In this episode of Harlem and Moscow: Red Flags we get hot, heavy and a little messy. Host Sam Riddell talks to experts about the hook-ups and heartbreaks of the 1932 trip to the Soviet Union. We learn about what the dating landscape was like during the Harlem Renaissance, the culture around marriage, views towards interracial sex, polyamorous and open relationships within the New Negro Movement, lavender marriages, and respectability politics levied toward Queer Black folks. Plus we spill tea on a certain couple who became known for their wild parties and delve into the motivations behind Dorothy’s proposal. And we link our 1932 tripgoers to phenomena of today like the Passport Bros and Love Is Blind. Sam is joined by the playwright of “Harlem and Moscow” Alle Mims as well as Angela Tate, the Women’s History Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. With a special guest appearance by historian, cultural critic, and author of “Our Secret Society,” Tanisha C. Ford.
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Transition
Full Transcript Below:
Announcer: You are now listening to theGrio’s Black Podcast Network, Black Culture Amplified.
Sam Riddell: Comrades, we’ve been screwed! Welcome comrades to Harlem and Moscow, Red Flags, the official companion podcast of theGrio’s audio play, Harlem and Moscow. I’m your host, Sam Riddell. I’m a producer and editor here at theGrio Black Podcast Network, and I’m co host of the Inner Hoe Uprising podcast comrades we’ve been screwed is the famous line uttered by Henry Lee Moon in the audio drama, Harlem and Moscow.
And it’s the perfect line for the theme of this episode on sex, sexuality, and gender. The six part audio play is about the true story of a group of Harlem Renaissance artists who went to the Soviet Union to make a film that would inspire a revolution in America. But if you’ve ever gone on a trip with a big group of friends, you know that there’s usually a few hookups and heartbreaks.
And this trip was no exception. Today I’ve got the perfect guest to talk about sex, sexuality, and gender in Black America in the 1930s. We have Angela Tate, who is a curator of women’s history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, aka the Blacksonian. And of course, also joining us is Alle Mims, the playwright of Harlem and Moscow.
We’ve just come back from listening to all six installments. The play is phenomenal. Congratulations, Alle.
Alle Mims: Thank you so much, Sam.
Sam Riddell: So today we’re talking about episodes five and six, AKA sex in the Soviet Union, where relationships get hot, heavy, and a little messy. So spoiler alert, listen to the series if you haven’t.
But before we get into the conversation, let’s go to Harlem and Moscow’s teller of tales and narrator, Jared Alexander for a recap.
Jared Alexander: Hey everyone. Thanks It’s important to know, on this trip, there were all kinds of relationships. Straight, gay, interracial. There was sexual freedom abroad, and everyone was letting loose.
There was Dorothy West and Mildred Jones. Were they, or weren’t they, more than friends? There was Mildred and Boris. The young beautiful Black woman gets a marriage proposal from the older Russian sergeant, and there was Dorothy West and Langston Hughes. Their relationship went from flirty to fiery, with Dorothy risking her reputation and, dare I say, dignity for Lang.
And let’s face it, There was Langston Hughes in basically every woman, and quite a few men, on the trip. Lang, the forever flirt. Were Langston’s seductive ways real? Or was he trying to hide his own sexuality? Sam, I know you’ll talk about that. And that’s your Relationship Red Flags Recap.
Sam Riddell: Thank you so much for that recap, Jared.
As you said, we’re going to talk about all of the things. So let’s get this conversation started. Shall we? Quite the jam packed episode. And, you know, you did such a wonderful job in this play of giving us a little glimpses into what sexuality and gender norms were like in Moscow. So I really want to.
Kind of as the characters in our play are coming back to Harlem, I want to come back in this conversation and talk about just what the landscape was like for gender and sexuality in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance for Black folks.
Alle Mims: Sure um, I think especially for a lot of these women who are middle class and all the way, especially Dorothy, upper middle upper upper class um, there was a lot of gendered expectations for them around presentation, femininity, Respectability politics.
It was just part of the game that they had to play once they hit that certain class. And once they were in the Soviet Union, this is where the lines start to get blurred. They realize, Oh, there’s, there’s interracial relationships. There’s same sex relationships, those kinds of things. While I can’t really speak to.
