Back in Miami, according to Wexler, ‘a certain element thought it was gonna be there to actually take possession of the record companies and the radio stations. And the emcee was whipping them up. “It’s your time, boys, go and grab it.” I’m sitting there to receive a reward for Aretha Franklin and King Curtis got me and said, “You’re out of here right now.” He said somebody was coming after me, a part of [what Wexler called] the irredentists’ movement, they were gonna off me. It was one of those moments when the surge of Black Power infected the whole record business.’ Wexler was rescued when King Curtis and Titus Turner, also carrying guns, escorted him safely from the building to his home in Palm Beach.
Since 1968, the story of the NATRA convention has grown arms and legs. Lurid versions claimed that Aretha Franklin was also threatened and abused. Although she was an award nominee, Franklin was in fact performing at the Newport Jazz Festival and was nowhere near Miami. Others claimed that Otis Redding was intimidated although he had died eight months earlier. Wexler has always maintained that the motives behind the disturbances were to do with an irate Black Power group. But there is an alternative interpretation.
Immediately prior to the dinner, Stax/Volt hosted a session of pre-dinner drinks where invites were extended to all delegates, including Wexler, King Curtis and award nominees Sam and Dave. Relationships between the Stax and Atlantic management teams were still frayed and tensions between the parties only grew worse with alcohol. It was in environments like this that Johnny Baylor and Dino Woodard’s worst instincts flourished. Although Wexler may have believed that Baylor and Woodard were Harlem gangsters, they had been adopted by Stax and were taking their instructions from Al Bell and, to a lesser extent, Jim Stewart. It is much more likely that their strong-arm behaviour – which was real and undeniable – owed as much to the tribalism between Stax and Atlantic than any grandiose ideas of black self-determination.
NATRA 1968 was unquestionably spoiled by a dark atmosphere and by reckless acts of intimidation, but it would be misleading to claim that the sole factor was the arrival of Black Power militants. The previous year had also seen an emergent black militant presence in the shape of H. Rap Brown, Minister of Justice of the Black Panthers and once a leading figure in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Brown’s fiery rhetoric lit up the convention and led to heightened demands for a fairer deal for black artists. As a consequence, NATRA chief Del Shields proposed a visionary new training academy that would train young African-Americans entering the industry in skills in studio engineering, production, songwriting and management. Shields had agreed a $25,000 levy from all US majors with black artists on their roster, or an R&B subsidiary, but none of the funding was forthcoming. This resulted in the Fair Play Committee, with some merit, accusing the NATRA executive of ineffectualness and the industry majors of ignoring legitimate complaints. By 1968, in the wake of King’s murder, many felt that nothing much had changed and the vacuum was filled with venom.
Whatever their initial reasons for leaving Harlem and moving to Memphis, Johnny Baylor and Dino Woodard quickly established themselves at Stax, by both fair means and foul. Their presence was resented by some, and several key figures in the early years of the Stax story, including the sophisticated William Bell and the musical intellectual Booker T. Jones, left the company. Much has been made of their departure, but it was probably more to do with seeking greater creative freedom under their own direction than a reaction to the presence of Stax’s in-house enforcers. However, session musician Sandy Kay claimed that a latent racism was visibly at play: ‘I also remember Johnny Baylor and Dino Woodard. I had some run-ins with Dino. I believe he deeply resented white people, or maybe it was just me. Actually, I think he hated me – why, I don’t have a clue. Since my hair was long, I had a beard, an earring . . . I suppose I was considered a “hippie” by some. Whatever the case may be, Dino took pleasure in regularly ordering me around . . . He was a very confrontational person. One day, we had some words, he hit me in the head with a gun, and I bled all over the carpeting in Stax’s hallway. He was pretty well known for hitting people with guns – it was a really traumatic day, and required a trip to the doctor. Johnny Baylor never gave me a problem, and I remember him being a very nice guy to me. But I suppose we were never in a situation where we might disagree on anything. There was a whole lot of tension in the building whenever those two guys were around.’
