“By the mid-1950s, the civil rights movement in the US had become a major international news story. People were horrified by the brutality of Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955, and by the mob violence directed at young black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. It undercut America’s claims about freedom and equality. US foreign policy officials decided that America needed to create a new international narrative about its domestic racial struggle.” Enter Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and their colleagues.