I’m sure there was still society moral issues with some of these things. They were not illegal. They were not criminalized in the Soviet Union. At least at this time, some of them weren’t criminalized later when Stalin gains more power, but in this sweet spot of the Soviet Union, divorce is legal.
Abortion is legal, interracial relationships, same sex relationships. None of this is criminalized. And almost all of that is still criminalized in the U S and even In New York, and so these women are having experiences. For example, Louise Thompson, uh, this doesn’t necessarily come up in this script, but in real life, she gets pregnant while in the Soviet Union, and she decides to end that pregnancy, and that’s something she, she might’ve been able to do in New York, but it would’ve been illegal, or she would’ve had to travel for it, what if she didn’t have the money, what, what about the courts, what about the police, and so, they are experiencing both the highs and lows of the, this, uh, More loose, especially sexual environments, um, that, and I think for me, you know, and this, I think comes through in this series, um, I think it was a big turning point for a lot of them in their lives and, and, and how they encountered gender politics, even once they went back to Harlem.
Sam Riddell: Yeah, I definitely want to dig a little bit even deeper into that because obviously we have like pressures of whiteness Always bearing down upon our shoulders, but I kind of want to talk about what tensions if at all existed within the Black community Right. So like when they’re on this trip like Henry Lee keeps saying like Let’s be free to explore.
Let’s like, get into this. And then you kind of through Dorothy here, a little bit of judgment, like a little bit of side eyeing like, Oh, Henry Lee’s paying for a prostitute for a nickel. And, um, uh, Louise Thompson is like, there’s pink toes in your bed. Like what was going on back home with like the judgment in all of these things that people are getting into.
Angela Tate: Honestly, um, this is a contemporary thing to think about, like the whole passport bros phenomenon. And just thinking about what it means to be able to essentially shed your Blackness, shed your Americanness, and interact with women of other nationalities, not just other races, but other nationalities. Um, and I, I can.
I can understand the judgment because there is this belief that if you are behaving in this manner in another country, are you still down for the race? Are you still committed to racial uplift? Or do you see this as a moment to essentially escape? These stereotypes, these restrictions, and that women, Black women in particular, could not fully escape.
Alle Mims: Definitely. Um, I, I, I just love all the diverse perspective because there were 22 people on the trip. I mean, obviously there was people from all all sides of the spectrum. Um, and I found it like, especially challenging as a writer to write from Dorothy West perspective, not just because I am not of her class, but also because I don’t share her beliefs as far as respectability, politics and gender roles and things go.
Um, so that was a real challenge for me. And I, I found it really rewarding to look at it from that side. Cause it is so easy or at least easier in 2024 to look back and say, well, they shouldn’t have done this. They shouldn’t have done that. But they were also too strict. Um, and going back to what we were talking about earlier, when so much of what we’ve seen in media so far is based in minstrelsy.
And so, so much of what you’re seeing is like the, these Jezebel characters. It makes sense that, that Black women of this time swung hard to the other side and said, no, I am the opposite of that. I am respectable. I am virginal. I am classy. I always have an escort anywhere I go, you know, no sex before marriage.
These people, at least Dorothy West in particular were religious, you know, like Countee Cullen. We get a little bit of him in the first episode. He’s the son of a very famous preacher at the time. And so those were all. Not all, but it’s so much driven by that response of well, people have sexualized me so hard for so long I have to show that I can be this other thing because they’re just going to assume that, but at the same time, it’s so fun to play with a character like Henry Lee, who sort of encapsulates a bunch of men who were on that trip in general.
I know he was actually a little more tame than his friends, but Theodore Poston, McNary Lewis. We’re the ones who are really, uh, cutting wild, going to the nude beaches, things like that. And it was so fun to play with that because yes, uh, sex is a form of power and in the States you’re, it’s not only illegal, but it’s not socially acceptable.
In the white and the Black community, um, at large to mix the races in this way. And so I think that’s also a way of them reclaiming their power is dating is visiting brothels in this way and saying, yeah, I can do what the white man does too. I’m just as good. I’m, uh, you know, and at the end of the day, maybe they are playing into these harmful stereotypes about Black men, but they’ve, they’ve also been restricted in the U S as far as.
