2013 Signoffs: Short Stories About A Few Remarkable Lives : Code Switch : NPR: Albert Murray
Looks can indeed be deceiving. If you saw cultural critic and novelist Albert Murray walking down the street, you might think you were looking at an upper-middle-class, African-American stick-in-the-mud. And you'd be two-thirds right.
Albert Lee Murray was indeed well-educated, well-heeled (and exceedingly well-dressed), and he was certainly, in today's parlance, African-American. (Emphasis on the American.) But despite the professorial tweed jackets, highly polished oxfords and his wool Trilby placed just so, Murray was no stick-in-the-mud. In fact, no less an authority than Duke Ellington once proclaimed him "the unsquarest man I know."
Murray, who died in August at 97 after a long decline, was what some people would consider an oxymoron: He was a race man, through and through, and an integrationist. In the late 1960s and early '70s, when the Black Arts movement celebrating a separate black aesthetic was powerfully influential, Murray would have none of it. Black art, he declared, is American art.
