With Brown, the movement directly interested my father for the first time. He was nearing high school, and although Chicago had no laws requiring segregated schools, common practice kept Negroes out of white schools just the same. The Court’s ruling wouldn’t change that, but if Negroes could integrate schools across the South, anything seemed possible.
Of course, neither Curtis nor his friends understood the legal complexities of the case. “Brown v. Board was what the grown-ups talked about,” Jerry recalls. “Black kids going to school was what we talked about. We didn’t know about the Supreme Court and no other stuff attached to that but we knew that there were these black kids trying to get into schools who were our age.” My father was just old enough for such a huge moment to imprint his mind with visions of how the world could change. He was also young enough not to fully grasp how much struggle, toil, and death it had taken for Negroes to achieve that change. The old folks viewed it warily, knowing all too well the brutal force of American racism. Dad didn’t have the same baggage, although he heard about it from his elders. Brown brought him pure excitement.
Soon enough, however, he learned why the old folks reacted with such ambivalence. In 1955, three Negro boys in the South were murdered as a reaction to Brown’s forced integration, including fourteen-year-old Chicago native, Emmett Till. My father and Till shared much in common. They were roughly the same age, and both came from southern migrants who fled to Chicago. In August of ’55, Till returned south to visit family that hadn’t made the migration, just as Dad often did with Annie Bell. The similarities ended there.
No one knows exactly what happened next—the official story goes that Till walked into a store and flirted with Carolyn Bryant, a married white woman, perhaps whistling at her, perhaps even saying something suggestive. He most likely just wanted to show off to his southern relatives, filled with the natural cockiness of a teenager and unaware of the South’s unwritten rules. Unfortunately, his first lesson in southern living was also his last.
On Sunday, August 28, between 2:00 and 3:00 AM, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half brother J. W. Milam kidnapped Till, flung the boy into the back of a pickup truck, and drove him to a barn where they tortured and killed him. They then drove to the Tallahatchie River, tied a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan around Till’s neck with barbed wire, and heaved his corpse into the water. Three days later, two fishermen found his remains.
The murder made national headlines and affected my father deeply. Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, wanting the world to see what Mississippi racists had done to her boy. Both the Chicago Defender and Jet magazine—two huge Negro publications—ran pictures of Till’s hideously disfigured face. My dad saw the pictures, and he’d never forget them or the story of Till’s death. For the first time in his life the sadistic extent of racist violence confronted him. It could have just as easily been him in that coffin.
As my father mourned Till’s murder, changes rushed over him with breathtaking speed. Around 1955, Marion moved the family into the Cabrini-Green housing projects. Constructed the year Curtis was born in an attempt to house the migrant flood washing into Chicago, the project was built on the site of an old Sicilian neighborhood nicknamed “Little Hell.” It eventually offered two choices of residence—tiny row houses that squatted along Cambridge and Chicago Avenue, and a cluster of high-rises known as the Cabrini Extension. Due to their redbrick construction, everyone called the first Cabrini high-rises “the Reds.” Several years after Marion moved the family into a row house at 966 Hudson Street, the city completed another high-rise on the north side of Division called the William Green Homes, or “the Whites.”
For Marion and the family, the row house on Hudson was a dream come true. Looking at it later in life, my father must have wondered how his family ever fit inside the narrow building, but compared to the White Eagle, it seemed a mansion. “We felt we were up in Pill Hill,” Aunt Carolyn remembers, referring to one of Chicago’s most exclusive black neighborhoods at the time. “We were finally in a two-bedroom place, and it had a back yard and front yard.” My father remembered it the same way: “It was really high-class living. We had our own toilet and two full bedrooms in our own apartment. Such luxury seemed too good to be true.”
The front door of the row house led into the kitchen, which joined a small living room. The house had a bathroom, closet, pantry, and back and front yards carpeted in lush green grass. The backyard had enough space to hang clothes to dry; the front yard was big enough for a garden. Finally free from the endless treachery of the slums, the darkness that consumed my grandmother lifted just a bit. She was still so poor she could only outfit her new house with what mismatched furniture she happened to find, but she had a safe place to raise her children, and now that Carolyn was finally old enough to take care of Kirby, she could look for a job. She began working at Marshall Field’s in Evanston, and soon moved to a job at the post office, where she’d work for decades.
