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Subject: The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2007 23:20:02 -0400
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The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
By DAVID MARGOLICK
Op-Ed Contributor
Published: September 23, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/opinion/23margolick.html?em&ex=1190692800&en=6617c05632e2b455&ei=5087%0A
FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little
Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for
the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high
school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand
Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that
battle -- until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis
Armstrong.
On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the
Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High
School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with
his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow,
meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and
jazz fan at the University of North Dakota,
moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks
Herald.
Shortly before Mr. Armstrong's concert, Mr. Lubenow's
editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr.
Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an
interview. Perhaps sensing trouble -- Mr. Lubenow was,
he now says, a "rabble-rouser and liberal" -- his boss
laid out the ground rules: "No politics," he ordered.
That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely
ventured into such things anyway. "I don't get involved
in politics," he once said. "I just blow my horn."
But Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race
relations among them. The bell captain, with whom he
was friendly, had told him that Mr. Armstrong was
quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done
innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the
first black man ever to stay at what was then the best
hotel in town. Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks
had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of
Judge Ronald Davies, who'd just ordered that the
desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov.
Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local
segregationists tried to block it.
As Mr. Armstrong prepared to play that night -- oddly
enough, at Grand Forks's own Central High School --
members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the
school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black
students out. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's meeting
with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport,
R.I., had ended inconclusively. Central High School was
open, but the black children stayed home.
Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn't talk to Mr.
Armstrong until after the concert. That wouldn't do.
With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into
Mr. Armstrong's suite with a room service lobster
dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and
shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to
his editor's script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his
favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But
soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not
believe what he heard. "It's getting almost so bad a
colored man hasn't got any country," a furious Mr.
Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged,
was "two faced," and had "no guts." For Governor
Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive,
utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something
safer: "uneducated plow boy." The euphemism, Mr.
Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong's.
Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his
experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang
the opening bar of "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting
Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr.
Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush
him up.
Mr. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour
to the Soviet Union for the State Department. "They
ain't so cold but what we couldn't bruise them with
happy music," he had said. Now, though, he confessed to
having second thoughts. "The way they are treating my
people in the South, the government can go to hell," he
said, offering further choice words about the secretary
of state, John Foster Dulles. "The people over there
ask me what's wrong with my country. What am I supposed
to say?"
Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming
community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also
knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went
back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to
get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press
editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could
have said such things, put it on the national wire, at
least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn't made it
all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the
Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the
Herald photographer take their picture together. Then
Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he'd written.
"Don't take nothing out of that story," Mr. Armstrong
declared. "That's just what I said, and still say." He
then wrote "solid" on the bottom of the yellow copy
paper, and signed his name.
The article ran all over the country. Douglas Edwards
and John Cameron Swayze broadcast it on the evening
news. The Russians, an anonymous government spokesman
warned, would relish everything Mr. Armstrong had said.
A radio station in Hattiesburg, Miss., threw out all of
Mr. Armstrong's records. Sammy Davis Jr. criticized Mr.
Armstrong for not speaking out earlier. But Jackie
Robinson, Sugar Ray Robinson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt
and Marian Anderson quickly backed him up.
Mostly, there was surprise, especially among blacks.
Secretary Dulles might just as well have stood up at
the United Nations and led a chorus of the Russian
national anthem, declared Jet magazine, which once
called Mr. Armstrong an "Uncle Tom." Mr. Armstrong had
long tried to convince people throughout the world that
"the Negro's lot in America is a happy one," it
observed, but in one bold stroke he'd pulled nearly 15
million American blacks to his bosom. Any white
confused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s
polite talk need only listen to Mr. Armstrong, The
Amsterdam News declared. Mr. Armstrong's words had the
"explosive effect of an H-bomb," said The Chicago
Defender. "He may not have been grammatical, but he was
eloquent."
His road manager quickly put out that Mr. Armstrong had
been tricked, and regretted his statements, but Mr.
Armstrong would have none of that. "I said what
somebody should have said a long time ago," he said the
following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his
next concert. He closed that show with "The Star-
Spangled Banner" -- this time, minus the obscenities.
Mr. Armstrong was to pay a price for his outspokenness.
There were calls for boycotts of his concerts. The Ford
Motor Company threatened to pull out of a Bing Crosby
special on which Mr. Armstrong was to appear. Van
Cliburn's manager refused to let him perform a duet
with Mr. Armstrong on Steve Allen's talk show.
But it didn't really matter. On Sept. 24, President
Eisenhower sent 1,200 paratroopers from the 101st
Airborne into Little Rock, and the next day soldiers
escorted the nine students into Central High School.
Mr. Armstrong exulted. "If you decide to walk into the
schools with the little colored kids, take me along,
Daddy," he wired the president. "God bless you." As for
Mr. Lubenow, who now works in public relations in Cedar
Park, Tex., he got $3.50 for writing the story and,
perhaps, for changing history. But his editor was
miffed -- he'd gotten into politics, after all. Within
a week, he left the paper.
---------------
David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair,
is the author of "Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max
Schmeling and a World on the Brink."
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