In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  Adam Clayton Powell

  One afternoon in late 1967, I saw Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. speak on the Berkeley campus. At the time, he was being accused of corruption and wanted to rally national support. Powell had been the most powerful black congressperson in US history. In 1961, after sixteen years in Congress, he had become chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, where he presided over the creation of Medicaid, the expansion of the minimum wage, education and training for the deaf, nursing education, aid for elementary and secondary education and school libraries, and legislation that made lynching a federal crime.

  Powell maintained a strong connection with his Harlem district as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where he had offered the pulpit to Malcolm X and organized and supported many boycotts to empower the community. He also had a flamboyant lifestyle, which made him an easy target for his political enemies. Powell was accused of mismanaging his committee’s budget, taking trips abroad at public expense, and bringing two young women with him on overseas travel at government expense. Powell’s defense was, “I will always do just what every other congressman and committee chairman has done and is doing and will do.” He refused to pay a slander judgment won by a constituent in his Harlem district and feelings against him reached a critical mass in the House, which voted to exclude him in March 1967. Powell would eventually be vindicated. Represented by Arthur Kinoy, he prevailed in a lawsuit that claimed the House had no right to exclude him, and he was reelected by his constituents.

  Powell was a lot older than those in the Berkeley audience, but his track record spoke for itself. “You know, you white kids and your protests are very impressive,” he said, “but you don’t seem to have any leaders. That’s okay—there are a lot of great black leaders, we have Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, James Farmer,” and then he jokingly pointed to himself, “and Big Daddy. Use one of ours.”

  The crowd of several hundred Berkeley lefties laughed, but the various white radical and hippie clusters, whatever their other differences, were all pretty phobic about empowering any particular leader. Nevertheless, Powell’s point about the richness of black leaders at the time was undeniable. In addition to those he mentioned, the Black Panthers were emerging, the NAACP still mattered, and even though it wanted nothing to do with white people, so did the Nation of Islam. No one of any race was more well known than the NOI’s most famous convert, Muhammad Ali.

  Ali!

  During the years 1965 and 1966, Muhammad Ali successfully defended his boxing title seven times, yet he was the only heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson not to be invited to the White House. (I liked to think that if JFK had not been killed, he would have had Ali there.) In August 1966, the champ announced that he was filing for conscientious objector status and would not fight in the Vietnam War, saying to a confrontational press corps, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.” At the time, Ali was going against the grain of popular opinion, even in the black community. According to Time, only 35 percent of blacks and fewer than 20 percent of whites opposed the war.

  On February 6, 1967, Ali fought Ernie Terrell, who had persisted in calling him “Clay” in prefight interviews. The champ won by a unanimous decision, taunting Terrell as he punched him, “What’s my name? What’s my name?” Just six weeks later, on March 22, Ali successfully defended his title for the ninth time, knocking out Zora Folley in the seventh round.

  Five weeks after that victory, Ali formally refused to step forward when his name was called at the US Army induction center in Houston, Texas. He was arrested and was immediately stripped of his title by the New York State Athletic Commission. Within the next few weeks, other states followed suit and Ali would not be able to box again in the United States until 1970. He defiantly told reporters, “No, I am not going ten thousand miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slave masters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.”

  On June 4, 1967, in his Cleveland office, recently retired Cleveland Browns superstar Jim Brown (at the time, he held the record for lifetime rushing yards in the NFL) convened a meeting of several top African American athletes with Ali. The group included Boston Celtics center Bill Russell (already a five-time NBA MVP), Bobby Mitchell and Jim Shorter of the Washington Redskins, Willie Davis of the Green Bay Packers, Sid Williams and Walter Beach of the Browns, Curtis McClinton of the Kansas City Chiefs, and Lew Alcindor, who would soon rename himself Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and go on to become the all-time leading NBA scorer. (Alcindor was then a sophomore at UCLA, but already one of the most famous college basketball players in the country.)

  “Muhammad Ali was one of my heroes,” recalled Abdul-Jabbar years later. “He was in trouble and he was someone I wanted to help because he made me feel good about being an African American.” Cleveland attorney Carl Stokes, who would be elected in November as the first black mayor of a major American city, also attended.

  There was no precedent in American history for any sports figure having taken such an aggressive antiestablishment stand, and some of the athletes tried to get Ali to soften his position. The army offered Ali an arrangement similar to what Joe Louis had during World War II, in which he would be spared combat and could just do boxing exhibitions. Some of Ali’s advisers were attracted to this option because it would have preserved the champ’s ability to make big money in the short run, but Ali wouldn’t consider it. Instead he spoke of the depth of his beliefs. “He was such a dazzling speaker, he damn near converted a few in that room,” recalls Jim Brown.

