It’s June 1 st , 2020, and Jazz singer and activist Aaron Myers joins thousands of demonstrators in
Washington, DC’s Lafayette Square. “I saw people running,” he related. “I started coughing and
crying.” Myers couldn’t think why security forces fired tear gas. Then he saw government
officials walking to a nearby church for a photo op. At that moment, he said, he committed to
raise his voice of resistance even louder.

As protests continued, other Jazz musicians have raised their own voices. Robert Glasper, Ben
Williams, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Terri Lynn Carrington are just some of those who’ve joined
the chorus. Bassist Luke Stewart, co-founder of CapitalBop – a DC non-profit advocating Jazz
performance and activism – was, he said, “pretty much at a protest in some fashion every day.”
Although fearful of the COVID pandemic, Stewart felt it was his responsibility to be a witness to
the movement.

Music executives launched “Blackout Tuesday,” a call for the industry to halt new releases and
close business for a day to protest the killing of Black Americans. Bandcamp – an online
marketplace – donated a portion of its sales on Juneteenth to the NAACP. The Warner Music
Group launched a $100 million fund to help groups promote social justice, and speak out
against violence and racism.

Aaron Myers celebrates the growing resistance movement toward real social change. But he
does, however, recognize that even big steps are still just steps on a long march to equity and
equality.

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Teaching the world through jazz. 

It’s 1961, and football star Harold Bradley, Jr. founds a cultural nexus. Two years earlier, Bradley left a championship NFL career to study art in Italy. The sports world thought he was crazy, but those who knew Bradley knew he loved painting more than football. He acquired a basement workshop in the Via Garibaldi and immersed himself in the art and culture of Rome.

Word spread about the Black American making paintings. Curious young people, artists, and fellow expatriates watched Bradley at work. His studio became the gathering place to discuss art, politics, and social activism. Bradley named his workshop Folkstudio, where by day he continued to paint and engage in conversation. He encouraged his onlookers to get involved in society. There was no room for bystanders.

At night, Folkstudio was a musical hub, where patrons first heard Americans Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Odetta, and jazz artists Gil Evans, Sun Ra, and Lee Konitz. Jazz and Blues, Bradley believed, was the perfect introduction to Black culture, history, and values. Folkstudio, as Time Magazine wrote, “was greeted like Springtime,” and fast became the most popular club in Rome. It was the epicenter of Europe’s burgeoning jazz and blues scene. Eventually, the Folkstudio record label was founded to further the careers of European jazz players.

The importance of Bradley’s creation did not go unnoticed. Citing Folkstudio’s cultural impact, the Italian government offered Bradley a stipend. Folkstudio was the subject of magazine articles, documentaries, and two books. And, on the 25th and 50th anniversaries of its founding, the City of Rome honored what it dubbed, “Bradley’s most important achievement.” 

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At the turn of the 20th century, the phenomenon of the Pullman Porter caught the public’s imagination. A journey on a Pullman car summoned up images of romance and adventure. In a rigidly segregated society, Pullman Porters were probably the only African-Americans that most of white society ever truly interacted with. But there is an often-overlooked contribution to 20th century jazz by these men who were neither performers, critics or promoters of the music.

For a hundred years, from the end of the Civil War until the late 1960s, the Pullman Company, which built sleeping cars for passenger railways, hired black porters to serve its overnight travelers. Those sleepy passengers were invariably well-heeled whites.

The Pullman Porters pioneered Negro labor unionizing and helped forge a black middle class. Moreover, the fight for union recognition was the basis for progress for blacks during the pre-civil rights era. The porters’ labor dispute and efforts to include blacks in more favorable positions in the war industry led to the first march on Washington.” Along the way, railroad porters played a crucial role in the spread of jazz across the continent in the 1920s and ’30s.

In his book, Rising from the Rails, longtime Boston Globe reporter Larry Tye writes: “To whites who watched him on the train or film screen, [the porter] epitomized servility. To black neighbors and friends, he personified sophistication and urbanity. He was a man of worlds they would never see or experience. And the porter did more than pass through those worlds. He helped disseminate the culture he saw and tasted to black Americans and whites in ways that writers and moviemakers seldom appreciated or reflected.

“He picked up, read and passed on newspapers and magazines that passengers left behind. He did something similar with music. In cities like Chicago and New York, the porter would buy dozens of the latest [recordings] of the sultry Bessie Smith and Mother of the Blues Ma Rainey. He resold them, often for twice the price, in communities across the South where the local department store did not stock black artists. Buyers got not just the records but their first look at revolutionary music forms like jazz.”

Porters and dining car men also got to mingle with musicians like Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong.” Tye writes “They traveled the country on Pullman sleepers and played their pianos, clarinets, and trumpets late into the night in the club car where porters listened, learned, and passed on what they picked up. It worked in the reverse too: porters spent time in the hamlets and villages of rural America where the blues and bluegrass were born, and they recounted what they had heard when they got home to the city or talked to troubadours on the train.”

Music: From 1921, Clarence Williams with “Pullman Porter Blues.”

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It’s 2016, and Yale University acquires a priceless piece of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1932, young artist E. Simms Campbell drew his “Night-Club Map of Harlem,” a who’s-who illustration of the neighborhood hotspots. Drawn cartoon-style, we see Cab Calloway singing at the Cotton Club. There’s Glady Bentley’s Clam House, with Gladys tickling the ivories in a tuxedo. And Smalls’ Paradise, with its “café au lait girls” and dancing waiters. 

Campbell’s affectionate tribute to Harlem, and the jazz music it cultivated, caught readers’ attention in the first issue of Esquire magazine. He’d been recommended by artist Russell Patterson. “I know a fantastically talented colored kid,” Patterson said, “if you don’t draw the color line.” Thus Campbell became the first African-American illustrator for mainstream white publications. 

Whether in Esquire, or the New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, or Redbook, Campbell’s art indeed crossed the color line. He subtly and subversively poked fun at so-called problems among affluent whites – an impatient husband waiting for his wife, a man caught cheating at a Whites-only nightclub, the crises in choosing wallpaper. Meanwhile, in Black-focused publications, Campbell addressed the deeper issues of creating a Black identity and the power of jazz. Always a jazz advocate, Campbell authored a chapter on blues music for the 1939 book Jazzmen, a study of jazz history and evolution. 

Campbell’s “Night-Club Map of Harlem” has also enjoyed a long career. Cab Calloway included it in his autobiography. Ken Burns published it in the companion book to his film Jazz. It was published twice in National Geographic and was displayed at the Smithsonian. Now at Yale, it’s available to historians for research. 

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