James Brown and the Men Who Would Be President, Part One

The Godfather of Soul was not a constitutionally-created position, but James Brown was still allowed to walk the corridors of power. Most of the presidents, from the 36th (Lyndon Johnson) to the 43rd (George W. Bush), had a connection with Brown, getting advice from him, whether they wanted it or not.

May 8, 1968. Lyndon Johnson is still president, but he declared nearly six weeks earlier he would not run for a second full term. Becoming President of the United States was his lifelong ambition, but four and a half years in the office had sucked the life out of him. Some of it was his own doing. By making the Vietnam War the American War and committing, within four years, 536,000 US soldiers to battle, Johnson created a great divide in the United States. The country had done well enough to avoid regional conflicts since President Eisenhower negotiated the end of the Korean War in ‘53, but here was Johnson putting the Cold War between the US and the Soviets to a low simmer. This was severe upheaval for the country that Johnson dearly wished would love him. Sons, brothers, and husbands going off to war. By year’s end, a total of 31,000 soldiers returned home in boxes. The annual US death toll in the war had gone from 216 to nearly 17,000 in just four years. This was hardly the way to earn the love of the American people.

But on that May evening, a festive atmosphere fills The White House. A state dinner is being held for Thanom Kittikachorn, the Prime Minister of Thailand, an important ally of the United States, given that Bangkok is roughly 550 miles from Saigon. Among the dinner guests were a handful of men whose names were in the papers daily for the better part of 25 years: Clark Clifford, Sam Ervin, Birch Bayh, Edward Bennett Williams, Cyrus Vance, Dean Rusk, John Anderson, Allen Drury, and Earl Wilson, men who were making the news or writing about it. A very special guest was James Brown, already a friend of Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s. Just before the dinner, President Johnson left a note on Brown’s place card, saying, “Thanks much for what you are doing for your country — LBJ.” Johnson and Brown talked a little, but official duties held precedence. He toasted the prime minister and promised “to never abandon our commitment or compromise the future of Asia at the negotiating table.” Then Johnson got on with his dinner. In his memoir, The Godfather of Soul, Brown wrote, “He was eating a lot of food. That man was hungry.”

In two days, representatives from the United States and North Vietnam would meet for the first time to plan negotiations to end the war. Formal talks would break down after three days. Nearly five more years would pass before the signing of a peace agreement. President Johnson, who escalated the war against North Vietnam, yet welcomed the negotiations, was a victim of the war himself. He much preferred to spend his administration’s energy and the nation’s money on his Great Society programs. The $77 billion spent on the war would’ve been more wisely used for environmental protection, education and health care. After he left office, Johnson told journalist Doris Kearns Goodwin of the corner he was forced into by the war. From her book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, we read of Johnson’s struggling over his choices:

“I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved — the Great Society — in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

Johnson realized peace in Vietnam would improve the chances for peace within the United States. Over the previous year, large demonstrations against the war had taken place in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and other cities, including Washington, D.C., where The March on the Pentagon drew over 100,000 protestors. Many of the protestors turned violent against the soldiers and officers guarding the Pentagon. The war caused a divide in the nation from which it’s never recovered.

And Johnson knew the promise of peace negotiations would benefit Humphrey, who announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in late April. Humphrey was an ebullient politician, accentuating the positive. He invented “the politics of joy” concept.

Adding joy to Humphrey’s public persona was his friendship with James Brown. In The Godfather of Soul, Brown recalls a humorous encounter with Humphrey at the state dinner. Humphrey wanted to speak with Brown, sending a Secret Service man to Brown’s table. “The Vice President of the United States would like to see you at his table,” the messenger said. Brown recalled that sounded like an order. His reply was, “Please tell the vice president that James Brown is not his boy. I will not walk across the room to his table.” Brown said that “really shook up” the Secret Service man. But then he offered a big smile, saying he’d meet Humphrey halfway. Upon receiving the message, Humphrey caught Brown’s eye and started laughing. They met halfway. Brown made his point. He wasn’t anyone’s boy.

James Brown had struck up a friendship with Humphrey a year and a half earlier upon launching his stay-in-school campaign. Humphrey received Brown and the first copy of his single, “Don’t Be A Drop-Out” at the White House in October ’66. The campaign was indicative of Brown’s self-styled activism during a tumultuous era. He wasn’t content to simply lend his name to a cause. Brown spoke at high schools, promoting education as the way out of poverty. Scholarships were granted. He spoke with public officials, seeking their support.

