The Wrong Place for the Right People

The story of Cafe Society, and its sister club, Cafe Society Uptown, is a remarkable one - an intentionally integrated club in New York at a time when even here, such things did not exist. Founder Barney Josephson's memoir, Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People, tells the story over several hundred pages, but the thing that brings it home to me is a single picture: the interior of Cafe Society Uptown in 1943. It looks like a full house, maybe 200 people sitting around tables in the center, with more tables lining the walls with chairs only on the wall sides, so these tables form a "U" around the central floor. You almost don't notice at first that there's a piano, and musicians, in the foreground behind the first two tables. The crowd clearly knows the photo is being taken - everyone is turned to the camera, most seem to be smiling. You don't notice the piano and the musicians at first because the first thing that strikes you is the crowd - black and white together. Brought together, as Josephson says, through a combination of bad legislation - namely Prohibition, and good booze. (Josephson notes, several times, that he didn't water his whiskey.) Oh, and opportunist criminal mobs, who apparently were the first to realize that black people's money was just as green as white people's. Speakeasies, as critic Dan Morgenstern notes in the book's forward, were among the first truly integrated places in America.

So Josephson fought the good fight. He had help from John Hammond, the great impresario who discovered everyone from Benny Goodman and Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. They celebrated blues and jazz, the African-American contribution to American music, and the way that music could bring the races together.

And that's why that picture is so striking. Because a closer look reveals that actually, only the couple at the table closest to the camera are black; almost everyone else is white. The other black faces in the crowd are the musicians. It just got me to wondering - Josephson's Cafe Society was founded in part to bridge the racial divide, but what about the economic one? How effective could it be when even some of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance were struggling to make ends meet?

The clubs were way before my time so I can only ask this question; I can't answer it. But Cafe Society presented some of the century's truly great musical talents - Billie Holiday unveiling "Strange Fruit"; the only US club appearance by Django Reinhardt; and so many more. By doing that in the face of threats from organized crime, industry bigots, and even his own government in the form of the notorious House Committe on Un-American Activities, Barney Josephson's story is truly American tale.

Tell us: Are there other examples of music attempting to bring black and white together? Have they succeeded?
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