Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age

In jazz age Montmartre, African American musicians arrived in response to a demand for American dance rhythms. Hallowed entertainment venues acquired jazz orchestras, and a plethora of clubs sprang up in the narrow streets around the rue Pigalle and the rue Fontaine, creating a jazz-fueled dance culture. On this self-contained island in Paris, far from their racist homeland, these performers established an imperfect utopia. In Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age, Robert Tomlinson guides readers down these streets and into clubs and theaters in an eff ort to reveal what this unique neighborhood looked like to the Black Americans who were forced to search abroad for their American Dream.

Though faced with resistance from some of their white compatriots—namely American media and clubgoers—a relatively benign and tolerant French society allowed Black artists to attain a level of social and economic achievement that was denied to them in the United States. Black Montmartre in the Jazz Age provides a focused and detailed narrative, undeveloped in previous studies, that depicts the decline of the clannish white “society dancings” of the rue Caumartin and the parallel rise of Black-owned and -managed clubs in Pigalle.

If the colorful, turbulent lives of these Black expatriates seem at times the trivial chatter of gossip columns, the battles they fought and the collaborations in which they engaged with white entrepreneurs constitute what Tyler Stovall called the “nation’s conflicted journey into the modern age,” conflicts not without significance for our own time and mirrored by the microcosm of Black Montmartre.