When Clark Gable arrived on the set of “Gone With The Wind” in 1938, he was already one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Lennie Bluett was an 18-year-old extra who wouldn’t even receive screen credit. But the megastar and the unknown fledgling actor were able to work together to defeat segregation on the lot of the biggest film of that era.
This little-known incident reveals how segregation extended even to Hollywood in the 1930s—and how a determined young Black man put his career on the line to force change.
How the GOP fails to appeal to Black conservatives. Source: Used with permission of Microsoft
After President Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, the Republican Party did a lot of soul-searching. It was very clear that demographic trends among the American electorate were putting the future of the party at risk. As South Carolina GOP Senator Lindsey Graham famously told the Washington Post, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
For the past half-century, the base of the Republican Party has been overwhelmingly white. In the 2012 election, the GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, won 59% of the white vote (39% voted for his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama). However, the incumbent president won the election by amassing 93% of the African American vote as well as 71% of the Latino vote and 73% of the Asian vote.
In the aftermath of that devastating defeat (President Obama won 332 electoral votes to just 206 for Romney), the Republicans conducted an “autopsy” to determine the causes of their loss and to give recommendations for rectifying those problems going forward.
The autopsy report, entitled “Growth & Opportunity Project,” noted that the percentage of whites in the electorate is shrinking year by year. The report concluded that if the GOP hopes to win presidential elections in the future, it must find ways of attracting more minority voters.
The Republican Party must be committed to building a lasting relationship within the African American community year-round, based on mutual respect and with a spirit of caring.
— 2013 GOP “autopsy” report
But that clearly hasn’t happened.
Although in 2024 Donald Trump managed to garner 15% of the Black vote, according to a 2024 Pew Research Center report, only 12% of African Americans self-identify as Republicans.
A Significant Number of African Americans Hold Conservative Views
According to a 2020 Gallup poll, 22% of African Americans describe themselves as conservative, compared to the 40% of the general population who make the same declaration. However, the number who hold conservative beliefs may be far higher. As a 2025 article published by the Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) notes, many African Americans are unfamiliar with the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and don’t use them concerning their views. So it’s likely that far more than 22% of African Americans hold conservative beliefs.
For example, when it comes to hot-button moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, polls indicate that the views of African Americans are more conservative than those of the population as a whole. The Stanford CDDRL article asserts that “according to national surveys, up to 50 percent of Black Americans describe themselves as conservative.”
Yet, while white conservatives identify strongly with the Republican Party, very few African Americans do. Why is there such an aversion, even antipathy, among the vast majority of African Americans toward the GOP?
Why Don’t Conservative African Americans Support the GOP?
Let’s be frank: many African Americans are convinced that the Republican Party is racist to its core. GOP leaders, of course, vigorously deny that charge. But the historical roots of that perception are well documented.
For decades after Emancipation, African Americans voted (when they were allowed to vote) almost exclusively for Republicans. After all, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, had been instrumental in ending slavery. And in the years immediately following his death, the Republican Party worked hard to secure civil and voting rights for blacks.
The Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of racial bigotry and white supremacy. Before and even during the Civil War, the Democratic Party supported slavery. After the war, they worked to legalize and institutionalize racial discrimination and segregation throughout the nation. Understandably, “black Democrat” was a contradiction in terms.
But the GOP’s response to the Civil Rights revolution of the mid-20th century turned African Americans’ allegiance around. Because of GOP policies and actions that were initiated during that period (which continue today), many African Americans came to the conclusion that the Republican Party was not one in which they could feel welcomed and valued.
The Presidential Election of 1964 Drove Millions of African Americans From the GOP
The event that caused the most precipitous drop in black allegiance to the Republican Party was the presidential election of 1964. The GOP candidate that year was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
Goldwater was far from racist himself. He was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and had helped to integrate the Arizona National Guard. He declared himself to be “unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race, color, or creed.” But, due to his conservative states-rights principles, he felt compelled to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, considering it to represent a dangerous intrusion into state affairs by the federal government.
Once enacted, the 1964 Civil Rights Act (along with the Voting Rights Act of 1965) completely transformed race relations in the United States. African Americans, both then and now, consider it to be one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. The GOP presidential candidate’s conservative opposition to this seminal measure caused African Americans to leave the Republican Party in droves.
In the 1960 presidential race, 32% of African Americans voted for the Republican candidate Richard Nixon. Just four years later, in 1964, only 6% of black voters cast their ballots for Barry Goldwater. Since that time, no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 17% of the black vote.
The Republicans Become an Almost All-White Party
Even Richard Nixon recognized and lamented the direction in which Goldwater was taking the GOP. “If Goldwater wins his fight,” Nixon told Ebony magazine in 1962, “our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party.” Although he himself would eventually move in the same direction, Nixon’s comment was prescient. More than a half-century later, the GOP remains an almost exclusively white party.
If Goldwater wins his fight, our party would eventually become the first major all-white political party.— Richard Nixon in 1962
The GOP Initiates a Southern Strategy
Although some Republican politicians and operatives may not have been personally racist, they were quite willing to pander to racists for political advantage.
Recognizing that Southern Democrats were very unhappy with their party’s growing support of civil rights for African Americans, GOP leaders made a deliberate decision to go after those votes. Goldwater himself said, “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.”
In a 1981 interview, high-level GOP operative Lee Atwater, a major architect of the Southern Strategy, explained how it worked:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*****’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
After attending a meeting of the Republican National Committee in the summer of 1963, conservative journalist Robert Novak reported on the thinking of many party leaders: “A good many, perhaps a majority of the party’s leadership, envision substantial political gold to be mined in the racial crisis by becoming in fact, though not in name, the White Man’s Party.”
