In the midst of all this running around in the jet and playing in all those big places, I was starting to get involved in public issues. I guess it started when I integrated the concerts in Macon and Augusta. But it really went back to the “White Water” and “Colored Water” signs I saw when I was little. I wanted to be more than just a person who screams and hollers on stage. I wanted to use my position to help people, and I wanted to have something to say about the country I lived in.
During the week I collapsed at the Apollo, Roy Wilkins came on stage one night, and Pop, Jack Bart, and I took out lifetime memberships from him in the NAACP. The organization was trying to get new members, and I was trying to help by joining publicly. We met for the first time when Mr. Wilkins came by the dressing room beforehand. I told him I thought he was a fine man, and I was proud of the things he’d done to benefit humanity. Out on stage he talked to the people about a lot of things that were going on in the struggle for human rights, things I didn’t know about. He was opening my eyes a little more.
A few days later—on June 6, 1966—James Meredith was ambushed during his “March Against Fear” in Mississippi. Meredith had integrated Ole Miss back in 1962: He tried to register four or five times, and each time the governor of the state or state troopers stopped him. It finally took several hundred U. S. marshals to get him registered. And then there was a riot, a couple of people got killed, and the army and the National Guard had to come stop it. This time around he was planning to walk from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to convince black people in the state not to be afraid to register to vote. He wasn’t but a few miles inside the state line when somebody shot him in the back. Like a lot of people, I was upset by it, and I wanted to do something to help. I was in Cincinnati when I heard about it. As soon as he was well enough to receive visitors, I flew to Memphis in the new plane and visited him in the hospital. We just talked and laughed. It was the first time I’d ever met him. He was a very nice fella and a very brave one, too—an Air Force veteran, I think. I told him I supported and admired what he was doing.
In Tupelo I did a show for all the people who were coming together and continuing the march. Dick Gregory was there, and Martin Luther King and his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Stokely Carmichael and his group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had joined in, too. There was a lot of ferment going on, and a lot of tension inside and outside the movement. Martin was trying to keep things going in a nonviolent way, and Stokely and them were starting to talk about Black Power—and upsetting a whole lot of people with it, too. Whitney Young and Roy Wilkins pulled out of the march because of it. Black Power meant different things to different people, see. To some people it meant black pride and black people owning businesses and having a voice in politics. That’s what it meant to me. To other people it meant self-defense against attacks like the one on Meredith. But to others it meant a revolutionary bag.
I wanted to see people free, but I didn’t see any reason for us to kill each other. Why should we kill each other, I thought, when we can talk it out? Stokely said I was the one person who was most dangerous to his movement at the time because people would listen to me. Personally, I’ll take a lick on one cheek, but I won’t take it if it comes to the second cheek. The Bible speaks of self-defense; you’re not supposed to let another man take your life. But I was out there to preserve life, to extend it, not to take it, and I didn’t want to see the country torn up, either.
I wanted to do something constructive. Not long after the Meredith thing, I wrote “Don’t Be a Drop-Out.” That was something I knew about firsthand because I didn’t have any formal education myself and knew how it could hold you back. The record came out in October and did pretty well, too, but I wanted to do more than just put out a record. I wanted to build a whole campaign around it. As soon as the record was pressed, I took the first copy to Vice President Hubert Humphrey at the White House and told him what I had in mind. I guess you could say he was my first politician. He was a good man, always had good things to say, meant well, and was close to the people. He said a stay-in-school campaign had come up before, but it never got off the ground. He was glad to see someone do something besides talk about it, and he said he’d help all he could.
I visited schools and talked to kids. I told them to stay in school, listen to their teachers, and stay close to their books. They were there to take care of business. I told them about my own background, and I think that made it more vivid. If I hadn’t been blessed with musical ability, I said, I’d still be a janitor. I put out a newsletter to kids and started “Don’t Be a Drop-Out” clubs. And I tried to get kids who had just dropped out to go back. Adults, too. I even put a routine in the show. Some of the others on the show acted like they were in school. Byrd played a drop-out, reading a book upside down. I talked to him at the mike, and then he turned the book around and acted like he was ready to go back to school. The point we were trying to make was that it didn’t matter how old you were, you could always go back and get an equivalency diploma. The band played the vamp of the tune while we did this, then we sang it from the top.