Eventually, Hubert Humphrey would get James Brown’s support — and endorsement— in his campaign for President, but that was due to the death of Robert F. Kennedy, who looked to be on his way to the Democratic nomination before he was assassinated on June 5, hours after winning the California Primary. Weeks before, Brown had already decided to endorse Kennedy. Upon returning from his trip to Vietnam, where he performed for the troops, Brown and the Kennedy campaign would meet up and iron out the details. But the get-together never took place. Bullets and hatred, as with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. just two months earlier, were taking lives and damning peoples’ hopes. America was making a difficult road for itself.

Then there was the situation Boston Mayor Kevin White faced on Thursday, April 4, 1968, one he’d end up making more difficult. It’s early in the evening and he’s at a Boston movie theater, watching Gone With the Wind. A captivated audience hopes against hope that members of two slaveholding families make their way back safely to the plantation where its few remaining slaves will help them through the unpleasantness. Soon enough, slavery’s perpetrators returned to the barbeques, ballrooms, and mansions as the legacy of slavery continued to mount. In fiction and in real life. After the Civil War and more than one hundred years later, in Memphis, Tennessee. The theater manager brought Mayor White the terrible news: Dr. King had just been murdered.

As mayor, White would have to comfort his city’s Black citizens and others who understood America had perhaps lost its last chance for reconciliation. He was also tasked with keeping Boston’s streets to a minimum of violence and damage once the inevitable protests become riots. Three years earlier King said that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” And the unheard knew what they were hearing. However, at the moment, White didn’t dwell on that. In Common Ground, a political and social history of Boston in the ‘60s and ‘70s, J. Anthony Lukas wrote that White briefly wondered what he should do. He couldn’t come up with anything. Coldly, he thought the man is dead and went back to watching the movie. On the screen, Atlanta was burning. In real life, flames could engulf Boston any moment, but White sat frozen until the theater manager returned, telling him the city’s police commissioner was on the phone. Commissioner McNamara told White that Black youths were smashing windows and overturning cars in the Roxbury neighborhood. White snapped out of his torpor, walked to police headquarters and worked to get his city through the night. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn about Atlanta.

Ostensibly a liberal, Mayor White, already contemplating the big job in the White House, was aware of the dissent in the country and longed for the sounds of peace, especially in Boston. Especially at that moment. He’d need help and it would come by way of his new association with James Brown, a famous entertainer he had never heard of before, but known by some to be a most competitive or combative fellow. Things were much simpler for White a few minutes earlier when he watched Scarlett struggle on the road to Tara.

In his book, The Hardest Working Man, How James Brown Saved The Soul Of America, James Sullivan reports extensively on Friday, April 5, 1968, the day after King’s murder and the impact Brown had on that day in Boston. Sullivan sheds light on Brown’s ghetto-to-glory passage while also providing background on the racial polarization that Boston couldn’t, wouldn’t shake. It would be another tough day for America, a country in need of at least a little redemption, even if provided by a soul singer from Augusta, Georgia. Brown was scheduled to perform at the Boston Garden that night, but given the riots in several American cities upon King’s death the night before, Boston’s leadership, including Mayor White and the Garden’s management, favored postponing the concert. The idea didn’t go over well with Brown, who already felt pressed after taping a performance earlier in the day at the Apollo in New York. That was several hours before the live show scheduled for that evening at the Garden. In Common Ground, we read of Brown arriving in town that day fuming, “The concert has been killed!” With that, seven hours of negotiations between Brown and Boston, Massachusetts began.

Neither White nor his top aide, Barney Frank, knew anything about James Brown. White kept referring to him as “James Washington” while Frank confused him with Jim Brown, the NFL great-turned-actor. That was reflective of Mayor White’s overall focus on the Black community. He often said the right things and did appoint numerous Blacks to important city positions, but according to Lukas, he gave little thought to the everyday plight of Boston’s Blacks. He did not move easily among Black people. His detachment made for less currency in the city’s Black neighborhoods. That was the price for giving more thought to the city’s disaffected working class whites (and his own political future).

The mayor’s ambitions were evident soon after he was elected the previous fall. There was already talk of his running for governor in ‘70. That could smooth the path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet before he could daydream of bringing home the troops and building upon LBJ’s “Great Society,” he had to deal with an agitated James Brown.

