When the Jubilee Came
The following first appeared in the GRAND JUNCTION FREE PRESS:
In 1942, the U.S. government enlisted some of the 20th century’s greatest artists and performers in an unparalleled social engineering experiment. Before the experiment was finished, an Oscar-winning director, a future Secretary of State and the father of jazz would be among those drafted to enact the enormous feat of integrating the United States’ armed forces… which in turn paved the way for the civil rights advances of the 1960s.
The America entering World War II was a very segregated nation, and this sad fact was reflected in the branches of its armed services. Although 1940’s Selective Service Act dictated a color-blind draft, segregation persisted in the military for most of the next decade, and a true end to racial discrimination among America’s fighting forces would have to wait until 1948, when Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 mandating equal treatment for all military staff regardless of race, color, religion or national origin.
In the meantime, the U.S. War Department faced a record number of black enlistees — and a concomitant rise in racial unrest in its military camps. In 1941, then Chief of Staff General George Marshall (who would become Secretary of State some years later under Truman) directed the Army propaganda unit led by Hollywood director Frank Capra to produce a film promoting racial integration and wartime tolerance. The result was 1944’s THE NEGRO SOLDIER, which was unspooled for black troops during the war. Although the film can seem simplistic — even hypocritical — to modern eyes, its depiction of an honorable black middle class was unprecedented. Poet Langston Hughes called it “the most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on the American screen.”
Meanwhile, as a morale booster, the War Department also began sending black troops a specially-recorded weekly music program called JUBILEE. The show was hosted by the fast-talking comedian Ernie “Bubbles” Whitman, and each week featured the work of the best black musicians from the ranks of jazz, blues and swing. Louis Armstrong was just one of the incredible talents who syncopated under the JUBILEE banner and helped make it the first American entertainment program geared toward a black audience — even though it never played within the United States!