How much they are allowed to show and how much they are allowed to desire, especially white women, but just women in general as well. Um, I think it’s, obviously we focus a lot on the women in this podcast and I love that, but I do think that the men are also going through a sort of sexual awakening that I think we might just write off as, Oh, well, that’s just men being men, but who knows if they ever would have, um, participated in certain activities had they not gone abroad in this way.
Sam Riddell: That’s a really good point. I think you captured the nuance in your answer really well. Cause in my mind, having listened to this play several times, being your producer on it, I’m like, man, Henry Lee is like,
Alle Mims: yeah,
Sam Riddell: he’s a bit much, but absolutely.
Alle Mims: He does have to represent that side for sure. But yeah, I do think there’s nuance to it.
And at the end of the day, I can’t fault them for ultimately just exploring, which is what, you know, we all should be doing. Yeah, I agree. Yeah.
Sam Riddell: That’s what vacation is for, man.
Alle Mims: As long as you’re doing it ethically.
Sam Riddell: Right, exactly, exactly. Um, I really appreciated how you brought up, um, on your own accord, Passport Bros, Angela.
And just like, rooting this conversation in a modern context because so much of what happens in this play reminds me of things happening now. So like, This will probably be released a little bit after this, but as we’re recording this right now, there are things like Love is Blind, where people are getting married to people who they’ve never met before and Married at First Sight and something, Who the F did I Marry going on on TikTok and all this, just like marriage, marriage, get married now.
And that was kind of the vibe on this trip. Like people were scrambling a little bit there. Um, And to my knowledge, it seems like, like on this trip, we have a lot of women scrambling, but there were even some men scrambling like Countee Cullen and stuff like that, outside of what we heard in this play. Um, so could either of you kind of speak to what societal pressures were kind of like driving this mad dash for marriage?
I,
Angela Tate: I don’t know. Marriage, even today, is a form of security, and it’s also considered to be a sign of maturity. Even though, as you mentioned, Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, Who the F Did I Marry? People are not mature, but there is this, this, the sign of respectability. And I also, you know, in the course of my own research, um, looking at like Edmonton Barnett and other contemporaries of this period, there was a, essentially a sense of power in Black people being married, even though, you know, we’re looking at typical heterosexual couples, cisgender, but there was This power and being married because being married was denied to Black people for so long under the conditions of slavery, that being able to say, I have the freedom to want to be married was revolutionary, also the desire and love.
And being able to express that was revolutionary because, again, still responding to this legacy of slavery, of being seen as an inhuman, not having souls, being incapable of feelings, physically and emotionally. And so this mad scramble for coupling and partnering up, whether it be permanently or temporarily, was in reaction to, I want to present this united front.
I want to also engage in these, ideas and these norms about romantic love, about partnership, about what American society or what society in general in the 20th century sees when they see people are married and coupled up.
Alle Mims: And I think for women especially, we’re sort of in this in between period where Uh, property, ownership, those sorts of things are much harder.
It’s not impossible, but it’s much harder for women to have those kinds of things without a man, without a Mrs. title. Um, and I think that’s also why we see so many women on this trip who are divorced or separated. Because being divorced also grants you More freedom than being a single woman who’s never been married.
Um, so, you know, Louise Thompson is separated. Mollie Lewis has already been divorced at this time. Mildred Jones has been divorced at this time. And because of that, they’re given more freedom because they’re essentially not these, these, these virginal young women anymore. Like, like you said, it’s a sign of maturity and they are given freedom in the world that, Single women and even married women as well aren’t, are not.
Um, and so I think that’s a big part of it. And for me, like story wise, Dorothy’s father passing away, I believe in the history happened later in the trip. But for me, it was a good catalyst because it gets her thinking about those things. Who is the heir? Who’s going to take over the business? You know, there’s now no man in the house.
I don’t think there was no men at all in her family left, but that sort of idea Well, if I’m supposed to be the one who’s in charge now, I need to have a man there because he has to be the one to sign the papers, to open the bank account, all of that stuff that she’s legally not able to do yet. And so that was a really great, um, sad also moment.