The Southern Strategy successfully encouraged whites who harbored racial resentments to leave the Democratic Party and join the GOP. When he signed the 1964 Civil Rights bill into law, President Lyndon Johnson commented that his doing so would cause the Democrats to lose the South for a generation. He was wrong. It’s been far longer than a single generation, and the South remains overwhelmingly Republican to this day.
The Southern Strategy Continues
As most African Americans see it, the Republican Party has never given up on its Southern Strategy and continues to follow it today. The necessity of placating the constituency brought into the party by that strategy has, in the view of millions of African Americans, turned the GOP into an institution that is very tolerant of veiled racism in its ranks.
Think, for example, of the kind of language African Americans have heard from Republican politicians over the last several decades.
In 1976 Ronald Reagan energized his campaign for president by bringing the term “welfare queen” into the popular consciousness. Since many whites associated welfare with poor black people, Reagan’s use of that term came across to African Americans, then and now, as a dog whistle appeal to whites who were beset by racial resentments.
In 1988 a political action committee supporting George H. W. Bush, whose campaign manager was the aforementioned Lee Atwater of “N*****, n*****, n*****” fame, ran ads that accused Bush’s opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, of having released on furlough a felon who went on to re-offend. That felon’s name was Willie Horton, and his mug shot photo was prominently featured in the ad. No one missed the fact that Willie Horton was black.
With the 2008 election and the 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as the country’s first president of African American heritage, Republican candidates and their surrogates used language that came across to African Americans as extremely demeaning and disrespectful.
For example, former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became a rich source of quotes that played well to the Republican base but which deeply offended African Americans:
“[Obama] is the best food stamp president in history.”
“This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
“And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”
Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, a surrogate for 2012 GOP nominee Milt Romney, expressed his sentiments about the first African American president with the following language: “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” And when Obama appeared ill-prepared in his first debate with Romney, Sununu knew exactly where the president’s problem lay: “When you’re not that bright you can’t get better prepared.”
The culmination of what most African Americans perceive as a torrent of disrespect aimed at their race by Republicans is embodied in Donald Trump. Trump rose to political prominence by demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he is an American. Then, as the 2016 GOP presidential candidate, Trump began speaking to almost exclusively white audiences about his conception of the problems faced by African Americans, using language many blacks perceived as highly patronizing.
For most African Americans, episodes like these (and many more that could be cited) are evidence that the Southern Strategy remains alive and well in the Republican Party.
Even Some Black Republicans Are Concerned About Racism in Their Party
One high-profile black Republican was particularly blunt in calling out his party for their attitudes toward racial minorities. In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said: “There’s also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities.”
Rather than listening to and learning from Powell’s critique, most Republicans responded with outrage: “I think the case that he makes is weak, and it is an odd thing for a man who declares himself to be a Republican—and has done so well under Republican presidents—to say,” intoned conservative commentator Britt Hume on Fox News. Another Fox News show featured a panel discussing the issue against a backdrop proclaiming that Colin Powell was “unhinged.”
In no case did any Republicans of note ask to sit down with Colin Powell to gain some insight into how African Americans view their party. J. C. Watts, an African American who is a former GOP Congressman from Oklahoma and a former chairman of the Republican Conference, stated that his party was “in denial” about how it is perceived by minority voters.
Perceptions of GOP Voter Suppression Increase African American Distrust of the Party
Speaking to the 2013 state convention of the North Carolina Republican Party, Watts noted that although many blacks are no longer enamored with the Democratic Party, they still are not becoming Republicans. “They just don’t trust us,” he said.
A major factor in that growing distrust is the efforts of various Republican governors and state legislatures to enact voter ID laws and other measures that African Americans perceive as being aimed directly at suppressing the black vote. Well aware that none of the states that have enacted ID laws can point to any substantial amount of voter fraud that would be corrected by such legislation, African Americans are almost unanimous in their belief that the only purpose for these measures is to make it harder for blacks to vote.
And the courts are beginning to agree. In its 2016 ruling striking down North Carolina’s voter ID law, a federal appeals court took the GOP-dominated legislature to task for enacting a law that was intentionally designed to discourage blacks from voting:
“The evidence in this case establishes that, at least in part, race motivated the North Carolina legislature. . . Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist.” (Emphasis added)
Can the Republican Party Ever Attract Significant Numbers of African Americans?
Unless it changes significantly, the Republican Party as it exists today will never be able to provide a welcoming political home for African Americans. Even among black conservatives whose outlook should make them a natural fit for the GOP, the level of distrust is simply too great.
A Black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Col. Sanders.
J.C. “Buddy” Watts Sr., father of former Republican congressman J.C. Watts
Attracting black people would require that GOP leaders—elected officials and candidates—significantly change their messaging to the base they have courted and depended upon since the start of the Southern Strategy a half-century ago. As long as African Americans perceive that many statements and policies put forward by GOP leaders carry a hidden meaning intended to appease people who are resentful of minorities, most blacks will continue to view the Republican Party as more enemy than friend.
What’s required is the kind of courageous statesmanship that is willing to speak the truth to constituents rather than pander to their prejudices. But true statesmen are always rare in any political party. Most politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, have their eyes fixed no further ahead than the next election. But for the Republican Party, politics, as usual, will never draw African Americans into the fold.
And that’s a shame. Republicans are fond of pointing out that the overwhelming affinity of black voters for the Democratic Party allows the Democrats to take them for granted. That’s one GOP message many African Americans would agree with.
We Need to Have More African Americans in the Republican Party
This country needs many more African Americans to find a political home in the GOP so that there can be real competition between the parties for black votes. I sincerely hope Republicans can find a way to start putting forward policy positions and campaign messaging that genuinely invite African Americans into the party rather than driving them away.
