The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  Freedom is a word that is the foundation of our country.77—Duke Ellington

  Duke Ellington has a White House story. On his seventieth birthday, April 29, 1969, his long career at the top of the jazz world was celebrated by President Richard Nixon with a dinner at the White House. At that event, Ellington was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given by the United States to a citizen. After more than seven decades of evolution and global impact, jazz and one of its grand masters were finally getting their due. Ellington biographer John Edward Hasse referred to the event as “the capstone of his career.”78

  Ellington’s relationship to the White House dated back to the Roosevelts. As early as February 16, 1934, Ellington had offered to play for President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House in a time when Eleanor Roosevelt was actively expanding the number and range of performances at the residence, including many black artists. However, Ellington and a number of other famous acts, such as the Andrews Sisters and Igor Stravinsky, were turned down, primarily due to scheduling issues.79

  Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Johnson had encounters with Ellington as well. On September 29, 1950, he met with Truman at the White House to personally present him with a copy of a musical piece he had written, titled “Harlem,” and a portion of his Toscanini-commissioned manuscript, “Portrait of New York Suite.”80 He admired the fact that Truman—albeit under pressure—had desegregated the military. Ellington planned to premiere his “Harlem” piece in January 1951 for a NAACP fundraiser at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Later, in November 1950, in a letter to Truman, he noted that the proceeds from the upcoming concert “will be used to help fight for your civil rights program—to stamp out segregation, discrimination, bigotry and a variety of intolerances in our own American society.”81

  Truman’s civil rights program was more mirage than reality, so it is not clear if Ellington was being kind or naïve. He was also recognized by Eisenhower, although it is unknown if he held the same opinion of him that Louis Armstrong did. In response to the president’s mishandling the school integration crisis at Central High School in Little Rock, Armstrong famously stated, “The way they are treating my people in the South, the Government can go to hell. The president has no guts.”82 In 1960 the State Department sponsored a tour to the Congo in which Armstrong participated. Only months later, the CIA and Belgian intelligence played a covert role in the assassination of the Congo’s progressive, anticolonial president Patrice Lumumba on January 17, 1961.83

  At age sixty-six, Ellington gave his first concert at the White House, on June 14, 1965, for the “White House Festival of the Arts.” Ellington’s performance was neither overtly political nor entirely neutral. He played his “Impressions of the Far East,” which reflected his travels to spread the music and a positive image of African Americans around the world, and his epic musical narrative of black history “Black, Brown, and Beige.”84 In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson presented Ellington with the Congressional Gold Medal. This award is given by Congress and delivered by the president to those who have achieved excellence and outstanding achievement in their field, or performed an outstanding service to the nation.

  By the 1960s, jazz had been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Nearly every corner of the globe had a jazz culture and paid homage to what many considered America’s most original musical contribution to world culture. Born in America’s black segregated communities around the beginning of the twentieth century, it spread to every corner of the nation, evolving local varieties and innovations as it went. Around the world, jazz was seen as embodying the principles of democracy in its harmonious reconciliation between the collective and the individual.85 In Hitler’s Germany, it galvanized young people to rebel against Nazism. In South Africa, anti-apartheid activists used jazz to challenge the racist white regime. In Brazil, it was appropriated by a rising middle class in the form of Bossa Nova. In Cuba, jazz remained popular both before and after the 1959 revolution. In India, it symbolized modernity and became the rage of the upper classes.86

  Cold War and Hot Jazz

  For millions around the world, jazz was heard on a regular basis through “Voice of America,” the U.S. propaganda radio station that was broadcast to 100 million people in dozens of countries by the mid-1960s, including, illegally, into Eastern Europe. And for many, the mellifluous voice of Willis Conover was the voice of America. Beginning in January 1955, his “Music USA” broadcasts were heard one hour a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. While he consciously sought not to engage in extreme pro-American cant, Conover was labeled “one of the country’s greatest foreign policy tools,” and he did believe in the Cold War objectives of U.S. foreign policy through several administrations.87 He felt that his show and what he considered the politics of the music were linked. In reference to non-Americans he said, “They love jazz because they love freedom.”88 His show would last for more than four decades before coming to an end in 1996.89

  The global popularity of jazz and the democratic impulse that it was perceived to express were of such significance that in 1955, the year the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, President Eisenhower’s State Department, in collaboration with black congressman Adam Clayton Powell, initiated a program of diplomacy that sent American jazz musicians around the world. Powell had a personal link to jazz, because at the time he was married to pianist Hazel Scott. Fearful of Soviet inroads into the newly independent African countries and the consolidation of Eastern European states into the Soviet sphere, with a green light from the White House the State Department, Powell sought to enlist jazz artists in the rapidly intensifying Cold War. It should be noted that jazz’s sordid and disreputable reputation in certain circles, and the fact that it was seen as black music, generated opposition to the program from Southern members of Congress.

