As the movement inspired my father to create these songs, he also inspired it. “‘People Get Ready’ was one that we used,” said Andrew Young, one of King’s partners. “None of us had great voices, but this was music that everybody could sing. You couldn’t do Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto, but we had kids who could. He was always one of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Shortly after the song became a hit, Chicago churches also began using “People Get Ready” in their services. Some churches changed the final couplet, “You don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord,” to “Everybody wants freedom, this I know.”
People Get Ready featured lighter fare as well. “Woman’s Got Soul,” a great party/love song, charted at number nine R&B. “Can’t Work No Longer” hit number six R&B later in the year for Billy Butler, and “We’re in Love,” “Get Up and Move,” and “Just Another Dance” all had upbeat rhythms and simple messages about young love.
But as catchy as they were, these songs didn’t approach the effect Dad’s message music had on his fans. “I can remember [‘People Get Ready’] just making people listen,” he said. “It was so different from what was looked upon as a hit.” He now knew his greatest strength as a songwriter came from the strength of his soul. After “People Get Ready,” his fans expected him to put something heavy on their minds, and he embraced the role. “I’m not totally about being just an entertainer,” he said. “It means a little bit more to me than that.”
After the release, the Impressions began two months of constant touring and television appearances. For some reason, when they appeared on Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is, they lip-synched “People Get Ready” as they rode a pleasure boat in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. The visual clashed with the song’s somber tone, but it was good exposure nonetheless.
On tour, “People Get Ready” added tremendous weight to the Impressions’ style of performing. “When we came out, it was like we were in church, that’s how the audience turned over,” my father said. “They could just be screaming and hollering and getting down and boogieing with one artist, but when the Impressions came out, they would respectfully be quiet.”
Sometimes, other artists on the bills would exit the stage mystified at the Impressions’ static power. Fred said, “We did a lot of shows with James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and they said, ‘Good Lord, you cats come back just like you went onstage.’ James Brown said, ‘Man, how can y’all go out there and don’t sweat and don’t do nothing but just sing and the people just go crazy? I have to go out there and work my butt off.’ But, we had to rely on our voices because we couldn’t dance.”
Perhaps no one underscored how little the Impressions moved onstage better than Otis Redding. “We were doing a show with him at the Regal Theatre in Chicago,” Fred recalled. “Otis came on before we did, and the stage was dirty. He was out there stompin’, and sweatin’, and stompin’, and dust was flyin’ all up, and when he was coming off, we were standing in the wings getting ready to come on behind him. He had dirt all up on his pants. It looked like he had been swimming. When he got to us, he looked at us, and we were nice and clean, and he said, ‘Man, [you’re] the only group I know that can do a show here for a whole week and don’t have to change their shirt.’”
As my father said about his guitar playing, when you can’t do something, you find a way not to need it. The Impressions couldn’t dance. Instead, they relied on dazzling harmonies and stone-heavy messages to get over.
Traveling the South, my father saw how much his message songs were needed. He witnessed firsthand the hope and terror coursing through places like Alabama, where a few weeks after People Get Ready came out, King and the SCLC joined a march from Selma to Montgomery. With the Civil Rights Act still facing violent resistance, the marchers planned on demanding voting rights at the state capital.
The first attempt, on March 7, became known as “Bloody Sunday” after state and local police brutalized the marchers with clubs and tear gas as white spectators cheered and whistled. After a second attempt ended in failure—without violence this time—President Johnson addressed a nationwide television audience. Seventy million people watched Johnson say, “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.” He ended by quoting the movement’s slogan, vowing, “We shall overcome” America’s “crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Never before had the movement received such strong federal endorsement.
The day after Johnson’s speech, events in Montgomery foreshadowed the new direction the movement would take. That day, a group of Montgomery sheriff’s deputies attacked a crowd of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers with nightsticks. Witnesses reported hearing the sound of the sticks cracking against skulls up and down the block. After the attack, SNCC’s James Forman told the crowd if Montgomery was unwilling to let Negroes sit at the table of government, then SNCC would knock the “fucking legs” off the table.
Forman wasn’t alone in advocating “violent overthrow of the government.” Stokely Carmichael, a young movement worker who had been active since the early freedom rides, ascended the ranks of SNCC and thrust the organization toward militancy. Like Forman, Carmichael demanded a policy of freedom by “any means necessary.” His ideas would soon father the next phase of the movement.
Around the time Curtis returned home from tour, King announced the SCLC would target Chicago as the first city in its northern campaign. King desperately needed to succeed in Chicago. For all his gains in the South, he knew life had barely changed for the vast majority of Negroes around the country. Even when it did change in places like Birmingham and Montgomery, it often went right back as soon as the SCLC left town. It seemed the future of the nonviolent movement, already teetering, would be decided by what happened in Dad’s hometown.
King faced formidable odds in Chicago. The organizations he once counted on as allies were in the midst of power struggles between the old guard and a younger, angrier faction. James Farmer lost control of CORE to Floyd McKissick, a Malcolm X devotee. SNCC fractured from within as the pacifist Bob Moses fought for control with Carmichael, who had just about run out of patience with the nonviolent movement.