W. E. B. Du Bois (left) and Booker T. Washington. Source: Public Domain via Wikimedia
Revisiting Booker T. Washington’s Legacy
When I was growing up in Tennessee in the 1950s, my family and I often visited the Booker T. Washington State Park just north of Chattanooga. But we never went to the W. E. B. Du Bois State Park, or the W. E. B. Du Bois anything else. I’m pretty sure no Southern state of that era ever named anything for Du Bois.
That’s because Washington espoused a vision of race relations with which whites could be comfortable, counseling Blacks to accept, for a time at least, their second-class status in society. Du Bois, on the other hand, was a fiercely militant agitator for full and immediate equal rights for African Americans.
Because of that contrast in approach, many today laud Du Bois as a prophet of racial equality while dismissing Washington as something of an “Uncle Tom.” To my mind, however, such critics do Washington a grave injustice. They, like Du Bois, fail to understand that what seemed to be Washington’s craven capitulation to racial injustice was, in reality, a necessary strategy in its time.
Booker T. Washington Becomes an Acclaimed Spokesman for Black America
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) was born into slavery in Virginia. But through hard work, dedication, and education he pulled himself out of poverty to become the most widely admired Black American of his time.
As he recounts in his autobiography, Up From Slavery, Washington grew up in circumstances where, both before and after Emancipation, there was not a single Black person around him who knew how to read or write. But from his earliest days, he displayed an intense desire for education. That desire led him as a child to take night classes after getting up at 4 in the morning to work long hours in a salt furnace, and later, a coal mine. Eventually, he would work his way through Hampton Institute. As both a student and then an instructor at Hampton, Washington so impressed the school’s founder, former Civil War General Samuel C. Armstrong, that when the Alabama legislature appropriated $2,000 for a “colored” school and asked Armstrong to suggest a white educator to run it, he recommended Washington instead.
Starting essentially from scratch, Washington built the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (now Tuskegee University) into one of the premier institutions of higher education in the nation.
So impressive were Washington’s accomplishments as an educator that in 1895 he was invited to speak at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia to an audience that included some of the most influential members of the South’s white power structure. That speech gained Booker T. Washington national, and indeed international, recognition as the acknowledged spokesman for the Black race in America. In 1901, he was invited to dine with President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Atlanta Compromise
In his speech, Washington offered what came to be known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” He suggested that Blacks should forego immediate agitation for political and social equality with Whites and work first to lay a firm foundation of vocational education and economic strength within the Black community. In return for that self-imposed restraint, Whites would support Blacks in their efforts to lift themselves up.
Washington explained his approach to race relations and Black advancement this way:
“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.”
With this declaration Washington was urging African Americans to accept, for now, their second class status in society, and the strict racial segregation that came with it. It was more important, he said, for Blacks to focus first on becoming so skilled in the industrial and agricultural arts that they would eventually be indispensable to the economic well-being of the South. Then, as the Black community proved its value to Whites, and earned their respect by advancing toward parity with them in terms of practical skills and accumulated wealth, the shackles of prejudice, discrimination, and segregation would fall away naturally over time.
To achieve those goals, said Washington, Black education should be oriented around industrial and agricultural training rather than the liberal arts.
Washington’s Speech Is Acclaimed by Blacks and Whites Alike
When Washington finished speaking, the audience erupted into a standing ovation. To Whites who heard the speech, or read about it in the newspaper accounts that were immediately published throughout the nation, Washington’s approach to race relations was everything they could wish for. What they heard him say was that there would be no push for social, economic, and political equality from African Americans. Blacks would willingly “stay in their place” for the foreseeable future.
The speech was, at first, enthusiastically embraced by most African Americans, especially those of the middle and working classes. But soon some Black intellectuals began to see it in a different and far more negative light. The most prominent and outspoken of these was W. E. B. Du Bois.
W. E. B. Du Bois Becomes a Crusader For Racial Justice
In contrast to Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was born into relatively comfortable circumstances in the fully integrated town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While growing up he experienced little in the way of racial prejudice or discrimination. Du Bois was the valedictorian of his high school class, and when it came time for him to go to college, the First Congregational Church of Great Barrington donated the funds needed for him to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from Fisk, Du Bois went on to become the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.
While at Fisk, in a South where oppression and discrimination were facts of everyday life for African Americans, Du Bois was exposed to a level of race-based humiliation far beyond anything he had experienced growing up in Massachusetts. Combating such prejudice and discrimination became the focus of his life. He later became one of the founders of the NAACP, and his written and spoken protests against injustice and oppression helped create the intellectual and moral climate that eventually led to the successes of the Civil Rights movement.
Du Bois’s Critique of Washington
Although he had initially approved of the Atlanta Compromise, Du Bois soon came to view it as nothing less than gutless accommodation with racial injustice and second-class citizenship. In harshly critical public attacks against Washington and everything he stood for, Du Bois advocated for a strategy of political and social activism to immediately secure full civil and political rights for African Americans. He asserted that in his Atlanta Exposition speech, Washington had “implicitly abandoned all political and social rights.” He went on to declare, “Washington bartered away much that was not his to barter.”
Rejecting what he considered to be Washington’s acceptance of the racial status quo, Du Bois insisted:
“that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”
The Talented Tenth
In contrast to Washington’s belief that the predominant focus of Black education should on be on practical vocational training, Du Bois advocated the nurturing of a “talented tenth” of highly educated Black intellectuals who would provide leadership for the race. In an article he published in The Atlantic in 1902, Du Bois explained his complaint against Washington’s approach:
“[W]e daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.”