Brown had enough going already. There was the concert that evening following the performance he taped for the TV special — entitled Man to Man — a few hours earlier. It would air in the early summer. The agreement between Man to Man’s producers and Brown called for no other television on the East Coast until after it aired. Complications on top of real life problems.

In the soap-operatic part two of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara tells Ashley Wilkes, “I’ve found out that money is the most important thing in the world. I don’t intend to ever be without it again.” One could easily perceive James Brown, like the fictional O’Hara, also born in Georgia, feeling that way too. He started on the bottom rung of life, had trouble with the law in his youth, then suffered from and dealt with the racism that was an essential element of his native American South. Two decades into his career, Brown, despite his charisma and success, was sure it could all be taken away. That said, there seemed no danger of James Brown becoming penniless in the late ‘60s. He was one of the most popular recording artists in America and upon waking on April 5, 1968, Brown was confident of selling out the 14,000-seat Boston Garden. A big payday awaited — as long as he took the stage that night and Kevin White was straight with him. That didn’t appear to be happening. Word got out that due to safety concerns, the James Brown concert was off. That decision was made without Brown’s input. His fans headed to the Garden throughout the day to get refunds for the tickets they bought in good faith. There were concerns that Brown would be culpable for supposedly abandoning his fans at an anxious time; a larger concern than one night’s proceeds.

There were acts of violence and looting in Boston on the night of the King murder, but the city did not experience the riots like those that occurred elsewhere in the nation. Still, Boston’s leaders worried over what would happen on Friday night and the rest of the weekend. Postponing a concert by one of the most popular Black performers in the country on that particular night would be an insensitive and foolhardy act — especially without talking to Brown first. So the talks, often terse, began. The seat-of-the-pants negotiations allowed the show to go on, be broadcast live and shown again throughout the night on Boston’s WGBH. Something would be worked out regarding the agreement on the East Coast TV exclusivity made with the producers of Man to Man. After all, events were emanating from the murder of the 20th century’s greatest and most inspirational person. Normal business practices could be set aside, or at least altered. But there was also the matter of James Brown getting what he expected when the concert was announced. He thought a $60,000.00 payday was still in order.

In The One, RJ Smith’s biography of Brown, we read of both sides feeling squeezed. There’d be a much smaller audience, roughly 2000, with fewer box office receipts to meet Brown’s demands. But fewer people in the Garden meant fewer people mixing with the tension on the downtown streets. Instead, they would be home watching the Brown concert on TV, once live and when shown repeatedly into the wee hours of Saturday morning. The city, supposedly finding a way to get the money, agreed to the $60,000.00. From there, White just needed to get Brown and his band on stage.

Brown gave a stellar performance, spoke to the audience about honoring the memory of Dr. King, and in a gesture of goodwill, introduced Kevin White to the audience, referring to the mayor as “a swinging cat,” one worthy of their support. There were some worrisome moments toward the end of the concert when fans climbed on the stage, wanting to shake Brown’s hand. Give Soul Brother No.1 credit, he treated everyone grabbing at him like a friend. He advised the police hovering nearby that everything was okay. All at once, Brown was cop and diplomat. Still, his nerves must have been frayed.

In The Godfather of Soul, Brown wrote of the relief felt in Boston as the city “got through the weekend almost without any trouble at all.” But the city gave Brown some trouble: Once the show was over, they reneged on the deal. In The One, RJ Smith reports that, according to Brown’s manager Charles Bobbit, the city only paid Brown $10,000.00. Exasperated, Bobbit said, “Where the rest of the money went, we’ll never know.” Smith observes that $10,000.00 wasn’t a bad price for “saving” Boston. $60,000.00 wouldn’t have been a bad deal either.

All the while, Smith laments:

It was ignoble of Brown not to do the show for free. But it’s possible to comprehend Brown’s perspective, too. Kevin White, who kept calling him Jim, pressuring him, telling Brown he owed it to Boston to stick his neck out further than White was willing to.

Brown was sticking his neck out in a time when many who did so were physically attacked, even murdered, for their efforts. He had to worry about resentful whites in a racially-polarized city and disenchanted Blacks who thought he had sold out to Kevin White — the mayor who wasn’t such “a swinging cat” after all. The vibes were awful; Boston’s most important guest and his band feared for their safety from the time they arrived until they beat it out of town.

