Ramblin' with Roger

Who was Hazel Scott?

HUAC

Who was Hazel Scott? The jazz pianist and singer was the first Black American to host her own television series, well before Nat King Cole. It aired on the DuMont network from July 3 to September 29, 1950, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 7:45 to 8 p.m.

From here: “Hazel Dorothy Scott was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on June 11, 1920. She was the only child of R. Thomas Scott, a West African scholar from England, and Alma Long Scott, a classically trained pianist and saxophonist. Scott displayed her talents for music at an early age and, by the age of three, she could play the piano by ear.”

Someone at church told me this story: A teacher at Juilliard overheard an audition of someone improvising on a Rachmaninoff classic, Prelude in C-Sharp minor. “Appalled, he went to confront the blasphemer, but found an eight-year-old Black girl, whose hands were too small to hit all the right keys.” Hazel was deemed a prodigy and accepted immediately, though the usual age of admission was 16.

From WRTI: “Throughout the 1940s, Hazel Scott was a household name, traveling the world with her ‘Bach to Boogie’ repertoire under contracts that stipulated her outright refusal to perform before segregated audiences…

“By the time Hollywood beckoned, her reputation as a consummate professional but no-nonsense businesswoman preceded her.. She agreed to appear in five films in just two short years, but under very strict contractual conditions—she would never wear a maid’s uniform or play a subservient character of any kind (her own gowns and fine jewelry would suffice), and her billing would always be: ‘Hazel Scott as Herself.'”

ACP

“Scott returned to New York City from Hollywood, where she began an affair with Harlem preacher and politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who in 1944 became the first African American elected to Congress from New York. She and Powell married the following summer, amid great scandal (he divorced his previous wife just days earlier) and great fanfare…. Scott gave birth to their son, Adam Clayton Powell III, in 1946.”

The Red Scare stalled her television career. “When her name appeared in Red Channels and CounterAttack, the right-wing journals that tracked suspected communists in film, television, and radio, she insisted on going before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to defend her good name” in September 1950. But it backfired, and her show was canceled a week after her HUAC appearance.

“In the mid-1950s, Scott and Powell separated, formally divorcing in 1960.” By 1957, she would “seek solace in France. Along with her young son, Adam III, Hazel struck a new path, joining the Black expatriate community of artists and scholars living in Paris. There, she was able to heal her emotional wounds and reconcile the anger and frustration she felt about American injustice.”

When Hazel returned to the US a decade later, the music scene had changed. She passed away from pancreatic cancer on October 2, 1981, “just two months after her final performance.”

Watch Whatever Happened to Hazel Scott. An American Masters program, The Disappearance of Miss Scott, was released in February 2025; you can watch it with a PBS Passport, but there are clips worth viewing. See also her Wikipedia page.

Tunes

A Hazel Scott mix (mostly)

Autumn Leaves – w/ Charles Mingus, Rudy Nichols

Dark Eyes (1942)

In a performance filmed for World War II soldiers, she begins with a section from Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” and ends with a jazzy tune.

February rambling: One of Us

Vote for Rebecca Jade in the San Diego Music Awards!

It Always Could Have Been One of Us— Crises are often invisible until they reach communities insulated from consequence

Fact Check of FOTUS’s SOTU

Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us

Marine Detained in Minneapolis Says Feds Copied His Phone Without a Warrant

Twitter and ICE & DHS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Measles Hits an ICE Facility: What Happens Next.— When infectious disease and incarceration collide, the outcome is predictable

The EPA Just Made Our Air Less Safe to Breathe— Repealing the Endangerment Finding will shape our clinical reality for years to come

In South Korea, ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison after he was found guilty of carrying out an insurrection in his country when he declared martial law in 2024 to try to seize control from the opposing political party.

Kremlin officials used the February 23 Defender of the Fatherland Day holiday to set conditions to mitigate any domestic backlash that may result from limited rolling reserve involuntary callups in the future.

Chinese New Year 2026 and the Fire Horse

The 24th Amendment

Obits and more

Jesse Jackson Witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination. Here’s How He Carried the Torch for the Civil Rights Movement Into the Future. ‘I am somebody.’ The Common Ground speech.

Robert Duvall, a Chameleon of an Actor Onscreen and Onstage, Dies at 95. I saw him in To Kill A Mockingbird, The Godfather, The Conversation, an episode of The Twilight Zone, and a bunch of other projects.

Eric Dane Dead at 53, 10 Months After Announcing ALS Diagnosis. In the final year of his life, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and ‘Euphoria’ actor was a leading advocate for ALS research.