Then in an essay published in 1903, Du Bois laid out his own prescription for the uplift of the Black race:
“The Negro Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education then, among Negroes, must first of all deal with the ‘Talented Tenth.’ It is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”
In essence, while Washington believed that the advancement of the Black race must be from the bottom up, Du Bois was adamant that it could only be accomplished from the top down.
Du Bois and Washington Differed on Strategy and Timing, Not Ultimate Goals
Washington and Du Bois were both fully committed to the ultimate aim of gaining full political, social, and economic equality for African Americans. Their differences related more to the when and how than to the what.
“I would not have the Negro deprived of any privilege guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States. It is not best for the Negro that he relinquish any of his constitutional rights.”
Washington also responded to Du Bois’s critique of the idea that Black education should, for the time at least, emphasize practical training:
“I may be asked, Would you confine the Negro to agriculture, mechanics, the domestic arts. etc.? Not at all; but just now and for a number of years the stress should be laid along the lines that I have mentioned. We shall need and must have many teachers and ministers, some doctors and lawyers and statesmen, but these professional men will have a constituency or a foundation from which to draw support just in proportion as the race prospers along the economic lines that I have pointed out.”
Even as he publicly accepted segregation, and counseled Blacks toward working cooperatively with Whites while being patient with regard to their civil rights, Washington was quietly aiding efforts to push back against racial oppression. In 1900 he founded the National Negro Business League to help the Black community develop its own independent financial resources. He privately contributed large amounts to fund legal challenges to segregation and, as even Du Bois acknowledged, spoke out forcefully against injustices such as lynching.
Yet Washington differed sharply with Du Bois on both the immediacy and the forcefulness with which Blacks should press their demands for equality.
Washington Understood the Danger of Blacks Pushing Too Hard, Too Soon
While Washington believed that achieving full equality would take time, and should not be agitated for until Blacks had become economically and educationally self-sufficient, Du Bois was not willing to wait. He believed that justice required that Blacks demand their rights forcefully and without delay. In his seminal 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk he wrote:
“The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North—her co-partner in guilt—cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem by diplomacy and suaveness, by ‘policy’ alone.”
Washington, on the other hand, was very aware of what a backlash from Whites would mean to Blacks in the South:
“There is danger that a certain class of impatient extremists among the Negroes in the North, who have little knowledge of the actual conditions in the South, may do the entire race injury by attempting to advise their brethren in the South to resort to armed resistance or the use of the torch, in order to secure justice.”
When Washington suggested his Atlanta Compromise in 1895, 90 percent of African Americans were concentrated in the South—a South that was adamantly opposed to any kind of equality between Blacks and Whites. Blacks, lacking the economic power and financial institutions Washington thought it essential for them to build, were dependent on the goodwill of the Whites among whom they lived. Loss of that goodwill could result in economic devastation, since the White power structure had the ability to deny to any Black of whom it disapproved the opportunity to make a living.
More importantly, whenever Whites felt threatened by Black demands for greater equality, they could with impunity unloose a vicious reign of violence upon the Black community. Terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan could, and did, burn out or lynch any Blacks they thought were getting out of line, with no fear of judicial consequences.
These were realities with which intellectuals like Du Bois did not have to live. Although he taught for many years at historically Black Atlanta University, Du Bois was never economically dependent on Whites in the way a tenant farmer or domestic servant was. And as a Harvard-educated scholar of international renown, he was far less vulnerable than local Blacks to the threat of racial violence.
The Atlanta Compromise Was a Wise Strategy for Its Time
Booker T. Washington, having lived in the South all his life, understood that full-on agitation for equal rights at that time would doom many thousands of Black men, women, and children to economic ruin or violent death. For that reason, his Atlanta Compromise was the wisest course available to African Americans at the turn of the 20th century in their efforts to make progress out of the dire circumstances the White South had imposed upon them.
Du Bois and Washington: Two Equally Necessary Links in the Civil Rights Chain
The insistent demand for full equality that Du Bois advocated would, in time, take its rightful place at the forefront of African Americans’ fight for civil rights. The result would be landmark accomplishments, such as the integration of the U. S. military in 1948, desegregation in schools and public accommodations in the ’50s and ’60s, the Voting Rights Act of 1963, and ultimately, the election of Barack Obama as a two-term President of the United States. These advancements almost certainly would not have taken place without the aggressive assertion of rights and refusal to accept the status quo that Du Bois had insisted on decades before.
But it was Washington’s strategy that provided the foundation on which Du Bois’s successes were built. Du Bois had advocated the nurturing of a “talented tenth” of highly educated Black intellectuals who would provide leadership for the race. Influential leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King proved the wisdom of that approach. But it was only after African Americans began to amass a measure of wealth and develop their own independent institutions, as Washington had urged, that such a leadership elite could be supported.
The degree of racial equality that exists today required the efforts of Booker T. Washington and of W. E. B. Du Bois, each in his turn. The nation owes a debt of gratitude to them both.
When “Hello Dolly!” reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, knocking the Beatles out of the top spot for the first time in 14 weeks, Louis Armstrong, at age 62, became the oldest artist to ever have a number one hit. Source: New York Sunday News via Wikimedia (public domain)
The Hit No One Wanted
Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was perhaps the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century. Not only was he the most innovative and influential trumpet player of his generation, but he was also a first-rate vocalist. In a music career that spanned almost half a century, from his first recording in 1923 through his last in 1971, Armstrong’s music never lacked an appreciative audience.
But by the early 1960s, tastes in popular music had changed drastically. Four young men from Liverpool, called the Beatles, had taken the American pop scene by storm, and there just didn’t seem to be a place among record-buying teenage music fans for the style of music Louis Armstrong had been a master of for so many years.
