Jazz musicians staged direct protest inside the United Nations Security Council.

Evidence

As the new UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson rose to make his first formal speech, a group of some sixty veiled women and men wearing black armbands (the accessories fashioned at Lincoln’s and Roach’s home) interrupted the Security Council session to protest UN policies in the Congo and, revealed two days before, the murder of the nation’s premier, Patrice Lumumba—“the greatest Black man to ever walk the African continent,” per Malcolm X. Another 400 demonstrated outside, among them LeRoi Jones, recently returned from Cuba. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 320

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger thesis on avant-garde scenes as products of material conditions — here, political crisis (Lumumba’s murder) plus physical proximity to power (two blocks from the Jazz Gallery in NYC) generates radical art-activism.
• QUESTION: The armbands ‘fashioned at Lincoln’s and Roach’s home’ — the domestic site of protest production is striking. Worth chasing what the Jazz Gallery scene’s geography looked like in detail.
• SEED: The ‘protest ballet’ staged inside the UN is a vivid anchor for an essay on art-as-direct-action in the early 60s — how jazz musicians moved from clubs into political space.