Narrator: At mid-century, New Orleans had no native son more celebrated than the great jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong.
Since leaving his hometown in 1922, he had performed all over the United States, made two tours of Europe, played on scores of hit records and appeared in a half-dozen Hollywood films, including one called New Orleans. "No band musician today on any instrument ... can get through 32 bars without musically admitting a debt to Armstrong," said the drummer Gene Krupa. "Louis did it all, and he did it first."
Now, in late February 1949, the 48-year-old New Orleanian was headed home, to the city where both he and jazz had been born. The occasion was Mardi Gras. New Orleans' premiere black Carnival krewe, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, had invited Armstrong to reign as King in its annual parade -- an event TIME magazine described as "a broad, dark satire on the expensive white goings-on in another part of town."
John Scott, Artist: Zulu was a parody. It was black people making fun by imitating white people imitating European royalty. So it was almost like a reverse minstrel show on the absurdity of Rex and Comas and those parades. They just took it to the extreme.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: If Rex came in the river and Rex was wearing a crown and a scepter, well Zulu would come down on a barge in the New Basin Canal wearing a lard can and waving a banana stalk or something. And they would wear black face, they were black people doing black face. To poke fun and say, you know you may ... making a lot of, a big to do about race, but here's what we think about it. It was a time for them to, to vocalize dissent when dissent had been pretty much closed down. And I think that's probably one of the things, sort of unstated about, about Louis Armstrong, why he, you know he was anxious to, to be part of it.
Narrator: Armstrong had grown up with Zulu. Most of the krewe's members were longshoremen from the Third Ward, the gritty district on the edge of the back swamp where Armstrong had lived as a boy. Like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, he'd spent many a Mardi Gras trailing behind Zulu and its band, blowing on an old tin horn in the so-called second line -- the boisterous swarm that spontaneously gathered around most every parade in New Orleans.
Interview: I know that you said in your interview with Time that you had one great ambition in life, and that was to be King Zulu, and after that, you could die. Is that right?
Armstrong: Yes, that's right. OK, well I don't want the lord to take me literally, but it ...
George Schmidt, Painter: My mother was a big Louis Armstrong fan. That's all she played, was Louis Armstrong, you know? [SINGS] "Someday, you'll be sorry. [HUMS] That it was wrong. [HUMS]" That's all we heard. I mean, it was like, you know ... it was constant.
And one day, well, you see, we were on the parade route. And it was 1949. And, we were standing in the yard. I am five years old. And this float goes past. And this man in -- this man in Black face, with his big White lips, you know, and the crown comes past. And my mother bent down. She says, "George, that's Louis Armstrong." [LAUGHS]
Narrator: Armstrong spent most of the day on Zulu's float, downing champagne and tossing hand-painted coconuts into the cheering crowds. "People from all over the world -- his fans -- had come to see him," one musician in his band recalled. "I've never seen anything [so] beautiful in my life."
George Schmidt, Painter: The Zulu parade in those days, it just meandered all over town. There was no route. Although when Louis was the King, they brought it onto St. Charles Avenue, 'cause he was, he was so popular with people down here, Whites and Blacks.
Narrator: On Mardi Gras, New Orleans looked just as Armstrong remembered it: everyone mingling in the streets, people of every hue celebrating together in a spirit of mutual respect, if not perfect harmony. But on Ash Wednesday, the city returned to business as usual -- and Armstrong could see just how much things had changed.
Some 570,000 people now lived in New Orleans -- half-again as many as when he'd left town. What then had been cypress swamp now was mostly settled, the muck replaced by parks and golf courses, and California-style bungalows. And though blacks and whites continued to live side by side in many parts of the city, as they always had, some neighborhoods, like Armstrong's own Third Ward, were fast becoming predominantly black -- as many of the white residents moved to new neighborhoods nearer to the lake.
Ari Kelman, Historian: The 1940s are a period in which you see radical cultural changes happening in New Orleans, as, as the old residential settlement patterns in the city disappear -- the, the, the mixed housing patterns where rich and poor and black and white people are living right next-door to each other, that had so much to do with the city's culture and what made New Orleans New Orleans. And you see a new New Orleans emerge.
Narrator: Armstrong had come up in a time when Jim Crow was still novel enough to be flouted with some regularity -- by both whites and blacks. Now, even in the neighborhoods that were still racially-mixed, segregation was a deeply-rooted feature of life in New Orleans -- as pervasive and predictable as the humidity.
Raphael Cassimere, Jr., Historian: I could remember my mother riding to town, I guess you call it, going to Canal Street with one of our white neighbors. They would talk to each other at the bus stop, they would get on the bus, the neighbor would sit in front of the screen, my mother would sit behind the screen and they would talk. Segregation had become so traditional I don't even know if they understood the contradictions.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: Louis Armstrong understood this wasn't really the natural order of things, growing up in New Orleans. The person who gave him money for his first instrument was a Russian Jew named Karnovsky on Rampart Street, which was the black Jewish shopping district. And I mean that kind of tells you something. And he used to play in an Italian bar. And so when he came back and saw this city trying to be arch-segregated, I think he was deeply offended. I think he felt this really went against what he thought the true New Orleans was.
Narrator: Not even fame could spare Armstrong. He was celebrated enough to be given the key to the city -- but he still had to stay in a Jim Crow hotel.
John Scott, Artist: Having sat down with royalty and all the rest of these people and had his humanity respected. Of course it was difficult to come back to a place where here it is you know you're on a first name basis with kings and some guy that owns a run down hotel is going to tell you go to the back door. Louis Armstrong didn't have to tolerate that.
Narrator: Armstrong left New Orleans in disgust, vowing never to return. "Ain't it stupid," he would later say. "Jazz was born there, and I remember when it wasn't no crime for cats of any color to get together and blow ... I don't care if I never see the city again. Honestly, they treat me better all over the world than they do in my home town."