A Renegade History of the United States Page 36

  THE SOUNDTRACK OF GLASNOST

  Like rock-and-roll, Hollywood movies and comic books received just as much scorn from American political leaders as they did from Eastern Bloc authorities. Concerns over the rising rates of juvenile crime and the general sexualization of American teenagers spurred several members of Congress to look for their causes in popular culture. In 1955 Senator Estes Kefauver conducted a series of hearings on juvenile delinquency and its connections to sex and violence in popular culture. Dr. Leopold Wexberg, chief of the Mental Health Division of the Bureau of Disease Control in the Department of Public Health, testified that movies, television programs, and comic books did indeed contribute to juvenile delinquency. Kefauver concluded that the federal government was “not fully exercising the powers presently vested in it to protect the public interest, and especially to protect the Nation’s [sic] children from the magnitude of programs dealing with crime and violence.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover vowed to suppress “trash mills which spew out celluloid poison destroying the impressionable mind of youth.”

  Meanwhile, in the Eastern Bloc, the introduction of reel-to-reel tape recorders in the 1960s helped create a vast underground culture of fans of rock, rhythm and blues, and later disco and hip-hop. In the 1960s the newspaper Sovetskaia Rossia warned: “The epidemic of bawdy and vulgar songs copied from tape recorders is spreading faster than a flu virus.” By far, the biggest dance during the Khrushchev era was the twist, which had been introduced in the United States by the black rocker Chubby Checker. In Czechoslovakia alone, there were an estimated two hundred “twist ensembles” that performed the dance in underground theaters. Increasingly, however, Soviet Bloc youth listened to native musicians who made the music their own.

  Though they avoided the explicit racism of their capitalist rivals, Communist authorities clearly understood the source of the corruption. A Bulgarian newspaper called young rockers “arrogant monkeys, dropped into our midst as if from a foreign zoo.” Soviet cultural magazines referred to jazz and rock as “mud music” produced by an “ape culture.” East German Communists more frankly dismissed it as “Negermusik.” But the youth in those countries apparently took the association with African Americans as a compliment. The first rock band in Poland, formed in 1958, was originally named Rhythm and Blues and subsequently changed its name to the Reds and Blacks.

  By the 1970s, desire for music frequently turned to hatred for the Communist regime. Riots broke out at several rock concerts, where the targets were usually authorities who attempted to stop the performances. Then disco swept the Soviet Bloc, soon after it was created in New York City nightclubs. It was particularly popular in the Baltic republics, where dance clubs were the sites of several uprisings against the police. A Latvian newspaper called the country’s three hundred discos the “incubators of violence.”

  The Kremlin was forced to acknowledge that popular music could no longer be contained. Instead, as the historian Timothy W. Ryback has put it, it became “the soundtrack of glasnost.” In the 1980s, performance spaces were opened with official approval from Moscow, the censorship of recordings was eased, giant rock concerts were staged all over Eastern Europe, and by the end of the decade, major American and British pop acts were allowed to perform behind the Iron Curtain. Polls of Soviet youth showed that they had far greater knowledge of rock stars than of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, East Germans flooded West Berlin record shops.

  Why, then, did the culture of American renegades get so little praise from the would-be evangelists of democracy? If jazz, rock, comic books, and “vulgar” movies helped bring down Communism, why were they not promoted by American political leaders as beacons of freedom? The answer might be that, by necessity, leaders of all political varieties—from the American presidents to Communist commissars—share a devotion to social order and are therefore natural enemies of renegades.

  14

  “A PROCESS OF SELF-PURIFICATION”: THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT’S ATTACK ON AFRICAN AMERICANS

  In the summer of 1957, a Baptist preacher in the segregated South issued a series of fiery sermons denouncing the laziness, promiscuity, criminality, drunkenness, slovenliness, and ignorance of Negroes. He shouted from pulpits about the difference between doing a “real job” and doing “a Negro job.” Instead of practicing the intelligent saving habits of white men, “Negroes too often buy what they want and beg for what they need.” He suggested that blacks were “thinking about sex” every time they walked down the street. They were too violent. They didn’t bathe properly. And their music, which was invading homes all over America, “plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths.”

  The preacher’s name was Martin Luther King Jr. And the immoral black people he denounced did more to destroy segregation than did the civil rights movement.

  BLACK CITIZENS AND “BAD NIGGERS”

  Since emancipation, many African Americans have struggled against the barriers to citizenship and the behaviors that set them apart from it. Members of the black middle class as well as what has sometimes been called the “respectable black working class” have understood what historians of the modern civil rights movement often have not, that the project of making black citizens required a radical reformation of African American culture.

  For Martin Luther King Jr. and many of the leaders of the civil rights movement, the requirements of citizenship merged with Christian asceticism. In his sermons and writings, King called for African Americans to work hard, to shun immoral forms of sexuality, and to curb their materialism. They would no longer abdicate familial and social responsibilities and would undergo “a process of self-purification” to produce a “calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens.”

