Trailblazers in Black History: Black Herman

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For early-twentieth-century American audiences hungry for entertainment variety, what could be more novel than an elegantly dressed black man, at the center of his own spectacular universe—pontificating on his success and performing marvelous stunts? Black Herman fit the bill. 

A magician and illusionist who successfully effaced the boundaries between theater, folk religion, and entrepreneurship, the mythology surrounding his person was to expand even further after his untimely death. Some seized upon his legacy by impersonation, adopting titles like “Black Herman the Second” and “The Original Black Herman,” and continuing, uninterrupted, the popular act that had made him famous. Indeed, it seems that the mystique of Black Herman was willed into perpetuity, sometimes by the name alone. 

To take two examples: he was reborn as Herman “Sonny” Blount, who had been named for Black Herman, and who was eventually apotheosized as the avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra of the eclectic Philadelphia-based band Arkestra. Later, black Herman made an appearance as a neo-hoodoo detective-sidekick in Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. Could it be, as Black Herman himself once cryptically prophesied, that he would “come through once every seven years” to stake his claim to immortality—if only by the forces of history and memory? 

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Source: http://cabinetmagazine.org