Even at the height of his fame, Armstrong remained unpretentious and unassuming, and his worldview would always be that of a successful working-class black man who believed devoutly in the pedestrian virtues of hard work and persistence. “I think I had a beautiful life,” he said not long before his death in 1971. “I didn’t wish for anything I couldn’t get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted because I worked for it.” Accordingly, he had no patience with blacks who were unwilling to do as he had done, regarding them not with sympathy but contempt. “The Negroes always wanted pity,” he recalled in a 1969 reminiscence of New Orleans life. “They did that in place of going to work.”
