http://msmagazine.com/blog/2010/10/28/10-things-to-know-about-ntozake-shange-and-for-colored-girls/
Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Berry
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001946/
Safundi: The Journal of South African and American StudiesVolume 13, Issue 3-4, 2012 |
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Original Articles
“Free That Brown Eyed Man”: The United States v. Chuck Berry
Abstract
As
1959 turned into 1960, amidst escalating national tension over both the
growing Civil Rights movement and the controversial popularity of rock
‘n’ roll music, Chuck Berry was charged with transporting a teenage girl
across state lines with the intent to engage in “immoral practices.”
The public scandal that ensued fed into conservative fears that rock ‘n’
roll encouraged the racial integration of America’s youth, both through
the airwaves and at live venues. The federal officials involved in
Berry’s prosecution saw him in particular and rock ‘n’ roll more
generally as posing the same main threats to the racial status quo as
those posed by state-enforced integration: the breakdown of racialized
spaces and the erosion of taboos against interracial sex. This piece
situates Berry’s music and his 1960 trial and conviction within legal
and musical histories shaped by the sexual as well as spatial mandates
of white supremacy. Courtroom debate from the trial demonstrates how the
perceived unity of gendered racial identity and individual intent
dictates the attorneys’ interpretations of both Berry and the Apache
teenage runaway on whose behalf the state is intervening; this
racialization of sexual intent caters to the state’s investment in
jointly regulating the sexuality and mobility of racialized subjects.
Portrayed at various points in the proceedings as the lawless foil of a
racially segregated Missouri, the Southwest, where Berry and his band
were touring when the alleged crimes took place, becomes a racialized
space in which delinquency and sexual deviance result from unregulated
contact between nonwhite populations.
