Jazz integration required real risk and financial sacrifice from its practitioners

Evidence

Different generations of jazz artists have insisted that race doesn’t matter, that the music doesn’t care what color you are. That’s an American romance. But in jazz it’s sometimes a kind of truth in action, provable by the hazards certain acts, like Dave Brubeck’s quartet, endured to play (and stay) integrated. The record producer and concert promoter Norman Granz worked with integrated bands, insisted on equal pay, and would sooner cancel a show than have his artists play for segregated houses. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1138