For the first half of the 20th century, mobsters and jazz musicians enjoyed a mutually beneficial partnership. By offering artists like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald a stage, the mob—including Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and "Lucky" Luciano—provided opportunities that would not otherwise have existed. Noting the racial inequity of talented black musicians depending upon powerful and unscrupulous white men, T.J. English argues that this was a glorified plantation system—one that eventually found itself out of tune with an emerging civil rights movement.