Jazz critic and author Stanley Crouch presents the keynote address to open the educational seminars at the Satchmo SummerFest (August 2-4). Crouch, who returns to the sessions on Saturday to provide commentary on an Armstrong documentary, is noted as a provocative speaker and writer. Presently, he is a columnist for JazzTimes and has been the artistic consultant for Jazz at Lincoln Center since 1987. He contributed to the Village Voice from 1975 to 1988 and numerous other publications and is the author of six books including 2000s “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome.”

Because Crouch, 56, enjoys a reputation for his frankness in dealing with racial issues, it seemed apropos to ask him his perceptions on Louis Armstrong’s early public image.

Particularly in the 1950s when racial tensions were at the boiling point, there were those in the black community discomforted by Armstrong’s big smile beaming out from televisions across the country. Even the great Dizzy Gillespie admitted in his biography “To Be or Not to Bop” that he didn’t like the image of Armstrong “grinning in the face of white racism.” Later, however, Gillespie, like many others, realized he’d misjudged his fellow trumpeter.

A turning point for some critics came in 1957 when Armstrong refused to go on a scheduled State Department tour of Russia when the governor of Arkansas sent National Guard troops to block eight black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. In an interview, Armstrong was quoted as saying “The way they’re treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.” He also declared President Eisenhower as having “no guts.”

I was thinking about Armstrong as an entertainer and ambassador. Do you remember the time when people disparaged him?

I remember that in my house. See people today don’t know, but when he was alive he had a presence as big in the American culture and perhaps in entertainment as Elvis Presley does now. That is to say, you can symbolically represent Presley with a certain kind of haircut and sideburns and everybody knows you’re alluding to him. If a guy who was a caricaturist drew a certain kind of smile or if he put a trumpet and a handkerchief together everybody knew that was supposed to be Armstrong. See, my father didn’t like him. My father was a fan of the bebop era and he felt he represented all kinds of negative type stuff—Uncle Tom, backwards, shuffling, skinnin’ and grinnin’. If he came on TV and my father was around, his thing would be like “There he goes again blah, blah blah.” I didn’t feel that way because my mother liked him and just about everybody else did too. But I actually started liking his playing about the time I had a jazz club in high school.

So you became more aware of him as a jazz musician rather than just an entertainer?

Yea, more than as an entertainment figure. I don’t think most of the people in my generation really thought of Armstrong as a jazz musician. At that time [in the 1950s], you could see Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton and all these other people on TV playing. So jazz wasn’t a nebulous word at that time. I’m just saying that basically, I didn’t really know except for my father and some guys like that that he [Armstrong] was supposed to be a bad guy, or this Uncle Tom or this throwback or something. All I knew was that guys of younger generations were frowned upon if they smiled on stage and stuff. Like I went to see [pianist] Oscar Peterson sometime in the early 1960s—up in San Francisco—and some guy was saying to me “I don’t like Peterson. I like to hear him play but he Toms too much.” And essentially what they meant by Tommin’ was smiling on stage. [Here, Crouch cracks up laughing]. The last thing you were supposed to do was be funny—if you were black—in front of some white people. Now you could be funny in private with some black people or a mixed group but it was bad if you did it on stage.

Were you aware of a change of perception of Armstrong in this regard after he refused to go on the State Department tour following the Little Rock incident?

The first thing, most people didn’t even know that happened. As you might know, Joe Glaser and those people who managed him were not anxious for people to know that that had ever happened. If you had been managing him and he told the government to go to hell in 1957, believe me, you wouldn’t put that in your press release. Like “Pops is coming to San Francisco and don’t forget last year he told the president to go to hell.” It’s been mentioned in a number of places but that’s one of the reasons why it [the incident] was so shocking to people when the Ken Burns show [the PBS documentary “Jazz”] came on because you could almost say it was suppressed.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s was Armstrong’s stance brought to the forefront in the black community or among activists?

I was in the civil rights movement and I never heard that mentioned once. You have to understand something. That was like a war. And see when you’re at Gettysburg what happened at Bull Run even a couple of years ago is not what people are talking about. Basically musicians were not really discussed in reference to political issues at that particular moment. They really weren’t. It isn’t like it is now, they weren’t asking musicians what they thought was going on in the world.

Do you think any of these notions about Armstrong’s stage persona linger on?

I doubt if Armstrong is perceived that way today. Because the Ken Burns documentary, as they say, reinvented him so people don’t see him quite the same—not as they used to.

Finally, what are the things that you hear in jazz every day that come specifically from Louis Armstrong?

The rhythm—he influenced how everyone phrases and that influence is still solidly in place. Whenever you hear anybody get into that rhythm that’s called swing, Armstrong is on the bandstand…Armstrong brought together all of those elements—the street music, the operas, the stuff that was left over from the plantations, the funeral parades—I mean everything that was central to the spirit and feeling of New Orleans. They were at the center of what he was doing. Just like everything that was going on in London was in what Shakespeare was doing. I think that’s the way most major artists are. They take all of the essences out of the place from which they come and they turn those into universally significant works.