By David T. Miller
Contributing Writer

The snow started early and kept falling. February 1960 had not been particularly cold in Kentucky, but on that second Saturday the snow piled up faster than it could be plowed, and the city came to a standstill. Everything shut down for nearly a week.

The very next weekend promised two highly anticipated events: a Friday concert by Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars at Memorial Coliseum and a Saturday night dance at the Phoenix Hotel featuring the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the culminating events of UK’s second annual Greek Week. Organizers were determined the shows would go on. 

Armstrong and his band were to start playing at 8:30 p.m. that Friday night, and more than 6,000 fans streamed into the Coliseum in anticipation. His concert was open to the public, unlike Dorsey’s the following night, which was limited to fraternity members and their guests. Armstrong’s tour bus was on its way to Lexington from a show in Washington, D.C., a 28-hour drive, just one more in a seemingly interminable series of road dates. The band’s bus was stuck behind a wreck in rural West Virginia and bogged down in the snow after crossing into Kentucky. The state police were alerted and escorted the bus to Lexington, and the concert began an hour and a half late.

The band walked onstage in their street clothes. They must have been exhausted, playing hundreds of nights a year all over the US and in Africa and Europe. But Armstrong — “Pops” or “Satchmo,” the greatest jazz trumpeter and one of the most revolutionary musical artists of the 20th century — mugged and joked and scatted and stomped through two hours of traditional “hot” jazz, show tunes and novelty numbers. He “rolled his eyes, made faces, roared like a panther, blasted out on his trumpet and then, playing with a soft breathy style, lulled the audience,” said a reviewer.

After the show, a sweat-soaked Armstrong stuck around only long enough to meet with members of UK’s Jewish fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, and sign a few autographs. Armstrong had worn a Star of David all his adult life, a tribute to the Karnofsky family, who had befriended him as a young orphan, buying him his first cornet and trumpet and arranging music lessons. “I don’t socialize with the top dogs of society after a dance or concert,” he said. “Even though I’m invited, I don’t go. These same society people may go around the corner and lynch a Negro.” Armstrong bid the students goodnight and he and his band packed up for the bus ride to their gig in Cincinnati the following night.

The Memorial Coliseum crowd that night had been almost entirely white, but Armstrong was used to that. He had collaborated with many white artists and had deliberately integrated various versions of his band, such as the one for Memorial Coliseum. That meant the band couldn’t play in some cities in the South, including Armstrong’s hometown of New Orleans, because of laws forbidding performances by racially mixed groups. 

Armstrong’s business affairs were handled back in New York by Joe Glaser, Armstrong’s manager from 1935 until his death in 1969, but Pierre “Frenchy” Tallerie, his road manager, traveled with the band and negotiated the complicated matter of the band’s dates in segregated cities. A musician who toured with the All-Stars said Louis knew that if he did something wrong, “Tallerie would report him [to Glaser], and if Tallerie tried to steal, Louis would do exactly the same thing.“ Both Glaser and Tallerie were white — a white road manager was a necessity for a bus full of Black musicians traveling in the South. Otherwise, they might be arrested and thrown in jail for vagrancy by a local sheriff. (Armstrong’s band had in fact been arrested in Memphis and had come close other times.) Racial tensions had eased in much of the North, West and East of the country following World War II, but were still very high in the South. 

Armstrong’s deep loyalty to Glaser, who allowed him to focus purely on his music, was well-known. In contrast, Armstrong’s relationship with Tallerie, who was openly racist and frequently used derogatory language, was much more strained. Everyone in the band disliked him. Armstrong’s friend Jack Bradley said of Tallerie, “I don’t know how Glaser got some of these people. I suspect they were all his cronies from Chicago… They were all gangster-related and tough and insensitive to people‘s needs and didn’t know anything about music.“ Terry Teachout wrote in “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong,” that “it must’ve galled [Tallerie] that the All-Stars were integrated, not by chance, but as a matter of policy.”

