The Emperor Wears No Clothes
by Jack Herer
And All That Jazz
In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new “voodoo” music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music . . . jazz!
Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists’ fears of “voodoo” to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazz’s birthplace is generally recognized to be Storeyville, New Orleans, home of original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).
* In 1930 – one year after Louis Armstrong recorded “Muggles” (read: “marijuana”) – he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.
American newspapers, politicians, and police had virtually no idea, for all these years (until the 1920s, and then only rarely), that the marijuana the “darkies” and “Chicanos” were smoking in cigarettes or pipes was just a weaker version of the many familiar concentrated cannabis medicines they’d been taking since childhood, or that the same drug was smoked legally at the local “white man’s” plush hashish parlors.
White racists wrote articles and passed city and state “marijuana” laws without this knowledge for almost two decades, chiefly because of “Negro/Mexican” vicious “insolence”* under the effect of marijuana.
* Vicious Insolence: Between 1884 and 1900, 3,500 documented deaths of black Americans were caused by lynchings; between 1900 and 1917, over 1,100 were recorded. The real figures were undoubtedly higher. It is estimated that one-third of these lynchings were for “insolence,” which might be anything from looking (or being accused of looking) at a white woman twice, to stepping on a white man’s shadow, even to looking a white man directly in the eye for more than three seconds; for not going directly to the back of the trolley, and other “offenses.”
It was obvious to whites, marijuana caused “Negro” and Mexican “viciousness” or they wouldn’t dare be “insolent”; etc…
Hundreds of thousands of “Negroes” and Chicanos were sentenced from 10 days to 10 years mostly on local and state “chain gangs” for such silly crimes as we have just listed. This was the nature of “Jim Crow” laws until the 1950s and ’60s; the laws Martin Luther King, the NAACP, and general public outcry have finally begun remedying in America. We can only image the immediate effect the black entertainers’ refusal to wear blackface had on the white establishment, but seven years later, 1917, Storeyville was completely shut down. Apartheid had its moment of triumph.
No longer did the upright, uptight white citizen have to worry about white women going to Storeyville to listen to “voodoo” jazz or perhaps be raped by its marijuana-crazed “black adherents” who showed vicious disrespect (insolence) for whites and their “Jim Crow Laws” by stepping on their (white men’s) shadows and the like when they were high on marijuana.
Black musicians then took their music and marijuana up the Mississippi to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., where the (white) city fathers, for the same racist reasons, soon passed local marijuana laws to stop “evil” music and keep white women from falling prey to blacks through jazz and marijuana.