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The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
September 29, 2007 11:45 AM

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the "Little Rock Nine," when nine African-American students were initially prevented by Governor Orval Faubus from entering a racially segregated high school in Arkansas (he used the National Guard to prevent them from entering). By orders of President Eisenhower, federal troops were sent to Arkansas to escort the students into school, and a major moment in the civil rights movement had transpired.

This incident was captured by Charles Mingus' composition, "Fables of Faubus," first recorded on his 1959 album, "Mingus Ah Um." Columbia Records, which released the album, censored the lyrics as being too controversial for their listeners. It was later released on "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus," on the Candid label, with the lyrics intact.

This important moment in the civil rights movement was also captured by a famous interview of Louis Armstrong by Larry Lubenow on September 17, 1957. The story of Lubenow's famous interview of Armstrong as he was on tour in Grand Forks, North Dakota, has become journalistic lore:

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong's concert, Mr. Lubenow's editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble - Mr. Lubenow was, he now says, a "rabble-rouser and liberal" - his boss laid out the ground rules: "No politics," he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. "I don't get involved in politics," he once said. "I just blow my horn."

Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn't talk to Mr. Armstrong until after the concert. That wouldn't do. With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into Mr. Armstrong's suite with a room service lobster dinner. And Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Mr. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor's script, asking Mr. Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. "It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country," a furious Mr. Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was "two faced," and had "no guts." For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: "uneducated plow boy." The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong's.

Then Armstrong threw out this famous line:


"The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell."

The best part of the story is that nobody would believe the young Lubenow. Louis Armstrong was incapable of saying such things!

Mr. Lubenow, who came from a small North Dakota farming community, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the paper to write it up. It was too late to get it in his own paper; nor would the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis, dubious that Mr. Armstrong could have said such things, put it on the national wire, at least until Mr. Lubenow could prove he hadn't made it all up. So the next morning Mr. Lubenow returned to the Dakota Hotel and, as Mr. Armstrong shaved, had the Herald photographer take their picture together. Then Mr. Lubenow showed Mr. Armstrong what he'd written. "Don't take nothing out of that story," Mr. Armstrong declared. "That's just what I said, and still say." He then wrote "solid" on the bottom of the yellow copy paper, and signed his name.

Solid! indeed, Mr. Armstrong!

Read the entire article
for the rest...it's fascinating.

postscript: Where are the Little Rock Nine today?

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