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“Fondly… is one of the most challenging projects I have ever undertaken,” said Jones. “A Good Man is an honest and unflinching portrait of that process.”

Through two tumultuous years, witness raw moments of frustration as Jones struggles to communicate his vision to his dancers and collaborators, as well as moments of great exhilaration when movement transcends the limitation of words. Jones and his company come face-to-face with America’s unresolved contradictions about race, equality and the legacy of our 16^th President. Initially an indictment of “The Great Emancipator,” the work evolves into a triumph of hope for our struggling democracy, with Jones revealing that Lincoln was “the only white man I was allowed to love unconditionally.”

“Abraham Lincoln and Bill T. Jones make total sense to me. The courage and convictions of both men are a testament to the timeless endurance of art and action,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a seven-time winner of the Emmy^® Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. The series is a production of THIRTEEN for WNET New York Public Media. WNET is the parent company of THIRTEEN and WLIW21, New York’s public television stations. For nearly 50 years, WNET has been producing and broadcasting national and local documentary and other programs to the New York community.

“I had always wanted to make a film that follows the creation of art from the very beginning all the way to the end,” says Bob Hercules. “Bill T Jones: A Good Man gave us that chance since we were wisely brought in by Ravinia at the very start of Bill’s research phase. Luckily, we had the resources and determination to keep filming through the whole process up to the premiere of the piece two years later. The result is an unvarnished look at how art gets created.”

“We tried to convey the immense amount of ideas and information that Bill T. Jones transfers into movement, music and speech for a performance. As we watched Bill’s struggles in putting his feelings about Lincoln and the contradictions and complexities of American democracy into Fondly…, we found ourselves drawn into the same contradictions about our democracy and our hopes for the future of this country,” says Gordon Quinn.

Throughout the film Jones explains how his childhood, artistic journey, personal feelings about Lincoln, and current emotional and physical condition affect the piece’s direction and development. Bill T. Jones: A Good Man also features interviews with dancers, musicians, crew, and staff from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, including Executive Director Jean Davidson, Associate Artistic Director Janet Wong, Producing Director Bob Bursey, and Creative Director/Set Designer Bjorn G. Amelan, as well as Welz Kauffman, CEO and president of Ravinia Festival. Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray premiered at Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Illinois, on September 17, 2009. The film features performances from the Ravinia premiere and rehearsals at the New 42^nd Street Studios in New York City, along with production, writing and research sessions, including an emotional viewing of Lincoln’s personal effects at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Archival performances include Still/Here (1994), Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land (1990) and Jones’s collaborations with his late partner Arnie Zane in Valley Cottage (1980), Blauvelt Mountain (1980) and Monkey Run Road (1979).

Bill T. Jones: A Good Man is a co-production of A Good Man Film LLC, Kartemquin Films, Independent Television Service (ITVS), THIRTEEN’s American Masters for WNET, and Media Process Group, with the cooperation of the Ravinia Festival. Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn are directors. Joanna Rudnick is producer. Keith Walker is directory of photography, David E. Simpson is editor and Rachel Pikelny is associate producer. Gordon Quinn is executive producer for Kartemquin Films and Sally Jo Fifer is executive producer for ITVS. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, Jack Rudin, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation, and public television viewers. Funding for Bill T. Jones: A Good Man is provided by the Ravinia Fund for Artistic Initiatives, Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Leiden, Mrs. June Bild Pinsof and Mrs. Madeleine Pinsof Plonsker, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Sage Foundation. This PBS Arts Fall Festival presentation is in collaboration with PBS member station WTTW. Funding for the launch of PBS Arts has been provided by Anne Ray Charitable Trust, public television viewers and PBS.

In writing INVISIBLE MAN in the late 1940s, Ralph Ellison brought onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were angry, uneducated, and inarticulate — the consequences of a society that oppressed them — Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, articulate, and self-aware. Ellison’s view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in INVISIBLE MAN comes upon a yam seller (named Petie Wheatstraw, after the black folklore figure) on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation “I yam what I yam!” is Ellison’s expression of embracing one’s culture as the way to freedom.

If Wright’s protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison’s more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A “frontier” state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the 1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were “among the poorest” in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those “who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day.”

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the variegated culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in INVISIBLE MAN. The novel references African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz, and black traditions like playing the dozens — much as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical Western and Eastern civilization in THE WASTELAND and ULYSSES. An added difference for Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own and the black identity — as well as a roadmap for anyone experiencing themselves as “invisible,” unseen. “Time” magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”

For Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison’s view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence — including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to “tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.” In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

In his own life, Ellison’s interests were as far ranging as his “integrative” imagination. He was expert at fishing, hunting, repairing car engines, and assembling radios and stereo systems. His haberdasher in New York said that he “knew more about textiles than anyone I’ve ever met,” and his friend Saul Bellow called him a “thoroughgoing expert on the raising of African violets.” He was also an accomplished sculptor, musician, and photographer. The scope of Ellison’s mind and vision may have contributed to the growing unwieldiness of his much-awaited second novel, which he toiled over for forty years. He planned it as three books, a saga that would encompass the entire American experience. The book was still unfinished when Ellison died in New York in 1994 at the age of eighty.

INVISIBLE MAN and the essays in SHADOW AND ACT and GOING TO THE TERRITORY were transformative in our thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be American. On the power of three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary project and helped define and clarify arguments about race in this country. Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. The universality and accomplishment of Ellison’s writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of INVISIBLE MAN, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.