  In advocating nonviolence, King asked African Americans to “present our very bodies” as living sacrifices to attain citizenship and respectability, and offered himself as a model of self-abnegation. After his house was bombed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956, King issued a statement to the press in which he sounded not only like the Apostle Paul but also like a citizen-soldier willing to die for his country. “The consequences for my personal life are not particularly important,” King said. “It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about.” In 1957 King cemented his position as national spokesman for civil rights with three interlocking projects: the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the launching of a voting rights effort called the Campaign for Citizenship, and an evangelical crusade to rid black people of un-Christian and un-American habits. The first two projects have been noted by historians as marking King’s ascendancy to leadership of the civil rights movement. What is remarkable, however, is the almost complete silence among chroniclers of King’s career on his moral reform crusade among African Americans.

  In the summer of 1957, King delivered a series of sermons under the title “Problems of Personality Integration.” The sermons were intended to prepare African Americans for entry into mainstream American culture. King encouraged “those who are giving their lives to a tragic life of pleasure and throwing away everything they have in riotous living” to “lose [their] ego in some great cause, some great purpose, some great ideal, some great loyalty.” By doing so, King said, they would create in themselves what he called “the integrated personality.”

  In subsequent speeches, as well as in an advice column he began writing for Ebony in 1957 and in a book he published the following year, King endorsed Christian self-abnegation as a means to attain “first-class citizenship.” To become citizens, African Americans must “seek to gain the respect of others by improving on our shortcomings.” King called for blacks to stop drinking and gambling and to curtail their desires for luxuries. On the causes of black crime, he blamed not only poverty and structural racism but also the lack of discipline and morality in the ghetto. “The church must extend its evangelistic program into all of the poverty-stricken and slum areas of the big cities, thereby touching the ind
ividuals who are more susceptible to criminal traits. By bringing them into the church and keeping them in touch with the great moral insights of religion, they will develop more inner stability and become more responsible citizens,” King wrote.

  King even attributed poverty in large measure to what he considered the profligacy and laziness of African Americans. On these issues he approvingly paraphrased Booker T. Washington: “There is a great deal that the Negro can do to lift himself by his own bootstraps. Well has it been said by one that Negroes too often buy what they want and beg for what they need. Negroes must learn to practice systematic saving.” King was particularly concerned that African Americans had rejected the white work ethic:

  Don’t set out to do a good Negro job… . If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures; sweep streets like Michelangelo carved marble; sweep streets like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”

  King recognized that black sexuality posed a special threat to his assimilationist project. “We must walk the street every day, and let people know that as we walk the street, we aren’t thinking about sex every time we turn around,” he told one audience. In Ebony he impugned readers to avoid rock-and-roll, which “plunges men’s minds into degrading and immoral depths.”

  When white southerners spoke of African Americans in these terms, they commonly referred to “bad niggers.”

  TOO BLACK

  One of the great untold stories of the civil rights movement is the flourishing and subsequent destruction of black ministers in the postwar period who were anathema to aspiring black citizens. It would not be an exaggeration to say that two of these ministers in particular, James Francis Jones, who was known as Prophet Jones, and Charles Manuel Grace, who operated under the moniker Sweet Daddy Grace, were the most popular religious figures among the black working class in the 1940s and 1950s, even more popular than the rising group of ministers who would lead the civil rights movement.

  Prophet Jones headed the two largest Pentecostal congregations in Detroit during this period. He also broadcast a live weekly sermon over Canadian station CKLW, whose fifty-thousand-watt signal reached several Midwestern cities with sizable African American populations, and in 1955 began hosting a Sunday-night program on WXYZ-TV, making him the first African American preacher in Detroit to host a weekly television program. The radio and television shows, were, according to several sources, the most popular programs among the city’s African American population. With the help of sustained national mainstream media attention, including feature articles in Life, Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post, by the mid-1950s, Jones’s admirers made up a substantial portion of the African American population as a whole. And he was almost certainly the most popular minister among Detroit’s black working class. A researcher at Wayne State University who studied one of Jones’s congregations wrote, “The devotees of the cult appear to constitute largely that class of persons who are near the bottom of the social and economic ladder.” In 1955 the Detroit-area circulation for the Saturday Evening Post jumped 30 percent when the magazine ran an extensive and flattering profile of Jones.

  Jones reveled in materialist self-aggrandizement. He spoke not from a pulpit but from a $5,000 throne. In public he often wore a full-length white mink coat draped over European suits, and at home he liked to relax in satin slippers and a flowing robe decorated with sequins and an Elizabethan collar. He was doused with cologne and festooned with enormous jeweled rings, and drove a massive white Cadillac. But most impressive of all was his fifty-four room mansion, called Dominion Residence, which included a perfume parlor, barber shop, ballroom, and shrine to his longtime companion, James Walton, who died in 1951. Jones had the mansion painted a different color each season of the year. Perhaps most astonishing, nearly all of his wealth came from gifts he received from his followers, whose devotion to Jones was never cooled by the press’s constant exposure of his homosexuality.

