My World With Louis Armstrong

8/4/12.

Charles L. Black, Jr.IN the middle of May 1955, at the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue

in Harlem, a philanthropic organization in the black community gave

a reception in honor of the thirty or so lawyers who had worked on

the case of

Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision

that declared school segregation unlawful and thus began the end of the

old Southern racist regime. I, by the grace of somebody or something, was

there. Thurgood lined us all up in front of the orchestra to receive the applause

of the whole crowd, Margaret Truman, Averell Harriman, everybody.

I turned and looked, a little wistfully, at the trumpet-player in the orchestra,

a young black; “I wonder,” I thought, “whether I wouldn’t rather

have been honored in the Savoy Ballroom for trumpet-playing?” Then I

heard Thurgood, moving down the line, “... Charlie Duncan. And next

over there is Charlie Black, a white man from Texas, who’s been with us all

the way.”

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/black-armstrong.pdf