bad rap

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 3:16 AM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
> _Our world_

Seeing that caused me to break my mental stride._Our World_ was the
name of one of the two black, LIFE-style magazines - the other was
_Sepia_ - driven out of business by EBONY. There wasn't anything in
EBONY that wasn't also in Our World and Sepia. The problem for the
older mags was that EBONY "spelled _Klass_ with a capital K." The
older mags were published on newsprint. EBONY, OTOH, was printed on
glossy stock, like in white folks's magazines! The snob appeal was
incalculable, as history has shown.

BTW, _sepia_ as a synonym for _negro, colored, Negro, ebon(y), black,
Afro-American_, etc., etc. was once quite fashionable. E.g., the
newsreels seen in the colored picture-shows were The March of Time
*and* the _SepiaTone News_ and even the movie shorts of the day aimed
at colored audiences - they featured various black people in the
entertainment business: Louis Jordan, Lucky Millinder, Bullmoose
Jackson, the Duke, the Count, Bill "bojangles" Robinson, Machito,
Perez Prado (not sure that he considered himself to be black, but he
was regarded by black journalists as black), Dizzy Gillespie, plus
various athletes, usually boxers and the Harlem Globetrotters - were
quite often in sepiatone instead of in B&W.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org