Tapes Break the Silence

To people around the world, he was the perpetually grinning black jazzman who brought comic relief to films such as “Hello, Dolly” and “High Society.”

To many jazz musicians who admired his art but loathed his public persona, he was at best a “clown,” as trumpeter Miles Davis once called him, and at worst a promoter of a “plantation image,” in the words of Dizzy Gillespie.

But as the world celebrates the centennial of Louis Armstrong’s birth (the actual date was Aug. 4), a new portrait of him is emerging, revealing that he privately seethed at the racism he endured throughout his life.

Armstrong--the first great soloist in jazz as well as the public face of the music to this day--often erupted into high-decibel rants at the injustices routinely accorded people of color in the United States.

Armstrong threatened to walk off the sets of movies, blasted entertainers who nurtured black stereotypes and railed at the unrelenting prejudice he saw in practically every facet of American life.

These revelations, contained in hundreds of hours of previously undocumented tape recordings examined by the Chicago Tribune, fundamentally alter Armstrong’s image in the great civil rights battles of the 20th century and render more than a dozen biographies at least partly obsolete.

Created from the late 1940s until his death in 1971, Armstrong’s homemade tapes for the first time document his private thoughts on the “shame” of racism in America, as he called it in the tapes.

Considering Armstrong’s lifelong public reticence on racial politics, as well as his perpetually optimistic stage manner, his often acidic comments on the tapes defy long-held assumptions about the man’s supposed lack of interest in the plight of blacks in America.

But it will take years before scholars measure the recordings’ full import.

The recordings have been stored since being acquired in 1987 by the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College in Flushing, N.Y. The tapes were only recently sorted out from the rest of Armstrong’s cache of memorabilia.

Fascinated by the reel-to-reel tape recorders that became commercially available in the U.S. after World War II, Armstrong took the machines with him on the road.

Armstrong can be heard uninhibitedly producing fiery soliloquies on racism, punctuated by the saltiest street language.

But Armstrong ripped civil rights champions such as Josephine Baker and Marcus Garvey, whom Armstrong explicitly condemned as exploiters, rather than healers, of racial woes.

In addition, he is heard criticizing some black Americans in general and reciting jokes that demean a variety of races, including whites, blacks and Asians.

The startling range of Armstrong’s sentiments, from outrage at racism to indulgence in the worst racial slurs, indicate a man apparently torn and tormented by race in America--quite the contrary of the jovial image he consistently projected to audiences.

“I’ll tell you an incident that happened right at the Brown Derby [restaurant] since I’ve been here in Honolulu,” Armstrong tells a friend on one recording. “You remember that white boy, he’s a sailor ... and he caught my show, and I come to find out he has damn near every record I made from childbirth.

“He come up and shook my hand after the whole show was over ... and he said, ‘You know, I don’t like Negroes.’

“Right to my [expletive] face, that [expletive] told me. And so I said, ‘Well, I admire your [expletive] sincerity.’

“And he said, ‘I don’t like Negroes, but you’re one [expletive] I’m crazy about. I’ve got every [expletive] record.’

“I’ve said it for years. You take the majority of white people,” continued Armstrong, “they always got one [expletive] at least that they’re just crazy about, [expletive]. Every white man in the world got one [expletive] at least that they just love his dirty drawers.”

Ultimately, Armstrong devised a strategy for dealing with racial discrimination that was as complex as any solo he ever played. For the most part, he avoided direct confrontation unless absolutely goaded into it.

Meanwhile, he continued to portray himself on stage as the perpetually upbeat entertainer, a strategy that made him immensely popular among a broad, diverse audience but also drew attacks from socially conscious concertgoers of different races.

The criticism, which only increased during the turbulent 1950s and ‘60s, took its toll on Armstrong’s reputation as an artist, with biographers such as Laurence Bergreen noting in “Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life” that the jazz icon never could shake his “Uncle Tom reputation.”

But Bergreen did not know that after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Armstrong was mesmerized by the television coverage of the tragedy, taping hours of it for future reference.

“Jazz musicians were demanding respect as artists, and Armstrong, who was paradoxically the most respected of all jazz musicians, seemed to undermine their cause,” wrote Gary Giddins in “Satchmo.” “He had too much fun out there. It was embarrassing. Artists don’t grin and mug and roll their eyes.”

But Armstrong had a ready answer for such criticisms.

“Showmanship does not mean you’re not serious,” he said on the tapes. His jocular stage manner, he explained, simply represented a means of disarming a predominantly white and therefore potentially hostile audience.

The tapes inevitably will give Armstrong a long overdue opportunity to be heard more fully on the subject of race, an appropriate turn of events for a man who shattered racial barriers early in the century. They stand to put new generations more closely in touch with the real Armstrong.

“He was not satisfied with the way things were, and many times he let the people who were harassing him know exactly how he felt,” said Selma Heraldo, 78, Armstrong’s former next-door neighbor in Corona, N.Y., who sometimes accompanied the Armstrongs on tour.

“He often expressed himself.”

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Howard Reich is arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.