Free In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Junior by Wil Haygood Page A

Avenue, then north again into the heart of Harlem,” a chronicler of that march wrote. “At 125th Street, the coiled, white rattlesnake insignia of the regiment hissed from thousands of lapels, bonnets, and windows. A field of pennants, flags, banners, and scarves thrashed about the soldiers like elephant grass in a gale, threatening to engulf them. In front of the unofficial reviewing stand at 130th Street, Europe’s sixty-piece band broke into ‘Here Comes My Daddy’ to the extravagant delight of the crowd.”
    Before war’s beginning there had been those who wondered—given the Negroes’ low standing on the socioeconomic ladder—whether, if called to fight, they would give their all. There now seemed little reason to ponder again the Negro sentiment concerning patriotism. “Black Jack” knew it: the Negro fought. Harlemites talked about the march for weeks on end. They would also come to mourn the fate of James Reese Europe. Less than three months after his triumphant march into Harlem, Europe was stabbed in the neck with a penknife by a fellow musician, who had started an argument with him while in Boston. Europe thought the wound was minor, but he bled to death hours after the stabbing. He received a public funeral in New York City. “Before Jim Europe came to New York the colored man knew nothing but Negro dances and porter’s work,” a grieving man told the
New York Tribune
. “All that has been changed. Jim Europe was the living open sesame to the colored.… He took them from their porter’s places and raised them to positions of importance as real musicians.”
    The downtown Negro churches that had relocated to Harlem after World War I—bringing their congregations with them—found opportunistic real estate agents, who began to welcome Negroes to Harlem in larger numbers than ever.
    There seemed to be much to enjoy in the growing Harlem. In time, scores of musicians and dancers began to arrive. “The Negro race is dancing itself to death,” a Harlem minister had earlier said of the goings-on.
    It was the neon glare of the Harlem theaters, especially the Lafayette and Lincoln Theatres, that soon caught the eye of the young Elvera Sanchez. You could look up at the Lafayette and notice, against the darkened sky, the word “ VAUDEVILLE ” twinkling in white neon light. The Lincoln had previously hosted white vaudeville acts for its white customers, but when the Negro drama critic Lester Walton leased it, he opened the theater to everyone. It was the men who dressed in snappy suits and raccoon coats and the women who wore silk that made Elvera pause in her Friday and Saturday walks along Harlem’s streets. In teeming Harlem there were garden-rooftop parties. There were tango teas. Spindly legged dancers were doing the Texas Tommy, theturkey trot. From every nightclub, music spilled forth. Elvera was mesmerized. Soon enough—and for the first time in her life—she found herself inside a dance hall. It was called the Hoofers Club. “I had never danced,” she recalled. And now she was hooked. She had a dancer’s lithe physique, long arms and long legs. She had large and pretty eyes, a prominent nose. At the Hoofers Club, Elvera became a habitué. The owners of the club were in the habit of sending out invitations to musicians to come and play. Their jam sessions were known to be exuberant. “You knew,” someone remarked about Coleman Hawkins playing his saxophone at the Hoofers Club, “he’d come in to carve somebody.” (The lingo simply meant Hawkins would dazzle everyone with his horn.)
    The grapevine of Negro America was hardly brittle. It held fast and strong east to west, north to south. The word went out: Negro Harlem was alive.
    Duke Ellington arrived in 1922 from the nation’s capital. Born to middle-class parents, Ellington had been playing the piano since the age of seven. In New York City, he joined Elmer Snowden’s band, a band he was soon destined to take over. Fats Waller was