1920-1939 African American history

http://krdance478.blogspot.com/2011/04/1920s-jazz-age.html

The Jazz Age

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who called the 1920's the "Jazz Age." However, it was African Americans who gave the age its jazz. Jazz is a musical form based in improvisation. Jazz recombines different forms of music, including African American blues and ragtime, and European-based music. Jazz emerged particularly New Orleans, where different cultures and traditions came together and influenced each other. From the South, it spread north with the Great Migration of Blacks. Trumpet player Louis Armstrong became the unofficial ambassador of jazz. After Armstrong, all jazz bands featured soloists. Many also began to feature vocal soloists, such as Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues."  Jazz wasn't just a musical style, it was also a symbol of the Roaring Twenties. Part of the Prohibition era, jazz was played in speakeasies and nightspots in Ney York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Phonograph records and radio spread jazz across the country and beyond. By the end of the decade, jazz had spread to Europe as well. Jazz was a demonstration of the depth and richness of blacks. Jazz announced that the U.S. was a land of shared cultures and traditions, a place where people came together and created something greater than their parts. In 1924 the jazz sound became influenced by some white songwriters and composers.

< Lapsansky-Werner, Emma J. "The Jazz Age." Prentice Hall United States History: Modern America. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2010. 243-44. Web. >





Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong

Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day. Only Charlie Parker comes close to having as much influence on the history of Jazz as Louis Armstrong did. Like almost all early Jazz musicians, Louis was from New Orleans. He was from a very poor family and was sent to reform school when he was twelve after firing a gun in the air on New Year's Eve. At the school he learned to play cornet. After being released at age fourteen, he worked selling papers, unloading boats, and selling coal from a cart. He didn't own an instrument at this time, but continued to listen to bands at clubs like the Funky Butt Hall. By 1917 he played in an Oliver inspired group at dive bars in New Orleans' Storyville section. In 1919 he left New Orleans for the first time to join Fate Marable's band in St. Louis. In 1921, he returned to New Orleans and played in Zutty Singleton's. He also played in parades with the Allen Brass Band. In 1922 Louis was asked to proform at Lincoln Gardens in Chicago. The New Orleans style of music took the town by storm and soon many other bands from down south made their way north to Chicago. Soon enough Armstrong found the love of his life Daisy Parker. They then wed and adopted a 3-year old mentally disabled boy named Clarence Armstrong in 1918. This marriage was short lived and in 1920 ended in divorce causing him to marry Lillian Hardinand on February 4, 1922. Unfortinately they divorced in 1938. There shortly after, Armstrong married his long time girlfriend Alpha. In 1942 Armstrong married his fourth wife, Lucille Wilson, a singer at the Cotton Club. In 1943 Armstrong and Lucille moved into the house in Queens that has become the Armstrong Archives. Armstrong was a very successful man and in 1968 he recorded his last hit, "What a Wonderful World". Armstrong then passed away on July 6, 1971 in New York.
<Bergreen, Laurence. Louis Armstrong: an Extravagant Life. New York: Broadway, 1997. Print.>



1930's Racial Burriers in Education

Black School in 1932

American education was racially segregated in the 1930s precisely because of the white presumption that blacks were inherently incapable of learning at an advanced level. Segregating white schoolchildren from black schoolchildren meant that white pupils presumably would not be "held back" in the classroom by less-capable black pupils. Black schools, especially in the South, were underfunded. There were a mere handful of black high schools throughout the South. Two hundred thirty southern counties did not have a single high school for black students in 1932—even though every one of these counties possessed a high school for whites. In sixteen states there was not a single state-supported black institution that offered graduate or professional programs. Black communities throughout the country built schools for themselves and hired instructors for the most difficult subjects. Black academics such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and E. Franklin Frazier attacked intelligence testing and educational discrimination that validated the status quo. They were combating years of neglect and racism. In 1930, 15% of rural adult African Americans had no formal schooling, and 48% had never gone beyond the fifth grade. White school boards paid white teachers an average annual salary of $833; black teachers, who had larger teaching loads, were paid only $510. Ironically, the Depression improved the situation of black education in many ways. In northern schools, school boards began to abolish segregated education as a way of saving money; in the South educators fearful of the possible consequences of unschooled, unemployed youths succeeded in getting school districts to build high schools for blacks—if for no other reason than to keep them off the streets. Thanks to such programs and to literacy campaigns mounted by New Deal agencies such as the National Youth Administration (NYA), by 1940 five hundred thousand illiterate blacks had been taught to read and write. The number of African Americans attending high school doubled; the number of high-school graduates tripled; and the percentage of blacks attending school became equal to that of whites.

White School in 1930

 <"American Cultural History - 1930-1939." LSC-Kingwood Library. June 2008. Web. 9 Nov. 2011. http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade30.html.>