  The “Jazz Ambassadors” program sought to use cultural diplomacy—what political scientist Louis Nye calls “soft power,” or “the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion”—in the service of a post–World War II global agenda. The strategy was to challenge Soviet efforts to expand its international positioning even as the United States was making its own efforts in that direction.90 The State Department’s Jazz Ambassadors program was conceived by the U.S. government to use what Ellington called America’s “classic music” in an effort to reposition through cultural means (along with the standard economic, political, and military aggression) the hegemonic aspirations of the United States.

  In a period in which the United States was on the defensive against charges of racism in international forums from soon-to-be independent African nations, liberation movements, leftist camps, and even globally conscious and active African Americans, the state-sponsored promotion of jazz was seen as a buffer against such accusations. Using a recognized black, American-born music genre made world famous by its black, Latin, and white performers, U.S. strategists applied a two-pronged approach of soft and hard power efforts. The bands of Dizzy Gillespie and David Brubeck were two of the earlier ambassadors. Like many who came after them, they did not propagate rigid pro-American hype, maintaining a critical voice when it came to the nation’s racial situation. At the same time, they more or less adhered to a liberal realist view, accepting the notion of American exceptionalism and the superiority of its democratic model. And although none were fervently anticommunist, they were sometimes guilty of framing their experience in such terminology, such as when Gillespie wired Eisenhower after his tour, writing, “Our trip through the Middle East proved conclusively that our interracial group was powerfully effective against red propaganda.”91

  Ellington was also one of the ambassadors. Between September 1963, two weeks after the March on Washington, and the beginning of 1974, when his health began to seriously deteriorate, he and the band traveled around the world on behalf of the State Department, including gigs in the Middle East, Soviet Union, Africa, South America, South Asia, and Easte
rn Europe.92 He was most active during the Nixon years, coinciding with the president’s foreign policy initiatives toward the Soviet Union. Politically, scholar Penny Von Eschen argues, Ellington “appears to have been not only a patriot but a sincere believer in the American Cold War mission of promoting the superiority of American democracy.”93 At the same time, Ellington was profoundly sensitive to African Americans’ image and status in U.S. society although that sensitivity was filtered through a privileged, middle-class framework and life experience. Relative to the normative politics of U.S. foreign policy and the administrations through which he worked, he represented a progressive perspective, and central to his notion of democracy was a politics of antiracism.

  However, just as black politics became more radical in the mid-1960s and 1970s, so did the jazz world. A new generation of jazz musicians and critics deemed Ellington’s views too conciliatory and passive in the face of the racism of the times. Long-simmering tensions between more radical blacks—led by black nationalism–oriented jazz musicians and activists such as Max Roach, Abby Lincoln, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, the Chicago Art Ensemble, Charles Mingus, and Ornette Coleman, and black critics Amiri Baraka and A. B. Spellman—and moderate-conservative blacks and whites in the U.S. jazz world finally exploded, as charges of racism in access to clubs, payment for performances, critical exposure, radio play, and other areas were expressed. Fundamentally, the issue was over who owned the music and what it represented in terms of American racial politics.

  Towering above the fray was musically pioneering, genre-shattering John Coltrane who was mostly, though not completely, nonpolitical and helped to take jazz in a new direction. Many in the “free jazz” movement viewed Ellington and Armstrong as antiquated or even “sellouts” and “Uncle Toms,” contrasting their own liberated sounds with what they considered the musical shackles of the style played by Ellington and musicians prior to the 1960s. They denounced the U.S. government as imperialist and the country as hopelessly and permanently racist.94 Needless to say, the black nationalist and Pan-Africanist wing of jazz was not invited to participate in the Jazz Ambassadors program or, for that matter, jazz concerts at the White House.

  Despite a century of showcasing all types of musical performances and despite the State Department’s jazz tours, it would take until 1962 before jazz was actually heard in the White House.95 And perhaps predictably, the premier performance was not by an African American group. On November 19, 1962, jazz made its maiden appearance at the White House and, according to the New York Times, shook “the crystal chandeliers of the stately old East Room.”96 Alto and soprano saxophonist Paul Winter and his sextet, an all-white group, made history by giving the first jazz mini-concert in the White House, at a children’s party organized by Jacqueline Kennedy. Earlier in the year Winter’s group had toured Latin America as part of the Jazz Ambassadors program.

  Soon, however, black jazz artists would become frequent visitors. The opening of the White House to black jazz musicians was an emotional moment for some. Bess Abell, who was Lyndon Johnson’s White House social secretary, vividly remembers a state dinner at which Sarah Vaughan sang but then, after dinner, disappeared. She stated, “I found her in this office, which had been turned over to her as a dressing room, and she was sobbing. And I said, ‘Mrs. Vaughan, what’s wrong? What can I do?’ And she said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is the most wonderful day of my life. When I first came to Washington, I couldn’t get a hotel room, and tonight, I danced with the president.’”97

  In the Johnson’s dancing White House, jazz found perhaps an unexpected reception, given Johnson’s conservative Texas background. Many musicians received an invitation to perform. Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan were only two of the veteran jazz artists who came to the White House. Indeed, a number of jazz groups were tasked to perform for royalty from around the world during the Johnson years. The Dave Brubeck band played for Jordan’s King Hussein, guitarist Charlie Byrd played for the King and Queen of Nepal, flutist Herbie Mann performed for Great Britain’s Princess Alexandra, and the North Texas State University Lab jazz band jammed for the King of Thailand.98

