Black cultural greats helped America realize segregation had to be left in the past | Opinion

This week’s 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s epoch-making Brown v. Board of Education ruling reminds us that the route to social change never is a straight line.

In this case that originated in Topeka, Kansas, the path was cleared by the all-Black Pullman sleeping car porters, Negro League ballplayers like Satchel Paige and, more than anyone, by three revolutionary American maestros named Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and William “Count” Basie, whose music throbbed at the soul of the 20th century.

This trio of African American music makers opened white America’s ears and souls to the grace of their music and their personalities, demonstrating the virtues of Black artistry and Black humanity. White men who wouldn’t let a Black person through their front door wooed their sweethearts with tunes from the Count, the Duke and gravel-throated Satchmo. White women who dodged African Americans on the sidewalk gleefully tapped their high heels in the isolation of their living rooms. Even the most unyielding of rednecks flipped on their radios to hear “One O’Clock Jump” as they sped their trucks through the rolling hills of the hinterlands. Race, for once, fell away as America listened rapt.

MLK: ‘Jazz speaks for life’

“Jazz speaks for life,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to the organizers of the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964. Three years later, the civil rights icon told the Negro National Association of Radio Announcers: “You have paved the way for social and political change by creating a powerful cultural bridge between Black and white. School integration is much easier now that they share a common music, a common language, and enjoy the same dances. … You have taken the power which Old (Uncle) Sam had buried deep in his soul, and through our amazing technology, performed a cultural conquest that surpasses even Alexander the Great and the culture of classical Greece.”

That wasn’t merely hyperbole. King, who was schooled in the history of social change, knew that among African Americans, only the Pullman porters saw more of the nation than the jazzmen, and even the porters just rolled through places like Fargo, North Dakota. But Duke Ellington stayed on one winter night in 1940 for a concert at the Crystal Ballroom that drew about 700 fans who, for the price of $1.30, got to hear the orchestra hitting on all cylinders. The entire population of North Dakota was only .03% Black then, and there were just 30 in Fargo. Racism certainly existed there, but wasn’t as all-consuming as in other parts of the country. The locals’ attention was focused more on dust storms and farm foreclosures. There was no TV to take people’s minds off the raging war, little money for the motion pictures and not much else to do in a city that celebrated its political and cultural isolation. That left jazz.

Elllington’s concerts that winter in Fargo, along with ones in nearby East Grand Forks and Duluth, showed heartland America that Black musicians could play before white large audiences without the sky falling, fans rioting or artistic standards being compromised. And performances like those proved to white entrepreneurs that musicians such as Duke, the Count and Satchmo could put money in their pockets.

Frank Sinatra’s boost in Las Vegas

Getting to know was a two-way street. Their time upcountry exposed the bandleaders to a raw and uninhibited America that was unfamiliar to people who’d grown up in Washington, D.C., Red Bank, New Jersey and New Orleans They watched ranchers lubricated with beer fight to get closer to their bandstand, sometimes with guns drawn. They got to know Frank Sinatra, who brought the Basie band to mob-run Las Vegas and told his bodyguards, “If anybody even looks funny at any member of this band, break both of their f****** legs.” Their up-close look at another icon of the era, Cary Grant, proved less flattering: Armstrong performed at the heartthrob’s 38th birthday party in Hollywood, where guests, Grant included, came in blackface.

Such interactions, the venal along with the congenial, emboldened the Supreme Court on May 17, 1954 to strike down laws segregating America’s public schools, and paved the way for the country’s eventual acceptance of the landmark Brown verdict.

Roy Campanella, an outstanding Negro League catcher who was called up by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson smashed through baseball’s color line, witnessed that kind of table-setting for himself: “Without the Brooklyn Dodgers, you don’t have Brown v. Board of Education,” he said. “All I know is we were the first ones on the trains, we were the first ones down South not to go around the back of the restaurant, first ones in the hotels. We were like the teachers of the whole integration thing.”

Larry Tye’s ninth book, out this month from HarperCollins, is “The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America.” A former Boston Globe reporter, Tye lives on Cape Cod and runs a Boston-based training program for health journalists.