One day my real estate man in Augusta showed Deedee and me the kind of house we’d been looking for. It was on Walton Way, one of the best streets in the wealthier part of town then. It was in a white section of town, but that was all right with me—I wasn’t prejudiced. It had enough room and enough yard that we could have some privacy and peace and quiet when I came off the road, which is what Deedee wanted. It didn’t matter to me who the neighbors were, and it shouldn’t have mattered to them. I told the agent I’d take it.
When word got out that I was going to buy there, some of the people in the area became very disturbed. They did not want a man of my origin to buy a home on Walton Way. I once had millions of dollars transferred from a New York bank to an Augusta bank in a single day, but they didn’t want me living where I wanted to. They got up a campaign to keep me out, but I refused to be intimidated. They approached the real estate agent and tried to stop him from closing the deal. He told them that if he didn’t sell me that house he was going to turn around and sell me some other house nearby, so they might just as well get used to it. I bought it and gave my old house to my father.
Meantime, I talked Byrd into moving to Augusta, too. I helped him find a nice place on Silverwood Drive, not too far away. Only problem he had was visitors all the time—me. Whenever I’d get an idea I wanted to discuss, I went over and talked it out with him. Kept him up all night lots of times. Liked to drove him crazy.
After I moved in on Walton Way, some of the people approached me to try and buy me out, offering me twice what the house was worth. I turned ’em down flat. After I lived there for a while it all died down and everybody forgot about it. But the results of that kind of thinking were fixing to break out real bad in Augusta. There was a lot of frustration, a lot of anger waiting to be touched off. You could feel it. I grew up on those streets and I knew.
When the spark came I was doing a gig in Flint, Michigan. I received a phone call at my hotel at about six o’clock on a Monday evening from Governor Lester Maddox. He told me there was a riot going on in Augusta. The city was in flames. There was looting, vandalism, and sniper fire. The local authorities had lost control of the situation, and he was sending in the National Guard and the Highway Patrol, He said the sheriff advised him to call me and see if I would come home and use my radio station and my personal influence to do what I could to stop it. I promised to meet him in Augusta in the morning to discuss the situation.
The whole thing had started a few days before when a sixteen-year-old black kid was beaten to death in Richmond County Jail—the same jail I turned sixteen in. A lot of people in the black community claimed he’d been beaten by the guards. The sheriff said his two cellmates did it, beating him with a shoe and belt and banging his head on the wall. Some of the black people said that even if that was so, it was the authorities’ fault for not supervising the prisoners enough.
There had been a peaceful protest on Saturday in front of the jail. On Monday there was a march through downtown. Everything was fine until the march reached the Municipal Building. That’s when a student from Paine College hauled down the Georgia state flag and burned it. I think some police tried to move in, some rocks got thrown, and things got out of hand from there. Windows were broken, looting started, and some gunshots went off. Fires started. The Augusta police force and the sheriff’s deputies started sealing off the Terry, all 130 blocks of it.
At first the looting was mostly around Ninth and Gwinnett, but it spread to Broad Street and all over the downtown. During the night there were fires all over the area and they spread, too, because the firemen ran into sniper fire. Eventually the guard showed up with live ammunition and bayonets. They rolled in with jeeps, half-ton trucks, and armored personnel carriers with machine guns mounted on them. They set up blockades, and searched cars, and tried to contain things.
I flew in on the Lear jet early in the morning with Byrd. From the air I could see flames and clouds of smoke; it looked like some of the scenes I had seen from the helicopter in Vietnam. I went to my father’s house to get ready to meet with the sheriff to find out what was going on. I was getting into a car when the police pulled up and said they’d take me in their car. I said, “No, that’ll just make people madder. I don’t want any police cars near me. I know the way to the jail. Nobody’ll bother me.”
The street around the jail was lined with guardsmen. I went inside to talk with the city officials. They assured me the boy had been beaten to death by his cellmates. I told them I didn’t want to choose sides in the thing, I just didn’t want to see any more bloodshed. When we came out of the building, television cameras were waiting and I made an appeal to all Augustans. “Don’t save face—save your city,” I said. “We can’t be bull-headed. We all have to deal as one, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
From the jail I went to my radio station offices out on Eisenhower Drive to meet with Governor Maddox. It was a cordial, businesslike meeting—no grandstanding or threats or arguments on either side. The sheriff and the Community Commission chairman briefed us on the latest developments, then the governor told me what he intended to do.
“I was advised by my intelligence people that this was going to happen,” he said. “Now that it has, I’m bringing in the necessary personnel to protect lives and property. It doesn’t make any difference to me whether the rioters are Republicans or Democrats, black or white. My purpose is to preserve the peace, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
“I understand that,” I said.
“But we need your help. I can’t communicate with the black community on this, but you can. If you would appeal to the people over your radio station to stop the burning and shooting, I think it could be a major contributing factor to restoring order.”
“Governor,” I said, “I can’t back up in supporting my people and their grievances. I’m sure you recognize that.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“But I don’t want to see any more lives lost, either. So I’ll do better than an appeal; I’ll broadcast appeals around the clock. I’ll go out in the streets, I’ll talk to whoever needs talking to until this thing is over.”
