Mr. Humphrey was my first choice for president in 1972, but as the process went along it looked more and more like he wasn’t even going to get the nomination. Meantime, President Nixon’s people contacted me sometime in late 1971. Robert J. Brown, who was special assistant to the president, was visiting black-owned businesses around the country, and I met him when he came by WEBB in Baltimore. He was very interested in how I got into the radio business and in the prospects for other blacks to get into it. We talked generally about the need for Afro-Americans to own things if we were ever going to have any real equality. He said the administration was pushing black capitalism even though some said it would never work. People said Nixon was trying to substitute it for domestic programs, but Mr. Brown said that wasn’t what they were going to do at all.
From there we kind of struck up a relationship. He came down to visit me in Augusta one time, and when I was near Washington I stopped in at the White House and had lunch with him and some of the other people on the senior staff. We discussed several issues that concerned me. They talked about what they were trying to do in the whole area of minority enterprise. Mr. Brown explained the Philadelphia Plan they had; it was supposed to get more blacks hired in the construction industry where they’d always been discriminated against. They talked about being the first administration to ever funnel large amounts of money to private black colleges, and they revoked the tax exemption for schools and colleges that practiced segregation.
Sometimes I said hello to the president or talked with him for a few minutes. His working office was right across the hall from Mr. Brown’s in the old Executive Office Building. The president knew about the discussions Mr. Brown and I were having, and he talked about what he was doing in those areas. Talking to Mr. Nixon, you could see he was very knowledgeable, very aware, even if you didn’t agree with him. He knew what was going on in the government.
One time I brought up the subject of making Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. I felt very strongly about it. I told the president what Dr. King meant to me and to so many other people. “A holiday in his honor would make a lot of people feel more a part of the country,” I said, “and it would stop a lot of unrest.”
“I think he should be honored, too,” the president said, “but I have to wait until after the election to do it. If I do it now, people will say it’s calculated just to get votes.”
As the election got closer I was thinking more and more about which way I ought to go, especially after Mr. Humphrey lost the nomination. When the real campaign started in the fall I could see that Mr. Nixon was going to win in a landslide. Everybody could. A situation like that puts somebody who’s sort of a spokesman in a dilemma: You can either try to get inside and have some influence, or you can stay outside and be pure and powerless. Either way you’re going to get criticized, especially if you’re a black spokesman.
When I went to the White House again, on October 10, the election wasn’t but a month away. I still hadn’t completely made up my mind what I was going to do. I had lunch with Mr. Brown, and we continued our discussions. After lunch we met with the president. I told him that Mr. Humphrey was my first choice but that I supported what he was doing for minority enterprise and black colleges, and in minority hiring. He said that was fair enough. I talked about drugs, too. It was something that was on my mind a lot then. I had given support to drug prevention programs in Georgia—Governor Jimmy Carter had honored me for that—and I was very concerned about young people staying off drugs. Mr. Nixon talked about a White House task force that was working on it. I told him I would like to see more drug clinics in places where they were really needed. He said he would support that.
After our meeting I went to a press conference at the offices of the Committee to Re-elect the President. “I say don’t quit the boat in the middle of the stream,” I told them. I spoke about some of the things Mr. Nixon was doing that I supported. “And we talked about a subject very dear to me,” I said, “making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. He said he couldn’t do it now because people would say he was just trying to get the black vote, but he said he plans to do it after the election.”
I knew what people were going to say about me endorsing Mr. Nixon. People were saying he was buying endorsements with the black capitalism grants and contracts. I tried to deal with it up front. “I’m not a sellout artist,” I said. “I never received a government grant. I never asked for one and don’t want one. I’m not selling out, I’m selling in. Dig it?”
A lot of people couldn’t dig it. The attacks on me and on other Afro-Americans who endorsed Mr. Nixon became vicious. Sammy Davis, Jr. almost got booed off the stage at Jesse Jackson’s Black Expo show in Chicago. Jesse had to quiet down the crowd himself before Sammy could sing. People announced boycotts of Jim Brown’s movies—he’d endorsed the president, too. Floyd McKissick, who had been director of CORE, was called a sellout.
Less than a week after I endorsed Mr. Nixon I did a show in Baltimore. There were pickets outside the arena discouraging people from coming to see my show. Usually I sold out all thirteen thousand seats there, but that night only about two thousand five hundred people showed up. I was disappointed. People just didn’t understand. Even Mr. Neely, a Republican himself, said to me one time, “I don’t think endorsing Nixon was a very smart thing to do.”
“I didn’t do it to be smart,” I said.
After the show in Baltimore, Mr. Brown came backstage. I could see he looked kind of down about what had happened with the pickets and the small crowd.
