Yes, I am celebrating Black History Month. – When I was a boy, my father used to tell me about what things had been like back in the early 1930s, when there were no Civil Rights Acts to speak of. He attended the University of Illinois. While Illinois is the Land of Lincoln, it was also pretty backward "downstate," i.e., once you went south of the Chicago area. The university did have some black students, but they weren't allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities, such as sports and clubs. My father and his fraternity brothers protested this policy to the Dean, who actually relented, at least somewhat. (From Black History Month: Nat King Cole was an enormously popular crooner, earning $4,500 a week in Las Vegas in 1956. He headlined at the whites-only Thunderbird Hotel, where he wasn't allowed to venture beyond the showroom and the cooks' resting area behind the kitchen. Cole's road manager was given a room in the hotel because he was white, but the high-paid feature attraction had to find other accommodations. He regularly stayed in a rooming house on the West Side. Frank Sinatra was a great fan of Cole's. While performing at the Sands, Sinatra noticed that Cole almost always ate his dinner alone in his dressing room. Sinatra asked his valet, a black man named George, to find out why. George explained the facts to Frank. "Coloreds aren't allowed in the dining room at the Sands." Sinatra was enraged. He told the maitre d' and the waitresses that if it ever happened again, he'd see that everyone was fired. The next night, Sinatra invited Cole to dinner, making his guest the first black man to sit down and eat in the Garden Room at the Sands.
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