“I used to shine shoes in front of a radio station,” the singer James Brown liked to inform listeners in the era of Black power. “Now I own radio stations. You know what that is? That’s Black Power.” Brown’s pithy conflation of Black capitalism with Black power was music to the ears of the powers that be, circles in which he moved seamlessly. As nimble politically as he was musically, Brown provided entertainment at a state dinner hosted by President Lyndon Johnson in May 1968, only to reappear in the same role at Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball the following March, after having endorsed Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s chief opponent in the 1968 presidential election. In return for his support, Brown extracted a pledge from Humphrey to promote Black entrepreneurship if he won the presidency; while Nixon, a sworn enemy of militant Black power, which he equated with “crime in the streets,” lustily embraced the contention that Black capitalism equaled Black power, as noted elsewhere in this volume. In between the Johnson state dinner and the Nixon inauguration, Brown, faithful to his mantra that he was the “hardest working man in show business,” remained in motion. Ignoring the growing antiwar movement, in which Black power activists stood front and center, he flew to Vietnam to play for US troops; he recorded on returning to the United States the patriotic “America Is My Home,” a tune that warmed the hearts of American nationalists, only to turn around weeks later and release “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” which instantly became a Black power sensation, spreading far beyond the United States.

From the standpoint of Black power, “Say It Loud” was Brown’s redemption story. Movement activists had bitterly complained about “America Is My Home,” and death threats soon arrived at Brown’s record label headquarters. The verbal assaults stung the self-proclaimed Soul Brother Number One even more. H. Rap Brown, who was unrelated to James by both blood and ideology, and who came by his nickname honestly, compared the singer to Black power’s favorite symbol of servility: James Brown was “the Roy Wilkins of the music world,” Rap Brown announced.