1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (10 page)

The killers ran, though the crowd caught one, Nation of Islam’s Talmadge Hayer, and beat him until the police showed up. He said that four others were involved, but he wouldn’t name them; two other men were jailed.

Elijah Muhammad said, “Malcolm X got just what he preached.”
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King sent a condolence telegram to Malcolm’s wife, Betty, and told the press, “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem. He was an eloquent spokesman for his point of view, and no one can honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems that we face as a race.”

Crowds of up to thirty thousand attended the public viewing in Harlem on February 23–26. Actor Ossie Davis, known to later generations by his many appearances in Spike Lee films, delivered the eulogy. Davis’ wife Ruby Dee (who would also later be a Lee alum) and Sidney Poitier’s wife Juanita raised money for Malcolm’s family. He had died at age thirty-nine with no savings for his survivors; he hadn’t wanted to profit from his organization.

The
New York Times
obituary on February 22 labeled him “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose.” On March 5,
Time
wrote that Malcolm was “an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred…” But theirs would hardly be the last word. Malcolm had been in the process of authoring his
Autobiography
with Alex Haley, who would later write
Roots
. Published in November, it went on to sell millions of copies over the ensuing decades.

*   *   *

In Alabama, on February 26,
Jimmie Lee Jackson died in the hospital from his gunshot wounds. King railed at Jackson’s funeral on March 3, “He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam and cannot protect the rights of its own citizens seeking the right to vote.”

In response to Jackson’s shooting, the SCLC planned a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery. It was to be in the style of Gandhi’s marches, which lasted for days and provided lots of time for media coverage. Governor George Wallace quickly forbade the march, but 525 protestors embarked on March 7 anyway.

Sheriff Clark ordered all white males over twenty-one in his county to report to the courthouse for deputation. Then Clark’s men watched as Governor Wallace ordered the state troopers to stop the march. When the demonstrators proceeded to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 200 troopers, many on horseback, attacked them with tear gas, billy clubs, bullwhips, and rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire. When the marchers fled, the mounted troopers chased them and continued beating them while white crowds on the sidelines cheered.

A local church was turned into a makeshift medical facility to help over fifty marchers suffering serious injuries, and at least sixteen were admitted to Selma’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Many enraged blacks wanted to return with guns to exact vengeance and had to be talked down by the nonviolent organizers, who pointed out the troopers had more guns, and more powerful guns at that.
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Contrary to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 rap “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” with the attack on the marchers, the nonviolent civil rights revolution would begin its televised climax. The ABC Sunday Night Movie that evening was
Judgment at Nuremberg
, in which Americans put white supremacist Nazis on trial in the weeks after World War II. ABC News interrupted the movie to show forty-eight million viewers footage of women, children, and clergy being assaulted in what was quickly named “Bloody Sunday.”

The nationwide revulsion was immediate. King arrived in Selma and put out a call for all religious leaders and sympathetic citizens to come to Alabama for a new march, to take place on March 9. Hundreds came by bus, car, and plane.

The SCLC requested a court order to prevent the police from obstructing the new demonstration. Instead, Federal District Court judge Frank Minis Johnson, though one of the only southern judges not hostile to the movement, issued a restraining order to delay the March 9 march until he could hold a hearing on the issue in a few days. Nevertheless, twenty-five hundred marchers set out again for the state capital. State troopers ordered them, again at the bridge, to turn back. King, at the front of the marchers, requested that they be allowed to pray, and he knelt in the street.

Having not yet crossed the bridge, the marchers had not yet violated the restraining order. The SCLC believed that the sympathetic Judge Johnson would eventually lift the restraining order. So they decided to turn around and head back to Selma, avoiding bloodshed—though frustrating many of the marchers.

That day, President Johnson called King. He asked him to wait until the court lifted the restraining order and vowed to get a Voting Rights Bill before Congress in a few days. As the marchers returned to Selma, King asked all the supporters who had come in from other states to stay a little longer.

That night, three out-of-state idealists, white Unitarian ministers, after leaving a local restaurant made a wrong turn and got lost. Suddenly they heard white men calling after them, “Hey, you n——s.”
11
They were attacked with clubs, and thirty-eight-year-old Reverend James Reeb from Massachusetts died from head injuries two days later.

President Johnson called Reeb’s wife, now a widow with four children, to offer his condolences. Protests increased across the country, though some blacks were upset that a white death generated bigger demonstrations and media coverage than Jackson’s death the previous month. On March 13, Governor Wallace arrived at the White House. LBJ put his arm around him, asking the governor how he wanted to be remembered by history. Wallace still wouldn’t agree to protect the marchers.

On March 15, LBJ went on TV to address the nation from Capitol Hill, in a joint session of Congress. Outside, civil rights protestors sang “We Shall Overcome.” “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause. At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Johnson announced that he was sending forth a bill to remove all restrictions used to prevent blacks from voting. “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

SCLC activist C. T. Vivian recalled, “I looked over … and Martin was very quietly sitting in the chair, and a tear ran down his cheek. It was a victory like none other. It was an affirmation of the movement.”
12

The restraining order on the march was removed the next day. Johnson sent three thousand National Guardsmen to protect the thirty-two hundred activists walking out of Selma and toward Montgomery on March 21. Threats against King prompted many marchers who shared King’s build to wear similar blue suits to confuse potential assassins. When the roads narrowed to two lanes, only three hundred people were allowed to march for the next four days, because that was the maximum number of people the Guardsmen felt they could reliably protect.

