The Power of Art That Makes You Pause
Culture can change the world, the art historian Sarah Lewis and the architect Michael Murphy argue, if it can get people to slow down.
Louis Armstrong is rightly lauded as one of the most influential jazz artists of all time, but less frequently appreciated is the impact he had on ending segregation in the United States. In 1931, when Charles Black, Jr., was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas, he went to see Armstrong play at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, hoping, in his own words, that there would be “lots. “It had simply never entered my mind, for confirming or denying in conjecture, that I would see this for the first time in a black man … And if this was true, what happened to the rest of it?”