Gradually Baylor and Woodard developed their own careers, as promoters and producers. The KoKo label flourished and Luther Ingram’s career at last took off. But they had cleverly noticed another emergent opportunity. Isaac Hayes had slowly but surely been cultivating a solo career and coming out from the shadows of songwriting. As Hayes’ solo career was in its early ascendancy, Baylor and Woodard took on the de facto role of his personal management team. Baylor set up shows, first in Memphis and then across the southern states, always insisting on cash in hand and sometimes with a menacing expectation. Woodard rose up the ladder of Stax’s promotions team, too, and was named Promotions Man of the Year at the more settled and less edgy 1973 NATRA convention.
It was Woodard, feeding on the food of hype and over-enthusiasm, who had the brilliant idea of rebranding Hayes. One night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he announced Hayes to the gathered press as ‘The Black Moses’. At first Hayes recoiled from what he thought was a presumptuous and sacrilegious new identity, but it was a moniker picked up with relish by prominent African-American magazines including Jet and Ebony, and it gave Hayes the final push he needed towards his era-defining album, the supremely innovative Black Moses. Hayes came to accept the new name, his initial anxieties proved unfounded, and with time he came to see the name as showbiz, rather than an affront to the Bible. Woodard never had any doubts and moved effortlessly from secular soul to religion and back again. Later in life he became one of the most respected black pastors in Harlem and a minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, a congregation he had first joined in the mid fifties when he shared a gym with Sugar Ray Robinson. Such was his presence on the streets of Harlem in his later life Woodard was described as ‘a church without walls’ and on his death he was given a pastor’s burial. ‘Boom Boom’ returned to the Lord from whom he had come.
Invaders incarcerated. John Burl Smith of the Memphis Invaders behind bars but still wearing the ice-cool look of Black Power.
Courtesy of author
SONNY YANCEY’S NEW JOB
September
Sonny Yancey cursed the day he took a short cut home from work, and every time he told the story it was with anxiety in his voice. Even his own mother was not sure if he was telling her the whole truth. Edward W. ‘Sonny’ Yancey was only eighteen and, unlike many of his friends, he had not been conscripted. Against all the odds, he had found a good job, too. It wasn’t the best-paid job in Memphis but he was now a lowly kitchen porter at the Top of the 100 Club, a fashionable skyline restaurant at 100 North Main, thirty-seven storeys up in the air overlooking the riverfront. It was one of three revolving restaurants in Memphis at the time, but Yancey was sure it was the best. He had seen Elvis eating there, and had walked past the singer on his way back to the kitchens carrying a box of carrots from the service elevator. Isaac Hayes came in regularly and sat at a private table, wearing his sunglasses. The kitchen staff, who were almost all black, were discouraged from looking at guests and were only ever allowed to use the service elevator. They were forbidden to enter the Japanese Gardens, a decorative retreat at the rear of the restaurant where lawyers and their clients met discreetly to discuss business. The rules were strict, but it was a job that came with a hint of glamour, even though his job was to gut chickens, carry waste to the elevator, and peel onions through smarting tears.
The night Yancey took a short cut home was 24 August 1968. He had come off a long Saturday night in the kitchens and he had gone over the story with police detectives in a gruelling eight-hour interrogation. They had not read him his rights, and he had s
pent most of the time fearful for his job as they pounded him with questions demanding greater detail and more corroboration. For a time they even told him that he was a suspect. There had been a spate of attacks on police vehicles, and a police officer had been shot. Yancey was in the area at the time and was questioned soon after. He had seen the suspects, and it preyed on his mind like a secret he wished he’d never been told. For the first time in his young life he felt pressurised into assisting a police force he had no good reason to respect.
It was approximately 10.30 p.m. when he headed home to his mother’s house on Castex Street. En route he noticed four people crouching by high weeds on an embankment on Davant Avenue, where it dips down to the Yazoo railroad tracks. It was an area steeped in the past – the old bluesmen called the rail track the ‘Yellow Dog’ and paid tribute to it in song and story – but for boys of Yancey’s age it was no more than a short cut home, through the scattered single-storey wooden-frame houses, rusting fences and deserted freight yards. Yancey was nearly home when he spotted the four men. He knew one of them as ‘Speedy’, the nickname for a nineteen-year-old local youth called Womax Stevenson, and he knew that another was the singer John Gary Williams of the soul group the Mad Lads. He had once dated Sonny’s sister. He had no idea who the other two were but suspected they were Memphis Invaders. They were Oree McKenzie (18) and Ben Heard Berry (18), both of whom were already known to the police and had been arrested for participating in a riot at the city’s Carver High School earlier in the year.
