Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

SPEAKER: Minneapolis native Charles Beasley, bandleader and saxophone player, has seen a world of change in race relations from the days in the late 1930s when he was a freshman at Minneapolis North High. Beasley and other school band members traveled to Washington, DC. As in many cities, Jim Crow was still the unofficial law of the land.

CHARLES BEASLEY: I couldn't stay at the same hotel as the rest of the band.

SPEAKER: Beasley recalls the incident over a late morning breakfast at a restaurant not far from his suburban Twin Cities home. Discrimination was nothing new to Beasley. Local all-Black jazz bands could not get work in Downtown Minneapolis at the time. On the other hand, there was work for individual Black players. That's how Beasley got his first professional job. In 1939 at age 16, he was hired for $5. The venue, the Persian Palms.

CHARLES BEASLEY: It was a great strip joint, and it was crowded all the time.

SPEAKER: By the end of the evening, the $5 had turned into $25 with tips, and Beasley was sold on making a living as a jazz man. He says the older players kept him out of trouble, allaying his mother's concerns about the hours and the environment.

When World War II broke out, Beasley says he wanted to be a pilot, military duty that was off limits for all but a few African Americans. Instead, Beasley was assigned to an all-Black military band playing mostly for Black soldiers. Even with segregation in the military and his low rank, Beasley says life for the group he played in was like nothing he had ever experienced.

CHARLES BEASLEY: I was treated like an officer, so I couldn't help but like it. I had my own valet. I'd get up in the morning. We had reveille at 10 o'clock.

SPEAKER: The band even had its own military aircraft to take them to various performances.

[BAND MUSIC PLAYING]

Near the end of the war, the military, including the band Beasley played in, was integrated. The move foreshadowed changes that would take hold throughout society decades later. However, at the time, Beasley says he had little hope the end of the war would end segregation in civilian life. He was a college graduate with a music major. He found work at first in all-Black schools in the south. He moved back to Minnesota and found work as a janitor. He started his shift at 7:00 in the morning.

CHARLES BEASLEY: And we'd be through at 3 o'clock. And I'd go home and take a little nap because at 9 o'clock, I'd start the gig, and at 1 o'clock, I'd get off.

SPEAKER: That was life for years, balancing a day job with work at night as a jazz musician. Beasley retired from his day job in 1990. He was playing with 10 bands at the time but cut back to three. That year, he started his own group, the Charles Beasley Big Band.

[BAND MUSIC PLAYING]

Beasley marks this country's improved race relations in several ways. Two years ago, he visited the formerly all-Black school in Tennessee where he'd been a teacher after the war. In those days, he knew of young Black men who had been put in jail on charges of what he calls reckless eyeballing. When he arrived for his visit, he was surprised to have a young White woman ask him if he needed directions.

CHARLES BEASLEY: Back in the days when I was down here, I wouldn't have even dared to say hello to her or even look in that direction.

SPEAKER: Beasley says the improvement in race relations in this country, while far from perfect, is dramatic.

CHARLES BEASLEY: It's just wonderful. And if this could have happened years and years ago, we would be so much further along than we are now.

SPEAKER: 80-year-old World War II veteran Charles Beasley. The big band he leads plays at the Minnesota Historical Society on Sunday. Dan Olson, Minnesota Public Radio News.

[BAND MUSIC PLAYING]