Cafe Society

Café Society was a New York City nightclub opened by Barney Josephson in 1938, at Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.

Josephson created the club to showcase African American talent and to be an American version of the political cabarets he had seen in Europe earlier. As well as running the first racially integrated night club in the United States, Josephson also intended the club to defy the pretensions of the rich; he chose the name to mock Clare Boothe Luce and what she referred to as "café society", the habitués of more upscale nightclubs, and that wry satirical note was carried through in murals. Josephson not only trademarked the name, which had not been trademarked by the gossip columnist for the New York Journal American M, who wrote as the first "Cholly Knickerbocker", but advertised the club as "The Wrong Place for the Right People". Josephson opened a second branch on 58th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenue, in 1940. After that, the original club was known as Café Society Downtown and the new club—designed for a different audience—as Café Society Uptown.

The club also prided itself on treating black and white customers equally, unlike many venues, such as the Cotton Club, that featured black performers but barred black customers except for prominent blacks in the entertainment industry. The club featured many of the greatest black musicians of the day, from a wide range of backgrounds, often presented with a strongly political bent. Lena Horne was persuaded to stop singing "When it's Sleepy Time Down South", Pearl Bailey was fired for being "too much of an Uncle Tom", and Carol Channing was fired for an impersonation of Ethel Waters.Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" there; at Josephson's insistence, she closed her set with this song, leaving the stage without taking any encores, so that the audience would be left to think about the meaning of the song.

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