Who's Got Soul?

I was reading Time magazine's 1968 cover story featuring Aretha Franklin yesterday in case I decide to draw a tribute cartoon about her. I have the suspicion that half my profession are going to draw the same cartoon, so I was looking to see if I could find inspiration from something else.

There were several notable things about the article, starting with the persistent, consistent use of the word "Negro" (except for a few quotations in which Black people use the word "Black") — there's even one "negritude."

There's also the capitalization of certain professions including "Gospel Singer Sam Cooke," "Savvy Producer Jerry Wexler," "Black Novelist James Baldwin," (okay, there's one exception to the Negro Rule), and "Bluesman and former Preacher Big Bill Broonzy."

I got a kick out of this footnote, beseeching the Time readers' forbearance for the printing of some bawdy language:

In the present day, when media of all kinds have had to print precisely how Donald Trump likes to grab women and how Harvey Weinstein likes to fertilize potted plants, having to beg forgiveness for the phrase "whip it to me" is quite quaint.

The other item that struck me is the magazine's attempt to list for their predominantly white readership Who Got Soul And Who Doesn't. (Exempli gratia: YES, People who use "got" as a present tense, third person singular verb. NO, People who use "doesn't." Also, people who spell out common Latin abbreviations.)

The body of the article suggests that the following list may have been previously printed in Esquire, although the Letter From the Publisher credits it to "Cover Writer Chris Porterfield, Senior Editor Jesse Birnbaum, Reporter Virginia Page and Researchers Molly Bowditch and Rosemarie Tauris Zadikov."

I've broken this sidebar article into three segments in order for it to be reasonably legible on line.

Somebody had better alert Lin-Manuel Miranda.

You may already have noticed that the list is overwhelmingly white. I suppose the writers decided that in comparison to even the least soulful Negro, even Søren Kierkegaard would be in the NO column. A quarter century later, they might have suggested YES, Thurgood Marshall. NO, Clarence Thomas.

Mary Worth got soul!? Whoomp, there it is.