August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottum is lighting up Netflix right now. It’s an entertaining vent of African American frustrations, foibles, and accommodations to White America.
America has honored Wilson with seven Tony’s for Broadway productions of his plays and an Academy Award for Viola Davis in his movie Fences. One Broadway theater is even named after him. His plays about The Hill District in Pittsburgh have also gripped African American New Yorkers like tales of their own neighborhoods.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottum stars Viola Davis as the legendary “Mother of The Blues,” and Chadwick Boseman gives an incredible last performance before dying in August of this year. The film is co-produced by Denzil Washington and directed by George C. Wolfe.
You may be surprised that the roots of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom travel through the Nation of Islam. Wilson’s searing anger against White American racism and a cleared-eyed view of the self-destructive consequences of African American bitterness has some similarities to the rhetoric of the Black Muslims (as the adherents to the Nation of Islam are called).
When Wilson’s Fences came out as a movie and Jitney made its first Broadway appearance in 2017, the religious aspects were striking. So, Journey started to look into the religious background of Wilson and discovered that he spent a highly significant three years with the Black Muslims in the period of 1969 to 1972. During this period, he wrote an early version of the play “Jitney.”
A letter on a fan forum pointed us toward Wilson’s involvement with the Black Muslims. The forum featured letters about August Wilson that were sent to a collector of his work. The letter that caught our attention was from 2007, one year after Wilson’s death, and was signed by Jabril Abdul Hafeez. It read:
“The Mr. August Wilson that I can talk about that I knew came out of my connection to him as we both were Nation of Islam members where I met his first wife Brenda Burton in the 70’s. She was a major influence on his life as it relates to “Black” consciousness. He joined her in marriage and enlisted in the Nation of Islam during the early 70’s…”
We then searched out people in Pittsburg and elsewhere who were part of the Black Muslims with Wilson during that period. Several older Muslims, who were members of the Masjid An-Nur Islamic Center in Pittsburg, had joined the Nation at Temple No. 22 with Wilson. They too noticed the continuing impact of Black Muslim thought on the playwright and the tendency to play it down among non-Muslims.
“Although many can choose to overlook Mr. August Wilson’s life and experiences as a Nation of Islam member, it is impossible to erase the impact that those years played on the works and thinking of August’s creative artistry,” said Jabril Abdul Hafeez, who was part of the Nation of Islam at the same time as August Wilson. “To do so would be cheating the truth about the real August Wilson’s education, life, and legacy.” Abdul Hafeez is a local intellectual leader among the Muslims and teaches Qur’anic Linguistics at An-Nur.
The masjid is an offshoot of the original Temple No. 22 of the Nation of Islam which dates back to 1958. Today, there are at least six Islamic congregations in the city. As early as 1927, Pittsburghers organized two Muslim-related congregations, The African Moslem Welfare Society of America and the Moorish Science Temple of America. In 1941, Kabi Mubarak gathered Muslim men and women of Syrian and other Arabic descent in his home for the feast in celebration of the end of the Fater fast and a photo by noted Pittsburgh African American photographer Charles “One-Shot” Harris.
Quadir Abdullah, a lieutenant at Pittsburgh’s Muhammad Temple No. 22, remembered Wilson as a good worker and astute observer of his surroundings. However, at the time, members of the Temple didn’t recognize the future playwright in their fellow Muslim. “He was just another soldier,” said Abdullah, and “wasn’t someone to be awestruck by.”
“He didn’t exploit his abilities, he didn’t show off,” Abdullah recalled. In fact, Wilson barely made an impression at all aside from his quirk of constantly scribbling down notes in a notebook about the scenes that were taking place around him. “We had an expression,” Abdullah explained about the Nation’s paramilitary structure, “’Yours is not to question why, yours is but to do or die!’ If we gave [August] orders, he followed them. He would go out, sold papers, bring people to the masjid so they could hear the message.” From these experiences, Abdullah could tell that the young Wilson was “here to be involved.”
Wilson’s religious journey
Wilson grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in the 1940s and 1950s. Wilson was born as Frederick August Kittel, Jr. on April 27, 1945, as the fourth child of six to a mixed German and African American couple. However, his White American father was mostly absent, and after he died, Wilson wrote under his mother Daisy Wilson Kittel’s maiden name. The majority of their neighbors were African American, but there was quite a mix of races, ethnicities and their religions.
His family lived in the back of a walk-up in The Middle Hill District at 1727 Bedford Avenue that also housed Bella’s Market (Siger’s Grocery), owned by a Jewish family. Seven blocks away was Logan Street, colloquially called “Jew Town,” which was known for its sidewalk sales giving it an atmosphere similar to the Lower East Side in New York City.
