The beloved Ella Fitzgerald was arrested, fingerprinted, and thrown in a Houston jail in October 1955. It seems she had the unmitigated gall in planning to perform for an integrated audience of Blacks and Whites. The great tenor saxophonist Jean-Baptiste Illinois Jacquet wanted to give his hometown Houston a show they would never forget, so he invited Ella, Dizzy, Oscar Peterson, and others to join him as headliners. Yes, that particular show did become unforgettable - an unforgettable disgrace.
Jacquet told The Houston Press at the time that, "I felt if I didn’t do anything about the segregation in my hometown, I would regret it. This was the time to do it. Segregation had to come to an end.” He and his producer, the jazz impresario Norman Granz, sold tickets to Whites and Black on a first-come, first-serve basis. They did not segregate the audience into separate sections. They also removed signs signifying separate "Negro" toilets.
The Vice Squad raided the Houston Music Hall that fateful evening and tossed Ella, Dizzy, Illinois, Granz, and Ella's personal assistant Georgiana Henry (also in photo below) in the hoosegow. A batch of plainclothesmen had arrived backstage posing as jazz fans. After skillful detective work - the concert and its integrationist purpose had been promoted all over local radio - they burst into Ella's dressing room at gunpoint and caught her and Henry eating pie and drinking coffee and nabbed Dizzy and Illinois for shooting dice on the floor. Granz followed one of the detectives into a closet who was about to plant drugs there. Granz wouldn't leave, so it never happened.
The police positioned the whole affair as a "gambling raid." It's better positioned as racism.
The performers were returned to the Music Hall where the concert was held without incident and, subsequently, Houston audiences were more or less integrated.
Image courtesy of Reddit.