Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (84 page)

M
EANWHILE THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION
was erupting all around them. Even as the troupe was facing what Bobby called “K-9 dogs” patrolling the aisles to prevent race mixing or overdemonstrativeness on the part of the colored population, in Birmingham, Alabama, the vicious police dogs and fire hoses of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor were thown up against whatever forces Martin Luther King was able to rally in opposition to the most intransigent resistance to integration in any form in the South. King’s campaign had begun in early April, just before the start of the tour, with Harry Belafonte raising well over $100,000 for bail-bond funds and forty-seven-year-old blind jazz and blues singer Al Hibbler standing side by side with Dr. King and going to jail with him early in the demonstrations. Comedian Dick Gregory had just gotten back from Greenwood, Mississippi, where he was a leading participant in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]’s increasingly confrontational voter registration campaign (“Well, now, Mr. Mayor,” he challenged Greenwood’s race-baiting Mayor Sampson at a public press conference, “you really took your nigger pills last night, didn’t you?”).

“Are Show Biz Folk Sincere in Going Down South to Protest Racial Ills?” asked the Negro weekly the
Norfolk Journal and Guide.
“We certainly are,” said Clyde McPhatter, who had recently refused to play an exclusive nightclub in Atlanta unless it rescinded its whites-only policy. He had cast his lot with the student protesters, McPhatter said, because he believed in “the right to be treated like an American. If we’re ever going to be free, now is the time,” he declared once again, as similar views by such notable figures as Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, folksinger Leon Bibb, organist Jimmy Smith, and Sammy Davis Jr. were all cited, and, it was pointed out, popular entertainers like “Sam Cooke, Chubby Checker and others canceled engagements scheduled before racially segregated audiences. . . . ‘We travel all over the country, and sometimes the world, having opportunity to observe—first-hand—the plight of the minority peoples,’ [McPhatter] said. ‘There is hardly one major entertainer who hasn’t at some time felt the sting of prejudice or the stick of jimcrow, and there is not one who wouldn’t give his all to erase these things from the face of the globe.’”

Not everyone agreed. Nat “King” Cole, who had been physically attacked and beaten onstage by local White Citizens Council members in Birmingham in 1956, defended “stars who shun[ned] Dixie picket lines.” Obviously defensive, Cole, who under ordinary circumstances showed exemplary civility in public discourse, suggested that Dick Gregory and Al Hibbler needed the publicity and that Harry Belafonte was a “professional integrationist.” It was an “idiotic idea,” he said, that “Negro entertainers should lead the way,” even though he could scarcely comprehend that so many of his white fans could love him as a performer, like his songs, even like him personally, “but still dislike Negroes as Negroes. This is baffling to me.”

Fats Domino, who, like Cole, had always had a strong white fan base, announced his own break with NAACP thinking by declaring earlier in the year that “henceforth he [would] play in any nightclub or theater which pays him, regardless of whether Negro patrons are permitted.” He was doing so, he said, because his band had to feed their families, his own family had to eat, and “I’ve lost thousands and thousands of dollars in the past because I’ve gone along with the NAACP, and it has hurt my reputation as a performer. I won’t do it anymore.” Within days, after a firestorm of criticism from the black community, he rescinded his new policy, declaring in a prepared statement that he had been misquoted and that “I know from my heart that the NAACP is the greatest friend of the minorities”—although, as the syndicated ANP story pointed out, he “did not say whether he was booking for any segregated performances.”

Even the black newspapers were not by any means uniformly convinced of the need for further demonstrations, worriedly suggesting to their readers that the militant actions of a few could threaten the gains of all and that this might be the time for patience and consolidation. The
Birmingham World,
along with the
Atlanta Daily World
owned by the Scott family of Atlanta, refused to even cover the Birmingham demonstrations at first, wrote civil rights historian Taylor Branch, “treat[ing] King’s campaign as a disturbing rumor,” a ragtag movement undertaken solely for reasons of political opportunism that those of good taste and judgment might safely ignore. When King was jailed and placed in solitary confinement on Good Friday, April 12, he began what came to be known as his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he laid out, on scraps of paper at first and in the margins of a discarded newspaper, the moral imperative of civil disobedience, the heroism of those who simply refused to capitulate to oppression. “One day,” he wrote, “the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be . . . old, oppressed, battered Negro women. . . . They will be the young high school and college student . . . sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream.” It was a document written with the kind of moral clarity that is born of desperation, and it might well have sparked a renewed sense of dedication in both the black and white communities, but, as Taylor Branch tartly observed, “reporters saw no news in what appeared to be an especially long-winded King sermon. Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month.” And the
Birmingham World
saw no reason to rescind its judgment that this type of approach was “both wasteful and worthless.”

Then, on May 2, backed into a corner by the white establishment, virtually abandoned by both the Kennedy administration and other civil rights organizations, and desperately in need of some sort of victory, King ignored the well-meant advice of family and friends, not to mention the entire Birmingham black establishment, and, along with SCLC lieutenant and local leader Fred Shuttlesworth, launched what amounted to a latter-day Children’s Crusade. On the first day by some accounts, 959 children were arrested out of six thousand marchers between the ages of six and sixteen. On the second day, the police dogs and fire hoses were set loose on the marchers, and the world saw images of children being bitten, of a little girl being rolled down the street by the pressure from the fire hoses, of children singing just the single word, “freedom,” to the tune of the old hymn “Amen” as they were brutalized by the civil authorities.