To like dig into the psyche of that, of like, what does it feel like when the only man in your family dies and these things are put in flux, the family business might be put in flux, you know, did he have a brother? Do you have a cousin? Does it go to some uncle that you’ve never met? You know, um, so I think that, that in order to move to the next part of your life that might involve house ownership or starting a business, things like that, it just legally made sense.
To get married and also talking about, um, these people in history, a lot of whom were most likely queer. Um, it, you know, lavender marriages were common, you know, like I, I love this quote from Louise Thompson. It’s a little confusing, but this is how I interpret it. Someone asked her why she separated from Wallace Thurman.
And she was quoted as saying, well, he would never admit that he was a homosexual. And I thought the word. Admit was really interesting because you could take it sort of to mean the man usually had to initiate the divorce So that means he would have to admit it to himself to the court or whatever and he would have to start divorce proceedings That’s why they don’t end up getting divorced.
But I also think Perhaps she was okay with it. Perhaps she was like, Hey, I recognize that this is more of a platonic partnership. Let’s build something together. And we can both have our weekend lives separately. You know, that’s how I choose to interpret it. Because I, you know, Countee Cohen ends up getting married as well.
And he was, you know, Suspected as a homosexual as well. That’s that’s why allegedly his first marriage ended because he came out to his wife and she was not okay with that. And so I think even though, uh, Dorothy West, I, I’m, I hope I’m remembering correctly. Never got married. Langston Hughes never got married.
I do think it. Uh, and what was a conversation. That’s why she ends up proposing to him in this version. She doesn’t necessarily know or accept that he might be gay, but in real life, maybe she did. Maybe she in that letter, um, which is very, um, sad, but also eye opening to read where she basically says, I just want to get married.
I want to have your kids. I don’t care if you continue to travel around and do your thing. Maybe that was her accepting that. I know that you have this other life. I would just love to be married to the Langston Hughes and have your babies and have that security. Um, and you can go off and do whatever you want and maybe I’ll go off and do whatever I want as well.
And so I think that was. definitely more common than I think we ever assume because once we see that a man marries a woman, they are presumed heterosexual until the end.
Sam Riddell: There also seems to be, at least from listening to the play, a level of, like, free love kind of going on, especially with, like, how Mildred and Dorothy react to each other in the Langston Hughes looming behind it all.
Like, Dorothy, uh, Mildred says multiple times, like, I’m fine with sharing. So what was that like in this era to our knowledge? Like polyamory, open relationships. What was the polyamory vibe like back then?
Alle Mims: I mean, it’s so hard. I know we’ve talked about this before offline. It’s just so hard to prove any deviance.
From the norm, you know, if there’s not a baby happening, it’s so hard to know what these people’s private lives were like as far as sex and relationships go. So I, I, I think it was more common, but I, yeah, it’s very hard for me to say, because, you know, it’s really hard to prove someone had a queer relationship.
It’s really hard to prove someone was polyamorous back then. I do think, obviously they use different words for it. And, you know, it, I think stepping out was, was pretty common. And, and, uh, unfortunately is, is. feels like almost an accepted, I shouldn’t say accepted, but it feels like a common part of, of Black love, um, in, in general, still, still to this day, you know, but, um, it’s, it’s so hard to say.
I, you know, the, I, I like to think that yes, they were all, they all had an open marriage, but they were all like messing around because I think that’s more fun.
Sam Riddell: So we actually have some bonus content about a particular couple who ends up together After the trip, and is later rumored to have one of these sort of open, free love kind of relationships.
So to tell you a little bit more about that, I’m going to toss to one of our guests from our Red Flags Episode 1, The Real People of the Harlem Renaissance, Tanisha C. Ford. Tanisha is a historian, cultural critic, and the author of Our Secret Society, which is all about one of the trip goers, Mollie Lewis, who later becomes Mollie Moon.
Tanisha Ford: Shortly after the trip to Moscow, uh, once they returned to the United States, Mollie Moon and Henry Lee Moon began this secret love affair, um, that blossoms and much to the surprise of their friends, they get married in 1938 and they really use their homes. They, they, they, split their time between New York City, where Mollie Moon lives and works and D. C. where Henry Lee Moon works. Um, they put their time in these two homes and they have parties in both. And that’s how they’re able to build this expansive political and cultural network from D. C. To New York City. And over time, these parties garner quite the reputation. I mean, the who’s who of New York society, Black and white were at these parties.
