To be honest, you could not tell from the cover photo that it was a magazine aimed at African Americans. The fair-skinned man had all the markings of what I would normally expect to see on the front of a mainstream magazine published in 1938.
The man looked rather ordinary so I bypassed the magazine, and moved on to the next one in the stack on a back table at the auction house. It was a copy of Sepia with a light-skinned black woman in a bikini on the cover with the subject “Are Chorus Girls Immoral.” Another title was even more intriguing: “Why Hollywood Stars Like Negroes.” Sepia was clear in its identity and I was familiar with the magazine.
As I re-piled the magazines, I decided to flip open the Flash Weekly Newspicture Magazine. To my surprise, I saw black and white photos of African American men and women in hair styles and fashions of the 1930s. The man on the cover was identified as Willie Bryant, a bandleader who had gained popularity through a broadcast from the Savoy Ballroom in New York.
He “‘has probably beat his fair skin jinx, says Down Beat,'” the magazine stated, apparently quoting the music magazine. “We present Willie on the cover because he has persevered and slain this very peculiar ‘jinx’ and is heading for the top.” Less well-known than Chick Webb (whose orchestra ruled the Savoy), Bryant’s orchestra played on the second bandstand for a number of years.
I had never heard of the “fair skin jinx,” and history had never shown light skin to be as much a hindrance to those who had it. In fact, many used it as a way to distance themselves from black folks of a darker hue, down to forming their own organizations of exclusion. Many of us black folks are familiar with the “paper-bag test” (if you were darker than a paper bag, you couldn’t join some clubs) and the saying “if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back.”
Last year, I came across a 1956 Sepia magazine with an article that tackled the subject of light-skinned versus dark-skinned blacks. Featuring Sarah Vaughan and others, the magazine was heralding the end of “color prejudice” whereby dark-skinned African Americans were considered lesser. This notion is long rooted in black cultural history.
I’d never come across Flash! magazine before, so I was curious about it. This issue, from March 7, 1938, was chocked full of black and white photographs. The magazine was celebrating its anniversary as the “first colored magazine publishing 52 consecutive issues, official organs excepted.”
The publishers noted that the March 22 issue would be the anniversary issue, and the magazine would be reduced to twice monthly at half the $4.50 rate. It was produced in Washington, DC, with Robert G. McGuire Jr. as president. Dutton Ferguson – who was listed as the secretary, and was an editor and writer – was said to be one of the founders. Inside the issue was a cartoon about taxes by Otto McClarrin, an editor, artist and writer.
The 25-page magazine includes a four-page spread of students at Lincoln University in Jefferson, MO; a two-page spread of African American abolitionists; personalities in the news; theater shows, and society and fashion news.
Flash! was founded in March 1937 as a weekly news photo magazine, and offered national and international news, society, sports and entertainment news about blacks in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Pittsburgh and Chicago. It folded in August 1939.
During its two-year run, it seemed to have published some nice covers and features, with photography by some very talented African Americans. The first credited photos of Charles “Teenie” Harris, known for chronicling the lives of African Americans in Pittsburgh, were featured in the October 1937 issue of the magazine. He had been selling Flash! on the streets when he decided that he should learn photography and submit his own photos.
Here are some other articles and photos:
When Lena Horne visited the city in 1938, Harris shot photos for a two-page spread that ran in Flash! and the Pittsburgh Courier, both of whom he freelanced for. By 1938, he was listed as a photographer for the magazine.
Billie Holiday was on the cover in May 1937, and Joe Louis in June 1938.
The magazine published an expose on female domestic works photographed by Robert McNeill, who would become a Federal Writers Project photographer who documented the lives of African Americans in Virginia in 1938. McNeill’s 1937 Flash! essay – titled “The Bronze Slave Market” – told of the lives of New York City black domestics as they looked for work.
A Harris photo in the Feb. 28, 1938, issue showed Duke Ellington and friends at a basketball game.
As for band leader Bryant and his “fair skin jinx,” his cultural blackness and not his skin color may have stymied his success. He and his band toured the country, and were said to be the “hottest” band around in a 1938 Indianapolis newspaper article. He was not a musician, but he danced, sang and clowned. The newspaper article gushed about him and his band, which was set to perform in the city.
While at the Savoy, Bryant and his band were broadcast on NBC and local stations in New York. He was host of the “Night Life” radio variety show on CBS in the 1940s and another CBS radio show “Uptown Jubilee” in 1949. He was known as the unofficial mayor of Harlem.
Bryant later moved to California and for several years was an actor who was said to have played non-black roles because of his light skin. He appeared in at least one movie “Keep Punching” and several music variety series on TV.
He and his dancing partner Leonard Reed apparently performed white until around 1933 when someone told on them.
“Before he was 21, he was a star graduate – prepped to become a dancer, comedian, bandleader, singer, deejay, producer, movie actor, talent scout and emcee,” David Hinckley quoted Reed in a New York Daily News column in 1999. “The only thing he couldn’t become was white. HE WAS CLOSE, with neutral features and ‘good’ hair. But close didn’t count, and he soon concluded that looking almost white was why he was almost a national star.”
