Tag Archives: Nixon

We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House …

Starting with real estate reforms in the 1970s supposedly instituted to open a path to the American Dream for Black citizens, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s new book, Race for Profit, a study of Black home ownership, argues that the turn from exclusion to inclusion was just another, less explicit, but equally damaging form of systemic racism. By the late 1960s and early …