Omaha's Jazz Corridor: Twenty-Fourth and Lake

There is a block in North Omaha where, if you stand still long enough, you can feel the ghost of an entire musical world. The intersection of Twenty-Fourth and Lake streets was, between the nineteen twenties and the nineteen fifties, the center of one of the most vital Black entertainment districts between Chicago and Kansas City. Club owners, musicians, and listeners packed into ballrooms and supper clubs along a stretch that locals called "the Strip."

Nebraska's African American community had grown steadily after the Civil War, with many families settling in Omaha to work in the meatpacking plants and on the railroad. By the nineteen twenties, North Omaha had its own newspapers, its own churches, its own commercial districts. And it had its own music.

Preston Love was born in Omaha in nineteen twenty-one and went on to lead his own band and play alto saxophone with Count Basie. He described the Twenty-Fourth Street scene in his memoir as a circuit connected to everything happening nationally: bands came through, ideas circulated, young musicians absorbed a range of styles in a single week. Nationally famous touring artists played Omaha.

The Omaha Star, founded in nineteen thirty-eight by Mildred Brown, one of the most powerful Black press figures in the region, covered this world in detail. The paper is still publishing today, making it the only Black newspaper still publishing in Omaha.

Urban renewal and freeway construction in the nineteen sixties cut through North Omaha's commercial core, displacing thousands of residents and businesses and ending the Strip's run as a continuous cultural district. What it produced, though, is part of the permanent record: a music scene that outsiders largely missed and that insiders understood as something special while it was still alive.