Although the star, Armstrong almost always rode with the band when it played road dates. “We don’t have no days off — feel like I spent 9,000 hours on buses, get off a bus, hop a plane, get in town just in time to play a gig,” he said. 

Armstrong rarely spoke about race but was well aware of prejudice and the complicated system of Jim Crow laws across the South. Despite his fame, he once complained that he had “$2,000 in my pocket and nowhere to eat…  We used to tour the South in a big Packard. Lots of times we couldn’t get a place to sleep. So, we’d cross the tracks, pull over to the side of the road. We couldn’t get into hotels. Our money wasn’t even good.” When the band traveled through the Deep South, their road manager would have to bring them food in paper bags.

Armstrong was a musical hero to many — the first Black American to play at the roof garden of the Kentucky Hotel in Louisville, the first to host a national radio show, the first to get featured billing in a Hollywood movie, the first jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time magazine, and he was beloved internationally for his tours of Europe and Africa. But to some, his mugging, puff-cheeked, always-cheerful persona in the face of widespread racism bordered on minstrelsy.

He defended himself by pointing out how many color lines he and his bands had broken, though he rarely talked about politics — “There’s a whole lot of smelly things that I can’t do anything about. So I don’t get involved, otherwise, I’d always be in trouble.” But by 1957, when he read about Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sending the state National Guard to stop the integration of a Little Rock high school, he’d had enough. In a candid interview, he condemned both Faubus and the president, calling Eisenhower “two-faced” with “no guts” for not putting the power of the federal government behind desegregation. Armstrong wondered whether to continue his international goodwill trips to Africa knowing “the people over there [will] ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?”

His comments were incendiary. Future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, then the lead attorney for the NAACP, weighed in. “I do know the Negroes in New York all still say what Satchmo says. They were so happy about Satchmo‘s outburst — because he’s the number one Uncle Tom! The worst in the U.S.!“ Armstrong had, in the space of a few paragraphs, redeemed himself with some of his detractors.

A few days later Tallerie tried to walk back Armstrong‘s comments, saying that Armstrong was “sorry he spouted off.” Amstrong wasn’t having it. “I wouldn’t take back a thing I said. What I said is me. That’s the way I feel.” Armstrong fired Tallerie, saying, “This road man Tallerie, whom I’ve respected for 20 years, although I’ve suspected him of being prejudiced, has made his money off them, has proved that he hates Negroes the first time he opened his mouth.”  

Glaser reinstated Tallerie a few days later.

Lexington's Civil Rights movement had matured since Armstrong’s visit. Late 1960 saw the young, vibrant presidential candidate John F. Kennedy motorcade through downtown the day after an historic debate with Richard Nixon, and Kennedy would soon take the presidency with a promise to pass civil rights legislation. Protests against segregation and boycotts of segregated businesses had begun spreading across the South and had reached Lexington. Though considered a Southern city, Lexington had been spared the violence many similar Southern cities experienced. In Knoxville, for example, members of a white citizens council dynamited the venue that hired Armstrong to perform for an integrated audience.

By late 1961, sit-ins and boycotts in Lexington included street picketing. The Lexington chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), composed mostly of local religious leaders, academics from UK, and college students, began marching in front of restaurants, movie theaters and hotels that refused service to Blacks. Some establishments completely barred Blacks while others would serve them only if accompanied by a white person — a policy that had held since the Civil War. 

The two Lexington newspapers, the moderately liberal Herald and the conservative Leader (merged in 1983 as the Herald-Leader) shared the same publisher and ignored the protests. "They catered to the white citizenry, and the white community just prayed that rumors and reports would be swept under the rug and just go away," one NAACP leader said later.

One target of CORE protests was the historic Phoenix Hotel, an enormous structure with 400 rooms in downtown Lexington where John F. Kennedy and most out-of-town guests of any note stayed. The hotel opened as a small tavern in 1797 and had grown to become the social focus of the city, with a convention center and several huge ballrooms. In October 1961, the professional basketball team, the Boston Celtics, were in town for an exhibition game and several Black players staying at the Phoenix were refused service in the hotel coffee shop. Incensed, they refused to play and flew back to Boston, and CORE began protests outside the hotel in earnest.

