Jackson Jambalaya

The Clarion-Ledger called Louis Armstrong, yes, that Louis Armstrong, a "colored trumpet tooter" after he dared to speak his mind about how blacks were treated in the South. 
Mr. Armstrong said what he really thought about segregation to a reporter while he was in Grand Forks, N.D.  Satchmo was considered by many to be the Ultimate Uncle Tom so his outburst caught more than a few people by surprise.  Some of the articles are posted below. 

The Clarion-Ledger naturally did not report Mr. Armstrong's remarks.  However, one of it's punk writers took a few shots at the Jazz legend a few days later.


Yup, crowds are cursing and spitting on little black girls but Mr. Armstrong is the one with the problem.  Got it.

The story behind the interview is a story in and of itself.  The Arkansas Times reported in 2011:

With Armstrong in town — performing, as it happened, at Grand Forks' own Central High School — Lubenow's editor, an old-timer named Russ Davies, sent him to the Dakota Hotel to see whether he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble — Lubenow was, he now says, a ''rabble-rouser and a liberal'' — Davies laid out the ground rules: ''No politics,'' he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Davies was a very conservative editor at a very Republican paper, and, with his famously sunny, unthreatening disposition, Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. ''I don't get involved in politics,'' he once said. ''I just blow my horn.'' (It wasn't so simple, of course; during his long career Armstrong had broken down innumerable barriers, the latest of which was the ban on black guests at the Dakota Hotel.) But Lubenow had been following the Little Rock story; oddly enough, Federal Judge Ronald Davies (no relation to the editor), who had ordered that the desegregation plan there proceed, was from Grand Forks. And, like everyone else, Lubenow had seen the picture of Elizabeth.

Armstrong's road manager told Lubenow that he couldn't see Satchmo until after the concert. But that wouldn't work: it was past his deadline. So with the connivance of the bartender and bell captain, both of them drinking buddies, Lubenow sneaked into Armstrong's suite masquerading as a bellhop, delivering the trumpeter's room-service lobster dinner. He told Armstrong he'd be fired if he didn't come back with a story. The musician, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, couldn't let that happen. He agreed to talk. And talk he did.

Lubenow stuck initially to his editor's script, asking Armstrong to name his favorite musician. (Bing Crosby, Armstrong replied.) But soon Lubenow brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe Armstrong's angry response. ''It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country,'' he said. Armstrong had been contemplating a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union for the State Department — ''they ain't so cold but what we couldn't bruise them with happy music,'' he'd explained — but now, he confessed to having second thoughts. ''The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,'' he went on, offering further choice words about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

''The people over there ask me what's wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?'' As he spoke, he got progressively worked up. Eisenhower, he charged, was ''two faced,'' and had ''no guts,'' while Faubus was a ''no-good motherfucker.'' (Writing for a family newspaper, Lubenow somehow turned that into ''uneducated plow boy.'') Armstrong bitterly recounted his experiences touring the Jim Crow South, like the times when whites, including some of the very folks who had just cheered him, rocked his tour bus menacingly when he and his musicians prepared to leave town. He broke out into the opening bar of ''The Star-Spangled Banner,'' inserting enough obscenities — ''Oh, say can you motherfucking see / By the motherfucking dawn's early light'' — to prompt the band's vocalist, Velma Middleton, to try to hush him up.

Lubenow, from the small farming community of Northwood, North Dakota, was shocked by what he heard, but he also knew he had a story; he skipped the concert and went back to the office, typing up what he had on yellow copy paper. ''The Ambassador of Jazz trumpeted a new tune today,'' he wrote, before laying out that novel song's jarring notes. The Herald printed his story the following morning (taking care to remove the word ''hell''), but, dubious that Armstrong would have said such things, the Associated Press editor in Minneapolis refused to put the story on the national news wire until Lubenow could prove he hadn't made it all up. So he returned to the Dakota, and, as Armstrong was shaving, the Herald photographer took their picture together. (The caption referred to ''Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong, who got all lathered up about segregation here Wednesday''; Lubenow himself was cropped out.) Lubenow then showed Armstrong what he had written. ''Don't take nothing out of that story,'' 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.

The story flashed across the country. Douglas Edwards and John Cameron Swayze reported it that night on the network evening news programs. Armstrong's road manager quickly claimed that Satchmo had been tricked, and that he regretted his statements. But Armstrong would have none of that. ''I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,'' he declared the following day in Montevideo, Minnesota, where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with ''The Star Spangled Banner''— the traditional version, that is, minus the obscenities.... Rest of article.

The newspaper fired Mr. Lubenow a week later for not limiting his questions to music-related topics.