Dan Burley : An African-American popular culture hero

OBIT OF DAN BURLEY FROM JET MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 8, 1962 SADLY OMITS DUKE MAGAZINE

Dan Burley is the most famous folk you never heard of. Why? Because he was an African-American man. Sorry, but that's just the way it was. (Is?) If you did a six degrees of separation chart for Dan Burley, it would include everyone of any importance in the music and publishing world, but yet again I'll ask. Do you know who Dan Burley was?

Well, let's see...He appeared in films with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong. He wrote music for Cab Calloway. In fact, one can trace his own piano playing right to the Beatles song Lady Madonna. Are you humming that piano run in your head yet? Thank Dan Burley.

Some people can do more than play. Burley was editor of Ebony Magazine way back in the 1930s. He married the first African-American woman to sing in Madison Square Garden. He invented the word Bebop, reportedly, and also created the Harlem Handbook of Jive. I mean, get HEP!
During World War Two, the USO show he organized was the black version of Bob Hope's entertainment for the troops.

He wrote for Elijah Muhammad.

He helped create Jet Magazine

He was personal friends with Ed Sullivan. NO ONE was friends with Ed Sullivan!

He had a radio show. No, he had TWO radio shows.

More importantly for our purposes here...Dan Burley published a GIRLY MAGAZINE!

He published the first serious African-American Men's magazine with sisters posing! DUKE! 1957. That's right...A skin mag with class and Beautiful Black Babes (Not to mention the writing of Chester Himes.) It was a high-fashion lifestyle magazine for the African-American man, a Playboy magazine for the Hood! As such, it SHOULD end my ten-part series on the African-American pin up and should also goose a real writer into a serious biography.

If you search Dan Burley, you'll find him identified as a sports writer. A Journalist. A Jazz Musician. A Poet. And yet he only lived 54 years. His Wiki Biography (which also omits his smut magazine) is HERE

Unfortunately, Duke Magazine lived for only six issues.

There's a few other interesting stories I'm leaving out...but it seems like a pretty high life.

Early African-American Beauty Pageant circa 1955? Original transparent Slide Collection Jim Linderman

A striking, and notable photograph slide from the 1950s collection Jim Linderman

A decade or more before the chant "Black is Beautiful" some history appears to be happening here.

While the promoters likely wish you didn't know it now,  "Rule Number Seven" prevented women of color from participating in the Miss America contest until around 1970!   The rule specified contestants had to be of the white race, although much earlier pageants had used them in dance numbers as slaves.  During the nascent days of the 1970s women's movent, they had reasons to hate the show they didn't even know.  That is, the show did not objectify women equally!

This pageant, on the west coast by an unidentified photographer certainly not only proves how wrong the Atlantic City promoters were, it seems to break serious ground.  As I wrote in the book "Secret History of the Black Pinup" it was photographer Howard Morehead who organized the first black beauty pageant in Los Angeles in 1958.  This slide could document one even earlier.

In 2002, PBS aired a documentary in The American Experience series reporting Black communities organized their own, and they did.  This is a splendid example, and one I believe was not widely reported.  Further study?  Black Beauty Pageants.  The documentary mentions a 1968 pageant, but not this one.

Let's hope some doctoral students pick up on this.  Black History Month is on the way. 

Untitled Slide Photograph Untitled (Black Beauty Contest) circa 1955?  3" x 3"
Collection Jim Linderman