The manager of the Phoenix called the hotel’s refusal to serve the Celtics a misunderstanding —it wasn’t hotel policy to discriminate against anyone registered as a guest in the hotel, he said, and the hostess in the coffee shop did not understand the situation. Governor Bert Combs, who had the year before ordered the desegregation of public accommodations in Kentucky, personally apologized and referred the matter to the newly created Human Rights Commission. But the Phoenix was a private business.

CORE continued protesting at the Phoenix through the fall. In November singer Chubby Checker headlined a revue at the Phoenix for an integrated audience, and despite CORE’s picketing, the hotel refused service to Black members of the audience unless they were accompanied by a white person.  Armstrong was familiar with that kind of policy. “I can have lunch with President Kubitschek in the presidential room in Brazil. But I can’t walk into a hotel dining room in the South and order a steak or a glass of water, as any ordinary white man can do. Because I’m Louis Armstrong, some big hotels will allow me to check in, and provide room service. But the dining room ban still goes.”

Armstrong and his band were scheduled to play a private concert in the Phoenix ballroom on December 4, 1961. That afternoon, several protesters were dragged from the hotel’s sidewalk, including a faculty member from the Episcopal seminary in Lexington and two Negro students from the College of the Bible. The All-Stars arrived at the Phoenix at about 7 p.m. that evening. Calvert McCann was there with his camera covering the protests when Armstrong’s bus pulled up.

We know about the CORE and other protests only because they were covered by Black newspapers such as the Louisville Defender and the UK’s student newspaper, The Kentucky Kernel. The most striking photographic documentation of the protests was produced by an amateur, Calvert McCann, a young Black employee of a local camera shop (and brother of noted jazz artist Les McCann).

A light drizzle had begun, and Armstrong stood on the bus step surveying the scene and the line of protesters. His stamina for the road had been incredible as he played hundreds of dates a year, but by now he was over 60 and had suffered a heart attack and kidney problems. 

Three decades earlier Armstrong had been the slashing young jazzman who’d brought New Orleans swing and hustle to the rest of America, budding into an ebullient and tireless showman and movie star who could charm any audience. It’s almost impossible to find a photograph of him not mugging with puffed cheeks and appearing to give it his all through his trumpet. But McCann’s camera finds a tired, somber older man standing pensively at the bus door, seemingly caught between two eras. Armstrong waited for Tallerie to work out what to do next. 

Ted Hardwick, manager of the Phoenix, and Julia Lewis, president of Lexington CORE, huddled nearby. Tallerie pushed for the police to open a lane into the hotel, but Armstrong refused to cross the picket line, saying that he had made his position on segregation clear when he spoke out about Little Rock, and he wouldn’t have agreed to play at the Phoenix had he known of its discriminatory policy. Tallerie told him he would be in breach of contract if the band didn’t perform, and Armstrong was nervous about that — he was already facing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit over canceled Las Vegas shows.

The impasse was broken when a spokesperson for the group sponsoring the concert promised Armstrong it wouldn’t use the Phoenix in the future, and Armstrong said he wouldn’t perform there again as long as the hotel was segregated. The protesters opened their lines and allowed the band through.

After the concert, the All-Stars boarded their bus for Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the next stop on their seemingly endless tour.

Downtown Lexington hotels began to quietly desegregate in 1962, before the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the state’s version in 1966. Lexington’s CORE fell apart in 1968, split by internal racial tensions following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 

The University of Kentucky would get its first Black basketball player, Tom Payne, in 1969. 

Through the 1960s, Armstrong continued to appear in films and tour relentlessly and became an even more beloved and benign icon of American music, the beaming crooner of “Hello Dolly” and “What a Wonderful World.” He died in 1971. 

The Phoenix Hotel was demolished in 1981 and was replaced by Phoenix Park and a brand new public library.