Before leaving the White Eagle, Marion had also met and married a man named Albert Jackson. Albert courted her and treated her better than any man ever had. On his payday, he’d even bring food to the family. But though he treated Marion well, he abused Kirby, and the children didn’t like him. It seemed my grandmother couldn’t find a man who treated both her and her children with respect. Regardless, Albert moved into the house on Hudson and stayed until their relationship ended a few years later.
Cabrini thrust my father into a brave new world. The homes were racially mixed, with Jewish, Italian, and Latino families living in relative harmony alongside Negroes. The Italians threw a block party every year, with floats, a carnival, and, of course, food. Residents took great pride in their homes and kept the project clean. Littering earned a three-dollar fine, and the Chicago Housing Authority inspected the apartments, stairwells, and hallways for cleanliness. People roller-skated, danced in the streets, and slept with their doors unlocked. They shopped at the local stores on Larrabee Street like Pioneer Meat Market, Big Frank’s, Del Farms grocery, Greenman’s department store, and a Negro-owned store called Jets. At night, juke houses along Larrabee jumped with the latest music, and two of Chicago’s biggest Catholic churches brooded nearby, in case one did a little too much juking and needed to confess the next morning.
Soon after moving into the house on Hudson, Dad entered high school, walking to Wells High and taking with him all the awkwardness of a teenager. For someone already insecure about his looks, he now had to negotiate puberty. His brief attempt at straightening his hair only made matters worse. High school held one major difference from grade school, however—his musical skills now made him one of the most popular students in class, when he attended. He even made friends with a white boy named Jimmy, who had a little money and never minded helping fund creative endeavors.
Those endeavors now ranged beyond the Northern Jubilee Singers and Chicago blues. Following the example of his hero Sam Cooke, who had just crossed over with the pop hit “You Send Me,” Curtis put together a secular group called the Alphatones with Al Boyce, James Weems, and Dallas Dixon. “We used to harmonize and sing Frankie Lymon tunes and the Spaniels and the Dells,” my father recalled. “We had two or three entrances to apartments where we had plenty of echo, and we was happenin’ with all the doo-wop.”
Curtis and the Alphatones weren’t unique; Cabrini-Green crawled with doo-wop groups, the air around the project hanging thick and sweet with multipart harmonies. The groups practiced in rehearsal rooms at Seward Park. “We were all trying to sing,” Billy Butler, Jerry’s brother, said. “That was the only thing to do really. The area didn’t have street gangs at the time. Everyone would form a group and go into Seward Park.”
Seward Park stood just a short walk from the row houses. It contained a big gymnasium and several small rooms where people could play Ping-Pong, take arts and crafts classes, or hold rehearsals. When word got around Cabrini that all the doo-wop groups practiced at the park, crowds of eager young kids l
ined up outside the doors to get a peek at the likes of the Capris, the Players, the Medallionaires, and the Van Gayles. The Alphatones became one of those popular groups, with people lined up for their practices. Soon there was always someone coming by the house looking for Curtis. He liked the attention, but sometimes he’d get tired of it, and, showing his mercurial nature, he’d tell Carolyn, “Get rid of those people,” or he’d disappear into his bedroom, just like his grandmother.
As he rehearsed with the Alphatones, he developed a unique style on guitar, almost tickling the strings rather than strumming them, and strengthened his naturally high tenor voice. He continued writing songs, mostly knockoffs of whatever doo-wop was popular. He also discovered a new influence in the music of Ray Charles, who had just set the R&B charts on fire with hits like “I Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say.” Charles did something altogether different from most acts of the time—he began his career making secular music rather than gospel, though his songs clearly came from the church. He mixed the holy with the profane, gospel with pop, R&B with jazz. The resulting music was all of those things and none of them at the same time. Dad paid close attention to Charles’s music as he worked on his own songs and honed the Alphatones into a tight unit.
