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 entertained by black slaves.” But it was not just Harlem that was unsettling; Calloway recalled a performance in St. Petersburg, Florida, where a racist patron tossed a bottle that bounced off the head of his drummer, Lester Maxey, leaving the dazed man, “bleeding like a stuck pig.” Then in Texas he found a white man could hit a Negro in the mouth if he wanted to but had to pay a $300 fine as a token; his bandmate Benny Payne was thus assaulted but fought back, with a riot ensuing at the club.14
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
