by Eugene B. Redmond, February 23, 2011 . . . Re: 150th Birthday Celebration, April 1.
1. we arrive, we arrive
we cross-fertilize
we derive, we survive
2. For a thousand years, Native Peoples (“mounds” builders) inhabit both sides of the Mississippi River. In “Illinois,” these “Mississippians” build the largest city in “America” (circa 1250 AD)—with a population exceeding that of London at the time. (Fast Forward: “Native” culture survives/pervades Metro East today via mounds, namesakes (sports teams, rivers, streets) museums (lectures/tours), conferences and annual pow wows.)
3. 1600-1800: After French Jesuits settle in “Cahokia” (late 1600’s), other Europeans follow, including Captain James Piggott, who operates the first Mississippi River ferry business (1790’s). A few hundred Africans are among settlers. (Fast Forward: During the 20th Century, ESL’s “Piggott” Avenue nurtures Scotia Calhoun Thomas (entrepreneur), James Rosser (college president) and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, among others.)
4. 1800-1860: Flood of Immigrants. Belleville incorporates as a city (1850). ESL, evolving through name changes, social and economic processes, is overwhelmed by flooding and a tornado at mid- and late-century. City becomes industrial/commercial center. Fledgling “Negro” self-help groups, one-room schools, churches and settlements (like Brooklyn and Quinn AME Church ) are created. (Fast Forward: Brooklyn is renown for its Harlem Club where Duke Ellington, Shirley Brown and Albert “Blues Boy” King perform.)
5. 1861: From “Illinois City” to “Illinois Town” to “East St. Louis” . . . the “Village” is born on April 1.
(Fast Forward: ESL, criss-crossed by railroads, is second after Chicago in RR and meat packing industries.)
6. 1861-1900: Civil War begins. U.S. transitions from agriculture to industry, driving a commercial-industrial revolution in ESL. 1871: Creation of National Stock Yards. Eads Bridge opens (1874). First mayor, John Bowman (1865), is assassinated in 1885. Centennial of St. Clair County is celebrated (1890). Captain John Robinson leads battle for schools (for “coloreds” plus Lincoln and Garfield); “Negro” lodges, churches (Macedonia, Mt. Olive, St. John A.M.E.) and professionals increase. ESL’s population rises to nearly 30, 000 (with several hundred African Americans). (Fast Forward: During 19th and 20th Centuries, ESL is “transfer” point for goods and soldiers. John Robinson Elementary School and Homes open on Bond Avenue. As a “ premiere avenue for Blacks during the 1920’s,” according to Jeanne Allen Faulkner, Bond is also home to mid-20th Century Lincoln High School and the Cosmo Club where Chuck Berry’s career is launched.)
7. 1900-1925: More flooding. Meat packing industry moves to town of National City on ESL’s northwest end and, like Monsanto (Sauget) on the southwest flank, incorporates as a separate entity, depriving ESL of a rich tax base. In 1917, a gumbo of social, political, economic and racial factors causes the Race Riot. (St. Louis [MO] Chapter of Urban League is formed the year after the Riot.) Of U.S. cities with populations of 50,000-plus, ESL is the second poorest. Even so, it is among fastest growing cities in the country: Its population doubles every 10 years (reaching 75, 000 in 1930). 1924: ESL NAACP chapter is organized.
8. 1926: Miles Dewey Davis III is born in Alton (IL). The Davises move to East St. Louis in 1927.
9. 1926: In sympathy/empathy re: victims of the Riot of 1917, Duke Ellington co-writes/records “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.” … The song later appears on a Steely Dan album, Pretzel Logic. [Throughout 20th and 21st Centuries, movies, TV shows, books, ballets/stage plays (like Katherine Dunham’s Ode to Taylor Jones III and Frank Nave’s East Boogie Rap) and publications, such as Drumvoices Revue, focus on ESL.]
10. 1926-present: After struggles for jobs and freedom, equal housing and education (Black-based and citywide schools); after “Miles/tones” and “Negro firsts” like the Paramount Democratic Organization and Dr. Aubrey Smith’s election to the Illinois House of Representatives (1930’s); after creation of “Negro” newspapers, being named an All American City (1940’s-1960’s) and more floods, the rest is history . . .
_________
Eugene B. Redmond is the poet laureate of East St. Louis founder of the EBR Writer’s Club and a retired professor of English from SIUE.
There was a fore-warning that there would be no question and answer segment, but listening. Only listening and laughing, for the poet is one who commands her audience in charm, and holds them spellbound as soon as she steps onto the stage like an acrobatic masquerade. She was introduced by poet Eugene Redmond who calls her his sister, and the audience rose in applause. Maya had come.
Then she read from her poem, “The Health Food Diner”, a poem she wrote in response to a diner in Mississippi where a staff had warned her not to smoke. And then she told stories from her past, in a husky voice that bellowed around the room. She told of discrimination, and hope, and joy, and rebellion, and progress, and love. “We are all rainbows,” the author said, “placed in the clouds to make some other person happy. And we’ve all been paid for,” she continued, “with either blood and human excrement from the slave ships from Africa, or the blood and brine of fleeing Jews from the camps of Eastern Europe, or the sweat from the brows of the Asians who came to this country in the 1800s to lay the railroad tracks, and buy properties so that their descendants can lay claim to the new nation.” Each one of us has an ancestry of brave people who have suffered so that we may enjoy. And so when we go out in the morning, just a little word of hope, of compliment, can always, always make a difference in some other person’s life. Speaking about the racist N-word, Maya made an allegory to poison pills in a labelled container. Putting the pills into a nice plate of gold would never make them less poisonous, or less potent, she said, in response to today’s youths (take that, Jay-Z!) who present new filmsy reasons in the entertainment circuit as justification for the continued use of these words. Poison is still poison, Maya said, no matter how it is wrapped, and I agree. And then she sang, beautifully. Pleasantly. At her age, one would expect brokenness. But no, she definitely didn’t sound coarse or broken, but rather mellifluous. She let it be known that she had written a couple of songs for some of Roberta Flack’s albums, and she sang one of them today as well, to rounds of laughter and applause. She is also a script writer, having written Down in the Delta, and acted in a few other films about African-America life. Then there was Roots, a tv series made from Alex Haley’s 1977 best-selling and Pulitzer-winning book.