Down Bedford across Manilla Street, there were other faiths and ethnicities like St. George Syrian/Antiochian Orthodox Church with a congregation of Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians.
As a child, Wilson attended a Catholic elementary school associated with Holy Trinity Parish. Located a short walking distance from his home to Fullerton Street in The Lower Hill District, he was taught by nuns from the Catholic Sisters of Divine Providence. Even in these early years, Wilson (still surnamed “Kittel”) stood apart by his habit of closely observing his classmates talking and doing, says Salo Udin, his childhood friend. His approach to religion was to observe and appreciate but not necessarily commit.
Though his mother was not religious, she encouraged her son’s involvement with the Catholic church. Wilson recalled that on Sundays, a local lady named Sarah Degree would pick up him and forty other children on the block to bring them to Sunday school at St. Bridget’s parish. However, the Catholic church considered all the African Americans in the neighborhood as members of the “Black” church, St. Benedict the Moor’s, at the bottom of the hill.
In the 1950s, reformers declared that The Hill District was substandard housing and used so-called urban renewal strategies to displace 8000 Hill District residents and 400 businesses in favor of building the Pittsburgh Civic Sports Arena. Many of the residents moved over to the Homewood neighborhood. Holy Trinity was demolished and its congregation merged with St. Bridget’s. Then, as the Catholic population of the Hill dwindled, St. Bridget’s joined St. Benedict the Moor in 1968.
Gathering steam in Detroit since 1930, the Nation of Islam, called the Black Muslims, prepared to send a mission to improve the spiritual, social, and economic fate of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Though loosely based on the Quran, the Nation taught many things that differ from the original Arabic text. One teaching was that Blacks were the original gods and that the White race was created by a jealous scientist to interfere with their sovereignty.
In the age of segregation and less than a century after the ratification of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, the Nation of Islam was the “antidote to the idea that White was God,” Abdul Hafeez told me at a local mosque.
In 1956, the Nation sent Imam Mustafa Hassain from Detroit to Pittsburgh to start Muhammad Temple Number 22. For three years in Detroit, Malcolm X had lived and learned with the imam’s family. Hassain (given the name of Minister Robert 3X before he assumed the Arabic moniker) moved into a house in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood and met residents by selling eggs door-to-door. He invited those he met to meetings in his apartment, where he preached The Nation of Islam’s message of self-reliance, self-defense, and self-respect. Hassain, age 36, was a vigorous presence as befitted his boxing and Negro baseball days when he was known as Robert Davenport. He introduced the boxer Cassius Clay by phone to Elijah Muhammad. The heavyweight boxer became a Muslim and was given the name Muhammad Ali.
Hussain’s message was magnetic to a working-class population that felt that, no matter how hard they worked, they would never quite make their fair dues. Hussain also visited prisons all over Pennsylvania and West Virginia recruiting people who thought they had been put down by the White man.
Wilson himself had felt that injustice; he often shared an anecdote about a time his mother won a laundry machine when she called in the correct answer for a radio call-in contest. When the radio hosts realized that the winner was a Black woman, they tried to give her a used washing machine instead of the new one that had been promised.
The mosque, which was based in Pittsburgh’s Homewood African American neighborhood, grew quickly. Abdul Hafeez estimates that at its peak three hundred members were on the Nation of Islam’s books in Pittsburgh.
Muhammad Temple No 22 moved from its first location on Lang Street to a new building on Kelly Street between Homewood Avenue and Sterrett Street in 1969. In the Temple’s ground floor was a school that taught boys and girls, originally in staggered class times to avoid the confluence of genders, and then in a co-ed schedule, from pre-K to high school.
The Muslims taught Black self-sufficiency. Practically, its mission was to establish businesses and institutions in Black communities, which had up to that point been almost completely reliant on outside services. Businesses and institutions run by White ownership could deny service to Black patrons. The Nation’s response was that Black communities should establish their own. Once African Americans could grow their own crops from the ground, manufacture their own goods in factories, and sell their own merchandise and services in stores, they would had achieved the dignity of self-possession.
On Kelly Street, the Muslims established two or three storefronts that stocked groceries and home goods, a bakery that sold bean pies, and a restaurant. These also were sourced by the Nation’s entrepreneurial network.
Wajihah Abdullah, who joined the Nation in 1971, remembered a time that a group of core members traveled from Pittsburgh to Athens, Georgia to visit a farm that was owned by members of the Nation. There, she saw where the crops were grown that were then trucked up to Nation-owned grocery stores in Pittsburgh and other cities. The Nation also established the Blue Seas Whiting Fish Company in Chicago to supply fish to affiliate communities in other cities. The uniforms that men and women in the Nation wore were handmade by local women. The goal—complete self-sufficiency—was seen as an achievable goal.
