The album shot of three young black men at the counter of an American diner, staring into the camera in a less than humble way was, in 1960, an open challenge to white America.
As the men wait to be served – by a white attendant – the album design for drummer Max Roach’s We Insist! clearly alludes to the sit-ins of the civil rights desegregation movement.
Frank Gauna’s design specifically refers to a sit-in that took place earlier in the same year, at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina.
On February 1 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at the counter. They were refused service, but they were not ejected.
A contemporary newspaper photograph of the incident showed three of the students staring straight at the camera; the counter attendant was black. Within days, the store was engulfed by hundred of protesting desegregationists.
Jazz musicians had expressed broadly political sentiments on record before, but We Insist!, subtitled “Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite”, represented the first time that politics had been carried through so overtly from the music to the sleeve notes and cover art.
Racial segregation invested such mundane activities as eating lunch or sitting on a bus with momentous political significance. Jazz musicians often restricted their political leanings to aesthetic choices – an emphasis on rhythm, an accent on the blues, incorporating non-European musical elements – or to coded song titles that carried allusions to Africa. The Sonny Rollins tune “Airegin” is Nigeria spelled backwards, for example.
But We Insist! was brazen. Oscar Brown Jr’s lyrics spoke of slavery, South Africa and emancipation; and Roach’s music drew African and Afro-American folk traditions into the orbit of contemporary modern jazz; and jazz critic Nat Hentoff’s sleeve notes were unequivocal. In 1960, We Insist! was a provocation.
SOURCE: http://www.ft.com/
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