The Traveller did get the photos he had hoped to get, but could not get the desired autograph from the visiting writer, at least not immediately. Like he had dreaded, the 81 year old woman had sneaked out of the hall before anyone else could, immediately after her completing her reading, and got onto her big dark coach before any member of the audience got there. That was such a lesson in humility, nil-expectation and obedience to the inner voice. (For on approaching the venue of the programme one hour earlier on a bike before the event began, I had noticed a big black coach bus in front of the library. But being quite a strange vehicle never before seen on campus, I’d wanted to check it out. After all, it was in that library where the photo exhibition took place on Friday. I didn’t. I had a seat to reserve. And this turned out to be a wise decision as well, in retrospect, because one hour before the start of the programme, half of the auditorium was already filled completely. However I was still able to get a seat in the front – which is usually not my style. It was then such a sigh to find out later that she it was indeed who was in the Library, inspecting some of her photos on display. Well, shtuff happens! A bigger conceit for me however is in another kind of pleasant waiting. Poet Eugene B. Redmond has taken away with him my new copy of Maya’s last autobiography, All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, to be duly autographed by the author, and returned to me. Within its pages is something that I had slipped in, with his collusion, brought all the way from home: a compact disc of songs and poems from Yorubaland, signed in my trembling student ink: “To Maya, With Love.”
In the begining, there was just me, going to a University in Ibadan, Nigeria. I had gone through all my primary and secondary education in this same city, so it was just as well that I never knew – nor would have given any thought to – the reality, fact or fiction of the phenomenon of “six degrees of separation.” There was no way in the world that a little boy from that ancient town could relate to the likes of Martin Luther King Jnr, Roberta Flack, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Coretta Scott King or Toni Morrison, even if by chance I knew a few of their names back then. The first American I could say I warmed up to was James Hardley Chase, and I didn’t know if we’d have gone along well if the chance ever presented itself for us to meet. Then there was Denise Robbins, whose many novels I read before I completed secondary school. The likes of Mark Twain, and Alex Haley came much much later, as did Toni Morrison, Eugene Redmond and Maya Angelou. I remember seeing Maya the first time while browsing through the now rested Microsoft Encarta Africana CD of 2002, and watching her read her poem, “Still I rise.” I was enchanted immediately, and while reading more about her, I realized that it was impossible not to be, considering how much of stories her life embodies. She was born in St. Louis, grew up in Southern California and Arkansas, then moved over to Ghana with her African Revolutionary husband whom she had met in the United States during the anti-colonial movement of the fifties. She returned to the States after her first son to the African, became a dancer, writer, teacher, public speaker, novelist, poet, film director and movie producer and later Inaugural Poet, the first African-American so honoured to recite for the in-coming president. She read her poem 
Now here I am in Illinois, less than ten years after that memorable introduction, now meeting the icon face to face in a campus auditorium. Looking at a slide show of pictures taken from the Eugene Redmond collection of photos of Maya Angelou on the big screen, I see a shot of her once with Coretta Scott King, the widow of the slain Civil Rights Activist, then another with Toni Morrison, then Oprah Winfrey, Eugene Redmond, Amiri Baraka and very many other famous names in African-American culture, and I remembered the rule of separation. If only because of this enchanting day, this time and this moment of fate, I can say that I may have finally connected my last branch of life’s six degrees, joining imaginary hands with all of the rest of the world, with everyone just six persons – or less – distant from me, no matter where they are. Oh how I like the sound of that!
I stumbled onto a photo exhibition on campus on Wednesday, after a very stressful day of two classes. If not for a chance meeting with retired Professor Eugene B. Redmond as I headed home from Pizza hut, I definitely would have missed out. I had first met EBR last in Ibadan in 2003 or so when he visited the University campus there on an exchange programme, and to present new editions of DrumVoices Revue – a quarterly publication of poems from all over the world. I was with him and another professor from Ibadan when he visited the palace of the Ooni in Ife – which was the first time for me at the time. I have not been successful in getting him to grant me access to my digital copies of those photographs. Maybe they will end up in an exhibition someday. It will definitely be a pleasure to see them for the first time in over five years.
The exhibition was titled “Eighty Moods of Maya”, and it features eighty of the pictures taken of the poet and novelist Maya Angelou over several decades, and in many moods, some serious, some trivial, some private and relaxed, and some public and tense. Eugene Redmond has worked as a poet, journalist and photographer as well as a critic, academic and publisher. He first attended SIUE as a student. He was a student journalist with a camera at the 1963 March on Washington as an editor of The Alestle, a student publication here on campus. He has also taught many times at SIUE before he retired a few years ago. On retirement, he donated a collection of his photographs to the SIUE Library, and thus became a patron of the institution.
Iconic American writer Maya Angelou will be on campus Oct. 4 as part of SIUE’s annual Arts & Issues series, along with seven other performers and speakers throughout the year.
