(7 of 8)
He certainly sounded bad enough. Mounting a car hood in Cambridge, the scene of prolonged racial demonstrations three years ago, Brown delivered an incendiary 50-minute harangue to a crowd of some 300 Negroes. Recalling the death of a white policeman during Plainfield, N.J., riots last month, Brown bellowed: "Look what the brothers did in Plainfield. They stomped a cop to death. Good. He's dead. They stomped him to death. They threw a shopping basket on his head and took his pistol and shot him and then cut him."
Rap, who earned his nickname because, so the story goes, his oratory inspired listeners to shout "Rap it to 'em, baby!" was just getting warmed up. "Detroit exploded, Newark exploded, Harlem exploded!" he cried. "It is time for Cambridge to explode, baby." Continued Brown: "Black folks built America. If America don't come around, we're going to burn America down, brother. We're going to burn it if we don't get our share of it."
An hour later, shooting broke out. Brown received a superficial wound in the forehead when Cambridge police opened fire on a Negro crowd near Race Street. Brown disappeared, and in the early morning, two blocks of Pine Street in the Negro neighborhood caught fire, apparently by arson. The white volunteer fire company failed to respond to the fire until it had practically burned out, leveling a school, a church, a motel and a tavern. When sobbing Negro women begged Police Chief Brice Kinnamon to send the firemen in, he snapped: "You people ought to have done something before this. You stood by and let a bunch of goddam hoodlums come in here."
In the ruins of his motel, Hansell Greene, 58, stood sobbing. "I'm broke, I'm beat, and my own people did it," he said. "It's all gone because of a bunch of hoodlums. I spent a lifetime building this up, and now it's all gone." Across the street, his brother's grocery also lay in smoking ruins.
Like Cherry Pie. The next day Brown was arrested in Alexandria, Va., on a fugitive warrant, charged by Maryland with inciting to riot and arson. That rap could get Rap up to 20 years in jail. Released on $10,000 bond, Brown compulsively continued to shoot off his mouth. Damning Lyndon Johnson for sending "honky*cracker federal troops into Negro communities to kill black people," Brown called the President "a wild mad dog, an outlaw from Texas." He told Washington audiences: "Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie. If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might just shoot Lady Bird." Echoing Brown, Harlem's defrocked Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, still in Bimini after seven months, did little to help cool off things by announcing in the midst of Detroit's troubles that such riots were "a necessary phase of the black revolution—necessary!"