The Jazz Man: Charles Black's Upbringing in the Segregated South Inspired his Lifelong Fight for Civil Rights
APR Legal Affairs, Vol. 42, 2003
3 Pages Posted: 10 Apr 2010 Last revised: 21 Apr 2010
Date Written: April 1, 2003
Abstract
When Charles Black was a teenager growing up in the segregated Texas of the 1930s, he heard Louis Armstrong play the trumpet at an Austin dance. More than 20 years later, Thurgood Marshall introduced Black at a celebration of Brown v. Board of Education held at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. “And next over there is Charlie Black, a white man from Texas, who's been with us all the way,” said Marshall, who had led the NAACP campaign against segregation and argued Brown before the Supreme Court. Black credited Armstrong's sorrowful yet irrepressible jazz with compelling him to join the fight for racial equality. Listening to this music in his corner of the South between the world wars, Black said, he began to understand segregation as “that most hideous of errors,” which he called “the failure to recognize kinship.” Years later he explained, “It is impossible to overstate the significance of a 16-year-old Southern boy's seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.”
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