Daniel Desdunes

Photograph of the Dan Desdunes Band outside of a train car number 6920. Desdunes is on the far right. Date and location unknown. Courtesy of Douglas County Historical Society, UNAC0422.

Daniel Desdunes was a Haitian-Louisianan cornetist and violinist who marched with a popular New Orleans brass band that bore his name. He was also a militant Creole of color activist who leveraged his fame as a musician to draw attention to an act of civil disobedience in a case that tested Louisiana’s segregationist laws—a case he won in 1892. He cooridinated his sit-in of a segregated train car with the Comité des Citoyens, which included the activst Homer Plessy.

Daniel Desdunes was significant figure in the New Orleans music scene, but he made an arguably bigger impact in his adopted home of Nebraska. Eight years after the defeat of Louisiana’s equal rights provisions with the Plessy vs. Ferguson case, he moved to Omaha. Starting as a janitor, within three years Daniel Desdunes had built one of Omaha’s leading Black bands. Daniel Desdunes’s organizational work was remarkable here, particularly his efforts to combat inequality through a mutual aid institution known as “Boys Town.” In December 1917, Father Edward J. Flanagan, an Irish immigrant priest, established Boys Town as a racially integrated antipoverty center for young boys who were homeless or formerly incarcerated.[1] Daniel Desdunes convinced Flanagan to create a “show wagon troupe” where students could perform on the road to raise money for the center.[2] Desdunes trained fifteen of Flanagan’s youth for a show in January of 1921. It was considered a huge success and the students “enthusiastically wanted more,” and so Desdunes returned and drilled the students for several months.

Daniel Desdunes performed desegregation as an embodied act through his sit-in on a segregated train car and in his later work as the brass band instructor of an interracial Omaha orphanage. His life, as well as that of his father’s, reveals how brassroots democracy is the organic expression of revolutionary cultural currents from the Haitian Revolution and its diaspora that profoundly inflected the tenor of jazz musicianship, not only in New Orleans, but throughout the Americas at large.

[1] Hugh Reilly and Kevin Warneke, Father Flanagan of Boys Town (Omaha, NE: Boys Town Press, 2011).

[2] “Father Edward J. Flanagan,” Boys Town, https://www.boystown.org/about/father-flanagan/Pages/default.aspx,  accessed September 19, 2020.