New Orleans Rhythm and Blues, African American Tourism, and the Selling of a Progressive South

In September 1950 Al Monroe, an entertainment reporter for the African American–owned and –operated Chicago Defender, embarked on one of the swingingest road trips of all time. Under the direction of his publication’s management, Monroe drove a company car south from Chicago to the city of Memphis and then down farther to the city of New Orleans, issuing a series of reports on the current state of southern entertainment. Over the course of three months, an intriguing picture of the American South began to take shape in Monroe’s dispatches. Monroe would report that New Orleans’s “disc fans” were “blues crazy” and that the “town jumped” for national headliners like Roy Hawkins and Buddy Johnson.¹ Saxophonist and bandleader Louis Jordan “set Memphis on fire,” and Big Joe Turner packed in the crowds at Frank Painia’s Dew Drop Inn, a New Orleans nightclub as “‘solid’ as old Rhumboogie [the famous Chicago nightclub] . . . during World War II.”²

Still, there was more to see in the South. Woven through Monroe’s reporting on the emerging rhythm-and-blues scene were effusive asides about the restaurant meals he ate in Jackson, Mississippi; the “modern” and “glamorous” Booker T. Washington High School building in Shreveport, Louisiana; New Orleans’s “finest news and magazine stand, operated by R. H. Gilmore,” an African American businessman who also ran “a number of . . . insurance and mortuary businesses”; and the summer homes of African American physicians O. S. Simpson and T. M. Johnson.³ Equally exciting in Monroe’s view was the racial progress he could hear on his car radio as African American disc jockeys took to the air in droves on newly integrated channels.⁴ Through such reporting, readers in Chicago and across the nation were delivered the image of a modern and progressive South friendly to both African American business and African American leisure pursuits.

Such conditions stood in remarkable contrast to those that had driven approximately 1.5 million African Americans to travel Monroe’s journey in reverse just thirty years prior during the Great Migration.⁵ Monroe’s paper had been a leading advocate of such movement, calling out the South for its brutal and paternalistic treatment of black labor. In one 1919 editorial, Defender editors wrote: “The South is an enigma. . . . It wants us and it doesn’t want us. . . . [I]t wants us as serfs and vassals but not as men and citizens.”⁶ Racial violence in turn played its part in motivating African American southerners to pull up roots. As James Grossman sets out in his study of the era, “mistreatment by law enforcement,” “rape,” “lynchings,” and the ongoing “fear of such violence” were piled on top of labor concerns as African American southerners contemplated a better life up north.⁷

Yet threats of racial violence are noticeably absent in Monroe’s travelogue. Instead, a rhetorical strategy with strong links to what has been commonly referred to as “New South” boosterism is enacted. Following the Civil War, several attempts were made to rebuild or reshape southern industry through the attraction of northern capital under the banner of creating a “New South.”⁸ Tourism was an important tool in these efforts, and “southern propagandists” worked to “attract northern visitors and investors” through the promotion of what they believed to be aspects of both southern history and modernity resonant with northern mindsets. Reiko Hillyer’s examination of how southern boosters washed away Richmond, Virginia’s Confederate past by showcasing its role in the “American Revolution . . . [and] its industrial prowess” serves as a case in point.⁹

Notably, African Americans were either written out or made nearly invisible in the stories about southern cities white boosters told.¹⁰ Yet parallel efforts to highlight African American progress and attract African American investment in the South did exist. John H. Murphy, editor of the Baltimore Afro American, wrote extensively about southern progress in a 1913 essay titled “South the Place for the Negro.” Published on the front page of his paper, Murphy’s essay highlighted the vast array of both...