Memphis 68

by Cosgrove, Stuart;

  From the outset, the Poor People’s Campaign attracted donations from all the major soul singers and independent labels of the time, from Motown in Detroit, from Stax in Memphis, and from Wand Records in New York City. It had touched a nerve in the glamorous bodies of the newly rich. Inevitably, many of the soul singers who had come to prominence in the sixties and early seventies identified with the campaign; some visited Resurrection City and many more helped with funding or appeared at benefit concerts. But by far the biggest connection was poverty itself. Many of soul music’s most successful artists had emerged from the deprivation that the campaign was designed to highlight. Bill Withers, whose classic love song ‘Lean On Me’ was yet to be released, had been born into brutal poverty in the coal-mining town of Slab Rock, West Virginia. Withers had a stutter, struggled at school, and lost his terminally ill father as a teenager. The great southern soul singer Millie Jackson was born in Thompson, a depot town on the Georgia railroad where her father laboured as a sharecropper. Like Withers she grew up in a single-parent family, her mother dying when she was a child. The troubled singers who rehearsed in Roosevelt Jamison’s segregated blood bank and then signed to Goldwax Records were inevitably poor and drawn from the scattered townships of Mississippi. James Carr was from Clarksdale, Mississippi, a former slave town where local black families were brutalised and then forced to leave when machinery replaced cotton picking by hand. The town had been home to Sam Cooke, Ike Turner and to blues troubadours John Lee Hooker and Son House. One of Stax’s most gifted singers, J. Blackfoot of the Soul Children, took his name from the streets of Memphis. Too poor to be able to afford his own shoes, he wandered the tar-smeared streets of the ghetto and earned the nickname ‘Black-Foot’. His real name was John Colbert, and as a teenager he became embroiled in petty crime, stealing cars, breaking into convenience stores, and shoplifting. By his late teens he was imprisoned in the notorious Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, where by sheer chance he ended up in the same prison wing as the incarcerated soul singer Johnny Bragg, who formed soul music’s most intimidating harmony group, the Prisonaires. Bragg had been an inmate since 1943, convicted for six charges of rape; Ed Thurman and William Stewart were both doing ninety-nine-year sentences for murder; they were joined by John Drue Jr, who was serving a shorter sentence for larceny, and Marcell Sanders who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Although Blackfoot never officially joined the Prisonaires, he sang with them in rehearsal and vowed that on his release he would pursue a music career despite the barriers in his way. He recorded one non-event record called ‘Surfside Slide’ on an obscure Nashville label called Sur-Speed Records and then headed home to Memphis where he sang in wine alleys and local juke joints on the corner of McLemore and College, where Stax had its base. Blackfoot was eventually discovered by songwriter David Porter and employed on a short-term contract at Stax, where for months after the death of Otis Redding he was a temporary member of the devastated Bar-Kays. Blackfoot’s voice, steeped in the cadences of poverty and rural church pews, set him apart, and he was eventually selected by the Stax management team to form part of a ‘manufactured’ group, the Soul Children. He was joined by Anita Louis, Shelbra Bennett and Norman West in a double male/female duo. Far from being contrived or in any way second rate, the Soul Children grew to become one of the most talented acts on Stax’s books and arguably one of the finest soul groups.

  Juanita Miller stayed in touch with the SCLC by phone, seeking advice and asking for help to source mules and wagons to carry the Memphis contingent all the way to the White House. Logic would have suggested they travel to Washington by Greyhound bus but that was not the spirit of the march, and so the Memphis contingent managed to secure farm wagons from the South and the rag-tag army became the last to leave the assembly point at Marks, Mississippi. Theirs were the final wagons to lumber into Washington, by which time Resurrection City stretched out like a shanty town across the Mall. Shortly before the demonstrators were to arrive, Abernathy had been granted a temporary permit by the National Park Service for 3,000 people to set up camp in the grassy surrounds to the south of the Reflecting Pool that stretches serenely from the Lincoln Memorial. It was a near perfect location – at the centre of power and at the seat of democracy – rippling with history and rich in meaning. Poor people had come to shame the powerful. An opening ceremony was held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo High School stadium, in an area of inner-city DC that had been most heavily hit by the riots. Coretta Scott King conducted the ceremony and Resurrection City was officially declared open. Back at the Mall, Abernathy took the ceremonial lead and drove an inaugural stake into the ground, announcing the foundations of a poor people’s city within walking distance of the White House. Construction begun and the first of 650 plywood huts roofed with plastic sheeting was built. Resurrection City was designed to have three makeshift dining facilities, a medical tent and a nursery. Food, blankets and medical supplies were provided by churches across the beltway and to echo the democracy of a real community a city hall was built. Reverend Jesse Jackson was declared the Mayor of Resurrection City, his first step on the ladder of public office. Street signs were erected – Martin Luther King Avenue and Fannie Lou Hamer Street – and other sections took their name from famous ghettos: Harlem, Watts and Motor City. Unofficial names began to appear as graffiti on the walls of the shacks. ‘Rat Patrol Cleveland’ read one, ‘Soul Sisters’ read another, and in the soul argot of the time another wall paid tribute to the dead and the missing in Vietnam – ‘Jimmy Mack – When Are You Coming Back?’

