Cotton club

The Cotton Club was a famous night club in New York City that operated during Prohibition. While the club featured many of the greatest African American entertainers of the era, such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, The Nicholas Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and Ethel Waters, it generally denied admission to blacks. During its heyday, it served as a chic meeting spot in the heart of Harlem, featuring regular "Celebrity…

Cotton club

One of hundreds of thousands of free digital items from The New York Public Library.

Cab Calloway performs at Harlem's Cotton Club in 1935.

St. Louis Cotton Club Band. Photograph by Block Brothers Studio, ca. 1925. Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections. Block Brothers Studio Collection. N27534.

Pearl Bailey and Cab Calloway, 1940's.

ca. 1920s-1940s, Harlem, Manhattan, New York, New York, USA --- The night spot that best evokes glittering images of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s is the Cotton Club. While literary urbanites appreciated Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes, more fun-loving New Yorkers were attracted to the neighborhood's vibrant cabarets. If you were white and well-heeled, you could enjoy African American entertainers like Louis Armstrong and Bill Bojangles Robinson at the elegant Cotton Club…

Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club!

Thanks to an animated map acquired by Yale's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we can get a sense of the vibrant nightlife of Harlem during this time in history. This original pen-and-brush map was drawn by Elmer Simms Campbell, one of the first commercially successful, and syndicated, African-American cartoonists in the country.

Cotton Club Membership Card/NYC 1930s