He hadn’t had a hit record since “Blueberry Hill” in 1956. In fact, by December of 1963, it had been more than two years since Armstrong had even set foot in a recording studio. Louis, however, didn’t consider that a problem. He was much too busy to spend time in the studio making records. Constantly on tour around the world with his band, the All Stars, he was making more money with his sold-out live performances than he ever had with his recordings.
Recording “Hello Dolly!”
But on December 3, 1963, Louis Armstrong went into the studio to record a song he’d never heard of and didn’t think was worth his time. But he made the record anyway, and the world changed. The song was “Hello Dolly!,” a rather simple little tune that didn’t have a whole lot going for it musically. Nobody thought much of it, and Louis himself viewed it with disdain.
But by the sheer force of his personality and superb musicianship, he transformed a forgettable song into a surprise hit and lasting musical treasure. This article tells the story of how Louis Armstrong came to record “Hello Dolly!” and how it became, as Melody Maker magazine called it at the time, “The hit no one wanted.”
Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, had a friend named Jack Lee, who was trying to promote a new Broadway show that would be opening in just a few weeks. As part of the publicity campaign for the production, Lee was attempting to get a demo recording made of one of the show’s songs. As a favor to Lee, Glaser agreed to ask Armstrong to record it.
Lee then went looking for a record company to produce the demo. But as Glaser recalls, the song was so unimpressive that five labels turned it down before Kapp Records agreed to do it. And even Kapp was reluctant. Mickey Kapp, whose father was the head of the company, remembers how the project was finally approved:
“Jack came to see my dad with the song,” he says. “My dad didn’t want to record it, so Jack went in my office and played it, and I liked it.”
Joe Glaser Convinces Louis
Once the record company was lined up, Glaser set about convincing Louis to do the session. In his book, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, which I found to be an indispensable source for details of how events played out, Ricky Riccardi records the memories of Arvell Shaw, the bass player for Louis’s band.
Shaw recalls that the band, known as “Louis Armstrong and His All Stars,” was playing at a club called Chez Paris in Chicago when Joe Glaser called and asked them to go to New York for a recording session. It was to be on a Sunday, their day off, and at first, Louis didn’t want to go because, as he said, “We’re working hard and we need some rest.”
Finally, as a favor to Glaser, Louis agreed to do the session, and the entire band set out for New York. At that point, Louis didn’t even know what songs they would be recording.
You mean to tell me you called me out here to do this?”
Louis Armstrong’s reaction when he first saw the music for “Hello Dolly!”
Louis Not Impressed With “Hello Dolly!”
Armstrong had agreed to take his band to New York on their day off because he trusted his manager. But when the All Stars got to the studio, and Louis was handed the sheet music for the song they were brought there to record, he was not happy. And he had good reason for his dismay.
As Laurence Bergreen notes in his biography, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life, Louis considered the song “lifeless and trite.” Still, Louis Armstrong was nothing if not a pro, so he set about putting his own inimitable stamp on the sappy little tune. For one thing, he changed some of the lyrics to fit his own style, substituting “Golly gee, fellas, have a little faith in me, fellas” in place of “Take her wrap, fellas, find her an empty lap, fellas” at the end of the song.
“This Is Louissss!”
The most famous lyric alteration was actually recommended by Mickey Kapp, the session producer. He suggested that Armstrong replace the second “Hello Dolly” with “This is Louie, Dolly.” Armstrong adopted that suggestion, but not before letting Kapp know in no uncertain terms the correct pronunciation of his name: “It’s not Louie, it’s Louis!” And perhaps to make sure everybody got the point, what he sings on the record is “this is Louissss” with the s drawn out so that it couldn’t be missed.
Even after giving his performance his all, Armstrong realized that the recording needed something more. “I don’t like that,” he said. “Can’t something just be done with this record to kind of pep it up a little or do something?” Trummy Young, the All Stars’ trombone player, suggested bringing in banjo player Tony Gottuso to do the introduction. And Mickey Kapp even dubbed in some barely noticeable strings just before Louis begins to sing.
“A Lot of Livin’ to Do”
Still, “Hello Dolly!” made hardly any impression on Louis and his band. They all much preferred the other tune they recorded that day, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” from the Broadway show Bye, Bye Birdie. As they walked out after their recording session was done, Louis Armstrong and His All Stars left almost all their memories of “Hello Dolly!” behind in the studio.
Hello Dolly! the Musical
When songwriter Jerry Hermann first heard that jazz superstar Louis Armstrong wanted to record his little ditty, he was dumbfounded. “I thought it was the silliest idea that I had ever heard,” he says. But when he heard the result, he was dumbfounded for a different reason.
The show that would become Hello Dolly! was being previewed in Detroit prior to its January 1964 opening in New York. At that point, the production, which didn’t even have an official name yet, was still in rehearsals, and it was during a rehearsal break that Jerry Hermann first heard what Louis had done with his song. The publisher brought a copy of the record and played it for the entire cast and crew. The effect was electric.
“There’s the title of your show”
In his book Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, which recounts the story in vivid detail, Terry Teachout records Jerry Hermann’s reaction to hearing Louis’s rendition of his song for the first time:
Armstrong had made it New Orleans Dixieland. He had taken the parochialism out of the number and substituted a universality. Everyone in the room could tell that this record had “hit” written over it.
The music publisher was the first to speak after Armstrong’s growl faded away. “There’s the title of your show,” he announced. “This record’s going to sell a million copies.”
The publisher was a bit conservative in his million-seller prediction. Over the next two years, Louis’s single would sell more than three million copies.
Kapp Records Rushes Out Single
When Louis Armstrong took his band into that New York studio on that December day in 1963, he had no intention of producing a record that would be released commercially. As far as he knew, his recording of “Hello Dolly!” was intended only as a demo to be used in publicizing the Broadway production.
