Traveling Soul (27 page)

On the other side, the Black Panthers filled the void left by King's death. From the beginning, the Panthers were one of the most misunderstood civil rights groups in history. Part of it was their desperate situation. As Huey Newton wrote in the
Black Panther
, “We've been pushed into corners, into ghettos, you dig it?” That cornering left them little choice but to lash out, especially after King, the paragon of nonviolence, was murdered.

Part of it was the Panthers' fault—they realized the more violent and incendiary they acted in public, the more media coverage they got. Satellite television had just been invented, and the rush of news from around the world roared with the force and noise of a white-water rapid. Amidst that din, the Vietnam War roared loudest. No longer did folks back home read about yesterday's battle in the newspaper. Now, they watched it on television as they ate dinner. The Panthers shrewdly realized meekness wouldn't get them featured on the evening broadcast.

Part of it came from Stokely Carmichael, who had just joined forces with the Panthers. He called Black Power “a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created”—a statement incendiary enough to get plenty of news coverage.

Though polls at the time showed only 15 percent of blacks identified as separatists, the Panthers had taken control of the public discourse by making more noise. Still, as Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale pushed the violent side of the Panthers, they also developed
another side to the organization, starting community projects including a free healthcare clinic and a free breakfast program for schoolchildren.

My father supported many of the Panthers' goals, but he couldn't get behind them the way he got behind King. “They aren't a national organization,” he said. “They don't have the muscle.” The Panthers would continue to gain influence, but they'd never reach the level of the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, or other groups that preceded them. Constant confrontations with police, disruptive tactics by the FBI, and vicious infighting made sure they never cohered as a unit.

With so much fighting going on at home, my father still worried about his brother fighting in Vietnam. Uncle Kenny was scheduled to finish his tour at the end of 1968, but he says:

They had a thing going on back then that they could not send two brothers to Vietnam at the same time, and I knew the government was still trying to draft certain people, so I extended another year to make sure that if my brother did get drafted, he wouldn't come there. So, that's why I took my extra year in Vietnam. Plus, when I got ready to leave Vietnam, they wanted to send me to Germany, and I refused that because at that time, they were still having racial problems. Any place they were having racial problems, I tried to avoid, because I'm outspoken. It's hard for me to get mad, but when I do get angry, I'm not in control of myself, so I kind of tried to avoid that, and I guess that's why I've always been a loner.

It's no surprise Uncle Kenny was a loner, coming from a family of loners, but he found solace hearing his brother's voice in Vietnam. “A lot of Curtis's music reached way over there,” he said. “My favorite one was ‘Choice of Colors.' Then you had ‘We're a Winner.' If you sit down and listen to it, it was inspirational, trying to build you up, trying to make you feel like you were somebody, trying to make you feel like this is my country.”

Even though he risked his life for America, Uncle Kenny didn't feel he had a country. Like many black soldiers, he followed the tragedies in America as news trickled into Vietnam, and he knew his prospects would be bleak upon returning home. “Here I am over [in Vietnam] fighting for somebody else's freedom that I didn't even have, but with what was going on in the country here, I didn't want to come back,” he says. “I didn't know where I was going, but I just didn't want to come back.”

He still faced racism, even in Vietnam. “I'll never forget it, I got off the boat in Danang, loaded down, had an M-14 automatic weapon, and this little Vietnamese guy come up to me and called me a nigger,” he says. “I took the butt of the weapon and I hit him with it.” His feelings fit perfectly with the movement's direction back home, both nonviolent and otherwise.

Around the time Uncle Kenny enlisted, the Defense Department had launched Project 100,000, which lowered standards for draft requirements, making one hundred thousand former rejects acceptable for induction. As a result, a disproportionate number of black soldiers ended up on the front lines. Black soldiers served as cannon fodder, suffering a casualty rate roughly twice that of white soldiers.

King had spoken against the war before his death, but SNCC, CORE, and the Panthers now made the war a major part of their rebellion. Carmichael and others trolled college campuses passing out flyers playing on army recruitment propaganda. “Uncle Sam wants YOU nigger,” the flyers read. “Become a member of the world's highest paid black mercenary army! Support White Power—travel to Viet Nam, you might get a medal! Fight for Freedom … (in Viet Nam). Receive valuable training in the skills of killing off other oppressed people! (Die Nigger Die—you can't die fast enough in the ghettos).”