During one tour, as part of the campaign, we gave away $500 scholarships to whatever black college was in the area we were working. The kids were nominated by their high schools through whatever radio station was helping to promote the show. We gave away five scholarships a show, four shows a week, for about six months. Every now and then I saw what I was up against, though. Once, in Dayton, Ohio, I was talking to one of the winners after the show, like I always did. I’d encourage them and tell them to work hard in college and all. This one kid said, “Hey, James, why don’t you just give me $500 in cash, man, so I can buy some sharp clothes and be hip like you.” I didn’t know whether to cry or hit the kid. Some of them just didn’t understand, and it broke my heart to see it.
I spent a lot of time and money on that campaign, but it’s hard to know the results of something nationwide like that. We heard from a lot of places that people were going back to school and pledging to stay in school. But we still have problems right today with people dropping out of school. And there are a lot of poor schools that should have their curriculum upgraded so they can be on a competitive basis with the wealthy schools. It’s not just the black kids who are suffering but poor white kids and Hispanics and everybody.
I was happy to do what I could to help, but once you start becoming a public figure and are seen with politicians, it can get tricky. People sometimes try to use you, and other people misunderstand. Later on I found out what can happen when you get involved, but it was already starting back then.
In November, the next time I was in the Apollo, Lionel Hampton dropped by and came on the stage during the show. I introduced him to the audience, and then he said some of the boys wanted to come out and say hello. I thought he meant some of the boys in his band, and I said fine. He waved to the wings, and out came Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who was running for re-election at the time. He walked over to me and shook hands right there on stage. When he did, a photographer with him snapped a picture. It was a complete surprise to me.
I said to him: “Okay, you got what you wanted, now go.” I wasn’t for him or against him. I was just trying to do my show.
With all the politicians I’ve endorsed over the years, this will surprise a lot of people: I don’t vote. I’ve never voted. In my life. I’ve tried to tell people which way they ought to vote, though. Sometimes you teach, see. A preacher says, “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” I’ve always tried to guide, but I’ve never voted myself. I cast my vote another way. I cast my vote with ideas and concepts. I never marched in my life, either. I tried to go a step beyond being a local statesman. I’m a humanitarian, not a politician. I’m just glad God showed me the way to take that other step.
Through the “Don’t Be a Drop-Out” program I became very good friends with Vice President Humphrey. We met several times after that, for official ceremonies and things, but behind the scenes we were doing a lot of serious talking. The country was going through some heavy changes, and there was a lot of unrest. Right after the Meredith march there were riots in Cleveland and Chicago and Brooklyn. Martin was leading marches for open housing in Chicago. That’s when people saw for the first time that the problem wasn’t just in the South, it was everywhere. In September there were riots in Dayton and San Francisco. Stokely was arrested in Atlanta for inciting to riot there.
All that turned out to be just a taste of what was coming the next year, in 1967. Mr. Humphrey and Mr. Johnson knew what might happen, and I think they sincerely wanted to avoid it. As I traveled around the country I talked to Mr. Humphrey on the phone and told him in plain language what was going on. Sometimes after a concert I talked to one of his aides about it, I told him the people were angry and that I was afraid there was going to be a bloodbath. I could feel it everywhere I went. I think I was providing the Democrats with one of the few non-white views they had of things from the street. They didn’t really have anybody to give them that view. Dr. King himself wasn’t a street person. I was. I came from a ghetto and was close to the people in the ghettos all over America.
I was in touch with Martin and his people a lot, too. We ran into each other in the Atlanta airport and talked, and I spoke with Andy Young and Hosea Williams, who were Martin’s aides at the time. They told me what they were doing and what they had to do it with, and I told them what I was seeing around the country, just like I had told Mr. Humphrey. I told them which way I thought the politicians I spoke to were going.
Adam Clayton Powell was a friend of mine, too. He was a very intelligent man. After they barred him from Congress and he was living on Bimini, he came to see me whenever I played Miami. I remember once the two of us and Mr. Neely sat around my hotel room talking politics and the whole racial situation. We were jumping from subject to subject, the way you will, when all of a sudden Adam became very serious. He started talking about Martin and about how much he admired him and how devoted he was to Martin’s philosophy of nonviolence. That was the kind of man Adam was, though a lot of people have a different picture of him.
