jazz

In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and....do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it....To be sensual, I think, is to accept …

…years surrounding World War I. Student protesters peacefully resisted billy clubs brandished by southern police. Demonstrators for civil rights were routinely tear-gassed and drenched with fire hoses. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers was slain in 1963, and, in that same year, four young black girls were killed in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama. Black power advocate Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, and Martin Luther King in 1968. Violence against blacks was pervasive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**