He put an empty counter on the front of his own record

I was always drawn to this cover for the picture, but I did not know the story behind it until I finally owned a copy.

Three men in coats at a lunch counter, turned around like somebody just walked in behind them, and the white man in the apron with his hands folded. What I never noticed until I owned it is that the counter is empty. Nobody has been served and nobody has been told to leave.

February 1, 1960. Four students sit down at the Woolworth counter in Greensboro and are refused service. They stay. Within weeks it is happening across the South.

In March, police in South Africa open fire on a crowd at Sharpeville. That same year seventeen African countries become independent. Max Roach was already writing with Oscar Brown Jr for the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. The year would not wait. He cut the suite that August and September, and Candid released it as only its second record.

What he heard, and almost nobody was saying it out loud, is that Greensboro and Sharpeville were the same story. Side one is slavery and emancipation. Side two is Africa. Forty minutes, no separation between them.

The photograph is by Hugh Bell, born in Harlem to parents from St Lucia. In 1955 Edward Steichen chose his picture Hot Jazz for The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, one of five hundred and three out of two million submitted.

Coleman Hawkins was fifty-six and had heard everything. He stayed in the studio long after his part was done, asking Roach if he had really written this. There was a squeak in his best take and he would not let anyone cut it out.

Weeks after this came out, Roach told Down Beat he would never again play anything without social significance. He kept his word for the next forty-six years.

I wanted it for the sleeve. I did not know I was reaching past a man telling me the whole thing before I had heard a note.