A different perspective comes by way of Rebecca Burns’s Burial For A King. The book, published in 2011, chronicles the events, historic and personal, that friends and family members of King experienced during that sad funeral week in Atlanta, where King grew up and went on to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King was one of the world’s most famous people, but with four children and a modest home west of downtown, he and his wife Coretta were barely middle class. A small matter of business revealed by Burns is edifying. On Friday afternoon, around the same time James Brown and Kevin White were talking money in Boston, Coretta realized she and the children needed new clothes for the funeral on Tuesday. Mrs. King would also need a hat for the services. She asked her friend, the musician and civil rights worker, Xernona Clayton, to go downtown and choose the apparel. Clayton, possessing a keen sense of fashion, ordered the items, but upon her return, wondered aloud whether she’d have the money to pay for them. Two family friends, activist Stanley Levinson and entertainer Harry Belafonte, at the King home when she returned from the stores, passed along their credit cards so Clayton could pick up the clothing when ready.

It gives one pause to consider the plight of Coretta King and the children, having lost Martin and having little financial flexibility. They were like the millions of people King gave his life for, except for having a friend like Harry Belafonte in the foyer. Then we have James Brown and his financial quandary. Yes, Brown had surely incurred some expenses with the Boston show. He had a payroll to meet,* but Brown didn’t have to pass the collection plate at churches as civil rights leaders did. James Brown was an established star and in the year ahead, would release three singles sure to top the R&B charts. With Hubert Humphrey’s running mate Ed Muskie, he was featured on the cover of the February 18,1969 Look magazine. The Brown story in that issue described him as a “new and important leader” whose “constituency dwarfs Stokely Carmichael’s and the late Dr. Martin Luther King’s.” His ‘69 road show earnings generated over $3,000,000.00.* Today, that’s the equivalent of $25,000,000.00. Brown’s chart domination would continue into the ‘70s. He could have told Mayor White to keep the $10,000.00. He could have told the world the show was on him in honor of Dr. King.

Brown’s busy weekend was hardly over. On Saturday morning he responded to requests from Washington, D.C.’s Mayor Walter Washington and other officials concerned over rioting in the capitol city. It was hoped Brown could reach the people with a plea to end the violence. He received similar requests from other cities but decided to go to D.C. “because it was really the symbol of the whole country.” What he saw in the nation’s Capitol shook him:

“I couldn’t believe the destruction: buildings smoking, smashed glass all over the streets, stores with their windows busted out…..”Soul Brother” was written on many black-owned stores to protect them, but in a lot of cases, it didn’t do any good. They were looted, too. What disturbed me most was the people dying. I didn’t want to see any more people die, white or black.”

Brown went on live television from the Municipal Center. He conveyed his empathy to the angered Washingtonians, saying he felt the same way, but that nothing could be accomplished “by blowing up, burning up, stealing, and looting.” He started rapping in that James Brown style:

“Don’t terrorize. Organize. Don’t burn. Give kids a chance to learn. Go home. Look at TV. Listen to the radio. Listen to some James Brown records. The real answer to the problems in this country is education. Not burning and killing. Be ready. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody. That’s Black Power.”

He called on people to honor Dr. King because he was their “hero.” He stated they had “an obligation to fulfill his dream of true brotherhood. You can’t do that with violence.” Brown continued his appeals later on WOL radio. Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady, and her daughter, Luci Baines Nugent, called in to tell him thanks.

Less than a week before the King murder, Mrs. Johnson and her daughters were breathing sighs of relief as President Johnson announced he would not seek a second full term in the Oval Office. Johnson’s health had long been a concern and his diet of fatty foods and hard liquor added pounds while taking away the years he hoped to spend with his grandson. Also, instead of campaigning during most of the nearly ten months he had remaining as president, he’d dedicate more time to achieving peace in Vietnam. That’s what he told the American people in a televised speech on March 31, 1968, but the killing in Southeast Asia would continue, as it would in the US, with nearly 14,000 homicides that year, two of them forever cheating the nation of a more peaceful history.

James Brown would continue showing up in the nation’s historic moments, conferring with leaders over important matters. Brown, after all, had not lived a sheltered life, he had been out there. Politicians seldom come upon such a unique acquaintance. But the more direct and profound words of wisdom were those he shared with his fans, like on that weekend in Boston and Washington, D.C. and shortly before the ‘68 election, when declaring his people, after all the pain they had suffered, should move forward with pride.

*Brown’s payroll in 1969 was reported to be over $1,000,000.00, more than $8,000,000.00 in today’s USD.

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