  Two days earlier Abernathy had been told by journalists that his family had been arrested in Georgia for trespassing on state highways. The Deep South caravan had made its slow progress mostly by back roads, but when the caravan of mules and farm wagons rocked perilously onto the highway the police intervened. Reactions varied: some mule trains were stopped and searched; others were given a police escort to the state line. Among the last to arrive at Resurrection City was Juanita Miller’s Memphis contingent. It was a ragged army of Black Power activists, welfare mothers and children. On arrival, they were allocated a row of shacks on the southern periphery, and on seeing the graffiti that had appeared elsewhere they decorated the sodden brown huts with their own painted slogans: ‘Invaders Have Landed’, ‘Memphis Soul’ and ‘Le Moyne Goes To Washington’.

  The journalist Nan Robertson, reporting for The New York Times, wrote: ‘Shacks were decorated with slogans and graffiti, funny and inspirational by turn, which illustrated the human need to put a personal stamp on even the most primitive and temporary of shelters.’ The photographer Jill Freedman, who travelled down from New York to join the campaign, found herself in the midst of one of the greatest photo opportunities of the sixties – a camp populated by the rural poor, restless children, Black Panthers, urban gang members and devout Christians. She wrote in her personal diary: ‘Resurrection City was pretty much just another city. Crowded. Hungry. Dirty. Gossipy. Beautiful. It was the world, squeezed between flimsy snow fences and stinking of humanity.’

  On 12 May Resurrection City was given its first significant boost when an additional 5,000 protestors flocked to DC for a Mother’s Day March, led by Coretta Scott King. But it was in many ways a false dawn. The place was compromised from the outset; the area around the Reflecting Pool was sodden, and the rudimentary plumbing that had been laid fell far short of the camp’s needs. Resurrection City quickly became a swamp as the torrential rains of the summer of 1968 defied the seasonal odds. Only fourteen of the forty-two days that Resurrection City survived were dry, and even as the city moved towards completion, health and welfare officials worried about dangers to public health as pools of urine flooded through the tented encampments. Wobbly planks of wood were arranged as pathways, but they only partly negotiated a way through floating sewage. In the early days the poor conditions did nothing to deter the campaign and a series of protests was under way. On 21 May the residents picketed the Capitol and the State Departm
ent, but with time the living conditions worsened and spirits flagged. Abernathy’s first-hand witness report hints at deteriorating moods. ‘Next day the heavens opened,’ he wrote. ‘Day after day, the gray skies poured water, huge sheets that swept across the mall like the monsoons of India. The first day or two it was an adventure, sitting in the City Hall tent listening to the persistent rapping of raindrops on the canvas. But after a week the green grass that had provided us with a natural carpeting sank under our feet into soft mud. You could emerge from your tent, take a couple of steps, and suddenly find yourself ankle deep in cold, brown slush.’

  Each new day brought further setbacks. The weather worsened and rain poured down. It was election time, but none of the presidential candidates showed up to talk to the campers, and the tolerance of the press, who had initially enjoyed the circus of the first few days, began to wane. A mood of sourness took over. A few unsavoury incidents broke out on the periphery of the encampment in which tourists were threatened and their money stolen, and police were insulted for no good reason. The official permit that allowed Resurrection City to exist was due to expire on 24 June and it became clear that there was little or no chance of an extension. Realising that time was running out, the SCLC leadership planned a final protest, a rally in tribute to Martin Luther King to be held in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the site of the very first Long March to DC, and where King had improvised his most famous speech – ‘I Have a Dream’.

