Throughout 2025, the World Tribune will feature on the cover historical acts of cultural diplomacy that were effective in helping shift public sentiment and even thaw tensions between nations.
As such, we open the New Year with the iconic January 1961 image of Louis Armstrong serenading his wife, Lucille, before the Great Sphinx of Giza in Giza, Egypt.
Armstrong was among the storied “jazz ambassadors,” part of a U.S. State Department–sponsored program that sent musical envoys abroad in the 1950s–60s to improve the country’s image and counteract Soviet propaganda that portrayed the U.S. as culturally barbaric.
In 1956, Dizzy Gillespie and his orchestra traveled to Southern Europe and the Middle East, proving to be consummate and highly effective ambassadors of the American spirit. In Zagreb, Yugoslavia, one concert goer went so far as to exclaim: “What this country needs is fewer ambassadors and more jam sessions!”[1]
The State Department went on to send jazz greats, including Gillespie, Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, to various continents to great effect. When Armstrong played in the Belgian Congo, a civil war truce was called so that that warring factions could see him play. Some 1,500 were expected; the concert drew more than 100,000.
While the jazz ambassadors helped improve America’s image abroad, it also spotlighted racial tensions back home. Armstrong, for instance, canceled his trip to Moscow in 1957 when the federal government chose not to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to help enforce public school integration.
As late as 1971, when Ellington traveled to Moscow, some 114,000 people attended his 22 concerts held in five cities, including high-ranking government officials and a cosmonaut. The Washington Post reported one young Russian fan yelling, “We’ve been waiting for you for centuries!”[2]
As SGI members, we tread the same path of peace as Ikeda Sensei, who worked for decades as a citizen-diplomat to build ties of trust between people and nations, through one-to-one dialogue and cultural and educational exchange. In his June 1981 poem “To My Beloved Young American Friends—Youthful Bodhisattvas of the Earth,” Sensei speaks of this entrustment, writing: “With complete faith in you as successors, I entrust to you the entire endeavor of kosen-rufu and can therefore proceed to every corner of the earth!”[3]
As yawning division, political subterfuge and war rage on at the national and international levels, our Soka philosophy remains grounded in our efforts to build relationships between people that transcend the superficial distinctions that divide us. And it’s in those consistent, daily efforts—reaching out to others, encouraging them in faith and creating a model of peace in our districts—that real and lasting change is made.
—Prepared by the World Tribune staff
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