But when the brass at Kapp Records heard it, they quickly realized that it had such potential that they needed to get it out into the marketplace as quickly as possible after the show opened on Broadway. They weren’t long in reaping the benefits of that decision.
The Broadway production of Hello Dolly! premiered at the St. James Theater in New York on January 16, 1964. On February 9, Louis’s recording made its first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and began a steady rise. By May 9, it reached number one, displacing the Beatles, who had held the top spot for 14 consecutive weeks. And, of course, it began to get massive radio play.
What is Hello Dolly?”
Louis Armstrong when audiences kept calling for the song at his shows.
Louis Caught by Surprise
But Louis himself remained blissfully unaware of all the excitement the song was generating. After that Sunday recording session, he and his All Stars continued their touring. It was during a swing through Iowa and Nebraska that audiences began shouting for the band to play “Hello Dolly!”
Louis, who famously never listened to the radio, had no idea what they were talking about; the song had made so little an impression on him that he had completely forgotten about it. When bass player Arvell Shaw reminded him of the tune they had recorded weeks earlier, Louis realized he needed to add it to the show.
But there was just one problem—no one in the band could remember how it went! Louis called New York to have the sheet music sent to them. Meanwhile, the band members had to listen to the record to refresh their memories. When they finally did start playing the song during live performances, audiences would go wild. Louis would sing “Hello Dolly!” in every show for the rest of his life.
Armstrong Becomes Even Bigger Star
The success of “Hello Dolly!” led to some striking results for the latter stage of Louis Armstrong’s career. Although he had been a celebrated A-list star for almost four decades, Satchmo now found his profile being elevated to an entirely new level.
With sales of the single accelerating toward the millions (it would become the best-selling record of 1964), Louis and his band quickly released a “Hello Dolly!” album that went gold and became the number-one LP in the country.
Television shows such as The Hollywood Palace and the Ed Sullivan Show clamored for him to come on to sing the song. He even gave an impromptu acapella performance on What’s My Line.
Hello Dolly! and Barbra Streisand
And when the Hello Dolly! movie was made in 1969, it included a big production number in which Louis and the film’s star, Barbra Streisand, performed the title song together.
Then there were the Grammy Awards. Louis received the 1964 Grammy for best male vocal performance, and “Hello, Dolly!” won the Grammy as the song of the year in 1965. Louis’s version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001.
“Hello Dolly!” is now one of the most well-known and frequently recorded show tunes of all time. And it all came about because a peerless musician, whose brilliance couldn’t help but elevate even the most mundane material, was willing to give up his Sunday off to help a friend.
George Washington is renowned as “the Father of our Country.” Thomas Jefferson is held in high esteem for committing the nation to the principle, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, that “All men are created equal.” Yet these men, traditionally acclaimed as American heroes, were, along with many others of the nation’s Founders, slave owners.
In this time of reckoning for those who have been willing participants in the national sins of racism and oppression in the name of white supremacy, does having held black people in bondage disqualify such icons of liberty from the places of honor they have until now occupied? Should their statues be torn down and consigned to the same historical ash heap as those of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis?
Should the statues of Washington and Jefferson be torn down and consigned to the same historical ash heap as those of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis?
There are many today who strongly argue exactly that. They believe that in order to open the way to a new future of true equality for people of color, we must make a clean sweep of public monuments to our nation’s racist past.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is justly famous for the pivotal Civil War battle that occurred there during the first three days of July in 1863. Many historians believe the defeat suffered by Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army during that battle sealed the doom of the slave-holding Southern Confederacy.
The town of Gettysburg suffered surprisingly little physical damage from the rebel invasion. There was some destruction of buildings and property, but the most significant and long-lasting damage was imposed on a specific segment of the population: the Confederates deliberately and systematically targeted the city’s Black residents with a campaign of terror that involved kidnapping and enslaving them. To this day, the Gettysburg African American community has not fully recovered from that traumatic experience.
One of the greatest songs of the 1960s was Otis Redding’s “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay.” It remains hugely popular even today. A Google search returned more than a million and a half hits for the title on YouTube, most of them amateur performances by individuals who love the song and couldn’t refrain from doing their very own version. According to music licensing company BMI, it is the sixth-most performed song of the 20th century.
The story behind “Dock Of The Bay” is both amazing and tragic. The amazing part is how Otis Redding came to be the hall-of-fame superstar who co-wrote and sang the song, carrying it to #1 on the charts. The tragedy is summed up in the fact that “Dock Of The Bay” was the first song in the history of the Billboard Magazine music charts to ever become a posthumous #1 hit.
The Unlikely Rise of a Superstar
Until 1962 Otis Redding’s life was that of a struggling would-be singer. Born in Dawson, Georgia on September 9, 1941, Otis moved with his family to Macon, Georgia when he was five years old. He was the son of a Baptist minister, and naturally enough, got his start singing in the choir of the Vineville Baptist Church in Macon.
With a father frequently unable to work because of chronic illness, and a family in dire financial need, Otis dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and began using his musical talent to supplement the family’s income. He started competing in talent shows at the historic Douglass Theater in Macon. After winning 15 straight times, he was banned from the contest. But it was at the Douglass that he was spotted by guitarist Johnny Jenkins, leader of a group called the Pinetoppers.
Impressed with Otis’s talent, Jenkins invited him to join with the Pinetoppers as they played local clubs and the college circuit. During this period Otis recorded a couple of sides for local labels: “She’s Alright,” credited to Otis and The Shooters, and “Shout Bamalama,” on which he was backed by Jenkins’ Pinetoppers. But his role with the Pinetoppers was more as a gofer and driver than the singer. When the Pinetoppers recorded their biggest regional hit, “Love Twist,” it was purely an instrumental.