“Look,” I said, “it makes no difference to me. I’m going to do what I think is right You’re pushing people away from drugs, you’re helping black colleges and black businesses. Y’all keep on doing that. That’s why I’m endorsing the president. I think he can do those things better than anybody else right now. It makes no difference what happens.”
A lot of the stuff was aimed at me because of a picture of Sammy Davis hugging Mr. Nixon. The picture was in newspapers and in Jet and it made a lot of black folks mad. But somehow the rumor got started that I was the one hugging the president. That caused more mess, pickets and threats and boycotts, so Mr. Patton and other promotional people went around to the program directors of black-oriented stations and explained that it wasn’t me. The jocks started talking about it on the air, cooling that down. Meantime, I went about my business, touring and performing. There was still plenty of resentment, and people got right in my face about it. There was heckling and booing in the audience. I think they wanted to see how strong I’d be. I always told ’em I’d do it again.
I spent most of November and December putting together the soundtrack for the movie Black Caesar. In the middle of December a very disturbing incident happened after a concert in Knoxville. There had been some kind of incident at a black concert a few weeks before I came in, so the city wanted to put restrictions on other black concerts, including mine. That was like waving a red flag in front of me. Since I had a radio station there, I voiced some very strong opinons, and they didn’t like it.
After my concert, I was standing in the parking lot signing autographs and rapping with the fans about community things. There was an old fella who ran the Knoxville Coliseum and he wanted me away from there. He called the police and told ’em a story about inciting a riot. All of a sudden a bunch of police cars came sweeping into the lot, and the officers came out with shotguns. One started snatching me around and pushing me around. It was strange because I had a .38 in my pocket that I carried for protection. I had started carrying it during the days when I first started speaking out about politics, wanting to protect myself against somebody trying to shoot me or do something stupid, because there is always a fool in the crowd. The police beat two of my people, Bobby Diaz and my road manager, Freddie Holmes, but they didn’t beat me. If they had, I’d be dead today because I would have shot ’em, and then they would’ve mowed me down with those shotguns. They told me to get in the car, and I did. They took me downtown and booked me for inciting to riot and threw me in a cell. The funny thing was they didn’t search me. They locked me up with that .38 in my pocket. If they had come in the cell that night to beat me, I would have shot them coming in. I never could figure out why all that happened because they were just dead wrong from the start. I’ve never been able to put my finger on it. The only thing I could figure was that it was because I had the radio station there. The whole incident, coming when it did, really depressed me because it turned me against the system a little bit.
In January 1973 the Nixon people asked me to play the inaugural. I asked for money for the band; I thought they should be paid for their performance, at least, even if I wasn’t. The Nixon people wouldn’t pay, so I refused to do it. I thought they had funds for things like that.
When I went back into the Apollo in May, the Nixon thing still hadn’t died down. I had SRO crowds, but there were thirty or forty pickets outside the theater with signs that said, “James Brown—Nixon’s Clown” and “Get the Clown out of Town.” Some of the people who bought tickets and came in were still upset about the Nixon thing, too. Some heckled and hollered things, so I stopped the show and tried to talk to them.
“You can’t change a house from outside,” I said. “You have to be inside the house. That’s why I endorsed Mr. Nixon. I’m trying to sell us in. I’m trying to put pressure on the government not to forget about us. I’m trying to do some good. I think in time you’ll see that.”
Some people responded to that, some didn’t. The protests outside the theater went on, but there was something funny about them. They were run by a black cat who called himself Rabbi Judah Anderson. He was supposed to be head of an organization called the Harlem Salute Committee and said that they wanted to raise money to do something to honor black heroes, like build a museum in Harlem or something like that. He said he was picketing me because I had “repeatedly refused to cooperate with black groups in Harlem in their previous efforts to honor our black heroes.” What I’m convinced he really meant was I wouldn’t do a benefit show for his group and that the whole thing was really just a shakedown.
I met with him but decided he wasn’t legit, that if I simply gave him money he would back off. After a few days somebody did give him some money, and the protests stopped. I saw him every now and then after that, and when our eyes met I think he could see what I thought of him. I didn’t hate the man, but had no respect for what he stood for.
There were still a lot of people who didn’t like what I’d done, and they picketed a lot of shows. Many never forgave me. I think it cost me a lot of my black audience, just like “Black and Proud” had cost me a lot of my white audience.
After the election I went to see Mr. Nixon again about making Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. My father was with me.
“People talk about a national holiday costing too much money, but I think you can get around that by making it on a Sunday,” I said. “He was a minister, a spiritual man. He should be honored on Sunday, like Christ.”
“I’m going to do something better,” he said. “I’m going to see to it that a fitting monument to him is built.”
“In Washington?”
“No, in Atlanta.”
I didn’t think that was enough. I thought there should be a holiday in Dr. King’s honor. But I don’t think Mr. Nixon wanted to take that step.