Cotton Club

The Cotton Club was a famous jazz music night club located in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City which operated from 1923 to 1940, most notably during America's Prohibition Era lasting from 1919 to 1933. The club was a white-only establishment even though it featured many of the greatest Black entertainers of the era including Lena Horne, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Adelaide Hall, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, The Nicholas Brothers, Lottie Gee, Ella Fitzgerald, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters. During its heyday, the Cotton Club served as a hip meeting spot featuring regular "Celebrity Nights" on Sundays which featured celebrity guests such as Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker, among others.

In 1920, heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, opened the 400-seat Club De Luxe at the corner of 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. Owney Madden, a prominent bootlegger and gangster, took over the club in 1923 while imprisoned in Sing Sing and changed its name to the Cotton Club. Owney Madden "used the cotton club as an outlet to sell his #1 beer to the prohibition crowd". (While the club was closed briefly in 1925 for selling liquor, it reopened without trouble from the police.) The site chosen for the downtown Cotton Club was ideal. It was a big room on the top floor of a building on Broadway and Forty-eight Street, where Broadway and Seventh Avenue meet – an important midtown crossroads, and in the heart of the Great White Way, the Broadway theatre district. While Herman Stark and the club's owners were quite certain the club would do well in its new location, they realized that depended on a smash-hit opening show. Stark also agreed to pay Robinson $3,500 a week, the highest salary ever paid to a black entertainer in a Broadway production, and more money than had ever been received by any individual for a night club performance.

The club reproduced the racist imagery of the times, often depicting blacks as savages in exotic jungles or as "darkies" in the plantation South. The club imposed a more subtle color bar on the chorus girls whom the club presented in skimpy outfits: they were expected to be "tall, tan, and terrific," which meant that they had to be at least 5 feet 6 inches tall, light-skinned, and under twenty-one years of age. Ellington was expected to write "jungle music" for an audience of whites. What Ellington contributed to the Cotton Club is priceless and is summed up perfectly in this 1937 New York Times excerpt: "So long may the empirical Duke and his music making roosters reign - and long may the Cotton Club continue to remember that it came down from Harlem".