Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  But by 1965, many black leaders openly questioned the goal of integration. Wouldn’t blacks be better off with their own successful institutions such as Motown? This was Hurston’s question, but after a decade more of experience with integration, more blacks were asking it.

  Major League Baseball was an example. Segregation led to the creation of about two hundred all-black professional baseball teams. They had black coaches, black managers, and black owners and were the leading black entertainment—according to some historians, a bigger draw than even music. Black baseball produced some of the best players and some of the best teams in the history of the sport. Then, in 1946, Major League Baseball was integrated, starting with Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. A handful of Negro League stars were picked up, such as Satchel Paige, who pitched for Cleveland on the 1948 World Series Champion Cleveland Indians. Soon white Major League Baseball was skimming off the best of the black players, and black baseball lost its fans and was no longer commercially viable. But at no time has Major League Baseball offered more than a fraction of the jobs in baseball that the Negro Leagues had. There was only a smattering of black players, a few black coaches, rare black managers and general managers, and no black owners until 2012, when basketball star Magic Johnson became owner of the Dodgers. So some could ask, why was this progress? And although this was an example of successful integration, by 1964 most attempts such as schools had had little success.

  Nor was there still wide acceptance of the tactic of nonviolence. In fact, it had always been a questioned approach. Martin Luther King Jr., who owned numerous firearms, was talked into nonviolence largely by Quaker Bayard Rustin. Among nonviolent civil rights activists in the Deep South, the shotgun was a common piece of household equipment that proved useful in scattering advancing Klansmen in the night. A distinction was made between the tactic of nonviolence and the necessity of self-defense. But even Mohandas K. Gandhi made that distinction. Following Gandhi’s example, nonviolence was used as an aggressive tool of activism and was never passive.

  Among black militants there were always skeptics. In 1959, activist Robert F. Williams was suspended from the NAACP for six months after he declared, “We must meet violence with violence.” There had always been numerous blacks who scoffed at King and felt his movement was not accomplishing anything. Some were the young people who joined SNCC, but there were many others. In 1963, after leaving the Great March in Detroit, King went to New York, where a young black crowd outside a Harlem church pelted him with eggs.

  It was not without reason that the youth questioned the efficacy of the movement. In 1964, ten years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision officially integrated schools, in the eleven states of the old Civil War Confederacy, 1 percent of black public school students attended integrated classrooms.

  As the nonviolent civil rights movement endured beating after burning, after lynching, after shooting, this idea of violence for violence was gaining currency. Also gaining currency was the phrase “black power.” The term had first been used by author Richard Wright in 1954 as the title of a book about the Ghana independence struggle. Malcolm X had used it. It was only in 1965 that it came into wide usage. The term, often misunderstood, summed up the idea that rather than petitioning the white establishment for their rights, black people ought to build their own power base through economic success, which had been Booker T. Washington’s argument. Berry Gordy, who tried to steer clear of black power politics, was in fact a black power ideal. Black power combined Washington and Du Bois, who thought blacks should be political activists. But this new movement found Du Bois and his NAACP to be far too soft, focused on having blacks aspire to white values. The black power movement was nationalist, infused with the idea that blacks were different, an African American nation within the American one. And like SNCC from the start, it had the impatience of youth. It carried the idea “we have waited too long.” And Malcolm X added the phrase “by any means necessary.”

  History teaches that every act of violence precipitates others until it is hard to say where it all began. But at least it can be said that the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, shot at least seven times at the beginning of a talk in a ballroom in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, at age thirty-nine, was an important step in turning the mid-1960s to violence. He was thought to have been killed by gunmen from the Nation of Islam, the group he had broken away from in 1964. His troubles with this group and its leader, Elijah Muhammed, started when Malcolm X had made this same observation about violence and history. He had referred to the assassination of President John Kennedy as the “chickens coming home to roost.” Elijah Muhammed disapproved of the remark. The point Malcolm X was making was that allowing violence against black people in America created the climate that made Kennedy’s assassination possible.

  Malcolm knew that violence. In his boyhood, Malcolm’s father had been killed, according to unconfirmed rumor, by white racists, and an uncle had been lynched. Malcolm converted to the Nation of Islam while serving prison time for breaking and entering. A young man of great political skill who could bundle together a confusing array of contradictions, he nonetheless advocated violence. He did not believe in the nonviolent tactics of the civil rights movement, and told every black person to own a firearm. In an interview published by the Village Voice four days after his death he said, “Only violence or a real threat of it will get results.”

  Yet there was a clear sense that the violence toward Malcolm X would unleash even more violence. Marvin Gaye said, “I loved Malcolm’s strength and his truth-telling. When they cut him down, I felt the loss inside my soul, and I knew that an age of terrible violence and suffering had just begun. I knew what my people were feeling—all the pent-up rage and anger. I felt it, too.”