Within days, the Kennedy administration became involved; within a week, the city government had essentially capitulated to the movement’s four basic demands, establishing a ninety-day timetable for citywide public desegregation. The settlement was announced on May 10 amid euphoria in the black community (“Do not underestimate the power of this movement,” King declared to a packed congregation), only to have riots break out in the wake of the bombing of King’s brother’s Birmingham home and the Gaston Motel, where King and all the other Movement leaders had plotted their strategy over the last month. It was only when President Kennedy announced his unequivocal support for the settlement, and the federal government’s refusal to see it “sabotaged by a few extremists on either side,” that the precarious truce was saved. It was, as Martin Luther King remarked just before the bombings, “the nonviolent movement coming of age.” But it raised new questions, and new challenges, within the black community at large, and within the community of black entertainers as well.

Brook Benton, who, like Sam, wrote almost all his own hits, had only recently played Clemson College in South Carolina in support of its new policy of student desegregation. “Before it’s through,” he declared to a
Chicago Defender
reporter in the immediate aftermath of Birmingham, “no one’s going to be unaffected. I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sure that before it’s over there’s going to be bloodshed.

We’re waking up. We’re tired of being pushed around. What are we—dogs? The man tells you, “Here’s a uniform. Take 13 weeks of basic training . . . and go fight for your country.” So you fight, and you get out and you can’t even vote. . . .

I’m not a non-violent Negro. If a dog or an Alabama or Mississippi cop comes on me, I’m gonna have something to protect myself with. . . . If I’m going to go downtown to try to speak to the officials to explain the rights of my people, and they have dogs there—well, it’s hard to fight off a dog with bare hands. So I figure I’m probably gonna have to get me a gun, or a knife, or a few bombs. . . .

Somebody’s gonna slip up somewhere, and it won’t be Negroes. These Negroes in Alabama have right on their side. Nothing they’re doing is wrong; they’re simply marching in to demand what’s been due them for years. . . . They’re not citizens, no matter what it says in the book. They’re not free, they’re slaves—they’re in something even worse than slavery. . . . When a man knows he may die, you’d be surprised how many people he’s ready to carry out with him.

Sam might very well have expressed the same feelings—and the same emotional ambivalence. As he declared to another reporter not long afterward, “We’re in the middle of a social revolution, and some violence is a part of it. There was violence in the American Revolution and in the French Revolution.” But for the time being, all he could do was follow the news with avidity as they played Raleigh, Richmond, Augusta, Memphis, and Atlanta. He knew most of the players to one extent or another, he was acquainted with Martin and his father and brother, and, like everyone else, he had stayed at the Gaston Motel, probably in the very rooms that Martin had occupied, the Gaston’s only suite. In describing his feelings to one and all, he found himself caught between anger and a sense of proprietary responsibility, joking with Dionne Warwick and Johnny Thunder in some measure to ease the pain of humiliation but telling Bobby about the time when he was with the QCs in Memphis, no older than Bobby now, “and they come and slap me in the park, ’cause I was black and I wasn’t supposed to be there.” His father had taught him: when you’re in the right, don’t never back down. But when Bobby said, “Man, if all black people would just [get guns and] fight back,” he told Bobby, “We got to buy the guns from
them.
” Part of him felt like he and Alex had figured out a way of operating in the white man’s world, they were gaining respect in the manner that mattered most,
as businessmen,
climbing the success ladder in the one way that permitted them to escape both detection and self-analysis. “I don’t care what the fuck you doing,” he told Bobby, “you can be oversold to your commitment to what you believe. Bottom line, if that fucker ain’t making no money with you, you gone.” But then sometimes his heart took over, and his commitment to what he believed overwhelmed his long-range plan, just as it had in Memphis when he and Clyde had simply refused to go on, and as it did not infrequently on this tour when he read fresh accounts of racial injustice throughout the country or simply listened to local news reports on black radio stations as he traveled from town to town. He never doubted that with SAR Records he and Alex were making a difference, but whether it was enough of a difference he was not at all sure.

I
N THE MEANTIME
, Allen Klein was doing his best to put Sam’s business affairs in order. With the accounting records that J.W. had supplied and Sam’s tax returns for the last couple of years, the problem became clear almost immediately: all of Sam’s money was going into SAR Records. His house might be worth $135,000, and he was owed a considerable amount of publishing money by Kags. “But,” Allen concluded, “he never took his songwriter’s royalties, and J.W. wasn’t getting any money, either. They were using the money to run the company.” For much the same reason, he had gone into debt with RCA, too, and Allen suspected the record company was using this as an unstated justification for holding back on its payment of mechanical royalties to Kags (mechanical royalties, as opposed to performance royalties, are paid not to the songwriter but to the song publisher for the right to manufacture records containing copyrighted material from that publisher’s catalogue; the publisher then splits the money with the writer). And while there could be no justification for cross-collaterization between Sam’s income as a recording artist and the money that was owed to a publishing company in which he happened to be a partner, it would not be the first time in Allen’s experience that a record company saw this as a way to quietly recoup its losses. It was hard to see where the rest of his income was going, but life on the road was much the same as any cash business, and Sam was clearly not averse to spending money. In the end, as far as Allen could tell, despite all of his record sales and all of his valuable copyrights, Sam’s entire net worth amounted to his house.

As soon as he had Sam’s signature on the May 1 letter of introduction, he entered into a dialogue with BMI, the performing rights organization that paid performance royalties directly to both songwriter and publisher. He met initially on May 8 with BMI president Bob Sour (who with Theodora Zavin had worked out Sam’s original songwriter arrangement with J.W. two years earlier), negotiating a deal over the next few days whereby Sam would get a $15,000 guarantee against his songwriting royalties for the present year, and an additional $14,000 in 1964, while Kags would receive an advance of $50,000 over the next two years, with various upgrades and bonuses attached.

As far as J.W. was concerned, that was more than enough to prove Allen’s value to them.

But there was still no word from RCA.