In 1968, riots spread throughout the Hill District after the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The neighborhood burned for days until it was near annihilation. Revolution could be smelled in the air.
By this time, Udin had become a Mulism. He and Wilson shared a sense of being “soldiers in the Black Liberation Movement.” However, Wilson’s rebellion was more artistic and cultural than political.
The details that Wilson had been scribbling down at the mosque and elsewhere would later flesh out his writing, capturing the nuances of African American speech and interaction. The ideas of Black nationalism espoused by the Nation of Islam also bled into his plays and stories. He showcased male African American characters who were seeking to build up their own capital and establish a dignity, an identify, for themselves. Part of that was not looking to a White God to save them, but finding divinity in their own Blackness.
“When you look in the mirror, you should see your god,” he said in 1990 after winning his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson. “If you don’t, you have somebody else’s God.”
Wilson and another Muslim, Rob Penny, helped to start the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh. The initial production of the Black Horizons Theatre was, Amiri Baraka’s, A Black Mass. The play is based on the religious story of Yakub (the Muslim name for the Old Testament “Jacob”) as taught by the Nation of Islam. It describes the origin of the wicked White people who need to be overcome with The Jihad. Over the next few years, Wilson served as the company director and Penny as the resident playwright. Penny mentored Wilson and encouraged the younger man to switch from poetry to plays. The Theatre closed in 1971.
The young director also found other dramatists like Curtiss Porter and Udin who were inspired by the Nation of Islam. As a University of Pittsburgh professor, Porter spearheaded the student movement demanding that a Department of African Studies be established at the university. Udin helped to found the Centre Avenue Poets’ Theater Workshop with Wilson and Penny and went on to be the Pittsburgh councilman for the Sixth District for ten years.
Later, Wilson return again and again to the argument that African Americans should have their own institutions, an idea that he probably picked up during his years in the Nation.
Across the street from Temple No. 22 was an elegant restaurant, The Shabbaz, run by the Nation. It was a hot spot for members of the Nation to meet up. F. Qasim Ibn Ali Khan remembers August Wilson coming into the restaurant and his reputation as a budding playwright. “We used to tease him about his ‘Sherlock Holmes’ styled double-brimmed hat,” he recalled in his autobiography. Prospective couples also came to meet each other in the respectable presence of others.
Marriage into the Nation of Islam
A young member of the Nation named Brenda Burton caught the eye of Wilson. Burton had grown up in the Hill District with Wilson. Her father Joseph Burton had been an entrepreneur himself and owned both a pool room, Burton’s Recreational Parlor, and a restaurant called Burton’s Place Father & Son. Wajihah remembers that Burton was “quiet to a point” but would speak up when she felt she needed to voice her opinion. A community-conscious woman, she was studying nursing. Wilson and Burton were engaged when Burton began attending meetings with the Nation in 1969 or 1970. In 1969, the two were married.
“I’m not taking a perspective,” Wajihah Abdullah said as she collected her thoughts during my interview on the Wilson-Burton marriage. She observed that people who came into the Nation in order to please someone else rather than out of their own conviction tended to move in and out. Wilson, she thinks, came in because his wife was in. Then, in 1970, their daughter Sakina Ansari was born, a further incentive to stay.
Wilson attempted to convert to Islam in order to preserve the marriage, but within three years, the difference between him and his wife was too great to reconcile.
Even though he never officially converted to the Nation, Wilson identified with the Nation until the day that he died. A 1991 interview is representative of his attitude. He said that he still respected all of the teachings and thought that “Elijah Muhammad [an early leader of the Black Muslims] is one of the most important black men that ever lived in America.” Wilson saw Muhammad as a myth-maker of the origins of Black America.
“The one thing we did not have as Black Americans was a mythology,” he observed. “We had no origins myth. Elijah Muhammad supplied that.” Before his career as a playwright launched, Wilson helped to fill in some of the mythmaking with poetry lauding such Nation of Islam figures as Malcolm X and the boxer Muhammad Ali. He was a fabulist about Ali as “man moving toward the perfection of the species,” “the balancer of East and West, the completer of the cycle,” and “the master of initiative energy.”
Religion in Wilson’s plays
Religious iconography was written into all of Wilson’s works. Renowned for capturing the syntax and atmosphere of African-American Pittsburgh in an arc of ten plays that span the Twentieth Century, Wilson knew that spirituality also needed to have a role in the Black lives about whom he wrote. “Blacks are essentially a religious people,” he told David Savran in a 1987 interview.
References to Yoruba, Christianity, and ancestor worship span his collection of plays, sometimes as a grace that saves his characters from an otherwise futile, directionless fate, but more often as a ball and chain that his characters must escape from.
May Rainey’s Black Bottom is one of Wilson’s earlier plays. The cornet player Levee is desperately ambitious and dismisses the criticism of his pride by Toledo, an older Christian member of Ma Rainey’s band. Toledo puts down Levee’s ambitious attempt to displace Ma Rainey’s “old-fashioned” blues musical style with a pithy proverb, “Some mens is excited to be fools.”
Angry and rejected, Levee (played by Chadwick Boseman in the Netflix movie) escalates the argument with a diatribe against God, “Turn your back on me, God. I will cut your heart out…” He angrily attacks Toledo for accidentally stepping on his new shoes. Lacking God as an easy target, he plunges a knife into Toledo’s back.
Levee instantly realizes that he has committed a foul deed and destroyed his own life.
In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988), the main character Herald Loomis has been abandoned by his wife and has sunken into a despairing, delusional life. When his wife finally returns, she pleads that Loomis “look to Jesus. Even if you done fell away from the church you can be saved again.” As she recites Psalm 23 to him, Loomis slashes his own chest with a knife and finds peace in the bloodletting. Ultimately, he is his own savior, rather than having someone else die for him.
In The Piano Lesson (1990), the aspiring preacher Avery tries to excise the ghost of an old slave master from the house by reciting Bible passages and sprinkling holy water onstage, but his efforts are undermined when the only spell that the ghost responds to is the character Berniece sitting down at her father’s piano and singing a plea to her ancestors to help her.
In the last play that he wrote, Gem of the Ocean (2003), the matriarch Aunt Ester (whose name sounds out “ancestor,” and who is a recurring character in Wilson’s plays) brings the main character Citizen to the City of Bones and shows him that he can only be free if his identity is rooted in the history of the slaves who were brought to America.
Leaving the Nation of Islam
Wilson stepped away from the Nation when he and Burton divorced in 1972. What caused the split was not publicized; at the time, Wilson had not yet risen to prominence. In later interviews, Wilson, who delighted in discussing the details of his character’s lives, was much more reticent in divulging the details of his own. In one 1984 interview with writer and theater critic Michael Feingold, Wilson conceded that they had broken up over “religious differences,” quoting, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Wilson may have refused to attend the Sunday service at the Temple and to follow the strict dictates of the Nation—for example, Wilson remained a lifelong smoker, which was prohibited.
As art mirrors life, Wilson’s 1984 play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom features a character named Toledo whose own marriage ruptured after his wife joined the Christian church.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Toledo exposits, “A good Christian woman going to church and wanna do right by her god. There ain’t nothing wrong with that. But she got up there, got to seeing them good Christian mens and wondering why I ain’t like that. Soon she figure she got a heathen on her hands. She figured she couldn’t live like that.”
“For a lot of people, the task of doing what we did was overwhelming,” Abdullah hypothesizes. It’s not that Wilson rejected the message of the Nation, but that the mission was too large for the young artist. Abdullah also asks, “What are you? Do you agree with everything your religion says? Some things [Wilson] didn’t agree with—some things we all didn’t agree with—but we evolved into something better.”
In the late 70s, after the death of Elijah Muhammed, his son Warith Deen Mohammad preached a transition to “Pure” Sunni Islam, or the “Universal” Islam. Some chose to follow Louis Farrakhan and remain with the Nation. Others, like the congregation of An-Nur in 1975, split off and formed their own masjids that were more universally focused. Masjid An-Nur now teaches following a God, Allah, who is outside of creation itself—not a Black man, but a Creator who loves all of His creation.
Searching for Wilson’s first wife
Does his former wife Burton have better insight into Wilson’s thoughts about the Nation? Wajihah Abdullah, who has remained close to Burton, offered to try to get in touch with her. But the phone line rang without being answered, and the voice mailbox was too full to leave a message.
Burton had moved out of Pittsburgh to study in New York City. Wajihah wasn’t sure if Burton had joined up with the Nation at their New York Temple, but the two women reconnected when Burton moved back to Pittsburgh. Burton also helped Wajihah prepare for her wedding in 1972. They alternated babysitting each other’s daughters. Then, Burton moved out to Cleveland.
Wajihah followed Burton’s pathway out of Pittsburgh in 1981, moving to Shaker Heights. She hoped to enroll her children in a better school system, and she looked up the masjid that Burton attended: Masjid Bilal, situated on the Euclid Avenue border of Cleveland’s Hough and Fairfax neighborhoods.
Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood was incorporated into the city of Cleveland in 1873 as a wealthy, White enclave. After World War I, the well-to-do residents moved out to the suburbs and the area was filled by a wave of African Americans moving northward from the South in the Second Great Migration.
Although Wajihah moved back to Pittsburgh in 2012, the Pittsburgh neighborhood tie prevailed. The two women maintained a “good closeness” and still talked regularly on the phone. This week, though, Burton was not answering her phone. “Maybe she is traveling, visiting her grandson,” her friend mused. She also explained that Burton, who is in her late 60’s now, was busier than ever, recently going back to school to become a nurse practitioner.
Wilson’s ex-wife remained with the Nation for a while. I decided to visit Burton’s former mosque Masjid Bilal to see if I could find out more information.
The Hough neighborhood seemed like a neighborhood in transition. The sidewalk was uneven, and patches of grass grew in a strip between the sidewalk and the street.
Masjid Bilal is a large brown brick building arranged at a diamond angle to the street rather than facing the street perpendicularly. It claims the title as the first mosque in the United States built by a predominately African American congregation. Muhammad Ali’s trainer provided the funds for its construction. It is centered in a large parking lot around it.
Across the street is a row of new-looking apartments, and catty corner is an Aldi’s grocery store.
Euclid Avenue is wide like Park Avenue in Manhattan, with the opposing sides of the street separated by a divider of grass and trees. It is a God’s Row in the neighborhood. The masjid is just one of several houses of worship.
One block away is a Church of the Latter Day Saints. Right next door, taking up the entire block, like a smaller Carnegie Hall topped with a grand rose-gold dome, is the Church of God & True Holiness. On the next corner, across from a cluster of shops and take-out restaurants, is the New Life at Calvary Presbyterian Church. Their stone façade holds up an LCD screen than cycles through messages, one of them asking, “Parents, please let your children have the opportunity to know God!” Residents sit on stoops and watch the waning street traffic. It is not yet time for rush hour.
The masjid was closed when Journey arrived, but there was a meeting being held in the basement space: a gathering of interfaith leaders and community representatives discussing how they could address the Islamphobia that has taken root in the greater United States and in their own neighborhoods. The senior imam of Masjid Bilal, El Hajj Shafeeq Sabir, was sitting at the table next to Congresswoman Marcia Fudge. Mayor Frank Jackson had made comments earlier in the afternoon. (When President Donald Trump attempted to ban Muslims from immigrating into the United States, Masjid Bilal was host to a large protest rally that included all segments of Cleveland’s religious, civic and political communities.)
The secretary of the masjid remembered Brenda who used to attend Masjid Bilal—but she went by the last name Shakoor, not Burton, after remarrying a Muslim man in Cleveland. She did not still attend, but he too provided her phone number. We called.
The line rang and rang, but no one picked up. An automated voice announced that the voice mailbox was full.
And though the intimate perspective of August Wilson’s time with the Nation of Islam, what brought him in and why he ultimately left, is out there, for now it remains hidden, though a little more explored than before, still buried in the mind of Brenda Burton Shakoor.
When Wilson died on October 2, 2005, he left instructions that his funeral service should be at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but also said, according to his friend Udin, “I don’t want no Catholic mass. I want a black funeral at St. Paul’s Cathedral.” Udin suggests that Wilson chose St. Paul’s because it was where prominent Catholics held their funerals. The playwright seemed to want to use his death as a way to force Black consciousness into the center of Pittsburgh’s mindset. He took the Black self-sufficiency doctrine from the Muslims, uplift from the Catholics, and language from the Black tradition.
In the end, he didn’t get a funeral at St. Paul’s because the church wouldn’t allow a non-Catholic “black funeral.” Instead, Wilson was memorialized in a hall on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh and a funeral parade lead by Winton Marsalis playing “When the Saints go Marching In.” “Everybody was laughing and crying,” recalled Udin. Wilson was not exactly Christian nor Muslim, but a saint in the composite mythology of Black striving.
It is highly appropriate that in December, we celebrate the Blues with Denzil Washington’s production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. And on January 28, 2021, the nation will celebrate August Wilson with a Black Heritage stamp, The University of Pittsburgh will start processing the Wilson archives where we will find more clues on Wilson’s religious journey. We already know that the archives includes an unpublished play on Malcolm X.
Denzil Washington says The Piano Lesson, which features the relative strengths of the Bible, preaching, and music, is the next Wilson work he hopes to bring to the screen. Saint Wilson goes on marching.
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Thank you for this very valuable report. Let us hope you find Brenda Burton Shakoor someday soon.