This story begins on the night of February 22, 1960, on St. Paul Street near the campus of Johns Hopkins University—and we will never know the end of it.
That evening, in the time of the civil rights protests, Duke Ellington’s band was playing at Shriver Hall of Hopkins. And after the concert some of the student activists persuaded the Duke to help them integrate the Blue Jay restaurant around the corner—which had consistently refused to serve African-Americans. But even the Duke himself was turned away. Two days later the story took a strange turn—unexplainable to this day.