As King prepared for the Chicago campaign and People Get Ready struck a chord with movement workers, my father continued writing for OKeh. He gave Major three hits—“Sometimes I Wonder,” “Come See,” and “Ain’t It a Shame”—and wrote “You Can’t Hurt Me No More” and “I’m So Afraid” for the Opals, a girl group modeled after the Supremes. Gene Chandler remade “Rainbow” as “Rainbow ’65,” and took it to number two on the R&B chart. Meanwhile, the Impressions had eight songs on the charts and a number-one album. “We were so hot,” Fred said. “I never will forget, I was looking in Billboard and they had Sam, Curtis, and myself standing in a big skillet, flames shooting up around us, because we were just so hot.”
It is hard to think of any songwriter with more hits at one time than Curtis during this period, let alone the number of hits he’d written over the past three years. His songs had built OKeh into a first-rate label. They’d made Major Lance, Gene Chandler, Billy Butler, and half a dozen others into stars and took the Impressions from one-hit wonders to premier social commentators and legends in the making.
Dad knew he was good. He proved it relentlessly with hit after hit. His success was a resounding answer to everyone who wrote him off because of his poverty, stature, or looks; to everyone who had hurt or mocked him as a child; to every record label that rejected him because they didn’t like his songs or his voice. As Eddie says about Vee-Jay, “They thought they had the cream of the crop, which was Jerry Butler. They had no idea they were throwing away the greatest songwriter I’ve ever known in this business. The cream of the crop was Curtis Mayfield.” They paid for it, too, as my father gave ABC and OKeh his constant stream of hits and the untold millions of dollars they earned.
In mid-1965, Diane told Curtis he’d soon have a second son—me. T
he news came at a point when their relationship had started showing signs of strain. My mother had difficulty dealing with my father’s idiosyncrasies, and they fought often. When they first met, she noticed the loner in him, but she didn’t realize he was a borderline recluse. On tour, he preferred to stay in his hotel room; at home, he felt most comfortable in his den with his guitar. “We would go to friends’ houses, either a party or Jerry Butler’s house, but he never wanted to stay very long,” she says. “He’d say, ‘Either leave now or figure out how to get home.’ And sometimes I’d leave and sometimes I’d catch a cab. But he was never a social person. His mother was kind of a loner. He was kind of a loner. He could go in the den, play his music, be creative. He didn’t need to be around people.”
He’d always been that way. It helped him handle the pressures of life, and with the added pressures of fame, he needed the solace of his guitar more than ever. It was his shield against the outside world.
My mother also discovered a tempest churning beneath his cool demeanor. “He seemed like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth—real easygoing,” she says. “But that was his facade in front of people. He was moody, so it would just depend on his mood.” His mood could swing from loving and affectionate to dark and brooding at a moment’s notice. It was the Gemini in him. His mind changed as fast as his mood—he often made last-minute plans to go to the Bahamas or Bermuda, and it had to happen now. The longer it took to leave, the more likely he’d change the plan or scrap it altogether.
She also had learned about his intense need for control. “He picked my friends,” my mother says. “When I was trying to be friends with the lady down the street, and I wanted to go to a movie with the kids, he said no. He didn’t know her, so I couldn’t go with her.” Dad’s controlling nature seemed to contradict the way he worked as a musician. Everyone who played for him knew him as easy and free in the studio. Only those closest to him saw the truth—beneath that laid-back demeanor lurked a man who needed control and almost always had it.
That need came from growing up in treacherous circumstances. Childhood in the White Eagle taught him what happened when you didn’t control your finances, your relationships, or your life. His mother couldn’t control those things, and as a result, his family starved and suffered. The lesson was sewn into his sinew and bone. Music gave him the power to overcome. It gave him control over himself and his family. It let him lift his friends from the ghetto with the power of his songs. He could never have total control, though. He couldn’t control racist radio programmers who put a lid on the success his songs could achieve. He couldn’t control which songs hit and which flopped. He couldn’t control his own insecurities. He couldn’t always control my mother, either, especially with her fiery demeanor.
Pursuing total control worked in the studio, where success was the only rule. It did not work in a romantic relationship. Even though he loved to buy my mother things—especially jewelry, including three wedding rings, though they never officially married—that didn’t make up for his shortcomings as a husband. “He was a better father than a husband,” my mother says. “He spoiled the kids, where I was more frugal. But with his schedule, a lot of times, I’d cook dinner, he wasn’t there. He’d come home, eleven or twelve o’clock at night, expect me to heat it up or fix him something to eat. And sometimes it was OK and sometimes it wasn’t. When he was in the studio, I’d understand. But you don’t know if they’re always in the studio.”
My mother’s fears were justified. Once the Impressions became famous, Dad had never been faithful to any woman. “Because of who he was, there were always women after him, and that makes it hard for a man, I guess, to say no,” my mother says. “I think he was addicted to sex.”