  For Ellington, the Nixon event was certainly enhanced by the fact that his journey to being honored at the White House could be traced back to his father’s own White House story. In 1899, the year Ellington was born and decades before the cultural rise of Harlem, Washington was seen by some as “the undisputed center of Negro civilization” due to its large and active black middle class.99 However, few black men found work outside of manual labor or personal service, including Ellington’s father, James Edward. Over a number of years, he worked as a “coachman (1898, 1901), driver (1899, 1900), butler (1903–4, 1906–7, 1909–17), caretaker (1918–19), Navy Yard employee (1920),” as well as caterer and eventually worker at the Government Printing Office.100 James—also known as “J.E.”—sought desperately to provide for his family, which meant he worked a number of jobs at the same time. One of those outside jobs included occasional butler work at the White House during the Harding administration.101

  Despite the tremendous hope he held for his son’s future, it is doubtful that James could imagine that one day the White House would hold a celebration of his son as one of the greatest jazz artists of all time. James had severe reservations about Duke making a career of jazz, especially as he had married relatively young and had started a family. Nevertheless, the younger Ellington prevailed and went on not only to join the jazz community, but to become one of its all-time leading lights.

  During the ceremony, President Richard Nixon remarked on Ellington’s parental legacy at the White House:

  To all of our guests here this evening, I think you would be interested to know that many years ago, the father of our guest of honor, in this very room, serving as one of the butlers in this White House, helped to serve state dinners. Tonight, in honoring his son, I was trying to think of something that would be appropriate, something that has not been more adequately said, I think very well, by the music that we have heard. We have tried to convey our affection for Duke Ellington through that music, and later on in the East Room, when I will make the first presentation in this administration of the Medal of Freedom to Duke Ellington, I will have more to say in more extended remarks about what this day means to us and what it means to this House. But in this room, at this time, for these special guests, it occurred to me that the most appropriate thing for me to say would be this: I, and many others here, have been guests at state dinners. I have been here when an emperor has been toasted. I have been here when we have raised our glasses to a king, to a queen, to presidents, and to prime ministers. But in studying the history of all of the great dinners held in this room, never before has a Duke been toasted. So tonight I ask you all to rise and join me in raising our glasses to the greatest Duke of them all, Duke Ellington.102

  The genesis and fanfare of the Ellington tribute had political undertones. In 1960, Nixon had received 32 percent of the black vote; in 1968, that number had dropped to 15 percent.103 In a period when the Republican Party actually cared about winning black votes, some actions had to be taken, even if symbolic and in contradiction to the larger strategy unfolding. In that context, Leonard Garment, a counsel to President Nixon, suggested to the president after his inaugural in early 1969 that he celebrate Duke’s upcoming seventieth birthday with a grand dinner and award him the Medal of Freedom. Reflecting on the jazz throng in attendance and Nixon’s unpopularity with African Americans, Garment noted, “This was not exactly a crowd of Nixon fans.”104 Garment was a jazz enthusiast and amateur musician who had played clarinet with Woody Herman. Garment along with Willis Conover and several others made the arrangements for Ellington’s grand White House celebration.105 And it was a good thing because Nixon’s notion of jazz was somewhat suspect—he wanted to include Guy Lombardo. The affair was attended by numerous jazz luminaries, among them Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Billy Taylor, and Mahalia Jackson.106 President Nixon p
layed “Happy Birthday” to Ellington on the piano. In turn, Ellington composed a melody on the spot dedicated to Nixon’s wife Pat.107

  Following the Nixon years, black jazz musicians would continue to be invited to White House events under both Democratic and Republican presidents. On June 18, 1978, the White House celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the renowned Newport Jazz Festival. Jimmy Carter and hundreds of guests listened to a galaxy of jazz stars, with performances by Eubie Blake, Ornette Coleman, Mary Lou Williams, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Joe Jones, Katherine Handy Lewis, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and Clark Terry. In the audience with the Carters and guests were Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Charles Mingus, among others.108 Carter stated, “[I]f there ever was an indigenous art form, one that is peculiar to the United States and represents what we are as a country, I would say it is jazz.”109

  Republican and jazz vibraphone player Lionel Hampton also played for the Reagans. He noted the class and cultural difference between the two administrations, saying, “During the Carter party we had a barbecue. At this one we have caviar.”110 In addition to Hampton, many other jazz luminaries appeared before Reagan. These included Art Blakey, Chick Corea, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Haynes, and George Shearing. Reagan made his most important impact on jazz, however, not by having musicians play at the White House but by making budget cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and by supporting conservative attacks on the arts. In fact, Reagan initially sought to wipe out the agency altogether. He only relented when a special task force on the arts, which included conservatives Adolph Coors and Charlton Heston, recommended otherwise.111 More broadly, the Republican Party and conservatives argued that the government should not be involved in supporting art. This campaign continued at the George H. W. Bush White House, where, records show, the White House held no jazz performances.