Jazz and Justice. Gerald Horne

      3. One O’Clock Jump

      IT WAS NOT JUST CHICAGO AND HARLEM and Paris that benefited from the mass flight from Dixie. Roy Wilkins, who was to become a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was residing in Kansas City during this era. This midwestern metropolis on the Missouri-Kansas border was a hotbed of organized crime—and Jim Crow, too. The difference with Dixie was the ability of many more to cast a vote, and that modicum of political power was hardly minor and certainly was perceived as such by those fleeing Arkansas and Mississippi for this town. Still, Wilkins recalled then that “in those days, even good manners could be a crime for a black man,” and apartheid was prevalent “right down to [the] bootstraps” in that “neighborhoods, schools, churches, hospitals, theaters and just about everything else were as thoroughly segregated as anything in Memphis.” There was a “large black ghetto,” said Wilkins that proved to be a hothouse for the flourishing of emerging musical trends. “Most Negroes in town,” he said, “were jammed into the Central East Side,” while on the “North Side,” there were “Italians and Negroes [who] lived easily side by side,” though this was in a sense illusory since “there didn’t seem to be any limit to what the white people would do to keep blacks from moving up,” including violence. The Kansas City Star, the major mainstream newspaper, did not report on the bombings designed to keep Negroes from moving into apartheid neighborhoods and “refused to print even a photograph of a Negro.” This miasma of intimidation meant, he said, that “almost all entertaining was done in the home, because the Jim Crow laws barred black people from most public watering holes, theaters and the like.” This presupposed that those willing to violate this brutal edict were sufficiently hardened to be unafraid of confrontation. Wilkins, a journalist for the Negro press, was told by the authorities that he was a “marked man” because of his willingness to expose illegal activity, a salient factor that ultimately contributed to his departure for Manhattan.¹

      Others were not as lucky in escaping and had to deal with the far-reaching political machine of Tom Pendergast, who was sufficiently powerful to propel one of his underlings, Harry S. Truman, into the White House. As in Chicago, there were “Negro jazz raids,” this time aided by the city’s police chief, John Miles. At that point, “KCMO” had more murders per capita than Chicago, but the authorities seemed preoccupied with rousting Negro musicians and club owners. The pressure placed on both, which induced frazzled harriedness, may have played a role in the impromptu performances now known as “jam sessions.”²

      Brothels and gambling joints flourished under Pendergast’s dominion, as he invested heavily in construction materials, liquor, taxicabs, hotels, and race tracks, all of which were facilitated by his political tentacles stretching from the suites to the streets.³ Time magazine, then arbiter of middlebrow opinion, announced with wonder in 1934 that Pendergast’s machine was responsible for “nominating and electing” a mere “county judge, Harry S. Truman, to the U.S. Senate.”⁴ As early as 1931, Truman gushed, “I am obligated to the Big Boss,” speaking of Pendergast, who, he claimed curiously, was “all man.”⁵

      Pendergast was ruthless, with a quick and at times violent temper, made more menacing by his coarse, gravelly voice. Thousands worked for him, including those who tended to his horses. He was a hopelessly addicted gambler on horses, and during the depths of the Great Depression he bet millions of dollars monthly, sometimes losing a hundred thousand dollars in a single day, a loss facilitated by the immense profits he garnered from payoffs, kickbacks, bribes, and other bounties of graft. Because of his mismanagement, Kansas City had the greatest per capita deficit ever accumulated by a U.S. municipality. He routinely deployed thugs at electoral polls to guarantee results. His crew included plug-uglies, ruffians, and ex-convicts who would beat senseless any who complained. He thus had a unique tie to the underworld, yet Senator Truman assailed his prosecutors from the floor of Congress.⁶

      This rationalization occurred, although threats, violence, and bombings accompanied Negro attempts to escape neighborhoods where they were consigned. Red-light districts favorable to brothels were sited routinely in Negro neighborhoods too, and then grew exponentially during the Pendergast reign since his machine skimmed a percentage of their profits. Pendergast and his comrade Johnny Lazia installed other forms of vice in Negro vicinities. Naturally police were far more draconian in confronting Negro-operated vice, as opposed to other varieties. There was a harbinger of the post-1932 shift of the Negro vote nationally from the Republicans to the Democrats: in brief, this shift was evident as early as 1925 in Kansas City. Ellis Burton and Felix Payne, Negro gamblers and nightclub owners, were in the vanguard of this epochal transition. However, this didn’t bar the 1929 kidnapping of Payne by his alleged “’business partners” with the order to produce $20,000 cash. The unseemly Burton was accused of hiring a thug to assault an organizer for the predominantly Negro union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Bandleader Benny Moten, according to instrumentalist “Hot Lips” Page, was tied directly to Pendergast.⁷ Pendergast formed an alliance with Felix Payne, local Negro powerbroker, who was co-owner of the Kansas City Giants, a Negro baseball team. He also initiated a Negro newspaper and, like Pendergast, was close to Moten. However, when Pendergast fell, so did this periodical, along with clubs that employed the likes of Moten.⁸

      But Moten and other Negro musicians did not have many choices. Not only did the local philharmonic orchestra refuse adamantly to hire these artists but also barred them from attending concerts. However, at Western University, the “Tuskegee Institute of the Midwest,” across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, Negro artists found a niche and were educated in the intricacies of music, and this trickled down to public elementary and high schools and into the wider community. As early as the 1920s, Negro elementary school teachers introduced into the curriculum of their schools the history of African Americans in music.⁹

      Even after being placed on probation in the aftermath of a criminal conviction. Pendergast violated the terms of this status by aiding Senator Truman’s political campaigns. In fact, his nephew, Jimmy Pendergast, directed the successful attempt to win the Democratic nod for the future president.¹⁰ It was not just Truman who sought Pendergast’s favors, according to officialdom. Despite being described as a “political boss” by the authorities, governors, judges, and the like were “craving” an “audience and favors” from him. His influence over the “ready mixed concrete” market provided him with further reach in this boomtown. “Vote fraud investigations and prosecutions” dogged him.¹¹

      But as powerful as Pendergast was, in some ways he played second fiddle and deferred to Johnny Lazia, the top mobster in Kansas City. Born in 1897, he was jailed in 1916 on charges of highway robbery, but then received an early release from a Pendergast-connected lieutenant governor. One of his early ventures was forcing stores to carry his soft drinks. He claimed to control 7,500 votes of fellow Italian Americans.¹² These voters, it was thought, were not necessarily progressive. As African Americans moved into neighborhoods favored by these relatively recent immigrants, they were said to have “turned with fury” on the newcomers, as “homes of Negroes were dynamited.”¹³

      Lazia was part of a wider influx from Sicily that arrived in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Many had arrived in New Orleans, then fled north for various reasons, one factor being the lynching of the 1890s (suggesting that the lack of a direct river tie between the two cities did not bar connection). Many worked in the packing houses and rail yards of the Midwest. Many fell under the influence of “Brother John”—Lazia—and his burly bodyguard, Charles Carrollo. They effectuated an entente