9. Harlem’s famous Cotton Club was racially segregated for much of its existence
The former World Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson founded what became the Cotton Club in 1920s, calling it the Club Deluxe. In 1923 a prominent New York organized crime figure, Owney Madden, took over the club, retaining Johnson as its manager. Under Johnson both Whites and Blacks were welcomed at the club, Madden made it segregated for Whites only. The segregation did not apply to the entertainment, and Duke Ellington and his orchestra gained local, and eventually international fame as the sound of the Roaring Twenties. Eventually, Ellington and other black performers gained enough leverage, through their fame, that the segregation eased, allowing socially prominent Blacks to enter the club. Little socializing between the races occurred, other than with the celebrity entertainers and musicians.
Ellington left the club in 1931, replaced by Cab Calloway. Other Black performers at the club included Sammy Davis Jr, as a tap dancer, a teenaged Lena Horne, and Ethel Waters. In 1935 the club became fully integrated. The following year it relocated to Broadway at 48th Street. Its period as a segregated all-White club with Black entertainment drew heavy criticism from many Black leaders, also directed to many who performed there. The Black poet Langston Hughes (a great-great-nephew of John Mercer Langston) described the Cotton Club as “a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites”. The fame of its name was such that other Cotton Clubs with similar policies opened in cities across the country. In Chicago, the Cotton Club was part of the Capone crime syndicate, managed by Al’s older brother Ralph.