It was in his role as driver and all-around helper that Otis found himself in Memphis, Tennessee in October of 1962.
A Fateful Driving Assignment
Guitarist Johnny Jenkins of the Pinetoppers had been invited to Stax Records in Memphis to do a demo recording with the Stax house band, Booker T. and the MG’s. Jenkins didn’t have a driver’s license, so Otis accompanied him in his customary role of driver and general gofer. He was totally unknown to any of the people at Stax, and there was no thought of him performing.
Guitarist Steve Cropper, who would become Otis’s songwriting collaborator, recalls the first time he saw Otis Redding:
“There was this big guy driving the car, and he pulls up and then he gets out and unlocks the trunk and starts pulling out amplifiers and microphones and all this stuff. And I thought he was a roadie, you know? He’s a big, strong guy (Otis was 6’2’’, 220 lbs). I figured, yeah, he’s a bodyguard and then roadie and stuff, valet or whatever.”
According to the Washington Post, the recording session with Johnny Jenkins turned out to be “a disorganized disaster,” and was cut short. Most of the musicians packed up to leave. But there were still about 40 minutes left on the clock for that session. They turned into perhaps the most serendipitous 40 minutes in music industry history. Here’s how Steve Cropper remembers what happened next:
“Otis Redding, as we know him now, came to our drummer Al Jackson and said, “You know, I’m a singer, and sometime I’d like to get somebody to hear me sing.” And so I was kind of the designated A&R director (the person responsible for identifying new artists) at Stax at that time and I used to hold auditions on Saturday. And Al came to me and said, ‘This guy that’s with Johnny, he sings with him and he’d like for you to listen to him sing. Can you take two or three minutes and listen to this guy?’”
In a decision that changed music history, Steve Cropper agreed to listen to Otis Redding sing. Going to the piano, Cropper asked Otis what he wanted to do. Otis started by singing an up-tempo number in the style of Little Richard, whom he had often imitated. That’s exactly how it came across, like an imitation, and it did not impress.
But then Otis requested that Cropper play what are known as “gospel triplets” on the piano, and he began to sing a ballad he had written, “These Arms of Mine.” The reaction was immediate! As Cropper says, “We all fell on the floor.” He grabbed Jim Stewart, the head of the label, and Stewart, too, was blown away.
By that time, most of the musicians who had been there for the Johnny Jenkins session were gone. Bass player Louis Steinberg had already packed his instrument in his car but hadn’t yet left. Stewart called for him to pull out his bass and come back in. Since keyboardist Booker T. was already gone, guitarist Steve Cropper got on the piano, Al Jackson Jr. was on drums, and Johnny Jenkins played guitar (one can only imagine what his feelings must have been).
That small group then proceeded to back Otis as he recorded “These Arms of Mine.”
Incredibly, that improvised, impromptu recording became Otis Redding’s first hit.
It was Otis Redding, not Johnny Jenkins, who went home with a new recording contract that October day. (Jenkins continued to record, and became a highly regarded and influential guitarist).
A Star Is Born
Soon Otis was bringing out albums and singles, both as a writer and a singer, that rose high on the Rhythm and Blues (R&B) music charts. Songs he composed such as “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Respect” (taken to even greater heights by Aretha Franklin), as well as his version of a Depression-era classic, “Try a Little Tenderness” became R&B standards.
By 1967 Otis Redding was an R&B superstar. During that year he had a triumphant European tour that resulted in a live album, appropriately titled Otis Redding: Live in Europe, that Rolling Stone magazine would name in 2003 as one of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In the wake of that tour, Otis was named the top male vocalist in the poll conducted by British music newspaper Melody Maker, replacing Elvis Presley, who had held that spot for the previous ten straight years.
Triumph at Monterey
Then came the event that catapulted Otis Redding to fame with an audience he had never reached before. As the only soul music act at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, Otis gave a scintillating performance that, according to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, “stole the show from Janis Joplin, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix.” He now became an ascending star, not just among African Americans, but with pop music fans all over the world.
A Wonderful Year, and a New Direction
That was a great year for Otis. In the wake of his success on the worldwide stage provided by the Monterey festival, he hosted a huge barbecue for about 300 guests involved in the music industry at his 300-acre Big O Ranch about 25 miles north of his former home in Macon, Georgia. “We had our own Woodstock,” says wife, Zelma Redding.
At this high point of his career, there was only one cloud on Otis Redding’s horizon. He had to have surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords. Under doctors’ orders, he was forbidden to sing or talk for six weeks after the procedure.
Naturally, there was some trepidation concerning what this might mean for his voice. To everyone’s relief, Otis sounded even better after he recovered from the operation than before. But the down time had given him a season for musical reflection that now took him in a somewhat different direction.
Otis Visits “Frisco Bay”
Otis had gone to San Francisco to perform at the Fillmore, and while there he stayed at a boathouse in Sausalito, just across the bay. He would literally sit and watch the ferry boats run back and forth. The thought that kept running through his mind was “I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.”
So, he began composing a song unlike anything he had written or recorded before. Steve Cropper remembers the day Otis shared the beginnings of the new song with him.
“Usually when Otis came to town, he waited until he checked into the Holiday Inn before calling me to work with him on songs in his room. This time he couldn’t wait. He said, ‘Crop, I’ve got a hit. I’m coming right over.’
“When Otis walked in, he said, ‘Crop, get your gut-tar.’ I always kept a Gibson B-29 around. He grabbed it, tuned it to an open E-chord, which made the guitar easier to play slide. Then Otis played and sang a verse he had written: Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun/I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ come/Watching the ships roll in/And then I watch ’em roll away again.”
