“The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said, offering further choice words about the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Now, though, he confessed to having second thoughts. “They ain’t so cold but what we couldn’t bruise them with happy music,” he had said. Armstrong had been contemplating a good-will tour to the Soviet Union for the State Department. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. (Bing Crosby, it turned out.) But soon he brought up Little Rock, and he could not believe what he heard. Lubenow stuck initially to his editor’s script, asking Mr. Armstrong, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, agreed to talk. Armstrong’s suite with a room service lobster dinner. With the connivance of the bell captain, he snuck into Mr. Lubenow was first told he couldn’t talk to Mr. Central High School was open, but the black children stayed home. Eisenhower’s meeting with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport, R.I., had ended inconclusively. Armstrong prepared to play that night - oddly enough, at Grand Forks’s own Central High School - members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black students out. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local segregationists tried to block it.Īs Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, who’d just ordered that the desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov. Armstrong was quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the first black man ever to stay at what was then the best hotel in town. The bell captain, with whom he was friendly, had told him that Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race relations among them. “I don’t get involved in politics,” he once said. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. Lubenow was, he now says, a “rabble-rouser and liberal” - his boss laid out the ground rules: “No politics,” he ordered. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Lubenow’s editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle - until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong. FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school.
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