The Invaders’ notoriety had grown since the Sanitation Workers Strike. They had tentacles that reached further than a street gang and an organisational depth that dug deep into the poverty programmes and ghetto streets of South Memphis. The Invaders were feared but also respected. Since the assassination of Martin Luther King, they had armed themselves and spoken openly of insurrection, but like the Black Panthers their activities mostly involved poverty outreach and black educational projects. The Memphis police were their sworn enemy and the police were distrusted by almost every black family in the city. A predominantly white force, who had attacked demonstrators during the strike and had acted at best incompetently in the case of the murder of Martin Luther King, the MPD had been slow to recruit young blacks and alienated even the most compliant youths with heavy-handed tactics and discriminatory stop-and-search procedures. In many areas, particularly in the south of the city, they were seen as an occupying army, patrolling neighbourhoods aggressively in their numbered tactical squad cars.
Across America, the police were retreating into themselves and failing to change with society. There was widespread concern within the law-and-order community that armed militants posed a real and present threat to the country’s major cities. Huey Newton of the Black Panthers had been accused of killing an Oakland policeman, Officer John Frey, almost a year earlier. In April 1968 teenager Bobby Hutton was killed in a police ambush in Oakland; fellow Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was wounded in the same ambush before absconding to Cuba. Police anxiety had been heightened by a volatile summer. In July in Glenville, a racially troubled ghetto in Cleveland, Ohio, a shootout between police and a group of Afrocentric militants led by community worker and bookstore owner Fred ‘Ahmed’ Evans had been provoked by a low-level dispute over an abandoned car. By the end of the night, seven people were dead: three policemen, three Black Power suspects and one civilian. The incident triggered five days of rioting, and when it became clear that the police were neither trained nor equipped to handle the disorder, Mayor Carl Stokes requested the assistance of the National Guard.
* * *
The Memphis police were regular and unwanted visitors at the Invaders’ offices at the Neighbourhood Organizing Project on 1310 Florida Street, which sat among wrecked low-rise buildings near the Illinois Central Railroad. Early in the afternoon of 24 August, police came in force to the Invaders’ headquarters and arrested a leading figure in the Black Power movement, John Henry Ferguson, a Memphis teenager who had joined the police’s Most Wanted list after he had threatened officers at a Sanitation Workers Strike meeting. He was alleged to have waved a wooden toy gun at a passing car. News of Ferguson’s arrest spread like wildfire, and the Invaders and their supporters confronted, disrupted and resisted the police wherever they could. A series of sporadic incidents erupted deep in ghetto neighbourhoods, well away from downtown. Teenage gangs took to intersections and jeered at passing police cars, and fire bombs were thrown at commercial buildings deemed to be unsupportive of local black communities. Laundry outlets owned by the family of the despised mayor Henry Loeb were targeted. Those Invaders who had access to guns were told that the time had come to arm themselves and be public about their rights under the Second Amendment of the Constitution. By the morning of 6 September resentment among the Invaders had grown to fever pitch after their offices were suspiciously burned to the ground in an overnight attack by what were likely rogue agents in the pay of the MPD.
It has never been entirely clear what pulled John Gary Williams into this maelstrom, or what brought him to the corner of Davant and Yazoo on 24 August. He says he was there to discourage his younger cousin Oree McKenzie from getting himself deeper into trouble; the police claim he was there as part of an organised Invaders’ plot to shoot and kill a police officer. Always a bright and well-read young man, Williams had become fascinated by the growing radicalism of African-American politics, and although emotionally committed to civil rights he began to feel that the movement for peaceful change was too slow. The assassination of Martin Luther King had convinced him that America was not yet ready for change, and that his generation would have to force it. Although he remained deeply loyal to his religious beliefs and the ‘journey of the soul’ – and in that respect he was a kindred spirit to King – he was also close to John Burl Smith, the most impressive of the Invaders and a man who had also been to Vietnam and was armed with a library of books that advocated revolutionary social change.