Mollie Moon was a great cook and a great hostess, so she threw a fabulous party, but all the leaders of the NAACP would be there, the National Urban League, stars of Stage and Screen, um, everyone. And they kind of had a reputation over time for being these parties where people got together and had extramarital affairs.
And a lot of this was due to Chester Himes, who was actually Henry’s first cousin, who wrote a book called Pink Toes that was all about interracial sex. And he actually started writing this book when he was living with Mollie and Henry Lee. In fact, in this apartment building that I currently live in, on this floor, they lived here and hosted all these parties.
And Chester Himes is taking notes and he writes this satire. about the people who come through their lives. And what it did was it kind of made Mollie Moon and Henry Lee Moon be seen as people who were involved in an open marriage and who facilitated the hookups of Black artists and white patrons.
Again, the book was a satire, but, but because the characters so closely mirrored their real life, um, the people they were inspired by, a lot of people took them as fact. So that piece of the Mollie Moon and Henry Lee Moon story has lived on. I discuss this in detail in Our Secret Society.
Sam Riddell: Now, that was some pretty hot tea.
Thank you to Tanisha for that. Let’s get back into this conversation with Alle and Angela.
Alle Mims: We have so many letters between these people, but there’s also so many letters that we will never see that were destroyed or hidden or, you know, given away in some way. Um, but yes, I do love that word share. That did come up a lot in, in Dorothy’s letter to Langston Hughes.
She specifically says, Don’t want to be shared. And as far as we know, even with the women she dated after this trip, very, uh, monogamous, very long term relationships, very steady. So, you know, even if you’re in a queer relationship, you know, you can still follow those norms.
Angela Tate: Well, when you think about it, historically, free love was associated with.
People attempting to create utopian societies. Um, this is not a new phenomenon, particularly in American history. There were so many sects or, you know, people who would branch off from the mainstream norms, typically, you know, white Americans, to say, we’re gonna create this utopian society amongst ourselves, and that included breaking the bonds of, you know, monogamy and breaking the bonds of what marriage was supposed to look like.
And so even though there is no proof, there is no archival record saying, this is what, this is the life that these people led. These are the relationships that they have with each other. I’m sure that they were also aware that there is this lengthy history related to, well, if you’re going to be physically free, you’re going to be politically free.
That also means being sexually free. But then, of course, as we see, and even into today, that still does not account for the emotional side. People might say they want to be free. They might want to partake in these utopian ideals, but then they catch feelings. Yes. I think that even though they might have been aware of these, these lengthy history around free love and utopian ideas, as Black people, they could not fully and publicly participate in this because of the norms of what Black people were perceived to be or fighting against the ideas of Black people’s innate and natural sexual, sexual deviance, which is, again, what fueled accusations of lynching in the United States throughout the late 19th and into the early 20th century.
And so. This is why it’s so important to think about them, this group of people leaving the country and essentially attempting to live in this utopian space that the Soviet Union promised them, but then coming up against the fact that they could never forget that they were Black.
Alle Mims: And I think queerness also wraps up in that as well, because That was also a stereotype of Black women and Black men is that they were so sexually insatiable that they would even go as far to have, uh, same sex relations.
Like, that was just a part of them not understanding, uh, moral, uh, uh, uh, duties that you have to your gender that you would go so far as to have homosexual relationships. And so I think that. We talked about earlier about disparaging the race and doing something that makes the race look bad. I think it’s sexual promiscuity, but it’s also, um, same sex relations of any kind, because you are, again, feeding into these stereotypes that Black people are just naturally more inclined, not just to be promiscuous, but to be deviant in their sexual, um, actions.
Sam Riddell: I guess in this context of this is like respectability on a million on a thousand, but in the context of speaking about respectability politics and kind of like what the right way to look Black is some of your research even details at a eugenics movement against queer Black people. Could you kind of expand on that a little bit?