What Happened Was… (in memoriam, Tom Noonan)

The Tariff Decision. Gorsuch takes aim at fellow Supreme Court justices in the tariff decision

The Clock May Be Ticking on ‘60 Minutes’ as We Know It

Honoring Lincoln: Character Matters

Stephen Colbert’s interview with one of the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas, James Talarico. Talarico is a Matthew 25 Christian, which I espouse.

The Soul in the Creases (photography)

Voice actor Brian Hull wandering around Disneyland, doing Disney voices for the characters he imitates.

Want to Reach Nirvana? Try a Colonoscopy.

The Two-Year Waitlist to Work at a Bookstore and The Battle Over the Floating Slum and The Man Who Killed 44 People and Broke the Lawbook

“Civilization”

Under Destruction: Munich Security Report 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, February 15, 2026: “At the Munich Security Conference last year…Vice President J.D. Vance announced the U.S. was switching sides in global affairs. Henceforth, it would work to destroy the values of representative democracy and the global systems of trade and security that the U.S. and partners constructed after World War II.

“In their place, officials in the [regime] and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying ‘western civilization.’ Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies…”

“In his speech to the conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and ‘a climate cult’ has imposed energy policies that are ‘impoverishing our people.’

Newsweek: “On the surface, the applause for… Rubio’s weekend speech at the Munich Security Conference suggested he had assuaged European concerns. In reality, the speech underlined the immense division between Europe and America. It may have deepened it.”

MUSIC

VOTE for this year’s San Diego Music Awards! Rebecca Jade (the first niece) is up for Best R&B, Funk, or Soul Song – Not Me No Way, and for Artist of the Year. You may vote once per day.

Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds

I Love To Tell The Story – Emmylou Harris, Robert Duvall, from my favorite Duvall movie, The Apostle (1997)

Donna Summer and more Donna

Sanctum by Courtney Bryan

A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy – The Kinks

Sarah McLachlan: Tiny Desk Concert – February 12, 2026

Here Comes The Sun – Richie Havens

New York, New York – Tim Waurick four-party harmony

Walking On Sunshine – Katrina & The Waves

She’s Leaving Home – Peter Sprague

I’m Just A Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band) – The Moody Blues

Blackbird – Dionne Farris

Coverville 1569: The Ed Sheeran Cover Story and 1570: Cover Stories for Otis Blackwell and MGMT

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star– the Byrds

Hey Jude – Wilson Pickett

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes – Bobby Vee

99 Luftballons – NENA

Genre Delve #12: Funk vs. Soul

And I Love Him – Esther Phillips

Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay – Danny And The Juniors

Michelle – Luther Vandross

K-Chuck Radio: The Romantic Pop of Nino Tempo and April Stevens

Eleanor Rigby – Wes Montgomery

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown – The Ed Sullivan Show for November 17, 1968

Kate Smith, Irving Berlin, and God Bless America

Lydster: fixing up the house

Washington County, 2:30 a.m.

Much to our astonishment, our daughter decided to start fixing up the house. One notorious area involved the second-floor landing. There was a whole bunch of miscellaneous crap, and iterations of it have been there for years.

My wife and I decided someday we ought to do something about it. Well, our daughter decided that “someday” had arrived in January. But she wasn’t going to do it alone. While my wife was at a work training event on a Saturday, my daughter and I went through everything, item by item, and sorted, shredded, and tossed.

Within about an hour, we got it down to one big container, which turned out to be her books and other childhood items. It was so heavy that even she couldn’t carry it up the stairs – and she is quite strong. So she got three boxes, separated the items, and we carried them up to the attic.

There’s a space that was designated for her stuff. Of course, we had to rearrange the attic well enough to GET to the space. The Christmas stuff had not been put away from Christmas 2024, so we had to tackle those items first.

The landing is not empty, though. It has a basket full of reusable bags I utilize for trash, a small bookcase for my oversized books, the vacuum cleaner, and a spot for Stormy to hang out. But it’s tidy.

My office

I had started cleaning my office in September, and, actually, it was a whole lot better than it had been, but not up to her standards. We spent an extraordinary amount of time sorting things into various bins. I was exhausted by the end of it, but not only did it look a whole lot better, but I also found things that I had been missing.

Moreover, she decided to hang the pictures that had been sitting in our living room downstairs. There was a stack of framed items against the wall near the television. It was really boring to see them because they’d been there seemingly forever.

A couple items we got for our wedding 26 years ago. Back in 2012, my wife said we should paint the living room walls, then put up some pictures. The painting happened, but the pictures never got put up then.

