Billie Holiday performs in New York City in 1947. Courtesy Library of Congress.
This piece is a response to our Call for Submissions: Histories of Political Protest in the U.S. For our submission guidelines, click here.
While the literary figures of the Harlem Renaissance are correctly celebrated as intellectuals and activists, jazz musicians of the time were not extended similar credit despite frequenting some of the same clubs, cabarets, and cafés.[1] All the while, jazz men and women crafted an incomparable art form that came to define the era—one more democratic in its diffusion, accessibility, and influence than poetry, plays, or essays. Black writers, who gathered to socialize and imbibe at philosophical symposiums, doubtlessly discussed important issues of the day; jazz artists, it was presumed, were merely capable of providing background music. In 1925, Alain Locke, one of the leading proponents of the Harlem Renaissance, edited a collection of essays and literary works on the cultural contributions of African Americans associated with the New Negro movement. In the foreword to The New Negro, Locke declared, “There is ample evidence of a New Negro in the latest phases of social change and progress, but still more in the internal world of the Negro mind and spirit.” Locke contended that American society discovered “in the artistic self-expression of the Negro today a new figure on the national canvas and a new force in the foreground of affairs.”[2]
Locke and his acolytes sought to harness the power of Black art to reframe the “race question” in American society and press for civil rights reforms. Yet, Locke’s vision was shortsighted. Despite the unprecedented reach of jazz and its ability to challenge the racial status quo—in ways Locke and other literary figures hoped to channel through their own work—Locke refused to grant credit to Black popular music and the artists who were its champions. It was a grave oversight.[3] Jazz musicians were an important, though underappreciated, component of New Negro activism “on the national canvas.”
Had Locke seen fit to acknowledge the ability of jazz musicians to affect social change, he would have discovered in Harlem and in Chicago’s South Side integrated cabarets that comprised some of the few spaces where white and Black people could openly interact in social settings at the height of Jim Crow segregation. As New York Amsterdam News columnist George S. Schuyler opined in 1927: “One great point in favor of the cabaret and dance hall as social assets is…they afford a meeting place for the individuals of the two races where they can know each other on a plane of equality and good-will. In many ways they are more valuable in breaking down racial barriers than all the whooping of the inter-racial leagues from one end of the country to the other.”[4]
Ethel Waters, the famous jazz and blues singer, believed Black performing artists had the power to affect public opinion from the stage. “I realize the good work that I and all of us colored artists have been doing,” she declared. “Many white people who would not listen to any other side of Negro life will gladly hear a Negro jazz artist or blues singer. All that helps pave the way by making them more sympathetic to our race.”[5] While jazz did not tear down the walls of racism and segregation in the United States in the inter-war period, the testimonies of Schuyler and Waters reveal the cracks developing in Jim Crow’s foundation—and that jazz could help widen those cracks.
The most impactful way jazz altered interwar society was through Black artists pushing back against the status quo of racial injustice. In these efforts, Billie Holiday was emblematic of an increasingly vocal push for civil rights. Despite her limited vocal range of a single octave, Holiday transformed and transcended singing as an art form, imbuing her songs with a keen sense of joy or despair that evoked her own triumphs and tribulations. Her ability to play with the offbeat—singing just before or slightly after the dominant notes in a 4/4 measure—not only highlighted her sense of swing, but it also inspired countless imitations. If Holiday had simply changed the way vocalists approached their craft forever more, she would be remembered, rightly, as one of the greatest who ever lived. But she was more than that. In her words, she was “a race woman”—someone willing to speak her mind, even when it might threaten her career.
In 1939, she opened an extended run at the Café Society in Greenwich Village. It was New York’s first racially integrated nightclub outside of Harlem, and a cadre of artists, writers, intellectuals, labor organizers, Communists, and like-minded politicos found common ground at its bar and cocktail tables. At the Café Society, she began performing a tune she called her “personal protest”—the haunting and evocative anti-lynching dirge, “Strange Fruit,” which she recorded later that year. “I worked like the devil on it,” Holiday recalled, “because I was never sure I could put it across or that I could get across to a plush night-club audience the things that it meant to me.”[6] Though it was not met with universal praise at the time, “Strange Fruit” remains relevant more than eight decades later and is fundamental to the protest music canon. “It almost singlehandedly changed the politics of American popular culture and put elements of protest and resistance back at the center of contemporary black musical culture,” writes Angela Davis.[7]
“Strange Fruit” was not the genesis of jazz protest and political activism; rather, it was the culmination of decades of grassroots political organization and mobilization on the part of jazz musicians, not unlike the work of their fellow New Negro activists. Black artists developed strategies of resistance in the South that conditioned musicians to political activism, which they continued in Northeastern and Midwestern cities during the Great Migration. Louis Armstrong was the physical embodiment of the jazz migration experience. Born in New Orleans, he left for Chicago in 1922 at the behest of his mentor, Joe “King” Oliver. He also spent years in New York during the Harlem literary renaissance. Musicians like Oliver, Edward “Kid” Ory, and W. C. Handy were not simply jazz innovators. They also encouraged and supported dozens of musicians, like Armstrong, as they attempted to flee the South. In assuming leadership roles, these individuals offered employment to prospective migrants, often a place to stay while musicians got on their feet in a new city, and typically sent cash or train tickets to allow for the journey north.
