How the Cops Silenced Thelonious Monk

A precedent for our current authoritarian moment

Since the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk last week, MAGA has rushed to use the powers of the state and the mob to terrorize and silence liberals and marginalized people. Since I filed this piece at Public Notice over the weekend, the crackdown has only intensified. Yesterday the Washington Post, which has transformed its opinion pages into a MAGA mouthpiece, fired Karen Attiah, its last Black opinion columnist, for tweets about white male violence in which she barely mentioned Kirk.

There are a lot of precedents in American history for authoritarian efforts to silence ideological opponents of the right in general and Black people in particular. During the Red Scare of the 50s, the government stripped Paul Robeson of his passport (the Trump administration is currently trying to pass legislation to allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to seize people’s passports for ideological reasons with no due process.) Left-wing Hollywood screenwriters were blacklisted at the same time; if you were too progressive, you were banned from the entertainment industry. Woodrow Wilson indicted thousands of pacifists and leftists who opposed World War I; it became a crime, upheld by the Supreme Court, to speak against the war. Even a presidential candidate, Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, was imprisoned.

The Red Scares are fairly famous. I’ve also been thinking about a less well-known attack on free speech rights—the New York City Cabaret Card.

Taking away Monk’s piano

From 1940 until 1967, every worker and musician in nightclubs in New York City was required to hold a permit. The permit was supposed to certify the morality and good character of performers. Musicians had to agree to be fingerprinted by police, who might also do background checks. If performers were arrested—for drugs, for disturbing the peace, for anything—their cards could be revoked, effectively destroying their ability to work in the city.

Many important artists were banned in clubs in New York City when their cards were revoked. Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Chet Baker were all banned on the pretext of drug charges. Comedian Lenny Bruce lost his license as well. Frank Sinatra refused to perform in New York City because he said the cabaret card application process was demeaning and intrusive. A comedian named Lord Buckley had his cabaret card denied in 1960 because of a marijuana arrest 20 years earlier; the stress of the controversy probably contributed to a stroke which led to his death.

Robin DG Kelley’s massive biography of Thelonious Monk is also a long, grinding chronicle of Monk’s inability to perform in New York City. His cabaret card was suspended three times. The first was in 1948 for having a small bag of marijuana in his possession; he lost his card for a year. Then in 1951 he was arrested with Bud Powell outside a club on a narcotics charge. The drugs in this case were almost certainly Powell’s, not Monk’s, but his card was suspended indefinitely. He didn’t get it back until 1957.

The final revocation of Monk’s cabaret card was both the most traumatic and the most telling. Monk was driving to Baltimore for a gig and was not feeling well; he stopped for a drink of water at a motel in Delaware. Neither he nor his companions thought that they’d face Jim Crow in Delaware—but the motel didn’t serve Black people. The manager refused to give Monk water; they also called the police.

Monk was pissed off and uncooperative; he wouldn’t speak and when the cops pulled them over after leaving the motel, he wouldn’t get out of the car. The police dragged him thorugh the door by force and beat him badly. They searched the luggage without a warrant and claimed they found marijuana and narcotics. Monk was charged with drug possession and assaulting an officer. His ended up in a serious depression; his cabaret card was also suspended again. It was another two years until he managed to get it restored.

Monk’s difficulties with the cabaret card were exacerbated by the fact that he had difficulty finding managers and peeers who were willing to speak to his character. That was in part because of Monk’s undiagnosed mental illness; he was probably bipolar. This may have affected his interactions with police as well; under stress he could become agitated or nonresponsive. We know from contemporary research that police tend to escalate encounters with mentally ill people; as a Black mentally ill man, Monk would have been doubly a target for violence.

Thanks to the cabaret card system, police prevented Monk from performing in most New York City venues throughout the 1950s. This did sweeping and painful damage to his career. Monk scrambled for money throughout the decade, and struggled to build a reputation even as his songs became standards and bop, which he had helped invent, became the dominant jazz style.

Not what you say, but who you are

The cabaret law was obviously very different in application and scope than the current rush to target Charlie Kirk apostates. Nonetheless, Monk’s ugly experiences illustrate a number of truths about free speech in this country which remain relevant some 70 years later.

First, the cabaret card allowed the government to conflate speech and criminality.

Cards were in theory revoked because of arrests; technically Monk lost his speech rights because he was a criminal, rather than having his expression was targeted as criminal. The lines blurred a great deal when Monk was arrested for protesting racial exclusion and Jim Crow—but even there, the cops found other pretexts (marijuana, assault) to justify the revocation of the license.

Second, the cabaret card was a way of targeting the speech of marginalized people—and targeting them not so much because of the content of the speech as because of who they were.

Monk (as Kelley’s biography makes clear) hardly ever made political statements on stage or with his music;. In fact, in interviews, he tended to criticize and even mock performers like Max Roach who addressed the civil rights movement in their compositions or performances. “I haven’t done one of these ‘freedom’ suites, and I don’t intend to,” he said in a 1965 interview. “I mean, I don’t see the point. I’m not thinking that race thing now; it’s not on my mind. Everybody’s trying to get me to think it, though, but it doesn’t bother me. It only bugs the people who are trying to get me to think it.”

Monk did perform at civil rights benefits—and his amazingly original genius was in itself a rebuke to white supremacist ideas of Black inferiority. Which is why he was a target; NYC cops wanted to suppress and control Black musicians because they saw their existence and their music as an innate violation of the white supremacist default, whereby Black people were supposed to only appear in public in subservient roles. The cabaret law was not really meant to stop people from saying certain things; instead it was meant to prevent certain people from speaking at all without official white oversight.

Certain people aren’t supposed to speak

The current crackdown is centered around speech about Charlie Kirk more or less; right wing trolls are searching twitter and facebook to find people who are not sufficiently reverent or who dare to express reservations about Kirk’s legacy. When they find the comments they are looking for, they contact the employers of professors, nurses, teachers, and attempt (often successfully) to get them suspended or fired.

Alongside this focus on content, though, there’s clearly also a prioritization of identity. Karen Attiah didn’t say anything inflammatory about Kirk…but as a Black woman, she’s a special target for right wing vitriol. The Post, which has divested itself of all its other Black opinion columnists, seems like it was probably looking for an excuse to jettison her as part of its all MAGA editorial page turn.

And of course, this isn’t the first round of MAGA censorship. Trump at the federal level and state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida have already been banning books by LGBT and Black authors and removing information about Black history (like slavery) from National Parks. Chicago Alderman Andre Vasquez received threats for speaking against ongoing horrific ICE deportations and arrests in the city—the note referred to “illegals”, again justifying silencing speech by conflating it with illegality and with marginalized identities (of the Alderman and of those being targeted by ICE raids.)

The history of the cabaret card shows that “free speech” in this country has long been dependent on the color of your skin. It also shows how restrictions on speech are justified and exacerbated by a criminal justice system designed to enforce white supremacist entitlement and hierarchy.

When cops adjudicate who can speak—in cabarets, in protests, or anywhere else—then Black people, disabled people, LGBT people, immigrants, sex workers, and anyone seen as marginalzed or “disruptive” is going to be silenced. The massive, bipartisan investment in policing over the last 60 years has poured more and more resources into the institution which prevented Thelonious Monk from playing his music. If we believe free speech is valuable, we need to defeat MAGA. But we also need to defund the police.

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