"The Night James Brown Saved Boston"
Of all the screeners that have crossed my desk of programs commemorating the upcoming 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., one caught my eye: a VH1 special, "The Night James Brown Saved Boston," airing this weekend on VH1.
Mixing footage of the night in question with interview footage, this low-budget docu offers a fresh take on what was one of the darkest times in American history — the week MLK died and urban areas across the Northeast U.S. burst into flames.
When I lived in Washington, D.C., in 1988, I had a dive half a block from a burned-out portion of 14th Street. It looked like little had changed since the MLK rioting had rolled through there 20 years earlier. That could've been Boston's fate too, except for three extraordinary things:
First, Soul Brother No. 1, James Brown, who in 1968 was nearing the zenith of his popularity, was playing the Boston Garden, and the mayor of Boston and the directors of public broadcaster WGBH decided to air his concert live to keep people at home and off the streets.
Second, the city's only African-American council member somehow talked Brown into this scheme even though the free telecast cost him tens of thousands of dollars.
Third, Brown averted a riot on TV (and in the rest of Boston) when black concertgoers started jumping on stage and white city cops started pushing them off.
This program tells that story, with video that is sometimes riveting (like the on-stage confrontation), and other times bizarro, like when we hear WGBH's upper-crust Brahmin announcer telling viewers to stay tuned for "the Negro singer Jimmy Brown." Or anytime Cornel West, everyone's favorite brilliant Afro-American crackpot, appears on camera to wax profound/insane about that night in '68.
In other King coverage, CNN will be launching its four-month-long series "Black America" on Thursday with a program about James Earl Ray and the conspiracy theories surrounding MLK's death. Talk about an inauspicious debut. And on Sunday, History Channel will be airing "King," its second Tom Brokaw special in six months — did I mention that he has a book about 1968 on sale?
