Barney Josephson

Barney Josephson (1902–1988) was the founder of Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York’s first integrated nightclub. It was opened in 1938 by, among others, Billie Holiday and it was here that the singer first publicly performed the song "Strange Fruit" in 1939.

Josephson was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, the youngest of six children. His Jewish parents immigrated from Latvia in 1900. His mother was a seamstress and his father a cobbler, who died shortly after his birth in 1902. Two of his brothers, Leon and Louis, became lawyers. Josephson graduated from Trenton High School. He then went to work in his oldest brother David’s shoe shop. After the store went bankrupt during the Depression, Josephson got a job as a buyer, window trimmer and orthopedic fitter in an Atlantic City shoe store. Although he had no experience in entertainment or nightclubs, he moved to New York in the mid-1930s with a vague plan to open a club. He was a jazz fan and had visited Harlem’s Cotton Club. He had also become intrigued while holidaying in Europe by the political cabarets of Berlin and Prague.

Josephson opened Café Society in a basement room at 1 Sheridan Square, New York in December 1938. He set out to break the norm for nightclubs in the city by making it non-segregated both front of house and behind the scenes, and free of mob influence. I wanted a club where blacks and whites worked together behind the footlights and sat together out front, he said. There wasn't, so far as I know, a place like it in New York or in the whole country. Few nightclubs permitted blacks and whites to mix in the audience. Even the famous Cotton Club in Harlem was segregated, admitting only occasional black celebrities to sit at obscure tables and limiting black customers to the back of the room behind the pillars and partitions. Clubs south of Harlem, like the Kit Kat Club, did not let African-Americans in at all. Josephson's Café Society was the first nightclub in a predominantly white neighbourhood to welcome customers of all races.

Using $6,000 borrowed from two friends of his brother Leon to start the club, he rented the basement of 1 Sheridan Square. He commissioned prominent Greenwich Village artists, including Sam Berman, Abe Birnbaum, Adolph Dehn, William Gropper, John Groth, Syd Hoff, Anton Refregier and Ad Reinhardt, to decorate the walls with murals. When he opened the club Josephson was in his mid-thirties with no experience in the nightclub or entertainment fields.

Cafe Society brought recognition to a number of key jazz performers including Billie Holiday, Teddy Wilson and Alberta Hunter. Josephson’s music adviser and talent scout was John Hammond.

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