Union Activism
America throughout much of the 20th Century was a country which was racially divided. Chris Albertson, producer of the "Living Legends" series, recalls an incident in 1961 with a Black musician, McNeal Breaux, during recording of the "Living Legends" series in 1961: " owned a restaurant and invited Dave and me to have dinner there, but we had to enter through the back door, because of our color." Starting in his teens, Cottrell worked diligently to organize the Colored Musicians Union as a chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 496. He would be elected president in 1956. He was as well known for seeking equitable treatment for musicians as for his music. Cottrell was able to see firsthand the fruits of his labor. Doug Ramsey wrote, "shortly before he died, told a friend how happy he was that New Orleans had finally become a city where he and other musicians like him could make a living playing as they wanted to play.
Read more about this topic: Louis Cottrell, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the word union:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)