Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People

This inspirational, exciting, atmospheric read takes readers to New York's West Village in the late 1930s, and the white-owned establishment that championed jazz, discovered Billie Holiday and welcomed its mixed-race crowd in a time when such mingling was unheard of. Former New Jersey shoe salesman Josephson (1902-88), frustrated with frivolous American clubs and their racial discrimination, was inspired by European political cabarets to open Club Society in the West village in 1938. A jazz club in which most of the performers, and much of the audience, was black, Josephson's stories from the pioneering music spot are incredible, including Leonard Bernstein performing Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock solo on piano at five in the morning; the virtually unknown Billie Holiday performing, for the first time, Lewis Allen's Strange Fruit; and a well-known policy of kicking out anyone who ""objected to sitting next to Negroes."" Other Society notables include Lena Horne, Zero Mostel, Sarah Vaughn, and Hazel Scott, and the club's success led to a second location on Park Avenue (which quickly proved wrong predictions that the uptown crowd would never integrate).