Angela Tate: Shockingly, people don’t think that eugenics was popular within the Black community. Um, I also did think that until I read, uh, Nella Larson’s Quicksand and I remember a scene in the book where her character, which is essentially an avatar of Nella Larson, attending this upscale, talented party where all of these, you know, a sensibly light skin, educated, well off Black people are talking amongst themselves saying, we need to marry each other to improve the race.
And so, in the context of thinking about how Alle, um, discussed, you know, lavender marriages, people marrying for the sake of being able to present a respectable united front to society, even if they were doing something else on the weekends. That movement of eugenics in the Black community, particularly in this upper class, middle class, Black, um, these Black circles was essentially saying we need to improve the race through Breeding with each other and breeding out undesirable elements.
And that also included queerness.
Sam Riddell: Very disturbing, but not unlike things that we see today. Yes.
Alle Mims: In this time period, especially in the literature, the fiction, I find that a lot of queer writers, especially instead of writing about queerness, because that that will get you censored. They often write about interracial relationships and interclass relationships.
I think that there, there is, there’s a lot of crossover. I mean, it all sort of falls under this like sexual idea. Um, and so Like Dorothy West, for example, she writes The Wedding, which is about a well to do Black woman, uh, who wants to marry a poor white man, and how her family sort of deals with that, who’s accepting, who’s not.
And even so far as like, someone who is darker skinned marrying someone who is lighter skinned marrying someone darker skinned, how that had, um, negative connotations as well. Um, it’s It not only is it still illegal in many states, it’s seen as going against the movement. You know, you’re not really down for your people.
You, you’ve been taken in by, um, European beauty standards. It, you’ve been taken in by these, um, white national Christian ideas that, you know, uh, white people are superior and that’s why you’re choosing to marry them. And I think it, it provides like a really interesting parallel to queer relationships, and especially with someone like Langston Hughes, who is sometimes suspected of having not just queer relationships, but queer relationships with white men.
It’s like, you know, that’s like two steps too far. Um, and I, as far as I can tell, Dorothy West mostly. Especially after this trip, she’s quoted as saying some pretty disparaging things about white people that make me believe that she most likely never dated a white person outside of this trip possibly.
But, um, it’s, it’s interesting how your personal relationships become so wrapped up in the politics of it all. Um, and I do believe the personal is political, but you know, obviously I’m, I’m the. Product of an interracial relationship. It didn’t solve racism, but I’m not sure that it necessarily set the race back either.
I think of it more of a new as a neutral thing. Um, and so I find it interesting that that is a lot of these. Authors weigh in is to, well, uh, queer relationships are so taboo that you can’t even use the words, um, without being censored. So I’m going to find a new way to talk about it through interracial relationships, which were also happening and were more common.
I would assume, I don’t necessarily have the numbers on that, but I would assume that it was much more common for you to see an interracial relationship than an openly queer relationship at this time.
Angela Tate: The, the movement of Black people into these urban spaces, into New York, into Philadelphia, into Detroit, into Chicago, not just created, uh, a sense of panic amongst.
Existing Black communities in these cities, but the existing white communities in these cities and how Black spaces, particularly Black entertainment spaces became a way for white people to interact and encounter Black people and vice versa. And how that then impacted. What we now know or conceive of to be the Harlem Renaissance, um, and a number of scholars have said our ideas of the Harlem Renaissance were created just as much by Black people as they were by white people.
Um, and so the first thing that comes to mind right now, when thinking about interracial relationships in this era was. Rhinelander versus Rhinelander, which was, uh, a really degrading court case between a Black woman or a mixed race woman who was white passing, who married a scion of an upper class New York society family, and how she’s on trial for saying she lied to her husband about not being Black or being of African descent.
And at one point of, during the trial, they ask her to strip. Herself naked so that they can look and see that she is of African descent based on her body based on how her body looks, you know, these ideas about, you know, like from Sarah Bartman on forward about what Black women’s bodies look like, and then, you know, Because she was so fair pass, uh, fair skinned and white passing, the, the court still couldn’t fully decide if she was lying to her husband or not.
But I think that it is so emblematic of this panic around what does it mean for Black people and white people to be able to meet each other essentially on equal ground. In the 1920s, in the 1930s, because they’re not in the South, there is no KKK that’s going to be corralling up someone for, who’s been accused of, you know, sexually assaulting a white woman because These white women are actually choosing and openly choosing to go to a club.
