While I was in Los Angeles I got a call one morning from my office in New York. I don’t remember who it was, but the person told me Pop was dead. He was playing golf with his son Jack and had a heart attack and died right there on the golf course. I couldn’t believe it because it seemed like lately his health had been better. But in another way, I could believe it: Otis, Little Willie John, Mr. Nathan, Dr. King, Senator Kennedy, and now Pop. That was probably one of the lowest points of my whole life. We were all family. Byrd and I and some of the other fellas used to lay around his house like it was ours, just like he’d come and lay around ours. For most of us, being from Georgia, Pop was the first white person we really felt comfortable with. Of all the acts he handled, I was the only one he ran with. We spent all those nights together on the plane after concerts, talking. We played tonk and talked until we got to the next city. His wife always wanted him to come off the road and be home more, but he loved me like a son and couldn’t stay away.
Usually, no matter what happens, I hold my grief in. I didn’t even cry much as a kid. Didn’t cry when I was taken to jail or when I went away to prison. But the day I heard about Pop I cried. The only thing I was glad about was that the insurance policy I had on him had lapsed. I couldn’t have taken the money. His death affected me very deeply. I never will forget Pop.
Not long after Pop died I started having problems with the Internal Revenue Service. While I was playing basketball with my son Teddy one day the mail came, and there was a letter from the IRS. I stopped playing ball for a minute and opened it. It said I owed $1,870,000 in back taxes. I just laughed and kept on playing basketball. See, earlier in 1968 I had asked them to help me with my taxes because I did not understand them. I wrote letters to Mr. Humphrey, President Johnson, and Attorney General Ramsey Clark. “I can’t handle it,” I wrote. “I need some help.” They did not reply, not Mr. Humphrey or anybody. I wrote to Internal Revenue and to Mr. Richard Kleindienst, who later took over after Ramsey Clark. All this was after I helped stop the riots and everything, and they didn’t answer.
I didn’t think it would be a big problem. I thought it was a misunderstanding that eventually would be cleared up, so I went on about my life. I was about to get into the franchise restaurant business and was negotiating to buy station WRDW in Augusta. At the same time I asked the Federal Communications Commission to help other Afro-Americans get radio stations so they could reflect community views. The FCC listened to me real polite, but they didn’t do anything.
Meantime, by the first of October, “Black and Proud” had gone to number 1 on the R & B chart. It stayed there for six weeks. It even got up to number 10 on the pop chart, but a lot of people still didn’t understand it. They thought I was saying kill the honky, and every time I did something else around the idea of black pride another top forty station quit playing my records. Mr. Patton would come back off the road from promoting the records and tell me what was happening.
After a concert at the Washington, D.C., Armory there was a riot, which caused more misunderstanding. A fight broke out in the armory just as we finished the show, and then some people started throwing bottles and chairs and things. Several hundred people got mixed up in it. The police hustled the crowd out of the building, but outside it turned into a general disturbance, and it took them a half hour to bring it under control. That should’ve been the end of it, but the next day a rumor went around that a white sniper had shot and killed me. That set things off again the next night. By this time I was in Los Angeles and didn’t know anything about it. The city called in all the police shifts and used tear gas and made several arrests. Station WOL broadcast over and over that the rumor about me wasn’t true, but nobody believed it. So they phoned me, and I made a tape for them to play. I said I was fine and “in good health and alive in living black color.” The next day they played the tape every two hours and things cooled down, but I think a lot of people associated the whole incident with “Black and Proud.”
No matter what people thought, I had to say what I believed needed saying and do what I believed needed doing at the time. I was getting ready for a big concert in the new Madison Square Garden and took out a big newspaper ad with the headline “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” I think a lot of people only saw the headline without reading what was under it. It told the story of my life and then said: “James Brown is totally committed to black power, the kind that is achieved not through the muzzle of a rifle but through education and economic leverage.” It explained what I’d done in my career and in business, and then ended with: “James Brown has won his fight, but that isn’t enough. He is now fighting for his soul brothers, and the heavy odds don’t discourage him.” But it didn’t matter what it said; people took it the way they wanted. See, just having an ad like that confused people because entertainers didn’t usually advertise concerts with a lot of political commentary like that.