Even the Viet Cong exploited American racism. At least one sign posted in Vietnam read, “U.S. Negro armymen! You are committing the same ignominious crimes in South Vietnam that the KKK clique is perpetuating against your family at home.” Perhaps no one summed up the situation better than Muhammad Ali, who put an exclamation mark on the black resistance to the draft when he issued his heartfelt but
incendiary reason for his refusal. In an often misquoted statement, he said, “My conscience won't let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father…. Shoot them for what? … How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

My father noticed all these developments. He and Ali were friends—my mother remembers the bombastic boxer visiting them at home—and Uncle Kenny still fought the war Ali resisted. Dad had never written an antiwar song before, and he wasn't ready to yet. The idea germinated in his mind, though. Perhaps he wanted to wait until his brother came home.

In 1969, Curtis celebrated a decade in the music business. Within those years, he'd gone from being Jerry Butler's sideman to one of the most powerful voices in popular music. He now stood on the cusp of even greater success, as he continued adding acts to the Curtom roster, including Baby Huey and the Babysitters. Baby Huey, real name James Ramey, was a hulking 350-pound man with a hell of a voice and one of the most popular live bands in Chicago. By the late '60s, he'd taken Sly Stone's lead and turned the Babysitters into a psychedelic soul act, electrifying audiences with R&B freak-outs amplified by his ample Afro and the trippy African robes he wore to cover his heft. In early 1969, the Babysitters' manager, Marv Heiman—also known as Marv Stuart—invited Donny Hathaway to watch the band at the Thumbs Up club in Chicago. Donny left so impressed that he had my father come with him the following night. Dad saw a star in Ramey and signed the band that night. Not long after, Baby Huey and the Babysitters released their first single on Curtom, a cover of the Impressions' “Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey),” renamed “‘Mighty' ‘Mighty' Children (Unite Yourself This Hour).”

Signing the Babysitters changed my father's life and career in major, unforeseen ways. Their manager, Marv Stuart, became a fulcrum that
pushed Dad into the next phase of his career. Marv was a hustler in every sense of the word. He'd already booked Baby Huey on Della Reese's talk show,
Della
, as well as
The Merv Griffin Show
, which even the Impressions couldn't get. He also booked them at the Whisky a Go Go and several other major clubs across the country. All this without a hit to their name.

Marv hadn't spent as much time in the music business as my father and Eddie, but his track record was so impressive that when the Impressions released their second album on Curtom,
The Young Mods' Forgotten Story
, Dad asked Marv to act as the group's manager. Dad liked Marv, frankly, because he was white and Jewish. As much as he believed in solidarity among black people, he also said, “My face during those years would not allow doors to open for me. As a black man, you don't get an invitation.” He thought Marv's face would open those doors, so he put his trust in a man who hadn't earned it.

Marv began booking the Impressions on television shows to coincide with an upcoming California tour. According to Marv, when he asked the producers why they never had the Impressions on the shows before, they said no one ever asked. He also took a hard look at Curtom's books. “There was one guy in charge of all the accounting, royalty collecting, bookkeeping,” Marv says. “According to the books, Curtom was broke and they weren't receiving the royalties they were due. Curtis said, ‘Is someone stealing from me?' I said I didn't think so—they just weren't able to handle the volume of work.” Marv hired an accounting firm to handle the books and Curtom quickly raked in roughly $600,000 in unclaimed royalties. From that point on, he was in.

Of Marv, my father said, “As green as he was, he was very ambitious. I taught him the record business and how to relate to people. Through his own know-how and his own go-gettingness, he learned. He was able to find weak spots in Curtom, and he turned them around.” Fred, Sam, and Eddie didn't share Dad's excitement, and the Impressions grew further apart.

Marv came onboard as Curtom took its biggest step toward legitimacy. The leadoff single from
The Young Mods' Forgotten Story
, another message song called “Choice of Colors,” shot to number one R&B. No stranger to the top of the chart, my father had now done it with his own label for the first time. With “Choice of Colors,” he retreated a bit from the edge of “This Is My Country” and offered a song more in the mold of his positive, food-for-thought, mid-'60s message songs. One main difference—“Choice of Colors” took on the issue of race directly. He sang, “If you had a choice of colors / Which one would you choose, my brothers? / If there was no day or night / Which would you prefer to be right?”

Dad held out hope for America longer than many black people around him did. “Choice of Colors” contained lyrics such as “People must prove to the people / A better day is coming,” and “With just a little bit more education /
And love for our nation / Would make a better society.” But those sentiments, which once helped give the old movement direction, now put him at odds with the new movement's goals and mindset.

The Young Mods' Forgotten Story
also contained a second message song, though, and it showed that even my father's hope for America had begun to erode. Tucked at the end of the album, “Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey)” warned about the dangers of “black and white power,” and it was clear when he sang, “We're killing up our leaders,” that King's death still weighed heavily on his mind. Unlike any song he'd yet written, this one played like a conversation about his feelings on where the country stood: