EDWARD HOTALING, TV REPORTER WHO SHED LIGHT ON BLACK HISTORY
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: June 10, 2013
- Edward Hotaling, a television reporter whose question about racial progress ended the career of the CBS sports commentator Jimmy (the Greek) Snyder in 1988, but who may have made a more lasting mark by documenting the use of slave labor in building the nation’s Capitol, died on June 3 on Staten Island. He was 75.
Edward Hotaling
The cause was a heart attack, his son Greg said. He had lived in a nursing home since suffering serious injuries in an auto accident in 2007.
Mr. Hotaling (pronounced HO-tail-ing) was a television reporter at the NBC affiliate WRC-TV in Washington when he interviewed Mr. Snyder on Jan. 15, 1988, for a report commemorating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Bumping into Mr. Snyder in a restaurant, Mr. Hotaling asked him to assess racial progress in professional sports.
Mr. Snyder’s reply careered into his theory that blacks were better athletes than whites because their slave ancestors had been “bred to be that way” and that soon “there’s not going to be anything left for the white people” in sports. The comment created a national stir and got him fired by CBS. He died in 1996.
Mr. Hotaling told interviewers afterward that though he was appalled by Mr. Snyder’s remarks, he opposed his dismissal — an opinion shared by many civil rights leaders at the time.
It was another anniversary that led Mr. Hotaling to a story of historic importance, if one with less hot-button appeal.
In 2000, while researching the 200th anniversary of the building of the White House and the Capitol for a news feature, Mr. Hotaling found hundreds of monthly payment stubs in Treasury Department archives detailing the work of African-American slave laborers in erecting both buildings. Of 650 workers involved in the projects between 1792 and 1800 400 were slave carpenters, masons and quarry men whose owners received $5 a month for their work.
Many historians considered the discovery routine, since it confirmed a presumptive truth about life in the capital before slavery was abolished in 1865. But the report was news to many of Mr. Hotaling’s viewers, including several members of Congress. Representatives John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and longtime civil right advocate, and J. C. Watts, an Oklahoma Republican, went on to establish a task force in 2002 to come up with ways to commemorate the slave builders.
In 2007, Congress named the grand space at the center of the new Capitol Visitor Center “Emancipation Hall.” Since then, tour guides have told of the slaves who built the Capitol, including one skilled craftsman named Philip Reid, who in the early 1860s helped cast the bronze Statue of Freedom that sits atop the Capitol dome.
“What was striking” about Mr. Hotaling’s discovery, said Ira Berlin, a University of Maryland history professor and slavery expert, “was not that slaves were involved in building the Temple of Liberty,” as the Capitol is historically known, “but that Americans are continuously surprised by the gap between American ideals and realities.”
In interviews, Mr. Hotaling said he was less interested in accolades for his research than in disseminating the information about the contributions of African-American slaves. “It was never included in the mainstream general history of America, and not included in the textbooks that the kids read in school,” he said in one interview.
Mr. Hotaling’s interest in American slavery had a history of its own. In researching a book about horse racing in his hometown — “They’re Off!: Horse Racing at Saratoga” (1995) — he became intrigued by the little-known history of black jockeys and trainers. That led to a follow-up book, “The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America’s First National Sport” (1999), an account of the slaves, former slaves and descendants of slaves who were the dominant figures in racing during the 18th and 19th centuries. (In the first Kentucky Derby, in 1875, 13 of the 15 jockeys were black men, many of them born slaves.)
“Although millions of Americans know nothing about it,” Mr. Hotaling said in a 1999 interview with The Village Voice, “African-Americans were our first professional athletes.”
Edward Clinton Hotaling was born in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., on Oct. 16, 1937, the son of Charles and Elizabeth Hotaling. His father was a grocer and factory worker for General Electric.
After graduating from Syracuse University and earning a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota, Mr. Hotaling worked for The International Herald Tribune in Paris and covered the Middle East for CBS News before joining WRC-TV in 1977. He won five local Emmy Awards before retiring in 2002.
In addition to his son Greg, he is survived by another son, Luc, and two brothers, William and James, and a grandson. His wife of 25 years, Marthe, died in 1995.
Mr. Hotaling, who was white, never found it necessary to explain his interest in African-American history. “He just grew up without a sense of racial difference,” Greg Hotaling said.
In an interview, Edward Hotaling said that as an amateur historian he had been struck by the relative dearth of research on the lives of slaves. “If you go beyond the word ‘slave,’ as historians rarely do, you find real people like you and me just trying to do the best they can,” he said. “We also need to believe that we can change the way that history is presented.”