The trial of the Memphis Invaders fell short of being a political show trial, but when it came to court it unfolded with all the intrigue and drama of a television special. John Gary Williams’ presence in the dock – charged with ambushing a police car – added a dimension that the local press found hard to resist. Stax was by some distance the most famous record label in Memphis and to have one of their recording artists accused of being a member of the city’s most notorious Black Power organisation added spice to an already compelling trial. The facts had been coloured by dramatic reporting. No one died in the incident, but shots had been fired and police were targeted, including one patrol car carrying the city’s police chief. Patrolman Robert James Waddell was seriously injured after a bullet pierced the side of his car and he was only able to hobble into court with the aid of walking sticks. An FBI ballistics expert confirmed that the rifle used in the incident was a Russian 7.62mm Mosin rifle, similar to the gun found in the group’s car. Unexpectedly, for the defendants, one of their tight-knit group had turned state’s evidence and pleabargained for lesser charges. Ben Heard Berry had been at a private meeting with the Shelby County attorney general in the company of his lawyer and struck a deal. So when Berry entered the court, he came as a pariah, having betrayed the Invaders and his friends. When Judge Odell Horton said that ‘his testimony was of great help to the State of Tennessee in the prosecution of the case’ the courtroom bristled with indignation.
Williams’ presence in the dock caused him to become a minor celebrity in the case. On one occasion he frustrated the court by arriving late, having travelled to Washington to promote a new single ‘Love Is Here Today And Gone Tomorrow’ (written by Bettye Crutcher). Williams’ girlfriend, a trendy afro-sporting teenager by the name of Gloria Fay Goodman, corroborated his story that he was only at the scene to try to discourage his young cousin from taking part in the shooting. Only seventeen and looking like an elegant soul singer in her own right, she was brought to the trial as a ward of the juvenile court and was forced to adm
it that she had made the bogus emergency phone call that had lured the police car into the vicinity.
Sonny Yancey was by far the most conflicted witness. He changed his story, even in the dock, went back on evidence he had given to the police, and at one stage claimed any evidence he did give might be wrong as he was drunk at the time. He looked petrified and often glanced over at his mother for emotional support. At one point, he enraged lawyers so much that the defence came close to securing a mistrial. He was simply a young man who was scared he would lose his job and concerned that he might enrage the neighbourhood who packed out the public gallery. His mother was so worried about his safety she had sent him to stay with relatives in St Louis the weekend before the trial and had threats of violence relayed to her by phone call.
Williams was compromised by the car that the Invaders had used in the attack. It was a green Chevrolet Camaro with the initials ‘JGW’ emblazoned on the side, the car he had bought with the proceeds of royalties from Stax Records. Despite the evidence stacked against him, Williams cut a credible figure in court, speaking slowly and lowly, offering contrition for the injury to the officer and at times wiping tears from his face. At least one member of the jury considered acquitting him, but the majority found him guilty on reduced terms. Of the Invaders who stood trial, John Gary Williams was given the minimum possible sentence and charges of attempted murder were dropped. He was found guilty of the lesser charge of assault with intent to commit voluntary manslaughter. It was clear that the jury did not wholly believe the story that he had tried to thwart the sniper attack, but it was apparent that he was the most honest and penitent of the three accused. Williams told the court: ‘I would like to say that what I said on the witness stand I learned a lesson from it.’ His cousin Oree McKenzie was given the longest sentence, charged with assault to murder in the first degree, and was sentenced to prison for not more than ten years. Williams made one request: rather than go to the tough Shelby County Jail, could he see out his sentence in a more useful way at the Shelby Penal Farm? There he could work outdoors tending vegetables and growing food for the prison population. Ben Heard Berry, the Invader who had turned state’s evidence, was also granted a reduced sentence, and it was recommended that he should serve time at the Shelby Penal Farm. Now fearing for his safety, he made an appeal to serve his sentence away from Memphis, in a jail in Nashville, claiming that his wife, children and his mother had all been threatened. Whether that was true or not, it was clear that Berry had made enemies and the Penal Farm would be a dangerous place to serve his sentence. The prison was already populated with convicted Invaders and his life was genuinely at risk. In a very public way he had abandoned the cause and was not going to be quickly forgiven.
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