  Robert F. Williams continued with his fiery rhetoric. In 1962 he published a book, Negroes with Guns, in which he said, “All those who dare to attack are going to learn the hard way that the African American is not a pacifist, that he cannot forever be counted on not to defend himself.” In July 1965, Williams, at a poorly attended speech, said, “We are now in the year of fire.” Using an increasingly common phrase, he predicted “a long, hot summer.” In fact he called for it. “Let our people take to the streets in fierce numbers and meet violence with violence. Let our battle cry be heard around the world: freedom, freedom, freedom now—or death.”

  The prediction about summer proved true just as the same prediction from Malcolm X the summer before had.

  • • •

  What Billboard had recognized when they reinstated the R&B chart was that blacks and whites still had very different ways of looking at things. In a 1961 essay titled “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin explained his friendship with Norman Mailer, saying that although he greatly admired him and had a deep fondness for him, the two writers could never truly understand each other because of the difference between being black and being white. Baldwin wrote, “There is a difference, though, between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.”

  Amiri Baraka saw the white-black relationship often stuck in a historic view from slave times in which whites tend to see blacks as childish and blacks see whites as foolish.

  The one thing that seemed clear was that whites and blacks saw through different lenses. One of those differences between the white perspective and the black was how the summer urban riots, which were becoming a regular event, were viewed. To the blacks they were insurrections, violent protest, uprisings that if not exactly planned had an idea and a goal behind them. The goal was to alarm the white man. It was Malcolm X’s idea of the value of violence. But whites saw only riots—violent chaos from an angry people, disorganized or perhaps incapable of real organization. Evidence for the black point of view was the pattern in which white property and interests in the ghetto were attacked while th
ose of blacks were left unharmed. This reality was obscured by the fact that the violent police response always left far more black victims than white.

  The division was never neat. Some whites also saw insurrection, including political activist Tom Hayden and even CBS News, which used the same word to describe these outbreaks. On the other hand, Martha Reeves was one of many blacks who simply saw these events as riots.

  • • •

  The violent outbreak in black Los Angeles should not have been a surprise. There had been several earlier outbreaks of violence, all of which were aggravated by a harsh, violent response from the Los Angeles Police Department. By the summer of 1964, the office of Governor Pat Brown had discussed a detailed report on the explosive situation in South Los Angeles. From the white point of view, it all erupted in August because of a heat wave that had kept the temperature in the nineties. This is also part of a racist stereotype that endured through the 1960s, that black people got out of control in hot weather. Actually the heat wave broke during the uprising, and most of it occurred in somewhat cooler weather. The violence of August 1965 spread throughout South Los Angeles, but was named after its epicenter in a neighborhood called Watts.

  For black people, even traditional civil rights leaders who deplored violence, what happened in Watts was understandable. Bayard Rustin said that Watts was caused by a “rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”

  It is interesting that since that uprising made Watts famous, whites have constantly expressed surprise that Watts is not a crowded urban area of high-rise tenements but a sprawling zone of houses on wide palm tree–lined boulevards. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush toured the area after another violent outbreak and declared with great surprise, “This is open and rather pretty.” It had also been supposed that crowding made Negroes act the way they did.

  Other suggestions were “brain disease” and “weak character.” An article in the 1967 Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Role of Brain Disease in Riots and Urban Violence” by Vernon H. Mark, W. H. Sweet, and F. R. Ervin, all respected doctors, asked why, if the cause of the violence was the conditions in the ghetto, all the ghetto dwellers didn’t riot, but instead only a minority. Is there a brain disease in the Negro population that causes these outbreaks? Dr. Mark spoke to President Johnson and to his Kerner Commission, which was investigating the riots. George Todt, a conservative columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, opined that the root of the uprisings was “the weak character traits in uncivilized human beings.”

  It was also proposed that the riot was caused by the writings of James Baldwin. And it was also suggested that the popularity of the song “Dancing in the Street” had encouraged black people to take to the streets. This idea comes primarily from the observation by fans that during the riots this very popular song at the time was never heard on the radio. Had it been banned because it provoked rioting? No radio station ever said so. The song just wasn’t played, and the rumor persisted. Even if only a rumor, this was the first time it was suggested that the song had a second meaning.

  This idea that “Dancing in the Street” caused violence came out of the broader idea that black R&B radio was being blamed. One of the favorite scapegoats was the popular LA black deejay Magnificent Montague. Montague was known for his flamboyant rap and for unconventional practices, such as playing a favorite song fifteen times in a row. Berry Gordy said of Montague, “Once you heard his outrageous oratory, you wouldn’t forget it or him.” He was particularly remembered for saying as he started a record, “Feel the heat I’m sending to your soul. Burn, baby, burn!” Montague had just arrived that year at KGFJ from New York. “Burn, baby, burn!” was already his trademark. Fans would call in and say it, and he would gratefully respond with “Burn, baby.”

