Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . I spent Martin Luther King Jr. Day reading Jonathan Gill's lively history of Harlem. After following the transformation of Muscoota, the Indian name for lower central Harlem, through tenuous Dutch settlement and successive waves of German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Latin migration to become the capital of black America, I arrived at the civil-rights era. King was signing his book at Blumstein when a woman walked in the department store's front door, cut to the front of the line of autograph seekers, and stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. She was convinced that the Communist Party had been persecuting her for years through King. Writing in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of King's assassination, philosopher and social activist Cornel West observed that many who now sing the praises of King would be threatened by what he stood for. "His grand fight against poverty, militarism, mate...

As a friend commented, Angela Bassett tore up the play at Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre last night. She was phenomenal, the heat and the heart of the action. She played the hotel maid who turned out to be an angel who had come to tell Martin Luther King Jr. (Samuel Jackson) that it was time for him to die. I was somewhat dismayed at first by the revelation that she was angelic because she was so full-blooded and interesting an earthly being, but the turn of events led to some well-judged comedy, in particular, a funny phone conversation that King had with Grandmother God, which ultimately underlined the pathos of a man coming to terms with his untimely end. The 90-minute play, directed by Kenny Leon, humanized the monument that is the civil rights leader. It opened with King shouting to his friend to buy him Pall Mall. The smoke, which generated high sexual tension between a flirtatious King and Bassett's comely Camae, was also a sign of their shared humanity. King entered his motel ...