In the midst of all this, I was working as hard as ever. I cut a bunch of Christmas songs at the end of 1966, and in January of 1967 I cut another live album, Live at the Garden. I did that one at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I was cutting singles and re-releasing stuff and doing instrumentals for Smash and cutting Byrd on Smash and cutting Vicki on King. The producers for the Broadway show Hallelujah, Baby saw Vicki on the revue and wanted to put her in the show. I wanted her to stay with me, though, and I think Leslie Uggams wound up playing the part. In April the Raw Soul album came out, most of it recorded in 1966 and January 1967.
I was still playing one-nighters, but now they were almost always in stadiums and coliseums. I rented those places myself, promoted the show, and took all the risks. Like Braves stadium—I rented it and put twenty-seven thousand people in there. But I still played places like the Fox in Brooklyn and always stayed close to the Apollo. They had a birthday cake for me on stage in May; I wasn’t performing there that week, they just did it as a compliment. At the end of the month I did another big show in Madison Square Garden. This time I was able to convince people I didn’t need extra acts. I did put the Mighty Clouds of Joy and Joe Cuba on the bill, but the rest of it was the James Brown Revue. I think I probably put the Mighty Clouds on because the show was on a Sunday. I wanted people to have fun, but I wanted them to have religion, too.
At the end of June I was back in the Apollo, fixing to record another live album there. This time, though, we had much more sophisticated equipment and a remote truck out back. Around the same time we did that recording, I released “Cold Sweat.” It was a newer, up-tempo version of a song I’d first put out on an album back in 1962 called “I Don’t Care,” and it was a slow, bluesy tune then. It was good that way, but I was really getting into my funk bag now and it became an almost completely different tune, except for the lyrics. It had the scratch guitar, the fast-hitting sound from the bass, and the funky, funky rhythms played by Clyde Stubblefield. “Cold Sweat” has a pattern that hasn’t been duplicated yet.
Around this time I got the name Soul Brother Number One. The word “soul” by this time meant a lot of things—in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing, too, being proud of yourself and your people. Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together. I think Soul Brother Number One meant I was the leader of the Afro-American movement for world dignity and integrity through music.
A lot of strange things were happening in the country. Besides Adam getting barred from Congress, Muhammad Ali refused to go into the army, got arrested, and had his title taken away. The war in Vietnam was starting to tear the country apart. Martin even came out against it and upset everybody; they said he should only talk about civil rights. In the middle of July there was a bad riot in Newark. Twenty-six people were killed. Not a week later an even worse riot broke out in Detroit. Forty-three people were killed, thousands were hurt, and many black people’s homes and businesses were burned. Federal troops were called in. The whole summer of 1967 was like that—riots of some kind or another in cities all over the country. I think there were more than a hundred. It was like I had been telling Mr. Humphrey and them—the whole country was burning up.
At the end of the summer I toured Europe. By the time I got back to the States, the cities had quieted down, but there was more tension and argument in the movement than ever about the best way to go. By the first of November, when I was back at the Apollo for three days only, I ran into Rap Brown, and we had a discussion about it. Byrd and I and some of the fellas were coming out of the fish and chips place by the theater. We had just finished eating and were fixing to go back to the theater for the evening set. Rap was coming down the sidewalk behind us and hollered. I don’t think I’d ever met him before, but I recognized him. He’d taken over as chairman of SNCC after Stokely, and I think he was already under indictment for inciting to riot in Maryland. I waved him inside the theater with us where we could talk.
It was very cordial, but it was very direct. He told me about some of the things he’d been doing and what they were planning. I said, “Rap, I know what you’re trying to do. I’m trying to do the same thing. But y’all got to find another way to do it. You got to put down the guns, you got to put away the violence.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “You just travel from town to town without staying long enough in one place to find out what’s really going on. I’m out in the neighborhoods, working with people. All you know is what you can see from the stage.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I can see pretty good from there. I know what’s happening, and I understand why. I probably come from a much poorer background than you do.”
“Then you should understand how people feel. You have an enormous following in the ghettos. You ought to get them to take action.”
“I’m not going to tell anybody to pick up a gun,” I said. “Besides, even if we did start a revolution, our people couldn’t do nothing but lose. We’re outgunned and we’re outnumbered.”
He talked about urban guerrillas and a lot of things like that. Finally I said, “I agree with you, Rap, we got to get justice. But people shouldn’t have to die. They shouldn’t have to die.”
That was it. There was no more to discuss. We wished each other luck and parted company. I headed for the dressing room. He headed back out into the street.