Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne
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of the site, as other racketeers sought to oust him. A chastened Manley then moved to Harlem, where Negro political power was growing, as evidenced by the rise of Adam Clayton Powell to the U.S. Congress shortly thereafter, with his City Council seat won by the Black Communist Ben Davis, Jr. Abe’s spouse, Effa Manley, also was involved in his varied enterprises and in 1937 sponsored a concert in Newark featuring Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. At this juncture, the Manleys had wealth of an estimated $1 million, quite unusual for a U.S. family generally and a Negro family particularly.43 Just as Glaser invested in boxers, the Manleys invested in the Negro baseball league. A fellow baseball owner, Gus Greenlee, was invested in the numbers, but like Manley he too was squeezed by Italian and Jewish racketeers, who shifted into numbers as the business of illicit alcohol dried up with the end of Prohibition.44
Possibly the Manleys arrived in Harlem unaware of the disturbing case of Barron D. Wilkins. This Negro entrepreneur had come to Upper Manhattan in the early 1900s and by the 1920s was a powerful club owner and a collaborator with boxing champion and musician Jack Johnson, but, said musician Sam Wooding, “Italians,” meaning competitors and mobsters, “got hold of Yellow Charleston,” a petty Negro gambler with debts and “they told him, ‘Look, if you want to get dope [drugs] and all the dope you want, you’ve got to shoot old man Barron.” And promptly, that is what the compromised Charleston (also known as William Miller) did. This crime took place “right in front of his place,” meaning Wilkins’s club, that is, “right there at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street,” and then the “white gangsters had him for a while,” meaning Charleston, until the furor ebbed.45
Unfortunately, travails were not the sole province of the Southwest and Northeast. Jabbo Smith, the trumpeter and rival of Louis Armstrong, born in Georgia in 1908, found it necessary to quit the band of Claude Hopkins because it was “too dangerous” not to do so. “While we were playing,” he recalled, “the drivers were supposed to be resting up to drive us. But instead they were out lollygagging, messing around. We’d get through playing, get in the cars and then we’d find out that the drivers were drunk. We’d be so scared riding on those mountain roads, we’d hang on to each other. We couldn’t sleep during the rides so we’d be real tired when we got to the jobs,” with resultant impact on performances.46
Thus, propelled by threats and intimidation, what might be considered a “Jazz Diaspora” kept moving westward, not only to Asia but making an intermediate stop in California before decamping to Honolulu or Shanghai. Elihu “Black Dot” McGee, an important figure on Los Angeles’s culturally rich Central Avenue, arrived in the City of Angels from El Paso, Texas, in 1926. Rather quickly he came to own and operate “The Flame,” “The Casablanca,” “The Congo Room,” along with the “Turf Barber Shop,” where many patrons gathered not just for a trim but to share bonhomie. A dapper dresser and considered a “a very hip cat,” he and his comrades controlled a good deal of the bookmaking business and numbers. Early on, records were sold by McGee and his colleagues, alongside other wares, for example, marijuana and heroin Inevitably, musicians were touched by this business, at times as avid customers of the drugs that permeated their environment.47
As the Second World War erupted and Japanese Americans were interned, the African American population of what was to become a major metropolis grew exponentially as Los Angeles became a major battleground politically and culturally.48
GIVEN SUCH DIFFICULTIES AT HOME, African American musicians were fleeing abroad, as the “Diaspora” extended westward and eastward alike. Edmund Thornton Jenkins was not a devotee of the new music, but he was a composer born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1894, as lynching was becoming customary. Still, by 1921 this Negro musician was exiled in Europe where he became involved with the W. E. B. Du Bois–sponsored Pan African Congress.49
The growing list of those leaving included New Orleans’ Sidney Bechet. He arrived in Liverpool from New York City on 4 June 1919. By 1922 a police file on him in London described his complexion as “swarthy,” and the accusation was that he had committed an “assault” on a “female,”50 a British subject, Ruby Gordon. Bechet had been employed by a club on Tottenham Court Road in London; this “man of colour,” as he was described, was listed as 5’3” tall with a “stout build” and a “valid American passport.”51 By 1926, he was playing in Moscow and when asked subsequently where he would choose to settle down permanently to play his music, he replied instantly, “Russia,” because he was treated so well. Shortly thereafter, he was in Paris where he was jailed because of a club shooting. He was not necessarily stunned by this turn of events, since, according to his biographer, the saxophonist “regarded mayhem as one of the hazards of a musician’s working life…. For much of his life he was fascinated by gangsters and hoodlums,” not unusual given the clubs he performed in back home.52
The pianist Glover Compton, born in Kentucky in 1884, recalled the 1928 incident in Paris. Bechet and Mike McKendrick, banjoist, became embroiled in a fracas, leading to an exchange of gunshots, wounding the stunned Compton in the leg and two women in the shoulder and neck respectively. Neither duelist was hurt. Compton, a pivotal figure, wound up staying in Paris for almost fifteen years, having fled gangster-run clubs in Chicago near 22nd and State Street that had a clientele that was overwhelmingly “white.” It was Compton who introduced Earl Hines around Chicago, and it was Hines who replaced Compton in Jimmy Noone’s band when the Kentuckian departed for greener pastures in France.53
Speaking of his European miseries, Bechet recalled of one of his victims, “I didn’t slap her hard,” speaking of a woman he was accused of raping. “They knew she was a whore,” he claimed. He was deported, nonetheless. As for Paris, he carried a pistol—but was jailed anyway. He wound up running a tailor shop in Harlem, though later he was lionized in Europe for his expert artistry and riveting performances54
Embracing Moscow like Bechet did was Darnell Howard, born in Chicago in 1895, who attended school alongside Capone’s little brother, “Itchy.” By 1925, this clarinetist and violinist was in the Soviet Union with the Singing Syncopators, before heading further eastward to Shanghai.55
Though Europe may have been more welcoming to these musicians than their homeland, it would be an error to assume that they were garlanded automatically with roses upon docking at local ports. It was in 1925 that a London periodical referred with contempt to the “Coloured Problem,” that is, the recent “attempt to introduce a nigger cabaret to London failed. At the Empire, a room was beautifully decorated by an American artist, with cotton fields in the distance and a nice cookhouse in which a real coal black mammy was to make hot waffles which were to be served while Negroes danced and sang.” A man interviewed was unequivocal: “I strongly object to coloured artists being employed where food is served to white people,” said one calloused observer. “So nervous am I about coloured shows generally,” he said, that “after Jack Johnson the famed pugilist and bassist—had been engaged at a high salary for four weeks by one of my assistants, I wouldn’t let him show.”56 Still, the contemporaneous warm reception accorded Paul Robeson in London indicated that there was no unanimous hostility to visiting Negro artists.57
Nonetheless, there were objective constraints limiting the arrival of U.S. artists, ancestry set aside. A kind of “protectionism” in Britain sought to bar foreign musicians in favor of the homegrown variety.58 By 1929, Margaret Bonfield, parliamentarian, was told that “unemployment being created through the advent of Talking Pictures”—that is, the decline in pit orchestras in theatres that had been accompanying silent movies—had “already thrown out of employment some 400 musicians throughout the country, the number of which is increasing weekly and will probably affect thousands more.”59 By 1930, British musicians were complaining bitterly about foreign competition, including challenges to that traditional sinecure: military bands.60 Still, there seemed to be less resistance in London to granting visas to the Euro-American bandleader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra.61
African Americans long had toured Britain’s variety circuit with minstrel shows, various revues, and ragtime bands. The date of the arrival of the new music called “jazz” in Britain is usually set in 1919