Opinion

Duke Ellington would be 125. Washington still dances to his tune.

What Edward Kennedy Ellington should be most remembered for is the low-pitched yet assuredly subversive way he opened America’s ears and souls to the magnificence of his melodies.

White men who wouldn’t let a Black man through their front doors wooed their sweethearts with “Mood Indigo.” White women who dodged Black youths on the sidewalk gleefully tapped their high heels to “Take the A Train.” Even the most unyielding of rednecks flipped on their radios to hear “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Race, for once, fell away as America listened rapt.

“I am a Negro,” Ellington told a newspaper reporter back in 1941, “and I brag about it every day.”

Washingtonians knew that, even if it took the rest of America longer to catch on.

The city of Ellington’s birth influenced his attitudes on everything from religion to race. The District of Columbia represented a border area between the old Confederacy and the Mid-Atlantic North. It was the capital of not just America, but Black America. In 1900, African Americans constituted a third of its population, and they worked not only as teachers at their neighborhood schools or clergy in their Black churches but also for the federal government at jobs that paid well and offered security.

The city was (and is) home to Howard University, arguably the best Black college in the United States, and its cultural and arts activities anticipated the Harlem Renaissance by a generation. Jim Crow laws existed in Washington, but they were more relaxed than in most of the South. Schools and recreation facilities were segregated, but streetcars and public libraries were racially mixed in a way that would have drawn White outcry in the deeper South. The Ellington family’s Shaw neighborhood was at the center of the Black business district, with theaters, restaurants, hotel rooms and department stores.

Washington’s largesse had limits, however, as became clear during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-bred president since the Civil War. He authorized Cabinet secretaries to segregate their departments, predicting that it would reduce “friction” among workers. By the end of 1913, Black employees in several agencies had been relegated to cloistered work spaces and “Coloreds-only” bathrooms and lunchrooms. On July 19, 1919, tensions that Wilson stoked spilled onto the streets in four days of rioting, as White veterans and mobs attacked Black businesses and residents.

The violence reached within steps of Ellington’s neighborhood, but Duke and his sister Ruth weren’t hurt physically, and their parents had erected an emotional buffer, too: an Ellingtonian exceptionalism that gave them faith they could do anything, no matter that they weren’t rich or that their Black skin made them a target for White rioters. “We were always taught that we were the best, and so we couldn’t do anything but the best,” said Ruth. “Some of the kids said to me be careful of the White kids; if you see them then walk on the other side of the street, and I really had not heard that. … I find that I forget who’s what color.”

Today, this might sound myopic and perhaps naive, but at the time it was the credo of America’s best-known Black educator, Booker T. Washington. He argued that rather than try to topple an entrenched Jim Crow system, Black people could battle back more effectively through economic improvement, self-help and focused teaching. That is precisely what the D.C. schools were doing in the early 1900s, offering a large dose of Black history and prideful learning to students like Duke Ellington. He remembered his eighth-grade English instructor’s dictum: “Everywhere you go, you’re representing the race. And you command respect. You don’t ask for it. … You command respect with your behavior.” Ellington took that message to heart, the more so since it was reinforced at home. He believed that Black is beautiful and made it a principle to live by, long before it became the mantra of Black activists.

In his later life as jazz’s preeminent bandleader, Ellington put the principle into practice by holding benefits for causes like ending poll taxes and housing the poor. He desegregated music venues across the country, from New York’s Paramount Theatre to swank Ciro’s on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. Ellington collected a closetful of honorary degrees, including from Yale, but none touched him like the one from Dunbar, Washington’s elite all-Black high school. His 1929 radio broadcasts from the Cotton Club were, in the words of a leading historian, “the first important national propagation of Black music by a pop group” and “the first encounter most White Americans had with Black music.” Forty years later, Ellington became one of the first African Americans to win the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Anyone who turned on a radio or read newspaper reviews bore witness to Ellington’s pushback against racist norms. Long before universities instituted Black studies programs, he celebrated Black achievement and pride through tunes such as “King Fit the Battle of Alabam’,” suites such as “Black, Brown and Beige,” theatrical productions such as “Jump for Joy,” and even his sacred concerts. As early as the 1920s, he proposed renaming jazz “Negro music,” and while that didn’t happen, it’s how he always described his genre. He insisted on remaining publicly apolitical and nonpartisan but nonetheless was a masterful albeit clandestine influencer. “I started my own civil rights movement in the ’30s,” Ellington said, looking back. “I don’t think there’s been any doubt how we felt concerning prejudice,” he added. “But still the best way for me to be effective is through music.”

With the dawn of the civil rights era, activists demanded more. So starting in the 1950s, Ellington pushed back against playing to the Whites-only crowds he’d once accepted as a fact of life, and in 1961 he took another giant step, writing into his contracts this clause: “The artist or artists have the prerogative of canceling this contract, if in any instance an audience is segregated because of race or color.” It wasn’t ironclad — he made exceptions in members-only clubs in places such as Texas and Virginia — but he was doing more than most Black performers.

In 1959, the NAACP recognized these efforts by awarding him its cherished Spingarn Medal for “the highest or noblest achievement by an American Negro during the previous year or years.” In 1971, Ebony magazine named him to its list of the “100 Most Influential Black Americans.” The honor he probably relished most, however, was a Rochester newspaper’s commentary on the unifying magic of an Ellington concert in the divisive year of 1968: “Whites and Blacks mingled in a tribute that extinguished barriers of color or race; they stood shoulder to shoulder; they smiled at each other; some brought lightweight folding chairs; red-headed white kids played tag with spic and span black children around the pillars at one end of the plaza; white and black teenyboppers argued the merits of sax and clarinet. The magic of the Duke and his music made one people of them, one admiring people.”

As momentum for civil rights picked up in the late 1950s and ’60s, so did Ellington’s activism, starting in Baltimore. In the winter of 1960, students frustrated with the snail’s pace of polite desegregation staged sit-ins demanding that Black people be served at Whites-only restaurants and stores. Ellington was performing at Johns Hopkins University, and his hosts told him about the Blue Jay, a nearby eatery whose epithet-spouting owner turned away Black students but said he’d serve Ellington. His first reaction was a customary “no,” but after listening to the young people’s persistent pleas, the 60-year-old composer relented with a “let’s go.”

It was a turning point for the Blue Jay, the Hopkins students and Ellington. Newspapers picked up the story, with headlines screaming, “Duke Ellington Joins Sitdowners; Can’t Eat,” and photos showing the rakish maestro being ushered out of the Blue Jay by a Baltimore patrolman. “We are happy that Duke Ellington saw fit to go into the restaurant and be refused,” wrote the Amsterdam News in New York City. “Earlier, it had refused the little average ‘nobody’ Negro. But Duke Ellington is not a ‘nobody.’ Duke Ellington is a ‘somebody’ Negro. His name is almost as well-known at Buckingham Palace as it is in Baltimore.”

His political narrative, like most aspects of Duke Ellington’s life, was rife with paradoxes. Was his music jazz or Negro folk? Was his faith Methodist like his father’s, Baptist like his mother’s or perhaps universalist? As for his politics, the famous musician was a traditionalist masquerading as a hipster. He knew he couldn’t take up arms over every indignity, so he was strategic and at times Machiavellian. He resisted talking about his ideology almost as much as he did about his romances and rivalries, but, in the end, in the memoir published a year before his death, he returned to his dreams of crashing through racist ceilings.

“I have contributed to the cause of the advancement of colored people,” he wrote in characteristic understatement. “Much of my work is inspired by this objective.”