Creativity Quote by Cab Calloway

The sting in Calloway's line is how offhand it sounds, like an inconvenient stage note rather than a civil-rights headline. "At times" and "some of theatres" are doing a lot of work: they shrink a systemic, enforced humiliation into a recurring nuisance, the kind of understatement performers used to survive an industry that depended on their talent while policing their bodies. Even the phrasing "as a performer" is loaded. He is talking about segregation not from the vantage point of an abstract citizen, but from the supposedly protected category of a professional who should have been exempt. The implication is brutal: if the headliner gets pushed aside, what chance does anyone else have?

The line also captures the cruel logic of American entertainment in the early-to-mid 20th century. Black musicians could be demanded onstage for the thrill, the swing, the modernity they represented, then quietly managed offstage to keep white audiences comfortable. Calloway, a star who sold sophistication and charisma, is pointing to the backstage infrastructure of racism: separate entrances, roped-off seating, rules that turned a night of music into a lesson in hierarchy.

There's a second subtext, too: he is testifying without begging. No melodrama, no sermon - just the factual abrasion of "they segregated us". It reads like memory polished by repetition, the kind of sentence someone learns to say because the truth has to fit into polite rooms. That restraint is the indictment.