Café Society
America's First Integrated Nightclub
I’m in the thick of writing STARDUST, the sequel to IRISH EYES, and as often happens at this stage of a project when I’m deep down the research rabbit hole, I’m stumbling onto the most tantalizing tidbits of history!
Café Society opened on December 18, 1938 in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village as the first racially integrated nightclub in the United States. The founder was Barney Josephson (1902-1988), a New Jersey shoe salesman and the son of Latvian immigrants. Disgusted with segregated nightlife in the United States, Josephson borrowed $6,000 in startup monies and rented a basement at 2 Sheridan Square, modeling his club on the progressive cabarets he had visited on vacation in Berlin and Prague.1
Josephson chose the name, “Café Society”2 to lampoon the pretensions of the city’s well-heeled nightclub goers who frequented hot spots like The Cotton Club where the performers and servers were Black and the audiences all white. (After the Harlem Race Riot of 1935, the Cotton Club reopened in midtown and admitted a limited number of Black patrons provided they sat at the obstructed view tables in the back).3
Josephson had a very different vision. From the start, he set out to disrupt New York City club culture, advertising Cafe Society as “The Wrong Place for the Right People.” Caricature-like murals by local artists covered the walls of the subterranean space. People of all races and walks of life sat side-by-side in the closely crammed tables.
“I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front. There wasn’t, so far as I know, a place like that in New York or in the whole country.” — Barney Josephson4
Café Society was an incubator for African American musical acts, including an exciting up-and-coming young vocalist, Billie Holiday, who sang in the club’s opening show in December 1938. With Josephson’s full support, Holiday debuted the now iconic anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit” at the club in 1939. When she left nine months later, she was a star.5
Holiday was the first of many Black jazz and pop performers that Josephson would have a hand in breaking out.6 His Café Society proved so successful that he opened a second location at 58th Street.7
Cafe Society’s gangbusters ten-year run was brought to an end not by racism but by politics. Josephson’s brother, Leon, a lawyer, had dabbled in communism and landed on the radar of FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. The heat spread to Barney, with the FBI staking out both clubs, photographing patrons, and opening a file on Barney himself.
In 1947, after Leon refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Josephson was pilloried by prominent columnists, including Dorothy Kilgallen, Lee Mortimer, Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell.8 Customers fled, and by 1950 both clubs were sold at a loss of $90,000.9
In 1953, Josephson and partners opened a restaurant chain, The Cookery. In 1969, music was added to the surviving location at University Place and Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. In 1984, bowing to changing musical tastes and high costs, Josephson discontinued the musical acts.10
A true entrepreneur, the then 82-year-old Josephson was already onto the next big thing, scouting an uptown location for a cabarbet he planned to call Barney Josephson’s New Cafe Society. “Musicians, singers, comedians, dancers - no big names and no big salaries. It will be basically jazz with a dance floor and cheek to cheek dancing. That’s the way we did it at the original Cafe Society.”1112
Barney Josephson died in 1988 at the age of eighty-six. Unlike the young talents he helped turn into boldface names, his own name has faded to obscurity, but his contributions live on.
THIS Saturday!
This Saturday, March 2nd, I’ll be at the Asbury Book Cooperative in Asbury Park, NJ. The free in-conversation event starts at 7pm and ends with me signing copies of IRISH EYES. Sign up on Eventbrite. (Ticket NOT required for entry, just trying to get a headcount.
For the complete list of in-person appearances, visit my website.
You can pick up a signed copy of IRISH EYES at these booksellers:
Barnes & Noble Upper West Side, Manhattan
Barnes & Noble, Brick Plaza, NJ
Book Culture, Manhattan (2 locations)
The Corner Bookstore, Manhattan
Posman Books Chelsea Marketplace, Manhattan
Thunder Road Books, Spring Lake, NJ
The Comfort Zone, Ocean Grove, NJ
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Newsday (New York, New York) · 16 Nov 1988, Wed · Page 135 via newspapers.com
Café society was coined by Claire Booth Luce, playwright of The Women and a darling of Broadway. https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2021/03/friday-night-fever-cafe-society.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/30/obituaries/barney-josephson-owner-of-cafe-society-jazz-club-is-dead-at-86.html
Ibid.
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-groundbreaking-cafe-society-in-sheridan-square/
Others included Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, Nellie Lutcher, Rose Murphy, the Golden Gate Quartet, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Hazel Scott, Josh White and Susan Reed. The boogie-woogie pianists Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson, along with Big Joe Turner, the blues singer, were in Cafe Society's first show and remained for four years, stimulating the boogie-woogie fad that swept the country. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/30/obituaries/barney-josephson-owner-of-cafe-society-jazz-club-is-dead-at-86.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/30/obituaries/barney-josephson-owner-of-cafe-society-jazz-club-is-dead-at-86.html
Ibid.
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-groundbreaking-cafe-society-in-sheridan-square/
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/30/obituaries/barney-josephson-owner-of-cafe-society-jazz-club-is-dead-at-86.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/05/23/arts/cookery-reopening-without-music.html
I found nothing to document that he materialized this final venture.
What a wonderful piece of history.