Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa

Outraged by the television images of white mobs and Arkansas National Guardsmen blocking the enrollment of nine African American students in Little Rock's Central High School in September 1957, Louis Armstrong called a reporter while on tour in Grand Forks, North Dakota, then sounded off on racial injustice: ''My people-the Negroes- are not looking for anything-we just want a square shake. But when I see on television and read about a crowd in Arkansas spitting and cursing at a little colored girl-I think I have a right to get sore-and say something about it.''1 Armstrong criticized President Eisenhower for his foot-dragging during the crisis, described Governor Orval Faubus as an ''uneducated plowboy,'' and withdrew in protest from a planned State Department tour of the Soviet Union. ''The people over there ask me what's wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say? The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.''

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Keywords: Civil Rights, Africa, American, Louis Armstrong