Another kid with a gun; another outcome

A hundred nine years ago a poor, 11 year old kid from a broken home in New Orleans got his hands on a ’38 caliber gun. He fired it into the night air, celebrating New Year’s 1913. A cop arrived. But instead of shooting the kid down, he simply arrested him, as was reported in the New Year’s Day edition of the Daily Picayune.

It was the kid’s second arrest and for the second time he was sent the Colored Waifs Home, a segregated institution for troubled black youth.

But there was a big change in the institution between his first stay in 1910 and his second in 1913. The couple who ran the Home started a band. They gave the kid a bugle.

On May 31, 1913, he made the Daily Picayune again, this time in a better light:

“Little black imps, sixteen of them, yesterday in honor of Federal Decoration Day, each bearing a criminal record, equipped with every wrinkle that goes to make up a brass band, paraded the streets of New Orleans. Marching proudly through the streets with drum and fife, they rendered several selections, patriotic mostly, and were loudly encored from the sidewalks. Those who made up the band were: Louis Armstrong, leader…”

We don’t know what kind of life 13 year old Adam Toledo might have had if his involvement with a firearm ended in arrest instead of a bullet. But unlike that of Louis Armstrong, who continues to thrill worldwide with his timeless music…we never will.