When Dave Brubeck Was Six Years Old...

Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) was six years old when he was on a cattle-buyer trip with his father, Pete, and saw "something that would haunt him for the rest of his life". Pete Brubeck asked a black cowboy called "Shine" to come over and greet his son Dave.

Pete Brubeck then asked Shine to open his shirt. Brubeck, then only 6, watched as Shine unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a brand on his chest: He had been marked like cattle. Shine was the first black person Brubeck had ever seen. A furious Pete Brubeck told his son that "something like this never should happen again."

Later, Dave Brubeck said in an interview that it had an impact on him he would never forget. "I thought, 'What can I do about this?' It's like my dad (was) telling me to do something about it." 
Dave Brubeck was more than a jazz legend and the "Ambassador of the Cool"; he was also a champion for civil rights. And, as John Blake writes, Brubeck "was bigger than all of that".
Brubeck and other white jazz musicians joined a community where they were the minority, where their skin tone was not the norm. At the beginning, the black experience was foreign to Brubeck but differences were something he did not find threatening but inspiring.

Brubeck was a champion for democracy as well as jazz. It's often forgotten that many of the exotic rhythms he infused into his music came from tours his quartet took of the Middle and Far East. The State Department sponsored these tours to promote democracy during the Cold War. Brubeck often compared jazz to democracy, saying both challenged individuals to express their freedom while being disciplined enough to respect the freedom of others.

Unsquare Dance:

One day, Brubeck heard a knock on his hotel door. He opened it to find Ellington, smiling and holding several copies of Time magazine. Brubeck was on the cover. His heart sank. Ellington was his friend. He knew that Time had also been interviewing Ellington, and Brubeck thought the jazz composer deserved the honor over him.
"I wanted to be on the cover after Duke," Brubeck told the narrator in Ken Burns' epic documentary on jazz. "The worst thing that could have happened to me was that I was there before Duke, and he was delivering the news to me." (via)

During World War II, Brubeck's Wolfpack Band was the only integrated jazz band in the army. In the 1950s, the Dave Brubeck Quartet became the most famous jazz group in the U.S. Nevertheless, they were turned away from hotels, and not only in the South. The South was "the worst trouble" which did not keep Brubeck from leading his integrated band "through the South in the tumultuous years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Riders, refusing to compromise the group's identity for the prejudice of Jim Crow" (via).

Brubeck refused to compromise. He cancelled gigs at Georgia Tech, Memphis State, and elsewhere. He took a similar stand on the Bell Telephone Hour, a musical TV program, when the producers made a similar ultimatum. "I told him that we weren't going to change," Brubeck recalled. "And, they said, 'Well, then we can't have you.' And I said, 'All right, I'm not going to do your television show.' (Later, he refused $17,000 to play in South Africa under apartheid.)
"Jazz stands for freedom," Brubeck said. For him, it also stood for loyalty and principle.
In 1960, after colleges demanded again that Brubeck substitute a white bassist for Wright, Brubeck cancelled 23 of 25 dates on a tour of Southern universities, a decision that cost the group an estimated $40,000. (The average annual U.S. income at that time was around $5,000.)
Another time, also in the South, before a gym of college students whose enthusiasm was approaching a riot, the governor and the college president came to a last-minute agreement to allow the band to play. "Now you can go on with the understanding that you'll keep Eugene Wright in the background where he can't be seen too well," the governor said to Brubeck, making sure the bassist's mic was off.
But Brubeck had other ideas: "I told Eugene," he recalled in conversation with Hedrick Smith, "You gotta come in front of the band to play your solo." The crowd went crazy.
"Nobody was against my black bass player," Brubeck said. "They cheered him like he was the greatest thing that ever happened for the students."
"We integrated the school that night." (via)

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photograph via