William Grant Still

William Grant Still compositions clearly inspired Gershwin's Summertime - was he ripped off? And first response to Blue Coated Terror on police brutality in New Orleans as a continuation of lynching culture

Blue Coated Terror

I’ve been reading about US police brutality this week – particularly the way death by civilian lynching morphed into state backed policing in New Orleans in the 1920s.

While looking for a soundtrack to accompany Jeffrey S Adler’s Blue Coated Terror – Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality – I came across some articles saying that Gershwin’s Summertime was very highly influenced by the work of William Grant Still.

The book itself makes for uncomfortable reading.

Adler says that white-on-black killings (lynchings) were ad hoc civilian affairs designed to control and intimidate slaves and reassert white supremacy at every opportunity.

But then the police was invented. Policemen were very often untrained, keen to assert racial dominance, and felt very threatened by even the smallest perceived threat to their authority.

The first chapter gives several examples of drunk power hungry police officers taking offence at everything and anything and being constantly abusive and even frequently killing black Americans for perceived insubordination.

I guess it’s lack of self esteem on the part of the cops that led to so much killing – it feels like many of the elements in the story are still with us in different ways.

NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 10, 2019: Black Lives Matter activist rallied in Grand Central Station and marched in the streets of midtown Manhattan in protest of the Attorney General Xavier Becerra of California announcement that his office would not bring criminal charges against two police officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark, a 22 year old unarmed black man in Sacramento last year in his grandmother’s backyard. They repeatedly chanted “FTP” (Fuck the Police), “We don’t need these killer cops”, “Fuck the pigs”, “Justice for – Stephon Clark.” They also protested excessive police force and the black men and women shot and killed by the NYPD (New York City Police Department). (Footage by Tomas Abad/Getty Images).

This Rachmaninov tune goes well straight after the Still

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