  The final rally was to be called Solidarity Day and, remarkably, after the torrential conditions, the camp woke to a blisteringly hot day. Over 50,000 demonstrators marched to the Lincoln Memorial and surrounded the Reflecting Pool, singing from the civil rights hymn sheet and listening respectfully as Coretta Scott King, shrouded in her now familiar black mourning clothes, addressed the crowd. It was a day of quiet resistance and determined solemnity, redolent of the early gospel days of civil rights, but within a matter of two days the mood had lurched yet again to one of threat and anger when a gang of Resurrection City youths, led by the Chicago gang the Blackstone Rangers, threw fire bombs at passing motorists. With less than twenty-four hours left on the camp’s temporary permit, police moved in with clubs and tear gas. It was a sad metaphor for the summer of 1968 as the power of the peaceful resistance and plea for civil rights gave way to the more strident and aggressive politics of Black Power.

  Washington’s local Public Broadcast Station WETA reported: ‘In the early morning hours of June 23, 1968, thick clouds of tear gas rolled through a multitude of shacks on the National Mall. This shantytown was Resurrection City, and its residents were the nation’s poor. As many ran from their shelters, they saw Martin Luther King Jr’s final dream of economic equality withering in the gas. They had been citizens of the city for six weeks, all the while campaigning for rights for the poor around DC. Now their work seemed all for naught. After an increase in violence and with an expiring living permit, the police had come to chase them out. Children were crying, adults screaming, and some were even vomiting. But amid the chaos, a song rang out: “We Shall Overcome”.’

  SCLC leader Andrew Young claimed: ‘It was worse than anything I saw in Mississippi or Alabama. You don’t shoot tear gas into an entire city because two or three hooligans are throwing rocks.’ The gas soon cleared but the authorities had the excuse they needed to bring the protest to an end. Within twenty-four hours a special Civil Disturbance Squad came and officially shut down the camp, and the dismantling of the dream began in earnest. The tired and bedraggled contingent of Memphis protestors, including the Invaders, made their sombre way home to the poverty programmes and decaying projects of South Memphis.

  Slick enforcers. Johnnie Baylor (left) and Dino ‘Boom Boom’ Woodard (right) at a Stax social gathering.

  © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

  DINO WOODARD’S TRIP TO MIAMI

  August

  Dino Woodard had fists that hung heavy like swollen fruit and the intimidating habit of cracking his finger bones as if they were being prepared for action. He had literally grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, and lived by the giant salvage yards off South Main Street where railroads met and merged. As a boy he kept fit by turning the scrapyards and discarded sleepers near Booker T. Washington High School into a ghetto gymnasium. David Porter and Maurice White lived locally, too, and, according to urban folklore, Woodard ran in a local gang with Porter’s older brothers in an area that the Stax songwriter once described as ‘a dead-end street in the last house on Virginia Avenue’.

  Woodard was a young man with an unnerving reputation for violence. Even as a youngster he had behavioural problems and teetered on the brink of sociopathy, yet he often regretted his brutality, was nagged by his conscience and deeply held religious beliefs. One Memphis insider, who had no good reason to like Woodard, once said, ‘He would beat you up, steal your money, but feel bad about it the next day, then come and apologise, and beat you up again.’ Despite his violent reputation, Woodard had mood swings that belied his hardness. He was a devout brute in many respects, yet one with a preacher’s sensibility and a fondness for quoting tracts from the Bible. He pioneered the shaven-head look that became more readily associated with Isaac Hayes and had a heavy sculpted brush moustache that accentuated a brooding menace. By August 1968 he had become a security guard at Stax, a description that significantly underplayed his real role. Initially, however, he had been hired by the company to repel local thugs and to ensure that Stax’s interests were protected in an industry that attracted gangsters and drug barons like moths to a light.

