Nov 17, 2014
"On September 9, 1957, Louis Armstrong was about to go onstage…when he saw on television a crowd of whites jeering at black children who were trying to enter Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Armstrong was outraged. He had just been asked to undertake a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union for the State Department. Jazz had always been a symbol of American freedom and Armstrong [would’ve] been the first American jazz artist to appear behind the Iron Curtain…with Little Rock, he was reluctant to go. Armstrong cancelled the tour. ‘The way they’re treating my people in the south,” he told a reporter, ‘the government can go to hell. It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.’” -Jazz (2001)
