Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in 1899 in Washington, D.C., then home to the nation’s largest urban African American population. Both of Ellington’s parents played the piano and enrolled him in lessons at age seven. He quickly showed early signs of what would become an unequaled talent for jazz melody. Heavily inspired by blues and ragtime pianists during his adolescence, Ellington was playing professionally as part of a small jazz band in Washington by the time he was 17. He was a hit as a piano player and a composer, and soon moved to play in the bright lights of New York City.
Mr. Ellington formed his own band, the Washingtonians, who secured a regular engagement at Harlem’s famous “whites-only” Cotton Club in 1927. This was a major turning point in Ellington’s career, as Cotton Club performances were broadcast almost nightly, bringing his music to wider audiences. At the same time, however, African American performers had to enter the club through its back doors and couldn’t interact with white customers.
Despite their popularity and fame, the band faced racial discrimination everywhere they went. When they traveled in the South, Ellington had to hire a private rail car to avoid the crowded, poorly maintained cars on “colored-only” trains. Restaurants refused to serve his all–African American ensemble. During a tour of the United Kingdom in 1933, the band scrambled to find boarding homes in London when hotels turned them away because they were Black.Ellington used his growing influence to support the struggle for racial justice. He demanded that the dance halls he played provide equal access to African American youth, and held benefit concerts for the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American adolescents falsely imprisoned for rape in 1931. Eventually, he refused to play for segregated audiences.