The marchers covered between seven and seventeen miles a day, singing and clapping to spirituals such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” sometimes in the rain. People waved and brought them food and drink; the marchers slept in black farmers’ fields. When they arrived in Montgomery four days and fifty-four miles later, on March 25, more than twenty-five thousand people had joined them for the final leg of the journey.

King gave a speech on the steps of the State Capitol Building, a few hundred feet from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where he had begun his ministry in 1954. The church was where the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott had been headquartered, after Rosa Parks set off a chain reaction by refusing to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus.

SCLC cofounder Rev. Joseph Lowry would later say diplomatically of King’s singing ability, “His gift was speaking more than singing,”
13
but the musicality of King’s cadence, in the black southern preacher tradition, made him the most memorable orator of his century. He would regularly incorporate the lyrics of hymns into his sermons, and the ancient call-and-response tradition was alive in him and in men such as Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who stood beside King at the Capitol that day, echoing his lines with “Yes, sir,” and “Speak, sir.” King’s deep vibrato and sustain on key words—“letting the worrrrrrrlldddd know”—and his repetition of key phrases turned his speeches into a cappella blues spirituals.

King exhorted the crowd to remain committed to nonviolence in order to win the friendship and understanding of the white man, and not to seek his defeat or humiliation. Looking forward to a society at peace beyond color, he soared into one of his greatest speeches, “How long? Not long!” He quoted William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Battlefield” (“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again”) and paraphrased the Bible’s Galatians, about reaping what one sows, as well as mentioning abolitionist Theodore Parker’s aphorism that the arc of the moral universe was long but “bends towards justice.” His speech climaxed as he shouted the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” into the roar of the crowd. Julia Ward Howe had written the song in 1861 by refashioning the melody of “John Brown’s Body,” a song in honor of the white abolitionist, into a marching song for the soldiers of the Civil War. In alluding to it, King was implying that the March from Selma to Montgomery had finally achieved what Brown started 106 years before.

King later remarked in his Annual Report at the SCLC’s Ninth Annual National Convention on August 11, “Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960; Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Selma produced the voting rights legislation of 1965.”
14

Despite the victory in Montgomery, the KKK wasn’t about to fade away. The night of King’s speech on the steps of the State Capitol, members of the Klan murdered white female activist Viola Liuzzo, a housewife who had come down from Michigan to help with the march. When the Klansmen saw her driving black marchers back to Selma, they chased her down and shot her in the car. One of the Klansmen was revealed to be an FBI informant who did nothing to stop the murder, so Hoover and COINTELPRO spread the rumor that Liuzzo was a Communist who had left her kids to have sex with black men.
15
The FBI’s role in the smear campaign was revealed in documents obtained in 1978 through the Freedom of Information Act. The killers were given a standing ovation at a Klan parade on May 3, 1965, but were sentenced to ten years seven months later. That same month, the three white men who beat James Reeb were acquitted of murder.

In April, the Staple Singers picked up on the theme of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” with “Freedom Highway.” They recorded the song, and the rest of the album of the same name, backed by a full gospel choir, in Chicago’s New Nazareth Church, with the congregation clapping along.
16
In the title track, an exasperated Mavis Staples boomed that the whole world was wondering what was wrong with the United States, but gave props to LBJ for saying, “We shall overcome.”

Pops’s “Why (Am I Treated So Bad)” was inspired by the time the National Guard stopped Little Rock black students from entering a white school despite the Supreme Court decision that segregation was unconstitutional. The song became one of King’s favorites. Thereafter, whenever the Staple Singers opened for King, the civil rights leader would ask, “Stape, you gonna play my song tonight?”
17

II

SPRING

5

Nashville versus Bakersfield

Nashville’s Roger Miller and Bakersfield’s Buck Owens fight for the country No. 1 spot in March, while the Outlaws take on Music City and Johnny Cash self-destructs.

Like Motown writ large,
Nashville (or Music City, as it was nicknamed) was a well-oiled assembly line. Producers got their songs from the publishing houses on Music Row and then brought them to life with a group of session musicians called the A-Team, renowned for their ability to cut three songs in three hours. The artists would perform at the Grand Ole Opry and then regroup at bars such as Tootsies or Linebaugh’s. After the bars closed, they could go to the home of Sue Brewer, dubbed the Boar’s Nest, where singer-songwriters such as George Jones, Faron Young, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson picked guitars all night long.
1

The year’s quintessential country anthem came from Faron Young. “Walk Tall” tells the story of a convict looking back on how he ignored the wisdom of his mama and fell in with the wrong crowd. He vows he’ll make her proud once he gets out. Porter Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home” was another archetypal country ode, in which a man revisits his beloved hometown, and then wakes up and realizes he’s in prison, about to be executed in the morning.

The biggest country hit of the year was Roger Miller’s ode to hobos, “King of the Road.” (Hobos loomed large in country music, as did truck drivers. They were both descendants of the drifting cowboy.) After its release in January, the song spent five weeks on top of the country chart, and it made it to No. 4 on the U.S. pop charts—and No. 1 in the United Kingdom. As a thank-you to the Brits, Miller penned “England Swings” in the same gently rollicking manner.

Alternately dubbed the “hillbilly intellectual,” “cracker-barrel philosopher” (
Life
), and the “unhokey Okie” (
Time
), Miller cleaned up with six Grammys for “King of the Road,” including Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Country Song, Best Country and Western Male Vocal, Best Country and Western Single, Best Country and Western Album (for
The Return of Roger Miller
)—and even Best Rock and Roll Male Vocal and Best Rock and Roll Single, which betrays the age of the Grammys voters. But though Miller was a favorite on the talk show circuit, he had peaked. Like innumerable contemporaries of his in country and rock, he was undone by pills.