Tizol, a Puerto Rican trombonist born in 1900 who played with Ellington, had similar difficult experiences in the Southwest, which cried out for the development of a countervailing force. Once in Dallas, he recalled, “we were getting ready to play and there were a lot of people there and people started looking at me,” probably because he was of a lighter hue than his bandmates. Then he was asked rudely, “’What are you doing playing with those niggers?” At other times, he would be able to fetch food for the band from sites where darker-skinned musicians were banned. “I’d get some food and take it to them,” he said. “I used to do that all the time down South.”37
Further north, bassist turned agent and manager John Levy was performing in Cicero, Illinois, in 1937 when “ten gangsters with their women arrive[d],” and when he sought to depart one of these unsavory characters tapped him with a pistol and said no, he could not leave. Since Levy had become enmeshed in the numbers racket at the tender age of eighteen, he knew it would be unwise to disagree.38 This illicit business was a kind of lottery that generated substantial profits and thereby attracted the ravenous attention of better connected—mostly Italian-American—mobsters.
This mobster influence was particularly resonant near the Canadian border. Before Prohibition was repealed in 1933, gangsters accumulated great wealth by dint of organizing distilleries, manufacturing and selling lightning and corn whiskey. In Detroit, this was the province of the “Purple Gang.” However, in Paradise Valley, where Negroes were proliferating, powerful Black challengers were also flourishing. Formidable barriers prevailed, however, as these entrepreneurs often were ensnared by loan sharks at best and denied capital altogether at worst. It was not unknown for sharks to charge interest rates of 50 percent. One of these challengers, Sunnie Wilson, exhibited the potential of his socioeconomic stratum when he established a school for the Black poor so they could learn how to read and write. His friendships with boxer Joe Louis and Duke Ellington bolstered both to the advantage of their wider community.39
Wilson’s benevolence could not obscure the pervasive gangster influence that afflicted artists. Pianist Duke Anderson forgot to play at a gig for a gangster in Newark. “Right then and there,” he recalled, “I got the worst whippin’ I ever got in my life. They broke my jaw and wrist. Eventually, I went back to playin’ but from then on, I was scared stiff of anyone who looked like a gangster.”40 Anderson may have been “scared stiff” for quite a while since for a fifteen-year period beginning in the late 1920s there was a sprawling neighborhood known as Newark’s “Barbary Coast,” featuring what one scholar termed “high-class pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, numbers bankers and hustlers.” It was anchored by the “Kinney Club at Arlington and Augusta Streets,” Newark’s “version of New York’s infamous Cotton Club” and “one of Newark’s first black nightclubs”—though “three quarters of the customers at the Kinney Club were whites,” many of those being racketeers.
One of the key figures of that dissolute era was Herman Lubinsky, a man despised by Negro musicians since his unscrupulousness rivaled, and perhaps exceeded, that of Glaser and Irving Mills, notorious for bilking Duke Ellington and others. “It spoils my whole day to mention Herman Lubinsky” was the considered comment of musician Al Henderson. He was the “’worst thief in the world. He made millions on us [black musicians] and he wouldn’t pay you nothin.”’ He was a “wily, unethical shark,” according to scholar Barbara Kukla, driven by a passionate “desire to steal their songs and talents for a pittance…. Some musicians contend Lubinsky got them drunk”—later hooked on hard drugs—“then had them sign a contract for a few bucks.” Nate Brown argued with similar passion that “Lubinsky [put] me out of business…. He wanted me to sing the blues but said I didn’t sound Negroid enough.” Thus, one journalist is not far wrong in concluding that “there is no doubt everybody hated Herman Lubinsky.” Lubinsky capitalized on technology as he was a prime mover in installing jukeboxes at local clubs and taverns, which meant huge profits for gangsters like himself who owned and controlled these devices; thus, as Kukla put it, “mobsters either owned the taverns or the owners were so in debt to them they had to take the jukeboxes whether they wanted to or not.”41 It was inevitable that at a certain juncture African Americans would seek to develop their own organized crime factions, and it was virtually inexorable that they would be crushed by their competitors often employing the organs of the state.42
Further south in the “Garden State,” Abe Manley, who also had a hand in the numbers racket and, reputedly, took his poker seriously, administered his far-flung business interests from his nightclub in Camden, across the river from Philadelphia, which was graced by an elegant piano that cost $8,000. In early April 1931, armed men invaded his club, followed by the bombing of the site, as other racketeers sought to oust him. A chastened Manley then moved to Harlem, where Negro political power was growing, as evidenced by the rise of Adam Clayton Powell to the U.S. Congress shortly thereafter, with his City Council seat won by the Black Communist Ben Davis, Jr. Abe’s spouse, Effa Manley, also was involved in his varied enterprises and in 1937 sponsored a concert in Newark featuring Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. At this juncture, the Manleys had wealth of an estimated $1 million, quite unusual for a U.S. family generally and a Negro family particularly.43 Just as Glaser invested in boxers, the Manleys invested in the Negro baseball league. A fellow baseball owner, Gus Greenlee, was invested in the numbers, but like Manley he too was squeezed by Italian and Jewish racketeers, who shifted into numbers as the business of illicit alcohol dried up with the end of Prohibition.44
Possibly the Manleys arrived in Harlem unaware of the disturbing case of Barron D. Wilkins. This Negro entrepreneur had come to Upper Manhattan in the early 1900s and by the 1920s was a powerful club owner and a collaborator with boxing champion and musician Jack Johnson, but, said musician Sam Wooding, “Italians,” meaning competitors and mobsters, “got hold of Yellow Charleston,” a petty Negro gambler with debts and “they told him, ‘Look, if you want to get dope [drugs] and all the dope you want, you’ve got to shoot old man Barron.” And promptly, that is what the compromised Charleston (also known as William Miller) did. This crime took place “right in front of his place,” meaning Wilkins’s club, that is, “right there at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street,” and then the “white gangsters had him for a while,” meaning Charleston, until the furor ebbed.45
Unfortunately, travails were not the sole province of the Southwest and Northeast. Jabbo Smith, the trumpeter and rival of Louis Armstrong, born in Georgia in 1908, found it necessary to quit the band of Claude Hopkins because it was “too dangerous” not to do so. “While we were playing,” he recalled, “the drivers were supposed to be resting up to drive us. But instead they were out lollygagging, messing around. We’d get through playing, get in the cars and then we’d find out that the drivers were drunk. We’d be so scared riding on those mountain roads, we’d hang on to each other. We couldn’t sleep during the rides so we’d be real tired when we got to the jobs,” with resultant impact on performances.46
Thus, propelled by threats and intimidation, what might be considered a “Jazz Diaspora” kept moving westward, not only to Asia but making an intermediate stop in California before decamping to Honolulu or Shanghai. Elihu “Black Dot” McGee, an important figure on Los Angeles’s culturally rich Central Avenue, arrived in the City of Angels from El Paso, Texas, in 1926. Rather quickly he came to own and operate “The Flame,” “The Casablanca,” “The Congo Room,” along with the “Turf Barber Shop,” where many patrons gathered not just for a trim but to share bonhomie. A dapper dresser and considered a “a very hip cat,” he and his comrades controlled a good deal of the bookmaking business and numbers. Early on, records were sold by McGee and his colleagues, alongside other wares, for example, marijuana and heroin Inevitably, musicians were touched by this business, at times as avid customers of the drugs that permeated their environment.47
As the Second World War erupted and Japanese Americans were interned, the African American population of what was to become a major metropolis grew exponentially as Los Angeles became a major battleground