  During the Watts uprising, white people started complaining that Montague was inciting black people to arson. In fact, people on the streets of Watts would shout, “Burn, baby, burn.” The police went to his studio and demanded he stop using the word burn. By the third day of the uprising he agreed not to say it.

  It was true that his phrase had become a slogan for violence in the street, a fact that even decades later was deeply painful to Montague. Often white journalists reported the use of the slogan without even knowing from where it had come. Throughout the 1960s, the phrase remained on the streets in black areas where there had been uprisings. In 2008, when Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin chanted, “Drill, baby, drill” to call for offshore oil drilling, she probably knew even less about the origin of the phrase than did the white reporters in Los Angeles in 1965. She did not mean to be invoking a phrase about the meaning of R&B soul, much less about black nationalism and urban uprisings, which she would have termed “rioting.”

  The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Popular culture seems to find a similar path from enthusiastic expression to violent opposition to banal jargon—from emotion to jargon to nothing more than a pleasing rhythm. This, too, was the trajectory with which “Dancing in the Street” was destined to struggle.

  • • •

  What did set off the violence was the arrest on August 11 of a twenty-one-year-old high school dropout named Marquette Frye with a juvenile record for suspected drunkenness. Frye, born in Oklahoma, the third of four children, moved to Los Angeles at the age of ten with his mother, who remarried there. According to Marquette, he and his brother Ronald were celebrating Ronald’s discharge from the Air Force, drinking vodka and orange juice with two women they knew. On the way home they were stopped by the California Highway Patrol, who were about to let them go, when a second car pulled up with an officer who allegedly taunted Marquette, and he argued back. A crowd formed, and they were joking with the police, exchanging words but lightheartedly. But when Marquette’s mother, who lived nearby, arrived, she angrily derided the police for harassing her son, whereupon one of the officers twisted one of her arms behind her back, lifted her by the twisted arm, and put handcuffs on her, causing her to cry out in pain. Then, according to Marquette, the crowd got “boisterous.” An officer hit Marquette with a hard blow to the head. The patrol car door was slammed on his leg. And he was hit in the head again as they drove him away, leaving an angry crowd behind.

  The police said that they had to use force because he was resisting arrest; however, Frye was five feet seven and 130 pounds. The situation rapidly ignited, and six days later 34 people were dead, 1,032 people injured, and there was more than $40 million in property damage. Most of the property damage was to white establishments accused of discriminatory practices. Most of the deaths and injuries were to blacks.

  In addition to 934 officers of the LAPD, 718 officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff and 2,300 California Army National Guardsmen were called in to quell the disturbance. The brutality with which the uprising was attacked caught national attention, as did Police Chief William Parker’s observation that the rioters were like “monkeys in a zoo.”

  • • •

  Many of the responses to Watts indicated that the uprising had successfully made its point. Journalist Theodore White, by no measure a radical, wrote in the Los Angeles Times on August 22, only a few days after South Los Angeles was subdued, “Modern Negro violence is not simply rioting but a form of guerrilla warfare.” Although he urged “new weapons and tactics” to face this new threat, he also stated, “It is at this time perhaps necessary to find out how to create some form of Negro self-government coupled with Negro responsibility in the big cities, which will give Negroes that sense of control over their own destinies that all men so dearly require.”

  The office of California governor Pat Brown obtained funding from
the legislature to give job training to five thousand people in South Los Angeles, which quickly created almost that many jobs, and though that barely made a dent in unemployment in the area, it was an impressive start.

  Watts had a profound effect on Marvin Gaye, which in turn would impact on Motown:

  I remember I was listening to a tune of mine playing on the radio, “Pretty Little Baby,” when the announcer interrupted with news about the Watts riot. My stomach got real tight and my heart started beating like crazy. I wanted to throw the radio down and burn all the bullshit songs I’d been singing and get out there and kick ass with the rest of the brothers. I knew they were going about it wrong. I knew they weren’t thinking, but I understood anger that builds up over the years—shit, over centuries—and I felt myself exploding. Why didn’t our music have anything to do with this? Wasn’t music supposed to express feelings? No, according to BG, music’s supposed to sell. That’s his trip. And it was mine.

  • • •

  In the spring of 1966 Trinidadian-born, New York City–raised Stokely Carmichael was elected leader of SNCC. A man of mischievous wit and elegant speech, he emphasized the break of SNCC from Martin Luther King. The slogan “Freedom Now” was to be replaced with “Black Power.” He simply had had it. In June 1966 he was arrested in Greenwood, Mississippi, during a march with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders. In a now-famous speech he said, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested—and I ain’t going to jail no more!” Then he added, “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nuthin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” The crowd roared back the new slogan “Black Power!”