The daughter decided to rectify this, and not just in the living room, but also in the hallways, and notably in my office. One of them was a picture I bought: Chuck Miller’s 2020 photograph, Washington County, 2:30 a.m., still in its packaging. It’s up with my Lennon photo c. 1972, and a Beach Boys photo that I received when I retired in 2019.

The painting, The Bookworm, I got from my late father-in-law’s belongings. I didn’t realize the joy of having stuff on my walls.

Internment camps of Germans in the US

German American Internee Coalition

At the book review for These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore at the Albany Public Library, Jim Collins made a passing reference to the WWII internment camps that held people of Japanese heritage. I made a comment that there were internment camps of Germans in the US as well. A few people had never heard that fact.

Indeed, there is a German American Internee Coalition (“GAIC”), “formed in 2005 by and for German American and Latin American citizens and legal residents who were interned by the United States during World War II.”

From the section Civil Liberties Violations: “German Americans constitute the largest ethnic group in the US. Approximately 60 million Americans claimed German ancestry in the 2000 US Census, more than any other nationality…

“Nevertheless, during World War II, the US government and many Americans viewed ethnic Germans and others of ‘enemy ancestry’ as potentially dangerous, particularly recent immigrants. The Japanese American World War II experience is well known. Few, however, know of the European American World War II experience, particularly that of the German Americans and Latin Americans.” Many ethnic Germans had moved to Brazil and Argentina.

Pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (50 USC 21-24), which remains in effect today, the US may apprehend, intern and otherwise restrict the freedom of ‘alien enemies’ upon declaration of war or actual, attempted or threatened invasion by a foreign nation. During World War II, the US Government interned at least 11,000 persons of German ancestry. By law, only ‘enemy aliens’ could be interned. However, with governmental approval, their family members frequently joined them in the camps. Many such “voluntarily” interned spouses and children were American citizens.

Started in WWI

War History Online notes: “The precedent was set during the First World War when laws dating back to the 18th Century were used to authorize the detention of anyone considered to be an ‘enemy alien’ and therefore a possible threat to security and the war effort.

“The Government set up four camps. The main ones were located in Hot Springs, CA and at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. These camps were referred to as DOJ (Department of Justice) Camps.” But there were others, mapped here.

“By 1940, Germans made up a large percentage of the ‘non-American’ population in the United States. There were approximately 1.2 million German nationals as well as another 11 million US citizens who had at least one German-born parent.

“As the war in Europe continued, America was laying the groundwork. The 1940 census introduced a new question. It now required that all respondents included their ethnicity. This would make them easier to identify after America entered the war.” As a Census enumerator in 1990 and 2020, I was especially appaled that information that was supposedly used only in the aggregate was manipulated in this way.

Wikipedia addresses the internment of Germans and German-Americans during World War I, which was fairly well-known, and WWII. About 120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were interned during the Second World War, as were about 1,800 people of Italian descent.

A poem by Sharp Little Pencil about the Japanese-American WWII experience: Concentration.

Redesigned the flag

the red, black, and green flag

This past week, someone asked my wife about the red, black, and green flag that represents Pan-Africanism/African Americans. From here: “African Americans have long reimagined the American flag. Marcus Garvey famously redesigned the flag with three symbolic colors: red for the blood of Black people, black for their skin color and racial identity, and green for the verdant lands of Africa.”

So, who was Marcus Garvey? I was asked this. From PBS: “As the leader of the largest organized mass movement in black history and progenitor of the modern ‘black is beautiful’ ideal, Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement. In his own time, he was hailed as a redeemer, a ‘Black Moses.’ Though he failed to realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological bondage of racial inferiority.”

I’m surprised – OK, not THAT surprised – that more folks don’t know who Garvey was. I probably read about him in Ebony and/or JET magazines when I was a kid.

“Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London. Content at first with accommodation, on his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916, he came to America at Booker T. Washington’s invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.” That last piece, I did not know.

UNIA in the US

“Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the ‘New Negro’ era. Black discontent, punctuated by East St. Louis’s bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked in 1919’s Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and lecturing.

“When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association], which he had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. ‘Garveyism’ eventually evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people worldwide who sought relief from racism and colonialism.”

Garvey was a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Other flags

I became curious about how similar the Pan-African flag is to the current national flags. It looks most like the Libyan flag, except that on that latter one, the black is wider and there’s a star and crescent. Here are the red, black, and green flags.

In 1990, David Hammons (b. 1943) created African-American Flag. From MoMA: “Hammons created this version—one in an edition of ten—for an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City.” I saw it at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in August 2024.