The Patriotic Black Chauvinism of Albert Murray, RIP

VDARE.com is temporarily blocked while we are running our fundraiser!! While this lasts you can read this item by purchasing it for $1.00

The Harlem literary critic and USAF major (ret.) has died at 97.

Back in 1997 I reviewed The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which was edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., for National Review. In "The Ebony Tower," I wrote:

This compendium raises the more general question of what is the overall contribution of blacks to American culture? One appealing, if possibly grandiose, perspective might be called the Patriotic Black Chauvinism of blues critic and novelist Albert Murray. In contrast to so many other black literary intellectuals, who've only been employed as professors and who now reside in such hotbeds of African American culture as Amherst and Santa Cruz, Murray is a retired Air Force major living in Harlem. Along with his friend Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) and disciples such as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Murray has argued that rather than merely being a pitiful victim of racism, the black man's defiant sense of style makes him the most distinctively representative of Americans. That seems fairly plausible, if unprovable. A cruder version is testable: If America otherwise was as WASPish as Protestant Canada, would blacks by themselves make America a much more interesting place than Canada? Most definitely. (Of course, several other American ethnic groups could claim the same: after all, for better or worse, America is a lot less boring than Canada.)

From the NYT obituary, an interesting adoption experiment story of nature and nurture:

Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty. “It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. ... As rendered in Mr. Murray’s inventive prose, the adolescent