They’d fight often about lipstick on his collar and other indiscretions, and even though my mother was a louder and more forceful arguer, Dad didn’t end his affairs. It became a constant issue, harder to deal with given his expectation that she only socialize with people he picked for her. He wanted a woman who bent to his wishes. My mother was no such woman. Growing up, it often seemed strange to me how they came together at all.
Dad’s obsession with control could be both dark and comical. For instance, in the late ’60s, he and my mother moved into a house in Pill Hill, and my mother received an offer to model. My father’s half sister Ann came to watch Tracy and me on the day the modeling gig was to take place. On a break at the studio, Dad called the house and found out about the modeling gig from Ann. He jumped in his car and sped home, screeching into the driveway before my mother could leave and demanding she stay home. She yelled, “I want to work! I want my own money!” He shot back, “You want money?” Then he snatched a wad of cash from his pocket and threw it at her. It caught the wind and blew all over the street. As my mother peeled out of the driveway, she watched him recede in the rearview, scrambling to gather the money he’d thrown to the breeze.
Like many a self-conscious man in love with a beautiful woman, Curtis wanted to control Diane’s every move. He couldn’t give her the space to make her own decisions—it felt too dangerous, especially when she decided to do something as fraught with sex appeal as modeling. As in most things, he was capable of the grand gesture—whisking her away to the islands, buying her the three wedding rings—but he couldn’t do the small things necessary to keep their relationship alive. Things like supporting her ambition to earn her own money, or helping around the house, or pitching in with the grunt work required to raise Tracy and me. He did love her, but his love often came from a place of insecurity. Inside, he was still the little boy called Smut, the one pretty girls laughed at or ignored.
That insecurity was wearing off in his professional life. He’d grown accustomed to others complying with his wishes when it came to business, and no one challenged him in the studio. With each new hit, he became more confident. He trusted his instincts, and if a musician didn’t see things his way, he found someone else who did. Even Fred and Sam followed his lead. He expected the same from his personal life, and his temper sometimes flared when he didn’t get it.
While my parents prepared for my arrival, Dad decided to leave OKeh. He couldn’t continue to supply hits to the label’s entire roster while also writing, touring, and promoting for the Impressions. “He was always up late writing,” my mother recalls. “I could hear him playing the guitar. He was always taping songs and going back over them. That was his main focus: writing, writing, writing.”
For a while, he tried focusing only on the Impressions, but true to his nature, he could never limit himself to one project. By the time King got to Chicago in July, Dad was in the studio with the Impressions working on two albums simultaneously. One by One, the first to be released, showed just how tired he was creatively. It had only three original songs out of twelve. The other nine were covers from a bygone era, such as “Mona Lisa” and “Nature Boy,” both made famous by Nat King Cole when my father was a child. The lead single, an original ballad called “Just One Kiss from You,” marked the Impressions’ first flop in two years.
Both the single and album seemed inconsistent after the triumphs of Keep On Pushing and People Get Ready—even more so considering what King was doing in my father’s backyard. Just before One by One’s release, King led a march down State Street to Madison Avenue in downtown Chicago. Traffic halted when the marchers reached Madison, a pocket of them singing the Impressions’ “Meeting Over Yonder.” By the time the procession reached city hall, the crowd had swelled to almost one hundred thousand bodies sweating in the sweltering heat.
As King spoke that day, there was serious dissension within the SCLC about the Chicago campaign. Tom Kahn, a movement activist close to both King and northern civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, recalled, “King had this naive faith that he could do in Chicago what he had done in the South, that he could reach down and inspire them, mobilize them, and so forth. And Bayard kept saying, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t know what Chicago is like…
. You’re going to be wiped out.’”
King expected to face white opposition, especially from Mayor Daley, and Daley delivered, setting his infamous political machine into action. Businessmen who backed King suddenly encountered trouble with garbage collection and city permits. Church leaders who offered King support found city inspectors knocking at their door, threatening to condemn the church’s property.
What King didn’t expect was the resistance he would face from his own people. Many Negro ministers and politicians told King to go back where he came from—they benefitted from the racist structure in Chicago, though they wouldn’t admit it. People on the street were just as hard to reach. After meeting with a group of Chicago Negroes, King’s close friend Hosea Williams said, “I have never seen such hopelessness.” Even King commented to an aide, “You ain’t never seen no Negroes like this, have you? … Boy, if we could crack these Chicago Negroes we can crack anything.” Despite the battle raging in his hometown, my father didn’t specifically comment.
On August 6, a month after One by One’s release, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in voting. It didn’t affect Curtis since he didn’t vote—a fact that always puzzled me, although it seemed he felt most comfortable (and perhaps most effective) dealing with politics in his music. Regardless, the movement scored another huge victory. As if on cue, a week later police brutality in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles ignited a massive riot there. For six days, columns of fire shot into the sky as Negroes in Watts destroyed everything in sight. They were sick of reading about King’s successes down South while they suffered in desperate poverty. They didn’t care about the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act as long as the police continued to harm them without repercussions. The riot caused 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage. It was just the beginning.
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