PEOPLES PUBS

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: january 2011 :: RMTnews 32 PEOPLE’S PUBS - Words by Mike Pentelow, Pictures by Peter Arkell LOUIS ARMSTRONG 59 Maison Dieu Road, Dover T he smiling face of legendary trumpeter Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) singing "What A Wonderful World" belies his strong stand against racism which attracted the attention of the FBI. His mother, Mayann Armstrong, was an ex-slave who was only 15 when she gave birth to him in New Orleans. At the age of just five he experienced segregation on a bus visiting his sick mother, when he was dragged from the whites-only front to the back. His next lesson in discrimination was at the age of 12 when he was sentenced to an indefinite period in a reform school (called the Coloured Waifs' Home) after a mock trial of just 15 minutes for the heinous crime of firing a pistol into the air during New Year's Eve celebrations. He went on hunger strike in protest for three days before ending it and being rewarded with a place in the school's brass band where he learned to play the trumpet. After a year he was released and got a job playing in bodellos and brothels which were outlawed the following year. At the age of 17 he was arrested randomly by police looking for a black man who had committed a robbery, and was only saved by the Mafia, who owned the club where he was playing. His nickname of Satchmo came from part of his act at this club, lampooning a lecherous and avaricious singing preacher called Rev Satchelmouth. While performing on a New Orleans radio show a white announcer refused to introduce "that nigger man" as he called him. Uncowed, Armstrong seized the microphone and introduced himself, so becoming the first black man to speak on that radio station. On tour in Memphis the band was stopped by police who, annoyed at seeing Armstrong sitting next to a white woman, arrested all the black musicians and took them to the jailhouse issuing racist threats. The theatre management was only allowed to bail them out for the performance on condition they make a radio broadcast for the benefit of police funds. Armstrong got his own back by dedicating the first song to the Memphis police force - it was I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You. As the police rushed towards the band they feared for their lives - only to be thanked by the police who had never had a tune dedicated to them before. White supremacists were outraged by the 1937 film Artists And Models because a white actress danced seductively next to Armstrong as he blew his trumpet. For the next 30 years he was not allowed to be seen interacting socially with whites in his films. When the desegregation of schools was being resisted in 1957 Armstrong saw a white mob spitting on a small, terrified black girl at Little Rock in Arkansas. He immediately called off his next government international goodwill tour and declared: "The way they are treating people in the South, the government can go to hell. It's getting so bad, a coloured man hasn't got any country." Pulling no punches, he accused President Eisenhower of being two-faced and gutless. It was then that the FBI opened a file on Armstrong. Later he also refused to play at the White House for the newly elected President Richard Nixon in 1969. "The only reason he would want me to play there now is to make some niggers happy," explained Louis. As he became richer he resisted pressure form his wife to move to fashionable Long Island in New York. He preferred to stay in the Queen's area "with the rest of the coloured folk and the Puerto Ricans and Italians and Hebrew cats." The pub in Dover was named after him just after his death in 1971, and regularly has live jazz, as no doubt many of the union's seafaring members will know. *“A Pub Crawl Through History, The Ultimate Boozers’ Who’s Who,” by Mike Pentelow and Peter Arkell, is published by Janus. ISBN 978-1-85756-701-4.