  Throughout his teenage years Woodard was a champion boxer, regularly winning high-school tournaments and local amateur fights. He borrowed a nickname from a flyweight boxer Lenny ‘Boom Boom’ Mancini, out of Youngstown, Ohio, and long after he retired from fighting was often known as ‘Boom Boom’ or simply ‘Boom’. Many thought that the name came from the sound of a gunshot, a misunderstanding Woodard never corrected. After exhausting the potential of the local boxing circuit in Memphis and a move north to New York, he fought as a Golden Gloves contender and trained in the same gym as Sugar Ray Robinson. With his low centre of gravity, orthodox style and forearm strength, he was employed as a sparring partner at gyms in Harlem, and by the age of twenty-four was the stand-in to get Robinson ready for crucial fights with Carmen Basilio and Gene Fullmer, whose styles he imitated. In the case of Robinson’s rematch with Fullmer, Woodard was instructed to persistently rabbit punch Robinson to allow him to ward off Fullmer’s illegal attacking style. For a spell Woodard was a day-rate boxer at Harry Wiley’s Gym at Broadway and 136th Street, where he helped Robinson to train the legendary jazz musician Miles Davis. It was at a time in the late fifties when Harlem was experiencing its last great era as the capital of African-American culture. Robinson drove around the neighbourhood in his flamingo-pink Cadillac – provocatively called ‘The Hope Diamond of Harlem’ – and, as author Wil Haygood described, turned his life into ‘a waltz through the times in which he lived’. By the time Robinson retired, Woodard had already diversified into Harlem’s other infamous pursuits, working in and around the late-night jazz and soul clubs, the small record stores and independent labels that were dotted around 125th Street.

  It was a world of flamboyance and dark violence. Sometime in the early sixties Woodard befriended Johnny Baylor, another formidable hard man, who had moved north to Harlem from Bessemer, Alabama. Baylor was the real deal, a US Ranger trained in military combat at Fort Benning, Georgia, who on his release from the military became an ice-cold gangster. His sharp suits and dark sunglasses screamed of self-confidence and latent criminality. Irrespective of the time of day, Baylor’s shades stared out at the world and the two men working in tandem began to cultivate a name for themselves on the fringes of the Harlem crime scene. Both men carried guns with the intent to use them, and together they dreamed of setting up a successful soul label, initially from a base in Harlem. Stax myth has it that the two were in effect gun
s for hire and were brought to Memphis to repel a group of local thugs who were intimidating the staff at the studio. Long before the riots of 1968, the area around the Stax studios had been on a spiral of decline and staff, especially the women, frequently complained to Jim Stewart that the neighbourhood was no longer safe. There had been a spate of carjackings and armed hold-ups, and a mood of brooding menace prevailed in the car parks and side streets surrounding the studios. The police were called on occasion, but Stax were told that they had chosen a bad area to base their business in and were left with no option but to provide their own security. It proved to be a darkly prophetic suggestion. At first Stax looked into a local security firm, but the petty criminals at the root of the problem needed a harsher solution, and someone among the ranks of the musicians suggested contacting Dino Woodard. That is the official version of events, but it is almost certainly the surface of a much more complex story. Al Bell already knew the pair from their membership of a nascent industry pressure group called the Fair Play Committee (FPC), which agitated for improved rights for African-American artists, producers and employees in the music industry, and he had met them on several occasions over the years when he was a promotions man and the distance between soul music and petty crime could be measured in inches. Since the fifties the R&B industry had built up its own questionable practices, not least of which was payola – the system that encouraged small under-resourced record companies to pay DJs to play their records. New York had built up its own industry, disguising payola by providing DJs with spurious credits on records, which allowed them to be paid via royalties rather than in cold hard cash. By 1968 soul music was rife with the malpractice. For example, DJ Frankie ‘Loveman’ Crocker was credited with being the artist on a funk instrumental ‘Ton Of Dynamite’ on the All Platinum Records subsidiary Turbo. It was in fact a track by the All Platinum studio band, to which Crocker made no real contribution other than playing it on his radio shows. The famous Chicago DJ E. Rodney Jones, the prime-time DJ at WVON, was also a recipient of revenue from a pounding instrumental ‘R&B Time’ in which he raps over the beat in a primitive hip-hop style. Most transparently of all, Philadelphia DJ Jocko Henderson had the drive-time show on Radio Station WLIB New York. Henderson supposedly ‘compiled’ two albums for the Wand record label featuring records by Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown. Jocko’s sounds led the compilations with records credited to him, and he was rewarded accordingly.