What intrigued me most, on first encountering the Moving Picture World story, was the identity of that Wilmington jazz band, a “local negro band of more than usual ability” that Bain knew about in the spring of 1920. Why isn’t the band named? From a present-day perspective, it’s a painful omission. The history of jazz in Wilmington is sketchily documented. That’s the case with a surprising amount of Wilmington’s rich, nationally significant Black history. This city’s past has for so long been shadowed by the infamous racial massacre and coup d’état that took place here in 1898. That violence, and an ensuing exodus of Black families away from the city, opened a great crack of cultural disruption in Wilmington’s memory of itself, and all sorts of stories have fallen into it.
Nevertheless, it is possible to say with some confidence who was playing the music in the horse-drawn float that day, moving slowly through the streets while the horses, carrying hooded riders, surrounded the wagon as if in a phalanx. There was only one jazz band operating in Wilmington in the spring of 1920, or at least only one that has left textual traces.
This time we have a name, Nixon. Nixon’s Silver-Bell Jazz Orchestra. And it’s a “colored” orchestra, as the Motion Picture World article specifies. So, was there a highly skilled Black musician with the last name of Nixon in Wilmington in 1920 who can be identified in the sources—one with whom a suburban white guy like Bain might easily get in contact?
There was. His name was Arthur Eugene Nixon. The investigation of this photo gives us a chance to recover his extraordinary life. He was a pure product of the Black intellectual world that developed and flourished in Wilmington during the roughly three decades between Emancipation and the massacre of 1898. In fact, his father, John, who died when Arthur was still a teenager, had been considered by many a kind of unofficial mayor of that world. The Nixons were “a large, thrifty, and influential family,” according to an obituary of the father that ran in the New York Age in 1906.