From that beginning, Otis and Cropper fashioned the rest of the lyrics and the melody of the song. Then, in two recording sessions, the first on November 22 and the last on December 8, 1967, Otis Redding recorded “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay.”
A Tragic Plane Crash
After laying down the vocal for “Dock Of The Bay,” Otis, along with his backup band, the Bar-Kays, left for a series of road appearances. It was as the group was flying in a private plane from Cleveland to Madison, Wisconsin that the aircraft lost power over Lake Monona and went down. The only survivor was the Bar-Kays trumpet player, Ben Cauley. Otis Redding was gone. He was just 26 years old.
The date was December 10, 1967, just three days after Otis finished recording the vocal for “Dock Of The Bay.”
Life Goes On
Otis’s plane had gone down on Sunday. But, as is perhaps to be expected, by Monday unsentimental record company executives were insisting, as Steve Cropper recalls, “We’ve got to get something out.”
At this point, the new song was far from being ready for release. Much production work remained to be done. The intensive effort of adding the necessary finishing touches to the recording would fall to Otis’s collaborator, Steve Cropper. It was, as he says, “very difficult.” Otis’s body had not even been recovered from the crash site. But the rush to complete and release his final recording was actually a good thing for Cropper. He says of that time, “probably the music is the only thing that kept me going.”
The Touches of Irony Surrounding “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”
Ironically, Otis Redding never heard the recording that is so beloved even after almost half a century. As Steve Cropper recalls,
“Otis never heard the waves, he never heard the sea gulls, and he didn’t hear the guitar fills that I did. And I actually went over to a local jingle company there, Pepper-Tanner, and got into their sound library and come up with some sea gulls and some waves and I made the tape loop of that, brought them in and out of the holes, you know. Whenever the song took a little breather, I just kind of filled it with a sea gull or a wave.”
A second surprise concerns the famous whistling coda that concludes the song. It has been called perhaps the most famous whistle in musical history. Yet it was never intended to be part of the song at all.
When Otis finished the recording session on December 8, he and Steve Cropper were still trying to come up with a lyric to end the song. So, Otis’s whistling was intended simply as a placeholder until the final words could be added once he returned from his road trip. That, of course, never happened, and Cropper left the whistling in as a fitting and very poignant ending to the song.
A final irony is that “The Dock Of The Bay” was so different from the style Otis Redding was known for that Stax Records chief Jim Stewart initially didn’t want to release the recording. Nobody at Stax, including Otis’s wife Zelma, liked it. But both Otis and Steve Cropper went strongly to bat for the song, insisting that it could become the first Otis Redding #1 hit. It was only after Otis’s death, and after hearing Steve Cropper’s final mix of the song, that Stewart approved its release.
Finale
When it was released, “Dock Of The Bay” shot to the top of both the R&B and pop music charts, and became a gold record. As Otis and Cropper had predicted, it became Otis’s first #1 hit, selling more than four million copies around the world. Four albums of previously unreleased Redding recordings were soon produced, including one featuring and titled after “Dock Of The Bay.” All were very popular. (Five Otis Redding albums, including “Dock Of The Bay,” are among Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest albums of all time).
At the 1968 Grammy Awards “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay” won Best Rhythm & Blues Male Performance for Otis, and Best Rhythm & Blues Song for Otis and Steve Cropper as writers.
The song has been re-recorded by a multitude of singers, including Glen Campbell, Bob Dylan, Percy Sledge, Sam & Dave, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ‘66, and Michael Bolton, whose 1988 version stayed on the music charts for 17 weeks.
And the momentum continues.
In 1992 a compilation CD, “The Very Best of Otis Redding,” went gold, selling more than 500,000 copies.
In 2013 “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay” was performed at a certain high-profile Washington, DC venue by Justin Timberlake, who was backed by a previously unknown singing duo going by the name of “Barack and Michelle.”
Otis Redding was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, and the US Post Office issued a 29-cent commemorative postage stamp in his honor in 1993.
But beyond all the accolades, perhaps the greatest legacy of Otis Redding is that with all the upheaval popular music has experienced since the 1960s, “Sitting On Dock of the Bay” has continued to draw fans in each new generation.
One of the most famous incidents in American sports history occurred when Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was looking for an African-American player to integrate Major League baseball. That role would require a man who could take tremendous abuse without hitting back.
When the man he selected asked if Mr. Rickey was looking for a Negro who was afraid to fight back, Branch Rickey famously replied that he was looking for a man “with guts enough not to fight back.”
Original 1916 caption: A social club of self-supporting young women (teachers, stenographers, bookkeepers) who have made good. This picture is eight years old. One of the group is dead, eleven are married and four are successful “bachelor maids.” Source: Charles Victor Roman (Public Domain)
I have always been fascinated by this photograph. It shows a group of young ladies who banded together to help one another make something extraordinary of their lives at a time when doing so was a daunting task for American Americans.
But with all the difficult obstacles they knew would be unjustly thrown in their way, they still seem, to my eye, to be determined, serene, and confident as they look to the future. I wish I could have known them.
I did, in fact, want to know more about them, so I tried to track down as much information as I could find about who they were and what happened to them. I wasn’t able to uncover anything about them as individuals, but the background of this photograph tells its own story.
The name of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, is inextricably linked with African Americans.
Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on a platform of prohibiting the spread of slavery into U.S. territories, like Kansas and Nebraska, that had not yet become states. His most famous single act during the Civil War was the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which effectively shut the door on American slavery forever. Lincoln himself viewed signing the Proclamation as the most consequential act of his presidency—and perhaps of his life.
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