They were openly choosing to go to someone’s rent party and or, you know, the migration of Black scholars, writers and artists, poets to midtown and downtown New York to eat food and drink wine and champagne in this parlors and salons of wealthy white socialites. They’re openly choosing to interact and mix with each other.
And so this, this, this panic around what is happening and what is happening to Black and white people. And I, I think that’s another reason why this period is so fascinating, because it was essentially another moment for Black and white Americans to say and to navigate well. How are we going to move into this new century?
How are we going to progress? How are we going to think about ourselves racially, as well as as Americans?
Sam Riddell: Well, thank you so much to you both for being here and kind of dishing it with me in this very salacious episode. Um, Uh, one thing that really stuck out to me about this play is just how much about interpersonal relationships it is.
Um, and it is also in the context of this big, huge historical moment and how we view class and race in our country and abroad, but also like these personal relationships between these people. And so my question to both of you as writers, as historians, as very smart people is why is it important to tell the interpersonal stories of the Harlem Renaissance era?
Alle Mims: I think it’s important to show that there will always be disagreements and different sides to every argument. I think the thing that surprised me the most once I started studying this time period was how much it mirrored present day, how much all the arguments that were going on are still going on now.
We just have different words for them. And so for me, um, As a queer person, as a mixed race person, it was really cool to see people having conversations that even in 2024 it kind of feels like, oh, this must be the first time this is coming up. No, of course not. Of course not. Um, there’s always been interracial relationships.
There’s also always been queer people. Um, and, and, In a way, it can be a little maddening because some of the arguments we see today are just regurgitated from 100, 200, 300 years ago. But another way, it’s, it’s very comforting. Um, and I think it also shows me the importance to. All sides of the struggle, um, for freedom that I think, uh, especially as a young person, um, in radical spaces, you can get sort of pigeonholed into thinking, well, this is the one way that we will gain freedom.
It’s just by doing this one thing. And by looking at it from all these different people who are on this trip, who has such diverse backgrounds and thoughts and education, it’s like, oh, they all were, hopefully, or the majority of them were trying to get. But they were all doing it in their own way and it’s, it feels easier now to point fingers and say, well, this person was right.
This person was wrong. But when you’re in it like that, you don’t, you don’t know. You only know what you know. And so I think it’s so important to keep that in mind and to instead of, um, Dragging others down, uh, uplifting everyone and saying, well, there there’s more than one way to go about this. And like, as long as we are all ultimately pushing for freedom for all peoples, then we should be encouraging all all, uh, manner of struggle
Angela Tate: and contextualizing that from the perspective of being a curator, being a story and being a scholar is that we do tend to To look at Black history through this respectability lens of let’s focus on the greats.
Let’s focus on the first and when you look at interpersonal relationships, you humanize Black history, you bring Black history to where people are. So they don’t think that. This person’s life story was so great that it’s unattainable for me to even look at them and see them as an example of things that I could do in my life.
Um, and also the, the complexities of things that were unspoken at the time that we can now speak up today. Um, you know, just thinking about how now we can talk about. the queer side of the Harlem Renaissance of the new Negro movement. And that people today, queer people today can see themselves in historical figures that maybe when they were growing up were only presented them as cisgender heterosexual, because that wasn’t spoken about at the time.
And so we have the language and the tools and then the interpersonal relationships also. Draw on everyone’s love of gossip and drama because we all still love gossip and drama. And I always say, and other, you know, my fellow historians say that we are professional gossips at heart.
Sam Riddell: See, that’s why I love historians. I absolutely love historians for that very reason. Thank you both so much for this, like, delightful conversation. I wish we could have it for forever, but we can’t. I would like to thank my guests, Angela Tate and Alle Mims. Be sure to catch up on any episodes you might have missed of theGrio’s audio play, Harlem and Moscow, wherever you listen to podcasts.
We hope you enjoyed this audio drama and all of its companion pieces. Harlem and Moscow is such a powerful story that few people know about. Please rate, review, share, and tell a friend about this important adventure in Black history. If you like this kind of content, check out our other shows on theGrio Black Podcast Network.
Thank you so much for joining us.
