"These people do not want to comprehend the fact that the role of the Negro, as entertainer, has not changed since the 1920's. In 1967 the Negro entertainer is still being used, manipulated and exploited by whites (predominantly Jewish whites). Negro entertainment talent is more original than that of any other ethnic group, more creative ("soulful" as they say), spontaneous, colorful, and also more plentiful. It is so plentiful, that in the marketplace of popular culture, white brokers and controllers buy Negro entertainment cheaply (sometimes for nothing) and sell it high - as in the case of Sammy Davis. But there is only one Sammy Davis. In the shadows, a multitude of lesser colored lights are plugging away, hoping against hope to make the Big Time; for the white culture brokers only permit a few to break through - thus creating an artificial scarcity of a cultural product. This system was established by the wily Broadway entrepreneurs in the 1920's. Negro entertainment posed such an ominous threat to the white cultural ego, the staid Western standards of art, cultural values and aesthetic integrity, that the entire source had to be stringently controlled. Forty years after the 1920's era, Duke Ellington has outplayed, outcreated and outlasted all the Benny Goodmans and Paul Whitemans - yet the situation has not changed very much."
"The Negto creative intellectuals have to look into the question of how it is possible for a Negro jazz musician to walk the streets of large cities, jobless and starving, while a record that he cut with a music company is selling well, both in the United States and in Europe. They have to examine why a Negro jazz musician can be forced to pay dues to unions that get him no work, and that operate with the same discriminatory practices as clubs, halls, and theaters. The impact of the cultural traditions of Afro-American floke music demands that the racially-corrupt practices of the music publishing field be investigated."
-- Harold Cruse, Black intellectual, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