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HAROLD J. CROMER, VAUDEVILLE DUO’S STUMPY
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: June 13, 2013
- Harold J. Cromer, a hoofer and comedian who as Stumpy, half of the vaudevillian duo Stump and Stumpy, performed antic dance routines in clubs around the country after World War II and later on television, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was in his early 90s.
Nan Melville for The New York Times
Harold “Stumpy” Cromer, right, and Hank Smith.
His death was confirmed by his great-granddaughter Chelsea Phillips.
Stump and Stumpy were among the top comedy teams to play the black theater and nightclub circuit — including the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas — from the 1930s into the 1950s. They also appeared at the Paramount Theater and the Copacabana.
James Cross was Stump, who towered over his partner, Stumpy (initially played by Eddie Hartman), and their act played off their differences in height — Mr. Cromer was 5-foot-2 — and their contrasting levels of sophistication. (Stumpy was the sharper-witted.)
They sang and danced, and they clowned with great precision, often to the music of jazz orchestras, frequently performing on the same bill with the likes of Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. Mr. Cromer took over the Stumpy role in the late 1940s or early ’50s.
With the emergence of television in the 1950s, the pair appeared on the Milton Berle and Steve Allen variety shows and occasionally in dramatic series, including “Dragnet” and “Gunsmoke.” Their slickly choreographed high jinks are said to have inspired those of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin.
Mr. Cromer was a self-taught dancer who was known early on for tapping on roller skates. As a teenager he appeared on Broadway in the Cole Porter musical “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1939), which starred Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr, and in which Mr. Cromer had two dance numbers with a leggy young ingénue, Betty Grable.
He stayed with the show after it went on the road (with Gypsy Rose Lee in the Merman role), and, in 1943, he appeared in another Broadway musical, “Early to Bed,” with music by Fats Waller. But his mainstream stage career was stalled by a lack of opportunities for black performers. He didn’t return to Broadway until 1978 in “The American Dance Machine,” a show named for a touring dance company that specialized in reviving dance numbers from musicals of the past.
“There was no advancement,” he recalled about his early theater days in a 2001 interview with talkinbroadway.com. “I did that and that was it. I went out on the road and continued to do ‘Du Barry Was a Lady.’ After that, what’s next, little man, when your show closes in Columbus, Ohio? I came back to New York and nothing was going on. That’s when I started to get into vaudeville.”
Mr. Cromer was born in Manhattan and grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, as his West Side neighborhood was known then, and Harlem. His father, William, a railroad worker, and his mother, the former Hattie Bell DeWalt, were transplants from South Carolina.
Always coy about his age, Mr. Cromer would acknowledge only that his birthday was on June 21. Public records report the year to be anywhere from 1921 to 1923, and Ms. Phillips, his great-granddaughter, said it might have been 1920. He was one of nine children, including a twin sister.
Mr. Cromer said he was inspired to dance when he saw a movie in which Bill Robinson, known as Bojangles, tapped down a flight of stairs. Through his early teens he helped support his family by dancing on the street (sometimes on skates) for change and winning groceries in dance competitions. During high school — he never finished — he danced at a night spot called the Kit Kat Club. He sang and danced in the 1938 film “Swing!,” directed by Oscar Micheaux.
Mr. Cromer appeared in other films over the years, including “The Cotton Club” in 1984. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, he was the M.C. for touring rock ’n’ roll shows produced by Irvin Feld, introducing performers like Paul Anka, Bobby Darin, Bill Haley and His Comets, Aretha Franklin and a young Stevie Wonder — to whom, according to Ms. Phillips, he gave a harmonica. (Mr. Wonder returned it decades later, she said.)
Mr. Cromer outlived two wives: Gloria Freeman, whom he married in 1939 or 1940 and who died in 1971, and Carol Carter, whom he married in 1980 and who died in 2000. In addition to Ms. Phillips, his survivors include a daughter, Dierdre Graham; a son, Harold Jr., known as Poppy; a brother, Raymond; five grandchildren, eight other great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.
In later years Mr. Cromer performed in Off Broadway revues and traveled widely as a teacher, often using his own choreographed piece “Opus One,” as a textbook. “Aside from ‘Opus One,’ danced to the Tommy Dorsey tune, there’s not a huge body of choreography that Harold left behind, but that one work, with its swinging rhythms and classic vernacular moves, was a classic primer in rhythm tap,” Constance Valis Hill, a tap historian and professor of dance at Hampshire College, wrote in an e-mail. “He kept the tradition alive for younger dancers. His life in entertainment — as a busker tapping for pennies, a vaudevillian, song-and-dance man, comedy tap dancer bringing that black vernacular style to Broadway — is iconic, representative of his time. If you saw him singing and dancing ‘Mr. Bojangles,’ you’d know his story.”
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 