Resources

Novels and Essays by Ralph Ellison

INVISIBLE MAN, 1952 (novel)
SHADOW AND ACT, 1964 (essays)
GOING TO THE TERRITORY, 1985 (anthology of interviews, essays, and more)
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON, 1995 (John Callahan, ed.)
JUNETEENTH (1999) (novel)

Selected Essays and Reviews

Albert Murray, THE OMNI-AMERICANS (1970)
Robert G. O’Meally, THE CRAFT OF ELLISON (1980)
Benston, ed., SPEAKING FOR YOU: RALPH ELLISON’S CULTURAL VISION
Jerry Watts, HEROISM AND THE BLACK INTELLECTUAL: RALPH ELLISON, POLITICS, AND AFRO-AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LIFE (1994)

A DVD of “Ralph Ellison: An American Journey”, containing an additional hour of video commentary and analysis can be purchased from California Newsreel.

1. Individuals play a variety of roles in people’s lives. Ask the students to brainstorm the roles they play. For example, they are children, siblings, students, workers, grandchildren, aunts or uncles, etc. Ask the students to choose one role and respond in a writing journal to the following questions:
   • Are you comfortable playing this role?
   • How does it make you feel?
   • Have you chosen this role?
   • What expectations do people have of this role?
   • Do you agree with them?
2. Divide the class into pairs, and ask them to share their responses.
3. Ask the class to discuss the following people and the roles they have played in society:
   • Princess Diana
   • Nelson Mandela
   • Maya Angelou
   • Michael Jordan
   • Hillary Clinton
4. Focus on the following questions:
   • Do you think these people have chosen the roles they play?
   • Are roles always freely chosen?
   • How do you think these roles have impacted their private lives?
   • Do people have a responsibility to take on roles? Why or why not?

Activity One

1. Ask the students to generate a list of people from ancient times to the present representing role models for youth.
2. Divide the class into two groups and debate the following question:
   • Do prominent people in public life have a responsibility to act as role models for youth?
3. After the debate, discuss the following question:
   • Do you feel that you have a responsibility to act as role models for younger children? Why or why not?
4. At different times in her life, Lena Horne struggled with how to reconcile her personal life and her life as a black woman living in the public eye. Many saw her as a role model. Some possible sites to read about Lena Horne’s life include:

   http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/horne_l.html

   http://www.worldbook.com/fun/aamusic/html/horne.htm;

   http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=B71y67u50h0jk

   http://www.who2.com/lenahorne.html

   http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Horne,+Lena

5. Compile a class fact sheet about Lena Horne’s life. This may include photos and websites.
6. Ask the class the following question:
   • Based on your readings, would you consider Lena Horne a role model?

Activity Two

1. Race played a central role in Horne’s personal and professional life. As an artist, she struggled with the expectations of her people, and her work. Divide the class into four groups to conduct Internet research. Some good sites to begin researching are suggested. Under each some group possible sites to begin researching are suggested.

   Group One: McCarthyism in Hollywood

   http://www.sag.com/blacklist.html#SAG%20&%20the%20Blacklist

   Group Two: African Americans in Hollywood

   http://americanhistory.about.com/homework/americanhistory/library/weekly/aa031997.htm

   http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/african-american/twentieth_century/cinema.htm

   Group Three: Lena Horne and Hollywood

   http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Delta/6424/lenacoverf.html

   Group Four: Civil Rights Movement and the Stage

   http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart9.html#09b

2. Each group should prepare a brief presentation summarizing the results of their research and share it with the whole class.
3. Ask the students to pretend that they are Lena Horne and are writing a letter to a friend. Have the students describe how they might imagine Lena Horne felt about one of the following incidents:
   • Lena Horne was blacklisted.
   • Lena Horne was thrown out of the USO for turning her back on a white audience and facing the black audience at a performance.
   • Lena Horne was unable to stay at many of the hotels she performed at, or be a customer at some of the venues she played at, such as the Cotton Club.
   • In 1960 Gary Cooper became the first white person on television to touch a black person when he greeted Lena Horne on a show they were both appearing on.
4. Share Lena Horne’s quote with the class:
   • “I’m a black woman, I’m not alone, I’m free… I no longer, I say I’m free because I no longer have to be a credit, I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody I don’t have to be a first to anybody, I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become I’m me and I’m like nobody else.”
5. Ask the class to respond to the quote in a brief paragraph based on their readings on Horne’s struggles throughout her personal and professional life.
6. Share individual responses with the class.

Activity Three

1. Ask the class to brainstorm their favorite performing artists.
2. Conduct a brief Internet search on the following 1960’s performers:
   • The Beatles
   • Janis Joplin
   • Aretha Franklin

   Discuss how each flourished in the context of the social, cultural and political movements of the times. You may want to play some music from the 60’s in the background that can be accessed at http://www.netoldies.com/.

3. Lead a class discussion on how the constraints of one’s time shapes who one is as both a person and an artist.
4. Divide the class into pairs or small groups. Have each group select a musician, an artist, or a writer to research. Each group should create a presentation that highlights how the social context influenced the individual and his or her work. Presentations may be in the form of posters, skits, murals, essays or any other appropriate rendering.
5. Compile a class list describing the societal influences and values on artists today with those in Lena Horne’s life.

Assessment

Students will be assessed on the quality of their participation in class discussions, the quality of their writing, and the quality of their presentations.

Extension Activities

1. Ask the students to prepare a brief report discussing how the Internet has the potential to transform the music and entertainment world. Share individual reports with the class.
2. Ask the students to research the life of Spike Lee and look for parallels between his life and Lena Horne’s life.