  It is likely that Ali persuaded a lot of young America as well. At this point in time, he was the most popular American to publicly oppose the war, and to many young people he validated the antiwar movement in the same way that the Beatles had validated psychedelics.

  On June 20, 1967, Ali was found guilty after a jury deliberation of only twenty-one minutes. Stokely Carmichael later said, “No one risked or suffered like Muhammad Ali. I didn’t risk anything. I just told people not to go.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell, then ninety-five years old, had convened an International War Crimes Tribunal in Stockholm to evaluate the situation in Vietnam, and wrote a letter to Ali that said, “You have my wholehearted support.”

  A handful of New York writers such as Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, James Baldwin, and Pete Hamill formed a committee to reinstate the championship to Ali, but in most of the establishment world, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. An editorial in the New York Times condemned Ali, as did virtually every major sports writer in the United States. Many older black celebrities rebuked Ali, including Jackie Robinson and Joe Louis. Howard Cosell, the ABC broadcaster who had previously been one of his biggest boosters, was too nervous about pressure from his network to lend his name to efforts to support Ali. The argument was almost totally generational for both blacks and whites. Most younger people got it; most older people were deeply offended. They hadn’t gotten the memo about the moral horror of the war in Vietnam or its lack of any relevance to America’s interests. They blindly trusted the government, just as they had during World War II.

  Although Ali was idolized by pot-smoking hippies, when he spoke at colleges he often talked about his Muslim values, which included no smoking, drinking, or drugs. He was usually greeted with adulation, except on a few occasions when interracial couples walked out, offended by his disapproval of such relationships.

  Ali publicly maintained the Nation of Islam’s separatist principles, but in his personal life he continued to work with whites, like his trainer Angelo Dundee, and befriended many of his white supporters. He usually adhered to the NOI insistence on staying out of electoral politics, but he made an exception and publicly endorsed Dick Gregory when he ran a quixotic write-in campaign for mayor of Chicago.

  By 1971, public opinion about the war would change so much that the United States Supreme Court unanimously overturn
ed Ali’s conviction. In subsequent decades, he was invited by several presidents to the White House and became one of the most popular people in America and around the world; but in 1967 he was on the cutting edge, at moments virtually alone with his conscience and beliefs.

  Singer/actor Harry Belafonte said, “He was in many ways as inspiring as Dr. King, as inspiring as Malcolm. Out of the womb of oppression he was our phoenix . . . They could not break his spirit nor deny his moral imperative.”

  Although they had differing religious beliefs, Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali privately had great respect for each other. When Ali first won the championship in 1964, King was the only black leader to send him a telegram of congratulations. Two days after Ali refused induction, King preached from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church: “He is giving up millions of dollars in order to stand up for what his conscience tells him is right. No matter what you think of Muhammad Ali’s religion, you have to admire his courage.”

  King met with Ali for about two hours on March 29, 1967. Afterward, the champ affably told reporters that although he disagreed with King regarding integration, the two men could still talk civilly like Kennedy and Khrushchev did.

  Riots

  The worst American race riots of the century took place during the summer of 1967. For some time, the black community in Newark, New Jersey, had been objecting to “redlining” (which placed undue economic burdens on black neighborhoods), lack of opportunity in education, training, and jobs, and police brutality.

  On July 12, a black cab driver, John Weerd Smith, was arrested, beaten, and taken to Newark’s Fourth Precinct, where he was charged with assaulting the officers and making insulting remarks. In the eyes of the community, Smith hadn’t done anything remotely wrong. He had passed a parked police car, and was then pulled over by the two white officers.

  Word of the unfair treatment spread quickly and over the course of five days, riots and destruction ultimately left a total of twenty-six people dead, including a police officer and a firefighter. Hundreds more were injured, over a thousand people were arrested, and property damage exceeded ten million dollars.

  On July 23 in Detroit, police raided the Blind Pig, an unlicensed after-hours bar, and things got out of control and triggered a riot which also lasted five days, resulting in forty-three deaths, over 1,100 injuries, more than 7,200 arrests, and more than two thousand buildings were looted or destroyed. (To put this into context, the widely reported 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown, resulted in no additional fatalities and less than one hundred arrests.)

  Riots triggered by confrontations with police also occurred that summer in Tampa, Syracuse, Milwaukee, and Buffalo. Racial conflicts of this scale had not occurred in the United States since the Civil War. Many in the black community objected to the word “riot” and preferred the words “revolt” or “rebellion.”

  President Johnson appointed a commission to study the underlying causes of the riots. It was chaired by Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, and included New York Mayor John Lindsay, Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke, I.W. Abel, the president of the United Steelworkers of America, and Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP.

  The commission’s final report was released on February 29, 1968, in book form, selling an astounding two million copies. The main conclusion was that the riots resulted from black frustration at the lack of economic opportunity. The report stated, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” It criticized the mass media as well: “The press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective.”

