@Bgigli: Einiges von dem was Du sagst, ist richtig, aber einiges bedarf auch der Korrektur: St. Louis solltest Du nicht mit East St. Louis verwechseln. St. Louis liegt in Missouri, East St. Louis auf der anderen Seite des Flusses in Illinois. Die Rassentrennung bspw. in Schulen war in Illinois offiziell verboten, aber die gesellschaftliche Realität sah anders aus. In Missouri bestand sie als ehemaligem Sklavenstaat offiziell weiter. Dass die Eltern von Miles Davis in einer „noblen Gegend“ wohnten, ist mir neu, Szwed charakterisiert die Familie als „upper-middle-class people“, die am Beginn ihres Aufenthaltes in East St. Louis nicht wohlhabend war. Inbesondere die Great Depression ab 1929 verhinderte das.
Aus: John Szwed: So What – The Life Of Miles Davis
When they first moved to East St. Louis, the Davises lived in three rooms behind the dental office on the second floor of a brick building at 3 North Fifteenth Street at Broadway, over Daut’s Drugstore. Fifteenth and Broadway was the black business and social center of the city […].
Fifteenth and Broadway may have been the focus of black life in East St. Louis, but it was not entirely African American. There was also a large Armenian population that owned dry-cleaning shops, liquor stores, bars, and restaurants. A number of their stores and homes were located on the same block as Dr. Davis‘ office. A scattering of Germans and Greeks also lived in the neighborhood. The south side of town below nearby Missouri Avenue was largely black, and north of it was white.
In 1929, only two years after they’d moved to East St. Louis, the Depression hit, the same year that Miles‘ brother, Vernon, was born on November 3. Almost immediately, Dr. Davis‘ income fell when his working-class patients, black and white, were laid off and unable to pay him in cash. „They used to pay my father in script, the pink relief slips the government provided the out-of-work, or with stolen hams and cheese from the packing houses,“ Vernon Davis said. „We got so sick of ham and cheese: ham-and-cheese sandwiches, ham-and-cheese casseroles, ham-and- cheese what-have-you. But Father didn’t make any real money until World War II.“ Paid in cash or not, Dr. Davis worked six days a week, sel-dom finishing with his patients before nine o’clock, just before the chil-dren were ready for bed.
[…]Dorothy and Miles started in Catholic schools when they moved from Alton, but then went on to public schools-first John Robinson Elementary School, then Attucks Elementary School and Lincoln High School. The black schools in East St. Louis were underfunded, in disrepair, always short of books and teachers, and for the rest of his life Miles recalled the condition of the toilets in the schools as a bitter emblem of life in his hometown. Though the schools had been legally desegregated in Illinois for many years, in practice most remained racially separate, so all three Davis children attended black schools. Yet „we weren’t fooled,“ Vernon said. „Keeping white and black people separate was a joke. There were people in East St. Louis who came up from the South who weren’t white there, but they became white here. There were students in school who were blue-eyed, with light skin and blonde hair, but they were black because they had people in their families who were black.“
The Davises felt more comfortable with the Armenians they lived among, because they saw them as less prejudiced than other whites they knew. Miles‘ first best friend was an Armenian boy named Leo, who died in a fire when he was six. Both Miles and Vernon started school speaking some Armenian, but the teachers stopped them because most of what they knew were curse words. All three Davis children had white friends through high school. Among their other white neighbors was Mr. Blanke, a Jewish shopkeeper who impressed the Davis children with his worldliness and the fact that he could speak seven languages, which, he explained to them, he needed in order to survive in different countries.
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Ohne Musik ist alles Leben ein Irrtum.