Café Society

Barney Josephson doesn't come from nightlife. He is a shoe salesman from Trenton, New Jersey, the son of immigrants, with one fixed idea: to open a club in New York where Black and white people can be together, both on stage and at the tables. At Harlem's big clubs, the performers were Black and the audience white. At many clubs downtown, Black people could only come in through the service entrance.

In December 1938 he opens Café Society in a basement on Sheridan Square, in Greenwich Village. It bills itself, with irony, as the wrong place for the right people. Murals on the walls poke fun at high society. The staff have clear orders: any customer who won't accept the mix is shown the door.

The stage hosts boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, singer Big Joe Turner and, soon after, a young Lena Horne. But the voice that defines the club is Billie Holiday's.

A Bronx schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, has written a poem about lynching in the South. Holiday turns it into Strange Fruit. Josephson turns it into a ritual: it is the last song of the night, the waiters stop serving, the lights go down and a single spotlight stays on the singer's face. When it ends, there is no encore.

The club ran for nearly a decade. In the late 1940s, in the middle of the anti-communist purges, Josephson's brother was called before Congress and the press branded the club as suspect. Business collapsed and Josephson had to close it.