Louis Armstrong headlining Carnegie Hall in 1947. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Once in Chicago, New York, or Kansas City, musicians’ unions became conduits for greater political participation and collective action. Chicago’s Local 208 of the American Federation of Musicians, for example, grew to become the largest Black local in the country. It was founded with the help of two Southern transplants who were familiar with collective organization as members of Black benevolent societies and social and pleasure clubs in New Orleans. While jazz artists like Waters and Holiday affronted prevailing racial mores wholesale from the stage, it was in the union hall that musicians engaged in retail political organization at the grassroots level. Kansas City’s Local 627 was especially successful in boosting its membership rolls and boasted a dues paying roster over the years that read like a who’s who of jazz innovation—Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams, and Charlie Parker.
Additionally, due to their experiences on the road traveling from one club to the next and confronting racism with regularity, musicians developed a consciousness that manifested in more openly militant engagement during the Great Depression and the post–World War II era. Accordingly, Larry Tye asserts, “Satchmo and his mixed-race sidemen traveled the South long before the freedom riders did, and before it was safe to do so.”[8] Louis Armstrong affirmed to Ebony magazine in 1961, “I’ve pioneered in breaking the color line in many Southern states (Georgia, Mississippi, Texas) with mixed bands—Negro and white. I’ve taken a lot of abuse, put up with a lot of jazz, even been in some pretty dangerous spots through no fault of my own for almost forty years.” These developments created an environment of political activism that sought to combat the repressive mechanisms that dictated the status of African Americans be that of second-class citizens in American society.
Despite the myriad ways jazz artists organized collectively and challenged the Jim Crow order, Waters, Holiday, Armstrong, Oliver, and countless others were not counted among the Black intelligentsia. Thus, class tensions offer one clue that helps explain why musicians were not taken seriously as political activists. Indeed, a significant segment of the Black middle class believed working-class musicians were not sufficiently dignified. In Memphis, W. C. Handy lamented that middle-class African Americans he encountered “suffered from the old conception of the musician. They had no respect for him except while he was entertaining them, if then.”[9] More than a few writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance (Locke among them) held similar opinions about the merit of jazz artists. Consequently, Cab Calloway asserted, the paths of writers and musicians seldom intersected. “Those of us in the music and entertainment business were vaguely aware that something exciting was happening, but we weren’t directly involved,” he declared, “but the two worlds, literature and entertainment, rarely crossed. We were working hard on our thing and they were working hard on theirs.”[10] Like Cab Calloway, the saxophone player, bandleader, and composer Benny Carter believed jazz was not entirely accepted by the visual arts and literary communities as an art form in its own right during the Harlem Renaissance. “I wasn’t, I feel, involved in it,” Carter explained. “I think the people…that were involved in the Renaissance; I think jazz was looked down upon…. I think they felt it lacked dignity.” Though Calloway, Carter, and their fellow musicians were well aware of the burgeoning artistic and political achievements of the New Negro movement, they were given little respect for their own contributions. “We in music knew there was much going on in literature,” Carter asserted, “but our worlds were far apart. We sensed that the Black cultural as well as moral leaders looked down on our music as undignified.” According to Carter, a notable exception to the lack of respect for jazz and jazz artists among the literary component of the Harlem Renaissance was Langston Hughes. Carter called Hughes “the poet laureate of the Renaissance, and a man who had much respect for an understanding of this music.” Hughes wrote glowingly about jazz, adopted blues phrasing in a series of poems in the 1920s, and made a conscious effort to create Afro-centric art.
Though class dynamics meant musicians were not given their due, the period is still remembered as the Jazz Age, not the Poetics Age. Far more people bought Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday records than attended poetry readings or purchased chapbooks. Given the extent of repression African Americans faced across the South and the lack of respect and full equality they were accorded in the North, the fact that jazz—derived from working-class Black culture—claimed a central place in the American zeitgeist in the interwar years is no small feat. We often take for granted that the 1920s was known as the Jazz Age, without fully considering the implications that had for American society. Though jazz did not tear down all racial barriers, we see the rise in this period of the first nationally recognized and positively portrayed Black celebrities. Larry Tye argues that “No Black had ever starred on commercially sponsored network radio” until Louis Armstrong “took over for Rudy Vallee on NBC’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Show in 1937…. Jackie Robinson was eighteen and the only Reverend King who mattered was eight-year-old Martin’s daddy.”[11] Like Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, and Billie Holiday were among the artists who challenged the status quo and confronted white America with new avenues of Black possibility. Today, in music conservatories across the country, students study the work of classical composers like Beethoven and Bach and the work of Armstrong and Ellington. It is a remarkable development few would have envisioned when jazz first burst onto the national scene roughly one hundred years ago. But the Jazz Age was not simply conjured out of the ether; it was manifested into existence by the New Negroes of jazz.
Charles Lester is the Director of Academics for the Cutler Scholars Program and a faculty member in the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University. He is the author of a book in progress for Temple University Press titled, Like Some Kind of God: Jazz Activism, the Great Migration, and the New Negro Renaissance, 1890–1940.
[1] David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1997), xxi–xxiv.
[2] Alain Locke ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (1997), xxv.
[3] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2020), 225–29.
[4] George S. Schuyler, “The Soap Box,” New York Amsterdam News, Aug. 23, 1927, p. 4.
[5] Ethel Waters quoted in J. A. Rogers, “Ethel Waters Selected as First Subject from Pen of Gifted Writer and Author,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 27, 1929, p. 9.
[6] Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues 50th Anniversary Edition (2006), 94–95.
[7] Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998), 184.
[8] Larry Tye, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America (2024), 259.
[9] W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (1941), 136.
[10] Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (1976), 105–106.
[11] Tye, Jazzmen, 259.