Count Basie and the Ramsey Lewis Trio were on the Garden bill. It was an honor to have Count Basie open up the show for me. I think I had met him somewhere before, but this was the first chance I had to really talk to him. We were all standing backstage in awe of him, but that wore off pretty quick because he was very friendly, just one of the fellas.
“It’s a pleasure just to be standing here with you,” I said. “When I was little I was always trying to play ‘One O’Clock Jump’ on the piano. Never could get it right, but I always admired your music.”
“You’d make a good jazz player,” he said. “I’ve heard your stuff.”
“Can’t make any money over in jazz,” I said.
He laughed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “But, see, the trick is to become an institution, like me. I can work until I die, even if I don’t have another record. That’s what you should do—become an institution.”
He did a fantastic job on the show. And that band was tight. The cats in my band stood and watched them. It was like seeing where you came from.
I liked playing those big places, the Garden and Yankee Stadium, but I still played the Apollo. I closed out 1968 with three days there in December. I had a special band shell built for the whole stage around the theme of “I’m Black and I’m Proud.” I think the audience knew what I was doing. I was a symbol of pride for people who had been deprived of their civil rights and their human rights. That’s what it was all about.
At the end of the year, Cash Box magazine named me the best pop male vocalist of the year. That was the first time in the thirty years the magazine had been doing it that they chose a black man. It was kind of funny to be chosen as the top pop vocalist because I didn’t compromise my music and try to go pop. People just picked up on it for what it was.
In January I played Mr. Nixon’s inaugural gala. I had supported Mr. Humphrey, but it was an honor to be asked to do the gala and I went—along with Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Hines, Hines and Dad, Andre Watts, and Barbara McNair. There was only time to do a couple of numbers; I did “Up Tight” and “Black and Proud.”
In February they held a James Brown Day in Augusta. Miss Garvin, my seventh-grade teacher, and Mr. Myers, the principal of Floyd School, arranged it. There was a parade in the afternoon, and then that night I did a benefit concert for Paine College, a black college there in the city. Their administration building had burned down in August, and they were trying to raise money to rebuild it. Unfortunately, I had to fly in from California, I believe, and after all expenses were paid there wasn’t as much money left as there normally would have been. I think some of the people at the college got upset about it.
I was sorry about any misunderstanding because Augusta was my hometown, and I was planning to move back there. It was impossible for me to live in a house in New York anymore. I couldn’t get any peace. Kids and fans were always jumping the fence and coming in the house and creating a disturbance. At Christmas lines of cars would come, full of people wanting to see the black Santas I put out front. I knew they meant no harm, but it was getting to be too much. Most important, Deedee and I had just gotten back together, and she wanted to get out of New York and move somewhere secluded so we could have something like a normal life. When I started talking about going back to Georgia, a lot of the cats couldn’t believe it. They said, “What? You’re moving back to Disgusted, Georgia.” That’s what they called it.
I had just about closed the deal for WRDW; it opened under my ownership officially on April 30. I was particularly proud of buying it because I used to shine shoes in front of it, and now I owned it. See, shining shoes has a lot of meanings for Afro-Americans, especially this Afro-American, because I actually did it. When the B’nai B’rith gave me their Humanitarian Award for 1969, I carried a shoeshine box with me to their award ceremony. “You made it possible for me not to have to carry a shoeshine box,” I said in my speech, “but I carried the box just the same.”
We found a house in Augusta and moved in temporarily while I looked around for something more suitable. Meantime I released “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” at the beginning of the year and “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing” in March. “Mother Popcorn” came out in June.
On July 3 I played the Newport Jazz Festival with Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, and Sly and the Family Stone. I think that was the only time they had those kinds of performers for the Newport Festival—before or since. On July Fourth I was back in the Garden, and the next week I co-hosted the Mike Douglas Show for the whole week. I had Beau Jack on and a lot of other people who meant a lot to me.
Somewhere during this period, while sitting in my office in New York one day, a fella walked in unannounced. Didn’t introduce himself or anything. He just said, “Who the hell is Velma Brown?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Who the hell are you? If you don’t get out, I’m going to throw you out.”
