Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [15]
Even when Louis Armstrong was playing shifts at two clubs a night, when he left work he would stay up till morning jamming with friends. On his nights off, Mezzrow loved going to the De Luxe café on Chicago’s South Side to watch Alberta Hunter singing, “He may be your man but he comes to see me sometime.” Hunter thought people only came to see her costar, Twinkle Davis, because of her wonderful legs, but Mezzrow liked the sly sexiness of her lyrics, a blues hallmark:
Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,
Baby, see that spider climbin’ on that wall,
He’s goin’ up there for to get his ashes hauled.
Like crime for Capone, music gave these artists the chance to transform their lives. Doing what they loved brought them undreamt-of rewards: ermine coats, diamond rings, flowing champagne, big shiny cars. Still, despite the sums they earned and the respect they received from their peers, black musicians lived in an almost entirely segregated world. Their ties to the mobsters who owned the clubs in which they worked and often supplied them with the alcohol and drugs on which they depended were inescapable. When Louis Armstrong changed managers halfway through the twenties he was forced to hire bodyguards to protect himself from gang violence.
In 1959 Richard Wright wrote in an introduction to a book about the blues that while its themes may have been negative—experiences of work and transit, bad luck, race, tragic home and family lives, submerged guilt, sexual betrayal, lost love—its message was paradoxically positive. “The most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and downheartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope. No matter how repressive was the American environment, the Negro never lost faith in or doubted his deeply endemic capacity to live.” Blues and jazz reminded people—especially black people—of their instinct to survive.
Musicians were not the only African-Americans who felt optimistic in the 1920s. Moving to the cities, learning to read and write, buoyed up by having participated in the war effort, becoming conscious of the injustices of racism—all these things stimulated a new sense of self-respect and a determination to create an America in which black men and women could live as equals alongside whites. Activists, historians, philosophers and writers began to believe, in the words of Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, that a coming of age beckoned. “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation,” he wrote.
The two great figures of the early civil rights movement were the dapper Harvard scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of its magazine, Crisis, and Marcus Garvey, a bombastic Jamaican immigrant whose United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fought to instill “black pride” in its millions of members.
The middle-class, mixed-race Du Bois was an intellectual, a novelist and a poet as well as a civil rights activist. At the start of his career, he had called for greater tolerance and understanding between the races and worked extensively with whites, believing that their change of attitude was just as important as a shift in black outlook. He hoped that education would be the key to racial equality. “By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men,” he urged, encouraging victims of discrimination to fight prejudice in the law courts instead of on the streets. His aim was an integrated America in which race no longer mattered. But, bitterly disillusioned by the racial hatred he had observed towards black soldiers fighting for America during the Great War, throughout the 1920s Du Bois became increasingly alienated from white America.