Even as the Staple Singers expanded their scope as artists, they rarely closed doors behind them. They could still hang with the serious gospel, jazz, and roots-music crowd that had nurtured them, and they were now as nationally recognized as many of the top pop and rock stars. In April 1973, they performed at the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans with Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, and Joe Newman. In the next two months they would swing from a nationally televised appearance on The Mike Douglas Show to a memorial concert for the murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, with B. B. King and Muddy Waters.
The Staples helped mark a remarkable transformation in Pops’s home state. Since Evers was assassinated outside his home in Jackson on June 12, 1963, the number of black registered voters in Mississippi had grown to 250,000 from 10,000. The state ranked third in the number of black elected officials with sixty-three, including Evers’s brother, Charles, mayor of Fayette. In 1963 there was none.
Back in Chicago, the Staples were helping their old friend Jesse Jackson by participating in a series of concerts with Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and other performers during the minister’s Operation PUSH Expo, documented in the movie Save the Children. Harry Belafonte invited the group to open for him during a string of dates at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, prompting a congratulatory telefax from Jackson on October 24, 1973: “Pop, we hear that you are breaking it up in Vegas. Right on. You’re looking good here in Chicago in ‘Save the Children.’ Talent is still talent all over the world. Keep on pushing. Yours in peace and freedom. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson.”
But at the peak of the Staples’ popularity, devastating news arrived on October 29 from home: Twenty-one-year-old Cynthia had shot herself to death.
A single soft-shelled bullet from a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that Pops kept at home had entered beneath Cynthia’s chin and exited her temple. Pops had loaded the gun only weeks before because unidentified intruders had tried to enter their seven-room home on 103rd Street, according to the Chicago Defender.
“Pops gathered us in a room at the hotel and told us Cynthia was dead,” Mavis recalls. “Mom was home at the time, and it was rough just thinking about what she was going through. We were all in shock.” So was Oceola, who was treated at a nearby hospital after her daughter was pronounced dead. Police found no suicide note or any evidence of foul play.
The family scrambled to make arrangements to leave Vegas for O’Hare Airport, where they were greeted by their friend, local disc jockey E. Rodney Jones, who had arranged for a helicopter to fly the family to Midway Airport on the South Side, closer to the family’s residence. The heartbroken travelers stepped into their home to find not only Pervis and Oceola but also Jesse Jackson and Stevie Wonder, who had arrived from Detroit.
“Stevie stayed with my mother till we got home the next day,” Mavis says. “He was extremely close with my family and my mother; he’d been to the house for dinner many times. That helped her a lot for Stevie to come and hold her hand. It took a long time to get a flight and it was night the next day by the time we got home. It was such a sad, long flight. When we got home, everyone just broke down.”
In the hours before the shooting, Oceola had been with her youngest daughter, a slender young woman with a caramel complexion. At five foot nine, she was by far the tallest of her sisters. She and her mom were laughing in the kitchen, talking about a television show and cooking turkey wings and greens. The mail arrived and Oceola said Cynthia was thrilled to receive a card and an $80 check from Pops in Vegas.
Cynthia promised to send a thank-you card and then went to the family’s guest room, ostensibly to pack for an upcoming family trip to Trinidad. A few minutes later, Oceola heard a gunshot and rushed to the room, where she saw Cynthia’s feet sticking out alongside the bed.
“I was called to the house as soon as this terrible thing occurred and the body was still on the floor as I arrived,” Jesse Jackson told Jet magazine. “This is a dark, dark hour for the Staples family and the entire black community.”
Cynthia had entered a local hospital four months previously for psychiatric treatment but had “recovered,” Pops told Jet. In his unpublished memoir decades later, Pops wrote that Cynthia was suffering from depression.
The funeral was held October 31 at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, where family friend Clay Evans was the pastor. The ninety-minute service was attended by more than a thousand people. C. L. Franklin, Jesse Jackson, and Al Bell were among those who eulogized Cynthia, who lay in state in a white dress, her wounds obscured by a shroud.
In the years since, the family privately tried to cope with Cynthia’s death while struggling with questions that never would be completely resolved. Leroy Crume said he’d never heard his good friend Pervis mention a word about the tragedy. “You could count on Blab to talk about anything and everything, but on this—not a word,” Crume says.
“Cynthia was getting bullied at school and in the neighborhood,” Mavis now says. “Kids can get so cruel. They would stay on her: ‘You can’t sing.’ ‘Why can’t you sing with your family?’ ‘Your family is famous, why aren’t you?’ Cynthia and I were very close. I was basically her babysitter for years while everyone else was at work. Later, after I moved out, she would get depressed and leave home and come to my house.
“I would take her over to the park and play volleyball with her. I would try to keep her lifted. We’d go get some Chinese food together. She’d stay with me for three, four days at a time. She didn’t want our parents to see her sad, she didn’t want to bring them down, and she knew I could handle it. I’d keep her laughing. I’d be crazy, act stupid, just to take her mind off things.”
Cynthia was working as a receptionist after graduating from high school and helping the family with some of its business affairs, Mavis says. “I would tell Pops, we need to put Cynthia in the group after she graduates high school. But Pops felt the group was set. If there wasn’t an opening as a singer for her, I thought we should let her play tambourine, be on the road with us. That would’ve been better than leaving her at home. But we didn’t realize how much she was suffering until afterward. At some point, I just don’t think she could take it anymore.”