Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, more famously recalled as Jelly Roll Morton, died on this day in 1941. He was 40 years old.
Morton was instrumental in the rise of jazz and sometimes claimed to have invented it. He had not, but he was the first jazz arranger, so his claim was not completely without merit. Fame came to him early with his famous Jelly Roll Blues.
Born in Louisiana of creole parents, he adopted the name Mouton when his mother married a man by that last name after his father, to whom his mother was not married, left the family when he was still young. He later changed that to the anglicized version of Morton.
Famous in the 1920s, his career carried on into the late 1930s. At that time, he was interviewed by Alan Lomax who encouraged Morton to record a series of songs for his collection from the early jazz era. Morton was highly disinclined to do so, as the songs contained a ribald selection and Morton himself was a devout Catholic. The song titles were not published until 2005 given their nature.
While paying at Washington D. C.'s Music Box bar he was violently stabbed. He was refused treatment at the nearest hospital on the basis that it was all white. While he did receive medical treatment at a hospital for African Americans, he never really recovered from the event and died on this day in 1941.
The Finns began a campaign to retake the Lake Ladoga region which they'd lost to the Soviets in the Winter War.
340 Polish Jews were murdered Jedwabne, a region that had just been taken by the Germans. The pogrom is remarkable, however, in that it was carried out by Poles.
Details of the atrocity only came to light in the 1990s, so there's some murkiness regarding them. What seems to have occurred is that animosity between the areas non Jewish population and Jewish population started when the town was turned over to the USSR following the joint German/Soviet invasion of 1939. Jewish residents of the town, which made up about half of its inhabitants, were understandably relieved to be under the Soviets rather than the Nazis, with some welcoming the Soviet arrival.
The Jewish residents were hardly Communist supporters but the actions by a few cast suspicion upon an already disliked group. On July 10 members of some German official unit arrived, probably the SS based on the discussion, and met with the town council. What occurred is murky but Poles from outside of the town, including at least one former NKVD operative, arrived and the pogrom commences. Most of the victims were burned to death in a barn. Residents of the town did participate.
As noted, many of the details were lost, probably more than a few intentionally. The Germans seem to have had an early role, but they did not carry out the atrocity. By some accounts, the Germans themselves were a bit surprised by the level of violence. They may have filmed it, by some accounts, which was a common German practice, but no films have come to light.
The revelation of the event after the collapse of the Soviet Union ultimately sparked a Polish law seeking to suppress stories which suggest that the Poles were more than victims during the war. Poland did suffer terribly, but throughout Eastern Europe events like this occurred with local civilians often independently murdering local Jews whom they had lived with for decades.
The Germans commenced their assault on Smolensk. They would take the city, but only after weeks of effort. While it was a Soviet defeat, it was notable that already by this point in Barbarossa the Soviets were proving difficult to dislodge from urban areas.
