NEW YORK In September 1957, Larry Lubenow, a journalism student and part-time reporter for the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald, escorted a lobster dinner into jazz great Louis Armstrong's hotel room and walked out with one of the biggest stories of the year.In what turned out to be a historic interview, Lubenow set down how the famously good-tempered Armstrong, long considered quiescent on the subject of race relations, lacerated President Eisenhower for his handling of the Little Rock school integration crisis and set off a diplomatic firestorm by calling off a planned State Department-sponsored tour of Russia in protest.
Precisely 50 years later, Lubenow himself was interviewed in Queens, N.Y., on Sept. 18 by Vanity Fair writer David Margolick as part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum's program, "Louis Armstrong and Little Rock."
"It was a shock, really, to get that call from Margolick," acknowledges Lubenow, now head of Larry Lubenow & Associates, a public relations firm in Cedar Park, Texas. "I hadn't realized it was the 50th anniversary of Little Rock — I don't feel that old. And I haven't told very many people about the Armstrong story."
The story begins with that crustacean: "I knew the bell captain at the Dakota Hotel, and he walked me in with the lobster," recounts Lubenow, who'd been told Armstrong would only speak to the press after the concert. Once the earnest cub reporter had won Armstrong over with his plea that he'd get fired if he didn't get a pre-concert interview, the popular "Ambassador of Jazz," dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, gamely began talking about his jazz favorites.
But his tone changed abruptly when Lubenow mentioned that Grand Forks was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, whose ruling in support of integration of Central High School in Little Rock had just led to Gov. Orval Faubus' deployment of the Arkansas National Guard to bar nine black students from entering. "He just exploded," Lubenow recalls. "He said he'd traveled all over the world for this country, and the way they were treating black men, he felt like he didn't have any country."
Armstrong accused President Eisenhower of having "no guts" and called Gov. Faubus "an uneducated plow boy. " When he proclaimed he was canceling the State Department-sponsored tour of Russia in protest over what he called President Eisenhower's "two-faced" response to the crisis, Lubenow knew he had a scoop.
After cleaning up some of the musician's vivid phrasing ("He sang 'The Star Spangled Banner' with the words, 'Oh say, can you mother------s see by the dawn's early light") he turned in the story, but his colleagues were reluctant to move on it.
"It was nighttime, there was nobody around with any authority, and everybody left was afraid of the story," he recalls. "I wanted it to go out on the wire, and they wanted to hold it until the next day, until I got a picture of Louis and me together." So Lubenow, who'd worked at the Herald every summer for four years, decided to file the story with the Associated Press in Minneapolis on his own. Then he waited for all hell to break loose.
It did, but not locally. "The editor didn't seem to realize that I had a great national and international story," he says. "I thought I was the only one in the world who thought it was a good story until the next night, when it was on the CBS and NBC news."
Suddenly it seemed that every black entertainer was being asked for a response about Little Rock, including Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis Jr. (the latter criticized Armstrong for playing to segregated audiences in the past). But Armstrong's passionate outburst did not signal a fundamental shift in his feelings about where his true role lay as a musician and an African American, notes Michael Cogswell, director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
"Louis was not known for speaking out, but he was keenly aware of the civil rights movement and was a victim of vicious racial discrimination himself," says Cogswell. "Louis did not, in general, speak out more forcefully, more often after Little Rock. He continued to break down racial barriers by the profundity of his art and the innate goodness of his personality. That had always been his way." Because Armstrong's public outburst on Little Rock was so unique, he asserts, "Lubenow must have approached Louis in just the right way at just the right time."
Yet Armstrong never backed away from his stance. State Department officials called, asking Armstrong, perhaps the most influential American musician of the century, to reconsider the trip. Gary Giddins writes in his biography Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong that his road manager told reporters while Armstrong was asleep that "Louis was sorry he spouted off," but when Armstrong woke up, he fired the manager and told the press, "I think I have a right to get sore ... do you dig me when I still say I have a right to blow my top over injustice?"
Lubenow, indeed, confirmed the quotes the next day, when the Herald's editors insisted he go to the musician's hotel to be photographed with him as he shaved. He brought along a copy of the AP story to show him, and a delighted Armstrong wrote at the bottom of the folded yellow copy paper, in No. 2 pencil: "SOLID. Louis Satchmo Armstrong."
The Herald finally ran the story the following day, with a photo caption that read: "Louis Satchmo Armstrong, who got all lathered up about segregation here Wednesday, is shown getting ready to shave shortly before leaving Grand Forks for Montevideo." Lubenow was cropped out.
A statewide television program sponsored by the Farmers' Union invited the young reporter to discuss the controversy, but his editor told him to refuse, alleging that the Farmers Union was a Communist organization. "But being a good liberal Democrat, I said the hell with them, and I quit," says Lubenow, who went on the program anyway.
The fallout for Armstrong continued for a year, with cancelled engagements and a call for a boycott of Armstrong's concerts from Jim Bishop, the famous columnist for the New York Journal-American. Armstrong was somewhat mollified after Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock. Armstrong sent a telegram to the White House that read, "If you decide to walk in to the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy."
Years later, in one of many notebooks Armstrong kept, he wrote: "I think I have always done great things about uplifting my race, but wasn't appreciated. I am just a musician, and still remember the time, as an American citizen, I spoke up for my people during a big integration riot — Little Rock, remember?"
Lubenow did not stay in touch with his legendary subject. He moved on to the Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune, went into the Army as an officer, and served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He eventually joined the renowned New York public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, and never again worked for a newspaper. Upon hearing that Armstrong kept a copy of the AP story in one of his cherished notebooks — laminated in the special Armstrong style, with Scotch tape — he admits to being proud he helped in the story's genesis: "I was a small part of it. In a way all I did was hold the mirror up
Barbara Bedway (letters@editorandpublisher.com) is a frequent contributor to E&P.
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