Some things I learned recently:
Jazz legend Louis Armstrong came late to the political arena, but he didn’t mince words when he arrived.
As David Margolick reports for the New York Times, Armstrong responded to the desegregation standoff in Little Rock, Arkansas by stating, “President Eisenhower…was ‘two faced,’ and had ‘no guts.’ For Governor Faubus, [Armstrong] used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print….He then sang the opening bar of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.”