In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new voodoo music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music jazz!
Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists fears of voodoo to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazzs birthplace is generally recognized to be in Storeyville, New Orleans, and home of the original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson, and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).
* In 1930one year after Louis Armstrong recorded Muggles (read: marijuana)he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.
Mexicans under marijuanas influence were demanding humane treatment, looking at white women, asking that their children be educated while the parents harvested sugar beets, and making other insolent demands.
American newspapers, politicians, and police, had virtually no idea, for all these years (until the 1920s, and then only rarely), that the marijuana the darkies and Chicanos were smoking in cigarettes or pipes was just a weaker version of the many familiar concentrated cannabis medicines theyd been taking since childhood, or that the same drug was smoked at the local white mans plush hashish parlors.
White racists wrote articles and passed city and state marijuana laws without this knowledge for almost two decades, chiefly because of Negro/Mexican vicious insolence* under the effect of marijuana.
* Vicious Insolence: Between 1884 and 1900, 3,500 documented deaths of black Americans were caused by lynchings; between 1900 and 1917, more than 1,100 were recorded. The real figures were undoubtedly higher. It is estimated that one-third of these lynchings were for insolence, which might be anything from looking (or being accused of looking) at a white woman twice, to stepping on a white mans shadow, even to looking a white man directly in the eye for more than three seconds; for not going directly to the back of the trolley, and other offenses.
It was obvious to whites, marijuana caused Negro and Mexican viciousness or they wouldnt dare be insolent; etc
Hundreds of thousands of Negroes and Chicanos were sentenced from 10 days to 10 years mostly on local and state chain gangs for such silly crimes as we have just listed.
This was the nature of Jim Crow Laws until the 1950s and 60s; the laws Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, and general public outcry have finally begun remedying in America.
We can only imagine the immediate effect the Black entertainers refusal to wear blackface had on the white establishment, but seven years later, 1917, Storeyville was completely shut-down. Apartheid had its moment of triumph.
No longer did the upright, uptight white citizen have to worry about white women going to Storeyville to listen to voodoo jazz or perhaps be raped by its marijuana-crazed black adherents who showed vicious disrespect (insolence) for whites and their Jim Crow Laws by stepping on their (white mens) shadows and the like when they were high on marijuana.
Black musicians then took their music and marijuana up the Mississippi to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., where the (white) city fathers, for the same racist reasons, soon passed local marijuana laws to stop evil music and keep white women from falling prey to Blacks through jazz and marijuana.
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