Lunch counter sit-ins, kicked off by four Greensboro, N.C., students, have spread like wildfire throughout the South, but here is another photo of Louis Armstrong in 1960, smiling, of course, hoisted like some gleeful maharajah on the shoulders of adoring fans in independent Congo.
What was it like for these black musicians to headline celebratory concerts for newly decolonized African nations on the one hand, but still not be able to stay in hotels south of the Mason-Dixon line back home? What was it like to travel under the auspices of a country known abroad for, as saxophonist Paul Jeffrey was told in Italy, white men being the boss of black men?
The questions provoked by this exhibit have the wonderful effect of humanizing the real-life men and women still breathing despite their poster-sized reincarnations as dead musicians on a wall.
"If you ask a black jazz musician to be a diplomat for a country that is still segregated," says Richard Pells, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and expert on post-World War II American cultural exports, "you put him in a very difficult position overseas."
The most famous grumble of discontent remains Armstrong's 1957 rebuke of President Dwight Eisenhower's foot-dragging on school desegregation in Little Rock, Ark. "The way they are treating my people in the South," Armstrong had said, while canceling plans for a State Department-sponsored Soviet tour, "the government can go to hell."
More often than not, though, musicians' rebellions were not publicly captured.
