang in front of a packed house at Carnegie Hall and, later, joined a Broadway show. 

In the decade that followed, Holiday, bounced between periods of intermittent sobriety and heavy use of heroin, alcohol and other substances. Her once singular voice, lost some of its quality. And, by 1957 Holiday was struggling with cirrhosis of the liver, a failing heart and fluid-filled lungs. When she died in a New York hospital that year, Holiday was under arrest and facing another round of drug charges.

Back at the Apollo on Monday, the Apollo's Procope read from an account of what her predecessor, Ralph Cooper, told  staffers as they weighed the idea of booking a then teen-aged Holiday to sing on The Apollo stage. 

"You never heard singing so lazy, so slow, with such drawl," Cooper told The Apollo's managers. "It ain’t the blues. I don’t know what it is, but you got to hear her.”

Before her death at just 44, Holiday performed at The Apollo Theater, at least 23 times. 

Janell Ross is a reporter who lives in Harlem.