Bold and Eloquent Musings on Race and Identity in America

In 1970, when it was chic to be radical, and the sensation-hungry media were lapping up the most extreme pronouncements of self-styled revolutionaries and black nationalists, a 54-year-old educator and retired Air Force major published a book called “The Omni-Americans.” In it, he made the distinctly un-chic but more genuinely radical argument that black and white Americans had more in common with each other than with anyone else. Albert Murray, the author of this seminal work, has gone on from strength to strength: as a novelist, a poet, a cultural, literary and jazz critic, and one of America’s most astute--and perhaps most under-celebrated--public intellectuals.

Now in his 80s, living in New York City, Murray was born in Alabama in 1916. Growing up there in Jim Crow days, he saw himself as “the ever nimble and ever resourceful mythological Alabama jackrabbit in the no less actual than mythological Alabama briarpatch.... What makes the Alabama jackrabbit so nimble, so resilient, so elegantly resourceful? The briarpatch!” Thus, as he declares in the book’s opening essay, “I have never thought of myself as a victim or a villain. I was always, but always, the fairy tale hero who would marry the fairy tale princess.”

The 17 pieces in this provocative collection include book reviews, speeches, memoirs and a pair of recent interviews. Whether he is describing his aims as an artist, meditating on the blues, urging college students not to settle for lowered intellectual standards or paying tribute to Duke Ellington and Ernest Hemingway, Murray is as forthright as he is eloquent.

“I don’t like being called ‘black American,’” he tells one interviewer, “because it so often implies less American. And I absolutely despise being called ‘African-American.’ I am not an African. I am an American.... All my values and aspirations are geared to the assumption that freedom as defined by the American social contract is my birthright.”

Murray’s insistence on his American identity has nothing to do with an uncritical acceptance of the racist myths that have been a part of this country’s history. He notes, for instance, that “the average American still thinks of the Reconstruction as having been ill-advised if not downright sinister.... The facts are otherwise.” Murray believes in hero worship, but only for the right heroes. “[I]t is Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, who ... deserves a place near Lincoln as the finest example of a nineteenth-century American, not Robert E. Lee. Schoolchildren should be told the truth. Robert E. Lee

Another such hero is the fugitive slave: Compared with the dangers he (or she) faced, Murray reminds us, even the “justly celebrated exploits of the backwoodsman, the keel boatman, and the prairie schoonermen ... become relatively safe.” And, like his friend, fellow writer and jazz fan Ralph Ellison, Murray finds heroism in the blues singer and the jazz musician.

Unlike Richard Wright or James Baldwin, Murray does not see his novels as vehicles of social protest but as works of art. His triad of novels, “Train Whistle Guitar,” “The Spyglass Tree” and “The Seven League Boots,” constitute an open-ended Bildungsroman in which the Southern black protagonist develops an ever richer and more complex view of the world. Murray’s ambition is to transform the particulars of his experience into art with a universal resonance, just as his favorite artistic heroes--Mann, Faulkner, Joyce, Hemingway, Ellington, Armstrong and Basie--did with theirs. In “Art as Such,” an address delivered at an Alabama arts conference in 1994, Murray affirms the importance of art as “fundamental equipment for existence....” Art’s primary concern, he insists, “is not with beauty per se, but with the quality of human consciousness.” He has no use for the “restrictions of political correctness ... exerted in the guise of a well-intentioned permissiveness in the interests of what our current crop of do-gooders think of as the empowerment of the downtrodden....Why should anybody’s efforts to equate inaccuracy and mediocrity with excellence be indulged? ... Most people prefer all-star quality over mediocrity in sports. Why not in the arts?”

Asked by an interviewer about growing up in the segregated South, Murray replies: “I wasn’t their conception of me, I was my conception of me. And my conception came from the great books of the world.” Murray’s vibrant blend of straight talk and erudition, irreverence and wisdom, makes it clear why Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest person I know.”