The November 5, 1964 edition of Downbeat with a cover titled “Dizzy’s Dream Inauguration Day, 1965.” Gillespie, of course, was never actually inaugurated – he never even made it on the ballot – but his humor-filled campaign sparked important conversations about the urgency and efficacy of the Civil Rights Movement to that time.
By Matt Silver
By now, you’ve heard it several times: Sixty years ago, Dizzy Gillespie ran for president. And it was kind of a joke but also kind of serious and ultimately not ever fully viable. All that’s true enough, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story.
You see, Dizzy’s vehicle may have been comedy — a classic performer and entertainer, the defining feature of his stage act, if not his blindingly fast improvisational lines and his manipulation of the trumpet’s sonic range to its very limits, was his irrepressible sense of humor — but here’s something about funny people too few people understand: funny people are some of the most serious people you’ll ever meet. That was Dizzy; he employed his sense of humor in service to notions of justice and fairness that he took very seriously.
“Gillespie’s run for the presidency was driven less by a genuine interest in capturing the oval office and was more significantly motivated by a desire to use the power and influence of his celebrity to push the envelope on the 1963-1964 election season’s political discourse surrounding freedom for people of color in the United States and abroad,” said Professor Nicholas L. Gaffney, the director of the Center for African American Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, during a 2023 presentation at Princeton University’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.
“In lieu of standing on the political sidelines watching to see how the prospects for securing civil and human rights for people of color would fare under a state guided by Barry Goldwater’s Traditional Morality or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Gillespie campaign injected the election’s political discourse with a radical third alternative….” A third alternative, which, according to Gaffney, sought nothing less than full economic and political self-determination for people of color.
Ultimately, Gillespie was never so much a candidate as he was a celebrity playing the role of “candidate.” His name never made it onto the 1964 ballot. But that was never really his true objective anyway. Gillespie was not just a groundbreaking artist; he was incredibly entrepreneurial, not just a brilliant musician but a bandleader who’d built and sustained successful businesses. He believed that the best chance of achieving holistic social and cultural parity began with African Americans’ full and unfettered participation in American economic life.
“Economics is the key to the whole thing,” Gillespie told Downbeat in 1964. “And the system of discrimination started during slavery time…. It’s an economic thing. Of course, we don’t have that slave system at the moment, but we do have something in its place, such as discrimination against people economically.”
To be sure, the aspects of Gillespie’s “platform” that received the most publicity were predictably the jokey bits — for example, his quips that he’d appoint segregationist governors like Ross Barnett (Mississsippi) and George Wallace (Alabama) to federal positions in the Congo and Vietnam, respectively. Similarly, much was made of the list of notable musicians Gillespie suggested would compose his cabinet. He jokingly, almost antagonistically, proposed the notoriously surly Charles Mingus for “Minister of Peace,” the notoriously aloof and distant Thelonious Monk as a “roving ambassador plenipotentiary,” Miles Davis to “head the CIA,” and Louis Armstrong as the “Minister of Agriculture,” because, “He knows all about raising those crops.” This was a not-so-oblique reference to the rather poorly kept secret that Armstrong grew his own cannabis.
Still, there can be little doubt that Gillespie’s methods were calculated to capture attention quickly and, once captured, to direct that attention to the issues of economic participation and increased access thereto for African Americans that Gillespie considered to be the most important underpinnings of the Civil Rights Movement.
“That’s why I thought I would run for president,” Gillespie would say later, looking back on the experience, “to take advantage of the voters and publicity that I’d receive to promote change. It wasn’t just a publicity stunt. I made campaign speeches and mobilized people.”
Proceeds from the sale of popular campaign memorabilia, like buttons and sweatshirts, were donated to the Congress for Racial Equality and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
And, though he’d never realize the lofty ambition of taking up residence in the White House (which, had he been elected, he vowed to rename “The Blues House”), he did get a chance to attend — and play — as then-President Jimmy Carter’s guest in June 1978, as part of that year’s White House Jazz Festival. Gillespie led a band featuring drummer Max Roach, at one point, calling President Carter up to the bandstand; the three of them performed an obviously unrehearsed, but maximally fun version of Dizzy’s hit, “Salt Peanuts,” with President Carter singing the titular lyric, in time though pretty badly off-key.
When they concluded, Dizzy turned to President Carter and said, “I just got one question: Would you like to go on the road with us?”
“I might have to after tonight,” President Carter replied.