He also noticed something else that had been happening, not knowing it would change the course of his life. On December 1, 1955—eleven years after Irene Morgan’s similar stand—Rosa Parks stepped onto a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, took a seat near the front, and refused to give it up to a white person when ordered to by the bus driver. Her refusal set in motion a chain of events that would revolutionize American race relations. Cops arrested and booked her, but her arrest seemed a blessing in disguise. Local activists had been waiting for a case like this for years, one they could take to the US Supreme Court and likely win.
As Montgomery civil rights leaders plotted a Supreme Court challenge, others planned a boycott of the city’s buses. Negroes had attempted bus boycotts across the South many times before, but gains had been minimal or nonexistent. Of course, no one involved with the Montgomery bus boycotts expected them to make great progress in race relations—they just wanted minor changes to laws that would allow Negroes greater freedom in bus seating. Boycott leader Ralph Abernathy said, “We thought that this would all be over in three or four days.”
They underestimated white recalcitrance. Instead of ceding to their modest demands, the white community dug in, forcing the boycott to continue for months. Soon, news stories across the country began covering one of the most brazen affronts to segregation ever mounted. Even though the boycott mostly concerned southerners, northern Negroes paid close attention, my father among them.
As the boycott slogged on, Martin Luther King Jr. reluctantly emerged on the world stage after a delegation of Montgomery’s civil rights leaders, including Abernathy, voted him to lead the protests. King initially did not want the role. He viewed himself as a simple preacher better suited to studying and teaching religion than leading a movement. But the times often pick the man. Even though King was young and baby-faced, he was a respected pastor, which the civil rights establishment believed would attract conservative Negroes to the movement. At the same time, he railed against segregation and racism, which Abernathy and company hoped would attract the more militant faction of Negroes.
Like millions around the country, my father felt great hope as King grew in stature. He supported the bus boycott and then rooted for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Finally, something stirred him as deeply as music.
As the ’50s progressed, a new breed of singers elbowed onto street corners beside Chicago’s electric bluesmen and hip beboppers. These young kids with processed hair and smooth-as-silk voices wove intricate harmonies into a new style. They sang anywhere and everywhere—on the corners, in stairwells, or in years to come, at one of Herb Kent’s sock hops.
Paralleling the competitions between gospel groups, which Dad had experienced, and anticipating hip-hop freestyling competitions two decades later, doo-wop groups battled each other for street-corner control. Reggie Smith, a member of the Five Chances, remembered my father hanging around the Five Chances’ turf at Forty-Fourth and Prairie, saying, “We’d tell him to get away from us with all that noise, ’cause we’re trying to sing, [but] he went on to beat us to death.”
Doo-wop was bigger than Chicago, though. Every city seemed to have its own collection of aspiring teenagers honing their harmonies, and in 1953, five young friends in Chattanooga, Tennessee, formed such a group. Sam Gooden, Fred Cash, Emanuel Thomas, and the brothers Richard and Arthur Brooks called themselves the Roosters. After Thomas quit the group, his sister Catherine joined, and they became Four Roosters and a Chick.
Catherine soon married and left, but the Roosters continued even though Fred’s religious parents never approved of the group. He was barely a teenager, and they didn’t want him out all night singing that secular music. Like most teenagers, Fred found a way around their disapproval. “Once they’d gone to bed, I’d slip out of the window and join the other guys on the corner, and then we’d go do to this little club on East 9th Street called Memos, where we’d sing,” he said. “And then, once we’d finished, I’d come home, slip back in through the window, go back to bed. And neither my mom nor my dad would ever know I’d been out.”
Chattanooga had no record labels to speak of, and after the Roosters tried to cut a record in Nashville to no avail, they faced a dilemma. Any serious singer knew that to make it in the music business, you had to go to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, or New York. Those places were far away and full of unknown dangers, though. With no other options, they took a chance. The Brooks brothers had a sister in Chicago, so the band loaded up on bologna sandwiches, packed into a car, and drove six hundred miles north to the Windy City.