  The commission’s suggestions included more diversity on police forces, stronger employment programs, the creation of housing opportunities in the suburbs for African Americans, and for public housing to be built on “scattered sites” instead of large high-rise projects.

  Martin Luther King Jr. called the report a “physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life,” but the Congress and president made no effort to implement any of the commission’s proposals. (When Dr. King was assassinated a few months later, riots broke out again in over one hundred American cities.)

  Amiri Baraka

  One of the most prominent people arrested in the Newark riot was poet LeRoi Jones, who was charged with carrying an illegal weapon and resisting arrest. Jones’s poetry had been influenced by the beats, and he remained close with Ginsberg until the end of his life. At Jones’s trial, as supposed evidence of his guilt, the judge read a portion of Jones’s poem “Black People!” including the lines: “All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. / The magic words are: up against the wall mother fucker / this is a stick up!” (In 1969, Jefferson Airplane used the phrase in the chorus of “We Can Be Together,” on their Volunteers album.)

  The poet was initially convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but an appeals court reversed the conviction on the basis that the decision had been made primarily for his writing. Jones joked that he was charged with holding two revolvers “and two poems.”

  In 1967, Jones visited Professor Maulana Karenga in Los Angeles. Karenga had started an organization called US after the Watts riots of 1965; he was influenced by Malcolm X’s short-lived Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). In 1966, Karenga created the year-end holiday Kwanzaa as a gift-giving alternative to Christmas. He said his goal was to “give blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.” Kwanzaa was inspired by African traditions, and the name is derived from the Bantu “First Fruit” celebration. Shortly after meeting Karenga, Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka.

  That same year, Baraka’s second book of jazz criticism, Black Music, was released, as was a movie version of his play Dutchman, which portrayed a shy black man being teased and seduced by a white woman (a film I saw while on acid).

  Dashikis and Afros

  In an article in the Harlem paper the Amsterdam News, reporting on the Newark riots, reporter George Barner referred to a new African garment called a dashiki, a colorful gown worn by men that was based on African clothing and was created by a black-owned company called New Breed, run by J. Benning. Within the next couple of years the dashiki was worn in public by many black celebrities, including Jim Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Russell.

  Around the same time the natural Afro hairstyle became popular with many young black women. Kathleen Cleaver, who was married to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, explained in a 1968 interview, “The reason for it . . . is a new awareness among black people that their own natural physical appearance is beautiful . . . For so many, many years we were told only white people were beautiful. Only straight hair, light eyes, light skin was beautiful, and so black women would try everything they could to straighten their hair and lighten their skin to look as much like white women . . . But this has changed because black people are aware.”

  Black Panthers

  Adapting the name from the Mississippi organization that Stokely Carmichael had supported, the Black Panther Party was created in late 1966 in Oakland, California. It was the brainchild of Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, both of whom had been heavily influenced by Malcolm X when they were student activists at Merrit College. In April 1967, the Black Panther Party opened its first official headquarters in an Oakland storefront and published the first issue of the Black Panther: Black Community News Service. Their core identity was armed citizens’ patrols which monitored the behavior of police officers and challenged police brutality in Oakland.

  The Panthers also instituted a variety of community initiatives, most notably the Free Breakfast for Children program. Although the Panthers were highly regarded by black nationalists, they also had strong ties to white lefties and the hippie counterculture. Their operation was initially funded from sales on the streets of Berkeley o
f pocket-sized books containing sayings of Chairman Mao; they were primarily bought by white college kids. The Panthers also welcomed financial support from wealthy liberals such as Bert Schneider, who was a producer on The Monkees TV series, Easy Rider, and the antiwar documentary Hearts and Minds. The first few issues of the Panther newspaper were printed on a Gestetner mimeograph machine borrowed from the Diggers.

  At the time, only sixteen of Oakland’s 661 police officers were African American. Newton had the Panthers memorize portions of California’s open-carry gun laws, and the group would record incidents of police brutality by following police cars. Membership started to really grow in February 1967, when the party provided an armed escort at the San Francisco airport for Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow and keynote speaker for a conference being held in his honor.

  Don Mulford, a Republican assemblyman who represented Oakland, quickly responded to the Black Panther police patrols in 1967 with a bill to strip Californians of the right to openly carry firearms. The legislation, known in the press as “The Panthers Bill,” passed and was signed by Governor Reagan. While the bill was being debated, the Panthers burst onto the national scene on May 2, 1967, when thirty members, led by Bobby Seale, appeared at the state capitol building in Sacramento carrying rifles, shotguns, and handguns, which evoked both fears of and aspirations for an armed insurrection. Six of them actually entered the assembly chamber. Some legislators took cover under their desks. The Panthers claimed that they were within their rights to be in the capitol building with their guns, but they exited peacefully when ordered to do so by police.