  Like Prophet Jones, Sweet Daddy Grace was a fount of self-love and an idol of the black working class. Beginning in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the 1920s, then expanding into Washington, DC, New York City, and finally New England, Grace built a Pentecostal empire up and down the East Coast that by the 1950s included at least five hundred thousand members in three hundred congregations in nearly seventy cities. Declared by Ebony to be “America’s Richest Negro Minister,” Grace made every effort to demonstrate the validity of the title. His shoulder-length hair splayed across the collar of his gold and purple cutaway coats, which often framed chartreuse vests and floral-print ties. More striking still were his five-inch-long fingernails, usually painted red, white, and blue. Grace, who immigrated from Cape Verde and worked as a dishwasher and migrant farm laborer before becoming a preacher, said the nails represented his rejection of work. It may be no coincidence that in the late twentieth century, this style of extraordinarily long and elaborately decorated fingernails became common among black, working-class women—many of whom worked at keyboards and cash registers but who refused to subordinate themselves to their jobs.

  Grace rode in a custom-built Cadillac limousine, and he bought some of the most prestigious real estate in Manhattan, including the El Dorado on Central Park West, which was then the tallest apartment building in the world. By the mid-1950s, his total net worth was estimated at $25 million. And again, like Prophet Jones’s fortune, most of it came from donations by Grace’s working-class devotees. In many of his churches, the members constructed enormous, arklike containers covered with dollar bills, behind which sat Grace’s throne. Grace’s services were also sexually charged. They began with him slowly walking down the red-carpeted aisle as his followers pinned ten-, twenty-, fifty-, and sometimes hundred-dollar bills onto his robe. While a rhythm and blues band played, the congregants danced ecstatically. Asked why he promoted such libidinous revelry, he replied, “Why should the devil have all the good times?” Grace gave himself the title “Boyfriend of the World,” and his theme song featured the chorus “Daddy, you feel so good.”

  The civil rights movement ended the careers of Prophet Jones and Sweet Daddy Grace. In January 1955, after years of neutral coverage of Jones, the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit’s leading black newspaper, published a broadside attack against the preacher, calling him a “circus-type headline seeker operating under the guise of religion.” Three months later, after NBC scheduled an appearance by Jones on the Today program, the Detroit Urban League and the Detroit Council of Churches organized a successful protest to keep the prophet off the air. The most strident attacks came from C. L. Franklin, father of Aretha Franklin, pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, and the emerging leader of the Detroit civil rights movement. Franklin had been friendly toward Jones for many years, but now he called the prophet “degrading not only to local religious circles but, more significantly, a setback of hundreds of years to the integration of all races who are this time seeking democratic as well as Spiritual brotherhood.”

  Soon after the attacks on Jones, he was arrested for allegedly attempting to perform fellatio on an undercover police officer who had been assigned to investigate rumors that Jones ran a numbers-running operation. The local black press cheered the arrest. The Michigan Chronicle called it a victory for “an increasingly vociferous element in the community” who demanded that people like Jones, “who exist by the skillful intermixing of religion, fear, faith in God, and outright fakery solely for personal aggrandizement be driven from their lofty perches.” The Detroit Tribune, which in previous years had praised Jones, now denounced him for giving the impression to whites that the black race was “under the guidance of a sex-deviate.” On the national level, Ebony devoted four punishing pages to Jones’s trial, calling it a “day of reckoning.” Yet despite his ostracism by the black leadership, Jones’s followers remained as lo
yal as ever. They packed the courtroom every day of his trial, and when the jury declared him not guilty, hundreds of them raucously celebrated and shouted, “All is well!” Jones was subsequently shunned by the press and lost his visibility as a representative of the black working class, but his enduring popularity was confirmed by the crowd of more than two thousand people who attended his funeral in 1970, where his bronze casket was draped with his famous white mink coat.

  Daddy Grace faced a similar fate. In 1957, Louvenia Royster, a retired Georgia schoolteacher, filed a lawsuit against Grace, claiming that he had been married to her in the 1920s but deserted her shortly after the birth of their child. Though the court quickly rejected the claim, the black press delivered a guilty verdict. Jet’s headline read, “The Past That Haunts Daddy Grace—Dismissed Alimony Trial Reveals Secret of 1st Wife.” The magazine called the preacher “America’s richest cultist” and speculated hopefully that the trial would “shake [the] kingdom of Daddy Grace.” Joining the attack, Martin Luther King pointed a damning finger at the profligacy and irresponsibility of preachers like Grace. He told his congregation in Montgomery: