Interviewed by pianist Dr. Billy Taylor the bassist Milt Hinton corroborated the story about racists paying $300 for the opportunity to punch a Negro in the face. “They hit Cab Calloway … This is the God’s honest truth,” he added to calm the doubters. “We had to get off the bandstand and go down underneath … and that began Cab Calloway not wanting to do a lotta travelin’ down there,” meaning Dixie. “For a black group to come down with all this sophistication, they didn’t like it too very much” there. As Calloway himself put it, “You comin’ down here all sharp” like “New York slickers” and you had to “watch yourself” as a result. Since, said Hinton, “they didn’t like us comin’ down with all those beautiful shows….”15 Hinton added that seeking succor in Negro neighborhoods brought no necessary surcease. Usually traveling musicians “got overcharged by the local hotel owners and the people who ran the rooming houses. All of them were black,” he said, “but that didn’t matter. They knew we couldn’t stay in the bigger places.” Ruefully, Hinton observed, “We all resented this kind of treatment.” Hinton thought that in turn “whites in these towns would try to turn local blacks against us,” contributing to a circle of distrust.16
The Cotton Club, while barring Negroes as customers, hired Negro women as dancers and the like, though they had to be of lighter skin, worsening a rift among African Americans, making them more susceptible to exploitation.17 The influence of racketeers also facilitated horrendous conditions for labor. Lena Horne recalls that when she tried to quit working there, bosses “made it clear” this was unacceptable, instructing that “nobody had any right to quit a Cotton Club job,” a kind of neo-slavery apparently. They punctuated their objection when “they got nasty. They beat him up,” speaking of her agent—they “dunked his head in the toilet bowl and threw him out.”18 The former Cotton Club dancer Howard Johnson recalled that Horne’s stepfather was “beaten unmercifully” by thugs because he “once took issue when the mobsters refused to raise Lena’s pay.”19
Organized crime was not a force for racial equality, in other words; mobsters enforced a system that undergirded Jim Crow, rudely imposing noxious effects on Negroes. Black people visited Smalls Paradise in Harlem, though musician Danny Barker suggests there was a trickle-down aspect of Jim Crow in that “black Cubans” visited yet another club, while Barbadians went to another, and “people from Virginia” to another and so on.20
Dempsey J. Travis, the Chicago-based writer, also spoke disparagingly of this conflicted era—the 1920s—when Owney Madden controlled the East Coast’s booze and beer distribution; Al Capone reigned over Chicago and its environs; Johnny Lazia controlled the police, liquor, and gambling in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Purple Gang dominated Detroit’s subculture—all sites where the new music began to flourish. “These cities,” says Travis, “were controlled by the ‘Jazz Slave Masters’ and some of the very best Black musicians were their serfs. Talented jazz musicians were chained to bands and specific nightclubs and saloons in the same manner as the antebellum Negroes were shackled to plantations.” They were “inmates behind the ‘Cotton Curtain’,” an apt metaphor since control from the top was so pervasive that many musicians found it difficult to perform at a site not of a boss’s choosing. This was all racially and ethnically coded, he said, since “the keepers of the cash box were usually Jewish or Italian and occasionally, they were mob-connected Blacks.”21
His recollection was substantiated by the jazz singer Ada “Bricktop” Smith, born in West Virginia in 1894, who ultimately chose voluntary exile in Mexico after a lengthy stay as a club owner in France: “No one in the saloon business can avoid gangsters, hoods, petty crooks and other types of criminals,” she conceded; this was a “built in nuisance.” In 1924 she opened her Parisian nightspot and, she confessed, by then “the French underworld was beginning to take some cues from American gangsters. They got them from American gangster movies,” pointing to these cinematic tributes as a primer in that it led these Parisians into “organizing protection rackets,” indicating the global reach of U.S. piratical tactics. For these men could quickly “get nasty” and “those who protested found themselves at the wrong end of a bullet or a switchblade.” As in the United States, these Gallic imitators also pushed prostitution—and “each time they were more threatening”—and then various illegal drugs. She began to arm herself as a result, mimicking those back home, the difference being that a Black woman in North America most likely would have had difficulty opening a club in the first instance.22
Horn man Benny Carter, born in 1907, in the early 1930s became acquainted with George Rich—“he was a great fan of mine,” he conceded—who was a “sporting gentleman,” a euphemism for gangster. When the Club Harlem was being liquidated, then in a losing rivalry with the Cotton Club, Rich intervened. When Carter visited him, “he started raising cushions … getting up cash from this chair, upholstered chair and from this sofa, and I never saw so much money, just being dug up right in front of me … and the next day he became the owner of the Club Harlem.” His motivation? “You’ve got to have a place for your band,” he told Carter, who, staggered, pointed out, “His only purpose for buying the club was to keep my band together.” After a messy split with his spouse, Carter was “pretty broke and George loaned me $150 … to pay my fare back to Paris.” Thus arose Benny Carter and “The Club Harlem Orchestra.”23 Not coincidentally, this beau geste also obligated the composer, arranger, and bandleader to this questionable patron.
This is no trifling matter since, according to critic Leonard Feather, Carter was a trailblazer because as a bandleader he was “the first genuine full-scale integrator,” even though Benny Goodman is often given credit for this feat. But, says Feather, the bespectacled clarinetist hesitated to hire Coleman Hawkins at the behest of John Hammond, the producer. The emphasis on Goodman’s purported trailblazing has hindered the necessity of focusing on others. For example, Feather stresses the pathbreaking efforts of Rex Stewart, perhaps the music’s reigning intellectual, who was crossing the color line in hiring as early as 1934 in Harlem.24
As ever, those at the top of the pyramid of capitalism were the beneficiaries in the first instance. This list included Arnold Rothstein, termed by his biographer as “King of the Jews,” who helped to fund the groundbreaking Negro musical Shuffle Along, which propelled the career of pianist Eubie Blake. Rothstein’s personal aide, Thomas A. Farley, born in Virginia in 1875, was a “gentleman of color” who had his tuition to Columbia University paid by his benefactor. Rothstein was also accused of being one of the earliest of the drug dealers, reportedly importing 1,250 pounds of heroin and allying with opium dealers.25 Pianist Fats Waller was friendly with Rothstein, though understandably wary of him.26 Rothstein was not singular, for New York City also featured the presence of mobster Casper A. Holstein, whose roots were in the former Danish West Indies, recently purloined by Washington from Copenhagen.27 By the 1920s he was running the Saratoga Club in Harlem.28
One of Holstein’s comrades was another personality of Caribbean heritage, Stephanie St. Clair, born in Guadeloupe. Like others, she was concerned when he was kidnapped at gunpoint shortly after betting more than $30, 000 at Belmont Park; at the time he was sporting jewelry worth a like amount and thus a $50,000 ransom was demanded. Ultimately, he was released at 140th Street and Amsterdam in Harlem after frenetic negotiations. Shortly thereafter, Rothstein was shot in a New York hotel; this attack on the man viewed as the “kingpin” of Jewish organized crime was also viewed with grave concern by his comrades, as a small fortune tied up in gambling and speakeasies was at stake. But the problem for his Negro competitors was their lack of influence at City Hall, which meant they were to suffer greatly from police harassment, which proved to be undermining.29
The pervasiveness of Jim Crow continued to hamper the ability of Negroes to gain a foothold in the nightclub business and other venues where the new music was beginning to flourish. On the other hand, the “Great Migration,” or the mass movement north from Dixie and the Caribbean to