I went on the air immediately, asking the people to think about what they were doing. I tried to make the same point I made in Boston and Washington—that it didn’t make sense to burn up your own neighborhood. “This is your city, too,” I said. “This country is as much yours as it is the white man’s. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s not.” I appealed especially to women and children to stay off the streets. At the same time I said that the establishment had better listen to the black citizens of Augusta. They needed to talk to the people themselves, not to so-called leaders who didn’t really represent the black community. Most of the rioters were young men and teenagers, and I tried to talk about their grievances: unequal treatment in jobs, education, and just generally not having a chance at the finer things in life.
We broadcast around the clock. Some of the appeals were live, some taped. I made some tapes to be played on station WBBQ, too. Byrd went on the air, too, directly appealing by name to friends of ours, white and black, to come out to the station—we’d put them on the air and they’d talk about their feelings about what was going on and how they hated to see it. We put down rumors and got people to check things out in different areas and call in to tell us if things were calm and warn us if anything looked like it was about to start up. WBBQ loaned us a remote unit, and we went around the streets and broadcast back through my station with it. I spent a lot of time in the streets. I drove around in the riot area, and when I saw cats running in groups I got out and talked to them. “What are y’all doing?” I’d say. “You’re burning down businesses that belong to black people. Can’t you see you’re making things worse for us, not better?” Most of them listened; they’d break up and get off the streets. But you couldn’t talk to some of them and they were mad at me for doing what I was doing. And there were some elements who wanted me out of the way, I think. There wasn’t anything I could really do about it. The police had a few plainclothes black officers out there with me, but if someone wanted to shoot me, nobody could’ve stopped him.
By Tuesday night things were a little calmer but still smoldering, ready to break out at any second. On Wednesday I went to Paine College and talked to the students. Some of them had been involved in the marches—that was fine—but I tried to get them to leave the rioting alone.
The police and sheriff’s department were giving me all the information they had so I’d know what I was talking about. As time went by the nature of the thing was changing. At the beginning of the riot, a lot of the Chinese merchants were burned out of their stores and homes, people I had worked for when I was a kid. I felt bad about that because the Afro-Americans and the Chinese had always gotten along. Then a lot of black businesses got torched, out of ignorance. The looting changed, too. At first the Afro-Americans were doing it, but after it got started, the sheriff’s department told me whites were driving across the Savannah River from South Carolina and looting stores and then trying to get back across the bridge before they got caught. The police started arresting almost as many whites as blacks. According to the sheriff’s people, there were also some militant whites—Klan elements and people like that—who wanted the thing to really blow up. They hoped the Guard and maybe the police themselves would declare open season on Afro-Americans. The intelligence people were watching them to see they didn’t make a move.
I started picking up hints from some of my sources in the black community about some things before they happened. There was talk about members of certain groups—the Panthers or others—heading for Augusta. I got in contact with people I knew around the country and found out it was true. There were some heavy political cats—I don’t want to call their names or the names of their groups—who were coming to Augusta. I thought that was the last thing we needed—people who didn’t have any stake in the community coming to tear it up. I’m not talking about that old “outside agitators” jive. The agitation had already happened—a lot of it, like I said on the radio, for good reason. What I was hearing about was people who just wanted to incite killing and burning. I felt all that would come out of that was black people in Augusta suffering and dying.
As soon as I confirmed the information, I turned it over to the sheriff’s department. Under their emergency powers they closed the airport and the bus terminal; for the next week no bus or airplane could unload in Augusta, Georgia. It was strange because Warren Martin, deputy sheriff at the time, later told me they received the same information from the FBI after I gave it to them. I always wondered if the FBI was just slow or if they got the information in the first place by listening in on me.
The whole cooling-off process must’ve taken about two weeks. Things smoldered that long. There were disturbances in other places around that time that had people stirred up generally. The week before the Augusta riot, the Ohio National Guard had killed four students at Kent State, and four days into our trouble some police in Mississippi fired into a dormitory at Jackson State College and killed two black students.
Eventually, though, things went pretty much back to normal in Augusta. But they couldn’t be perfectly normal, not after something like a riot. That’s when the real work began—reopening lines of communication, negotiating with the city and the state about all the local issues that had everybody upset in the first place, trying to encourage good will on both sides.
Augusta is my home. I grew up there and saw a lot of changes between the time I was a kid and the time I moved back there. I made a lot of changes myself. But I could still see a lot of changes that needed to be made. See, you try to make things better where you are. You don’t turn your back because some place or somebody has caused you pain. You work. That’s why I bought the radio station; that’s why I tried to make the best of a bad situation during the riots. I moved back there in the first place to be close to my roots, to be close to my memories, good and bad, to be close to my father and to people I’d known all my life. And to make a difference.
That’s why, when I released the Sex Machine album the September after the riots, the album cover said: “Recorded live at home in Augusta, Georgia, with His Bad Self.” Bell Auditorium, where I recorded it, kind of makes my point about me and the city. I started out there doing battle royals as a kid. Later on I played segregated shows there. Then I integrated the place. Then I recorded live there—and called the record Sex Machine. Any way you look at it, for better or for worse, Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Georgia, is mine.
On October 22 I got even closer to my roots when I finally married Deedee in Barnwell, a few miles from where I was born. The probate judge, who performed the ceremony at her house, had never even heard of me. She told Jet magazine later: “I married them out there on the front porch. I got a real nice front porch. I marry most of my colored couples out there unless it’s raining, then we come inside.” Roots can be real tangled.