Saxophonist Russell Procope, born in New York City in 1908, was stunned by the discordance delivered by Prohibition. It meant frequent raids—“Even the Musicians’ club they used to raid,” he said, “on any trumped-up excuse because they used to have gambling in the back room and all that,” that is, poker tables and blackjack tables. The “standing joke,” he said, “was you could [go] in almost any apartment house and knock on almost any door and get something to drink,” meaning more opportunities for raids.3
Prohibition may have contributed to a preexisting climate of repression. It was not the proximate cause of what Eddie Barefield endured in the 1920s. “Some rich man” hired him and his fellow musicians to play but “the cops caught them and beat them up and beat the guy that was giving the party. Some of the guys were crippled for the rest of their life and some of them died from it and [the cops] broke up all their instruments..” Another time he was in Benny Moten’s band in Beaumont, Texas, and “Jimmy Rushing was sitting on the bandstand with white socks on a guy walked up there and pulled out his gun and said, ‘Nigger, take those white socks off.’”4
The musical genius Art Tatum had similar experiences in his native Toledo, where he was born in 1909. Pool halls and gambling joints were owned mostly by a Detroit mobster who had ties to the criminal “Purple Gang,” which terrorized northern Ohio from the earliest days of Prohibition. Tatum honed his marvelous piano skills at Charlie’s Chicken Shack, a nightspot in a Negro neighborhood owned by Johnnie Crocket, a place where mobsters were often found. Tatum at times played other gigs out of fear as a result of the pervasive influence of racketeers. Prohibition meant that these newer speakeasies were desperate for performers, a vacuum filled by the likes of Tatum.5
As in Toledo, so it was in Harlem, in that Prohibition brought more nightspots to the neighborhood. One estimate details that there were an astounding “twenty-two thousand speakeasies … in Manhattan alone” then, with a goodly number found uptown.6 Beginning in 1923 and continuing for a decade, Harlem was characterized as the Port Said of the eastern seaboard of North America. Shortly after this fateful decade commenced, Owney Madden, the British-born jackanapes and racketeer, had compelled many African American club owners to sell their enterprises.7 In further empowering mobsters, Prohibition brought more fear to musicians. Singled out in New York City were pianist Teddy Wilson and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. These two men were picked out to be examples in dissuading other musicians from moving downtown for a wage bonanza. Hyman “Feets” Edson was a manager of the film star George Raft, and both were in turn close friends of Owney Madden. Later, Edson managed Erskine Hawkins’s band. This unsavory character began threatening to shoot off these musicians’ fingers if they moved downtown. Unsurprisingly, Eldridge carried a weapon; as bandleader Artie Shaw put it, “he saw himself as traveling through a hostile land and he was right.”8
Neither Toledo nor Harlem were sui generis. In St. Louis in the 1920s, as the popularity of the new music continued to spread, members of the segregated local of the American Federation of Musicians began a campaign to stop “white” establishments from hiring Negro musicians. This campaign took the form of picket lines in front of these enterprises. The problem for the picketers was that often these clubs were owned by racketeers who were hardly about to be intimidated by nonviolent protest.9 In a sense, this protest boomeranged and provided an incentive for gangsters to solidify ties with Negro artists.
In some ways, what unfolded in the Mound City was a battle between the influential and virulently anti-Negro Ku Klux Klan and mobsters, embodied in the so-called Charlie Birger gang, named after the man born as Shachna Itzak Birger, of Lithuanian Jewish origin. Wielding their machine guns expertly, the Birger gang battled the KKK, and by the end of 1926 these terrorists, who also harbored anti-Semitism, were functionally inactive.10 This did not happen through friendly persuasion. A typical incident occurred in September 1925 as a modest crowd was listening to a band, when without warning three men barged inside and opened fire with automatic weapons.11 Before then a fracas erupted at a popular cabaret called Jazzland located at Grand and Easton not far from the Mississippi River. On one side was the Russo gang, composed of Italian American bootleggers. Their opponents included Klansmen known for holding mass rallies featuring thousands; at one gathering 1,000 men and 700 women were sworn in underneath two huge flaming crosses while Klan-friendly lawmen stood guard. Nonplussed after one confrontation, the gangsters sought to use dynamite against the KKK, also known to harbor anti-Catholic and anti-Italian forces.12
Miles Davis was born in this region and he well knew of the “bad gangs”—“real bad ones,” he stressed that proliferated in his homeland. Davis also knew of the infamous massacre of Negroes in East St. Louis in 1917 that featured organized criminal efforts by Euro-Americans. “Black people there who survived used to talk about it. When I was coming up,” said the trumpeter, “black people I knew never forgot what sick white people had done to them back in 1917.”13
Roughly, Prohibition provided Negro artists with a difficult choice, symptomatic of the harsh options encountered by Africans since their arrival on these shores: ally with racketeers to foil Klansmen.
“What Prohibition did,” says bandleader, Cab Calloway, “was place liquor under the control of the underworld gangs. And as long as the underworld controlled liquor, they controlled a number of clubs in Harlem as well,” not to mention nationally, speaking of the sites where the new music was performed. “There was booze all over the country in those days,” he said knowingly, “but there was more of it in Harlem.” The profits were so handsome that bloody competition ensued, gang wars, with musicians often caught in the crossfire. Calloway recalled an attack in the 1920s on the aptly named Plantation Club in Harlem: “All the windows of the club had been broken and pieces of half the tables and chairs were on the sidewalk and in the street,” leaving this performance venue in a “shambles,” and the “mirrors on the walls … smashed to smithereens. Somebody had taken an axe to the tables and chairs. The hanging chandeliers had been pulled down and smashed,” apparently at the behest of a competitor, the owners of the Cotton Club. In response, a few weeks later, Harry Block, a comrade of Owney Madden, suspected of sponsoring the assault, was found dead, his lifeless body riddled with bullets in the elevator of his apartment building. This violent atmosphere did not leave musicians unaffected, inexorably influencing their performances. Calloway recalled playing at the Crazy Cat at 48th and Broadway in Manhattan. “Four guys were sitting there with their coats and hats … from the mob. Wide-brimmed hats, long cloth coats, one of them had on shades. They were all white guys. I tried to be cool but inside I was scared to death.” These men were exemplars of “pure muscle,” for “’the mob didn’t play games. They were for real.” The performance setting was meant to transmit a not so subtle message. Thus, at the Cotton Club, said Calloway, “the bandstand was a replica of a southern mansion” from the slavery era; “even the name Cotton Club was supposed to convey the southern feeling. I suppose,” he mused. “The idea was to make whites who came to the club feel like they were being catered to and