Historian Burton Perreti’s 2007 well researched history of New York City nightlife includes a detailed 10-page background of the 1926 Cabaret Law which refutes any claim that the law was directed at Harlem, jazz, and interracial nightclubs. For Mayor Walker, the Cabaret Law was intended primarily to provide a closing time of 3:00 AM and was intended to bring the new nightlife under effective government oversight.
Document Category: Books
Chevigny – Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City
Constitutional Law Attorney and Counsel for Plaintiffs in Chevigny and Festa Cases book on the Cabaret Law and litigation to eliminate restrictions against music.
Dry Manhattan Michael A. Lerner Harvard University Press 2007
Published by Harvard University Press in 2008, historian Michael Lerner’s Dry Manhattan is an exhaustive history of prohibition in New York City. Lerner wrote that “It has been argued that Walker’s cabaret law was later used to regulate jazz clubs and, in particular , interracial dancing in Harlem clubs, but there is little evidence that this was the case during Walker’s administration.” Lerner researched the contemporaneous Harlem newspapers and magazines for the Renaissance Era, apparently finding no evidence that at the time the Cabaret Law and in the following years, there was no evidence to support this claim.