The Indignity of It

Tweet

As February is Black History Month, one of my vacation stops today ties in with that. So sit back, and I’m going to give you some very unpleasant history. On April 23, 1940, Walter Barnes and His Royal Creolians made a last-minute gig stop at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi. Barnes, who was born in nearby Vicksburg, thought nothing of stopping at an extra show to pick up $100 before heading home to Chicago. Barnes and his band had a huge following in the big band circuit. His fans weren’t limited to just African-Americans (which was true of many performers: I remember seeing ads for Fats Waller in the Knoxville paper microfilm reels from 1936, then after a few days a banner appeared in the ad that said “for COLORED audiences”). So Barnes stopped at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, and people began showing up by the hundreds. The dance hall was literally packed. The manager wanted to make sure that no one got “free entertainment,” so he locked all the doors except the front door, and boarded up the windows. And you can guess what happened next. There are so many things we don’t even give a second thought to today. The notion of having Spanish moss, which had been sprayed with a flammable pesticide to keep the bugs away from the audience, as decorations wouldn’t enter anyone’s mind. (If it did, it’d obviously be fake Spanish moss with LED lighting.) But this was 1940, remember, in the poor rural South. There also weren’t capacity laws at the time (which was evident two years later, at the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston), so if someone could squeeze in they got in. That’s why the death toll was so high. At 209 fatalities, the Rhythm Club fire ranks as the second worst nightclub fire in U.S. history, and the fourth non-terrorist fire disaster overall. Unlike the Cocoanut Grove and the #3 worst nightclub fire (the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which I’ve discussed before), there is a memorial to the victims of the Rhythm Nightclub. The museum stands on the original foundation of the building. A gentleman who bought the property had no idea of the tragic history when he bought it, but as he educated himself he realized that he had to educate others as well, so the Rhythm Nightclub Memorial was born. It’s been quite a while since I cried while going through a museum. I think the last time was at the Holocaust exhibit at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. It happened again today as I viewed the photos, many of which I’d never seen before, about the fire. Among the photos were a number of pictures of the dead, carelessly piled on top of one another, lying around as indiscriminately as twigs picked up after a wind storm. “The indignity of it,” I mumbled to the owner/tour director, staring at the photos of burned bodies. “No respect at all for those poor people.” Speaking of “no respect,” most of the headlines in national papers qualified the tragedy by saying that over 200 Negroes had died. Some papers did say “200 people.” And it wasn’t just a Black audience: although things were segregated in 1940, Barnes, as I said, was very popular, so some whites were in the audience as well. A couple of them died in the fire. While we have fire laws and inspections to try to prevent such a tragedy again, those safeguards don’t always work (e.g., Happy Land Social Club, the Station nightclub). Natchez has done itself quite proud to remember the 209 victims of the fire. In addition to the museum, there are two historical markers and a plaque listing all 209 victims in a park near the Mississippi River. Sadly, that plaque is a reminder of segregated times: it’s located in what used to be “the Colored section” of the riverfront park. The indignity of it, indeed. COLLAGE: 1. Monument in the park with 209 fire victims’ names. 2. Historical marker outside of the museum, where the nightclub stood. 3. The parking lot for the museum is the original foundation for the nightclub. 4. The second historical marker commemorating the fire, on display in the Natchez visitors’ center. Here’s Walter Barnes, the bandleader who perished in the fire that night with his band: