Soldierly Swing
James Reese Europe enjoyed pride of place in two Manhattan parades during 1919. The first was a cheering February 17 welcome to the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 369th Infantry, returning after fighting in France to march up Fifth Avenue behind the battalion’s famed band, which Lieutenant Europe led.
The second event, less than three months later, was a funeral procession honoring Jim Europe, slain at 39. Both events were notable, because James Europe, like the rank and file of the 369th, was black. He also was the man who inserted into the mainstream the beat that became jazz and who insisted that white audiences and managers show black composers and black musicians respect. “Before he arrived in New York, jazz was a little-known word and if known at all was probably a vulgarity,” biographer R. Reid Badger wrote. “By the time of his death it had become an accepted term for describing a musical revolution.”
Europe certainly acknowledged racism, but, he told the New York Tribune, “I am not bitter about it. It is, after all, but a slight portion of the price my race must pay in its at times almost hopeless fight for a place in the sun. Some day it will be different and justice will prevail.”
Those 1919 parades mattered monumentally to black Americans, who turned out in thousands for each. Summoning an image of the regimental victory march, U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove wrote “The Return of Lieutenant James Reese Europe,” describing Europe’s band “stepping right up white-faced Fifth Avenue in a phalanx.” But Dove’s paean came 85 years later. In 1919, even mainstream—read white—newspapers emphasized Caucasian New York’s adulation for the man. Reporters noted that among onlookers waving flags from windows of their Fifth Avenue homes as the 369th marched past in February were industrialist Henry Frick and society doyenne Mrs. Vincent Astor.
Yachtsman John Wanamaker Jr., grandson of the department store founder, and fellow Manhattan aristocrat Hamilton Fish, about to be elected to Congress, were among reported. “The crowd that turned out to see the cortege jammed the sidewalk all along the line of march.” Floral tributes to Europe filled six vehicles. His was the first public funeral procession in New York City for an African American. By the time of his death, James Europe had become a one-man catalog of firsts.
