INTERRUPTED MELODY: THE 1956 ATTACK ON NAT "KING" COLE

Alabama Heritage, Winter 2004 by Sprayberry, Gary S

Generational divides became nearly impossible to bridge, particularly in a tradition-bound region like the South. When Carter and his cohorts preached their fiery sermons against rock and roll, they were not only doing it to prevent interracial coupling; they were attempting, however feebly, to retain control over their families. They were trying to restore what had somehow been lost in the decade since the war.

The NAGG kicked off its anti-rock campaign in Anniston during the last week of March 1956. Councilmen visited drugstores and restaurants in the city, demanding that proprietors remove all rock records from their jukeboxes. Carter instructed the councilmen that if owners or managers refused, their names were to be placed "on the list." Similar strategies were employed in Birmingham, with council members applying varying degrees of pressure upon merchants, radio deejays, and concert promoters. They were determined to stamp out rock music in all its guises.

On April 6, a group of NACG men gathered at a West Anniston service station owned by Kenneth Adams, one of Garter's chief lieutenants. "In the heady atmosphere of gasoline and crankshaft oil," Adams lectured the men on the evils of rock-and-roll and bebop, elucidating the wicked, communistic intentions of the African American musicians who played such music to corrupt white teenagers and to invalidate the integrity of the color line.

To prevent further degradation and to draw the public's attention to the problem, he proposed that one hundred white men, enlisted from northern and central Alabama, attend the Nat "King" Cole concert in Birmingham on April 10. When a signal was given, they would launch an attack on the performer. Some of the men were instructed to pummel and, if possible, kidnap Cole, while others were ordered to subdue band members or stand back and heave eggs at the stage. After the meeting, word of the impending action spread throughout the state, from council meeting to council meeting. Over the weekend, Adams received assurances that more than one hundred men, seething with racial animosities, would storm down the aisles and fall upon the "negroidal jazz musician" when the signal was given.

On Tuesday, April 10, Adams and several companions loaded into their cars and headed west to Birmingham, looking to end the threat of black music once and for all.

AS NAT "KING" COLE BEGAN his concert, Adams and his cohorts waited in the shadows for a signal to rush the stage. A spectator nearby overheard one of the men grumble, "Let's go get that coon," and watched in horror as several men started down one of the side aisles toward the stage. Only three men, rather than the estimated one hundred, had stood at the signal.

Panicked, the onlooker ran to Officer R. N. Higginbotham, who was surveying the crowd from the rear of the auditorium and shouted, "They're going after him! They're going down to the stage to get him!" Higginbotham immediately spotted the men approaching the singer and pursued them, hoping to intercept the group before it reached the stage. "I caught up with one guy [twenty-three-year-old Willis Richard Vinson] just as he was jumping up on the stage," the officer said afterward. "I grabbed him, and he hit me in the face with a bottle. Then I hit him with my stick and somebody else grabbed him."