Fred’s parents wouldn’t let him go, which meant Sam, Arthur, and Richard had to find a replacement in Chicago. After a little searching, they met Jerry, who was working a dead-end job as a short-order cook. With his strong voice, he got the gig. As Jerry remembered the group on first meeting them:
Arthur was stockily built with a light complexion. Sam, who was about my height and complexion but thinner, had narrow facial features that enhanced a big, broad smile. Richard, Arthur’s brother, was about my age. Much skinnier than Arthur, Richard had distinctive sandy, curly hair that he combed constantly.
Arthur and Richard were dead serious, but I always got the feeling that Sam really didn’t give a damn. I remember him saying once that if he didn’t make it singing, he could always play baseball. After watching him play one day, I could see why. He could really play.
Soon, they worked out a practice schedule—Jerry went straight to meet the guys after work around midnight. He’d sing all night, work all day, and do it again the next night. It didn’t take long for them to get tight. Even though they had grown up in different cities, they shared a common link in the church. Sam’s father was a minister and his mother an organist. His parents forced him to sing solos in church, which he hated doing. Jerry had grown up in Annie Bell’s church with Curtis, listening to and singing the same gospel tunes. Unlike Sam, he loved the spotlight.
They all knew the basic rules of singing gospel and shared a love of doo-wop, but Jerry knew the group lacked a key element—a musician who could tie it all together. He thought first of my father and asked him to join the group. Always bent on control, Dad saw no reason to leave his own group, where he was the leader, for one where he’d be just another member. Jerry pleaded with him, “If you join us, man, with the way you play the guitar and the way they sing, we’ll come up with a different sound.” Dad didn’t bite. Jerry cooked up a scheme. “Dig, Curt,” he said. “Let’s do it like this—you rehearse three nights a week with us and three with your group. Whoever improves first, or seems to have the most potential, will be the group you go with.” Even at such a young age, my father knew a good business deal when he heard one.
Jerry’
s persistence paid off—Curtis soon dropped the Alphatones and joined the Roosters. Wasting no time, they began working on original material, dreaming of writing the next big hit. “We woodshedded for a good year,” Dad said, “and finally we came along with a few songs.” One of the songs, an emotional, spoken-word ballad called “For Your Precious Love,” would become the group’s calling card. It owed a good deal to Ray Charles’s genre-bending style—it wasn’t quite gospel, R&B, or pop, but contained all those elements. It also shared quite a bit in common with the Gospel Clefs’ “Open Our Eyes,” which Herb Kent used to close his radio show. Structured around Curtis’s plucked guitar chords and set in a slow 6/8 meter, “For Your Precious Love” played almost like a hymn. My father’s high falsetto rode atop the heavenly backing vocals, providing a lush bed for Butler’s chocolaterich voice.
As they perfected the song, they also looked for a break. The Roosters entered a talent show at Washburne High School in 1957 and challenged some of the best groups in Cabrini, including the Medallionaires, who held the distinction of releasing a single called “Magic Moonlight” on Mercury Records. The Medallionaires were so professional they even had a manager, Eddie Thomas, who drove a canary-yellow Cadillac with glinting white trim. As Eddie recalls, “The Medallionaires thought they were hot stuff. Girls were screaming and hollering, going crazy, and they had a song they had just written and recorded on Mercury Records. I have a feeling they bought all the copies that were sold themselves. It didn’t do that well.”
Eddie came to the talent show to watch his group perform, but he’d also heard of the Roosters and made sure he caught their set. That night, the Roosters harmonized on Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” and despite struggling with a single microphone that kept cutting out, they took the house by storm. “Their harmony was mind blowing,” Eddie says. “The lead singer had a great smooth, sexy baritone voice. They had a young guitar player who had a very unusual style of playing his guitar. When they learned that I was working with this group called the Medallionaires, they asked me could I work with them too.”
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