According to Gifford, “ith the exception of upper Manhattan, home of the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago’s Black Belt was the most vibrant and prosperous African American city during the 1920s.” They also became breeding grounds for new forms of artistic expression. Unsurprisingly, those neighborhoods became havens of petty crime, including sex workers and pimps. Crackdowns on gambling and prostitution in the red light districts in the “white” side of town squeezed those vices into the Black Belts, which law enforcers treated like a no-man’s land. Excluded from the commercial amusements their white neighbors enjoyed, blacks established their own nightclubs and cabarets and other fora that became watering holes not just for racial minorities, but for others not accepted by the mainstream: homosexuals, mixed race couples, prostitutes, and others. Nevertheless, violent racism and de facto segregation confined African Americans to particular neighborhoods, colloquially known as Black Belts. More important, cities like Chicago and New York offered relief from the constant threat of lynching, and a generally better standard of citizenship - better educational opportunities, stronger voting and civil rights, and far less restricted access to public spaces. The southern sharecropper turned into the black factory worker, a life perhaps no less humiliating, but at least slightly better paid. Around the time of his birth in 1918, Beck and his mother, Mary, became two of the six million black people who would leave the Jim Crow south for northern industrial cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, and, as in the Beck’s case, Chicago, dramatically changing “black America’s social, political and cultural lives in the 20th century” and “the very composition of the American city.” The First World War, and eventual US involvement in it, was a lucky break for African Americans, as white males ended up in military service while their European counterparts suspended westward migration across the Atlantic, leaving American factories, meatpacking houses, and rail yards in need of new labor. Poetically, the beginning and end of his life coincided with two key episodes in the African American experience: the Great Migration of the early 20th century, and the Rodney King riots in 1992.
Like Malcolm, Beck/Slim can be assessed on two fronts: as a writer, and as the figure he’s writing about.
It isn’t difficult to see Beck’s story as the B-side of Malcolm X’s, both men reborn - after intense jail-time reflection and reading - as revolutionary black knights, informed and haunted by a brutal past. The beauty of this book is that he almost succeeds. But supporting his case is a tall order, especially in such a slim (no pun intended) volume. Gifford makes some other big claims at outset: that Beck is “one of the most influential renegades of the 20th century” that “a strong case can be made that more than any other cultural figure of the past 50 years, Beck transformed American popular culture and black literature” and that Beck “invented the figure of the pimp that is now an ever-present fixture in hip-hop songs and videos.” He describes Pimp as “one of the most important pieces of American literature of the 20th century, but one that is still widely overlooked by the American mainstream.” Okay – Mr. Iceberg Slim, the Ur-gangsta rapper, or as the scholar Justin Gifford describes him in his new biography, Street Poison, “the godfather of hip-hop.” You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m referring to Malcolm X’s Autobiography, but this description is actually of a book called Pimp: The Story of My Life.
A couple of decades later the author inspires the pioneers of rap music, who not only invoke his name, but also consciously transmit his character. THIS PROBABLY sounds familiar: A mid-1960s memoir, of a former petty black crook who reforms himself in prison, becomes one of the landmark nonfiction works about the pre-civil rights African American experience.
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