Jazz (TV Mini Series)

Our Language: 1924 -1929 (2001)

Samuel L. Jackson: Narrator

Quotes 

• Narrator : What occasions the focusing of attention on the Negro? Granted that white people have long enjoyed the Negro entertainment as a diversion. Is it not something different, something more, when they bodily throw themselves into Negro entertainment in cabarets? Now, Negroes go to their own cabarets to see how white people act, and what do we see? Why, we see them actually playing Negro games. I watch them in that epidemic Negroism, the Charleston. I look on and envy them. They camel and fishtail and turkey. They geechee and black bottom and scrontch. They skate and buzzard and mess around, and they do them all better than I! This interest in the Negro is an active and participating interest. Is is almost as if a traveler from the North stood watching an African tribe dance, then suddenly found himself swept wildly into it, caught in its tribal rhythm. Maybe these Nordics at last have tuned into our wavelength. Maybe they are at last learning to speak our language... Rudolph Fisher, The American Mercury.