He could see I meant it and he left. He turned out to be from the IRS. After I threw him out he got a vindictive thing going against me. He was the same one who later on got the same thing against Mr. Nixon for his taxes.
Velma and I had been separated since 1964 but we were still married, and that’s why he was asking who she was. Later on he came back and said he was head of the criminal investigations division of the IRS in New York. Then he presented some papers.
“You have a tax problem,” he said.
“No, you have one,” I said. “I wrote the government and asked them to help me. I asked for help, and you didn’t help me.”
The government is responsible for it because they didn’t allow me to go to school. I have an elementary school education and didn’t even graduate from there. They have no legal boundaries over me. By the Constitution of the United States. The people who represented me had shingles and sheepskins, and I didn’t have any of ’em. So I owe nothing. My kids owe taxes because they finished high school. You pay tax when you’re represented. You pay tax when you exercise all of your rights. I didn’t exercise rights. I didn’t have a chance to. I lived with the word can’t, so I can’t pay tax. They had better forget every tax case they have with people who weren’t allowed to go to school because we can sue the government. They’re messing around with men like me and Ali and others, people who weren’t allowed to go to school and had problems. They should go to the high school graduates from now on and leave us alone.
Besides the taxes there were a lot of strange things happening during that time. I had the feeling somebody besides the IRS was watching me. Later on it came out that the FBI under Mr. Hoover had a program during this time to destroy black nationalists. They were infiltrating several groups, spying on people, taping them, like they did to Martin. Mr. Hoover wrote instructions to his agents to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.” I think “Black and Proud” probably got their attention. So did my radio stations and my political raps and activities with my shows. Then Look put out a cover story on me headlined, “Is This the Most Important Black Man in America?”
It was silly, really. I stop trouble, not start it. They should’ve known that from what I did in Boston and Washington. I don’t even think that way. I’m for peace; always have been. I will protect myself. I would take a life if I saw mine was going to be taken, but I don’t believe you should tear up the country. I believe you should come to the table and talk out your differences. Just be fair.
The record I put out in March of 1969 explains where I’ve always been. It’s called, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing.” “Just open the door,” it says, “and I’ll get it myself.” It’s like “America Is My Home” and “Black and Proud” put together. Equality. If I become a bum, don’t label me a nigger bum, let me be just a bum. Equal opportunity both ways. If I’m a criminal, let me be an equal criminal. Don’t have a race and tell me it starts at ten o’clock when it has already started at eight o’clock and expect me to win it. The song was supposed to be the next step after “Black and Proud.” I wanted to let the black people know that nobody owed you anything for being an Afro-American, and I wanted to let the white people know that all anybody wants is a fair chance. Don’t give me a welfare check; give me a job so I can fare well.
In July I was hit with a paternity suit. A young lady in California claimed I had relations with her one time while I was out there and that her child was mine. I can’t say much about it except I denied it at the trial but agreed to support him until he was twenty-one.
About the same time those charges came up I was finally getting a divorce from Velma. We’d been officially separated since 1964 and had been apart a lot longer than that. We had stayed in contact with each other, and I spent a great deal of time with the kids. The wounds had healed by then, and we were able to go through with it as friends. We’re still good friends today.
A lot of good things were happening, too: concerts, records, WRDW, my business generally. I opened up two Gold Platter restaurants in Macon; Dick Clark wanted to produce a film of my life; I recorded half of the Sex Machine album live at Bell Auditorium in Augusta and wound up the year back at the Apollo.
But I was taking a lot of mess with the taxes, the paternity suit, the surveillance, and everything. That’s why I announced after a concert in Memphis that I was going to retire from live performing. See, a lot of the tax problem came from the fact that the IRS didn’t understand how the expenses worked on my tours. King Records paid a lot of ’em, but they were cross-collateralized in my royalties so I eventually paid those expenses myself. These were legitimate deductions. I was tired and mad and just said I was going to quit, but when I cooled off I felt it might all be worked out without a lot of mess. But, really, it was just beginning.