2023-05-07 15:10:48
James BrownBoston Garden’s historic 1968 concert has been remastered and restored in its entirety for the first time, and is now available for free viewing on its official YouTube channel.
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The concert, on April 5 of that year, quickly passed into folklore because of its importance and the calm leadership shown by the godfather of soul music, at a very volatile moment in American social history. The show took place just 24 hours following the assassination of the civil rights activist and figurehead Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis, leading to widespread violence across the United States.
The situation was so volatile that Boston’s newly elected young mayor, Kevin White, considered canceling the long-planned concert, but was persuaded to allow it to go ahead. The show was broadcast live across the city by WGBH-TV, hoping to encourage Bostonians to stay home and watch it, rather than take to the streets. The gamble paid off and fewer crimes were recorded in the city than on a normal day in Boston.
The speeches at the concert were, and remain, as inspiring and captivating as the performances, and Mr. Brown was widely credited with stopping a riot and helping to maintain a certain calm in Boston that evening. At one point, as the police began to forcefully push back the young black men who were encroaching on the stage, the soul hero said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, now wait! “Resign now, be a gentleman… now I’ve asked the police to back off, because I think I can get some respect from my people.” »
The concert was the subject of a PBS documentary in 2008, The Night James Brown Saved Boston, directed by David Leaf. James Sullivan, author of The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved America’s Soulwrote that Tom Atkins, the only African American on the Boston City Council, told the mayor, “You can’t cancel the James Brown show because if you do that, you’re going to have 14,000 kids showing up at the Boston City Council. Garden finds out from a piece of paper taped to the door that the show has been canceled and, if they aren’t already angry and upset regarding Dr. King’s murder, now they’re really going to be mad.
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