THE SOUTH: Unscheduled Appearance

To Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium, where stage groups may be mixed but, under city ordinance, not the audience, came 4,000 whites one evening last week to hear a variety troupe one-nighting through the South with Negro Singer Nat “King” Cole featured. For the musky-voiced baritone, born Nathaniel Adams Coles in Montgomery, this was almost a home-town audience; he spiced Autumn Leaves with an extra lilt, then crooned into Little Girl. With the second chorus came pandemonium.

Somewhere in the auditorium there was a wolf howl. Then down the aisles, feet thumping the wooden floor, bounded five men. They dashed past rows of seated spectators, crossed the ten feet between front row and stage and jumped the four-foot parapet. One swung on Cole and sent him reeling onto the piano bench, which split under him.

Brass Knuckles. Police had been tipped that a demonstration was coming, but they thought the demonstrators would use steps at the ends of the stage. Temporarily caught off base, the cops rushed in from the wings. One attacker, twisting Cole’s foot, was wrestled until he let go; another swung on one of the cops and got a night stick across the head. Then eight cops armlocked the five out of the hall while Ted Heath’s 18-piece British orchestra valiantly played America (also the tune of God Save the Queen) as order was restored. In jail the five men were joined by a sixth, found in a parked car outside the hall guarding two rifles, a blackjack and brass knuckles.

As Cole limped offstage, the curtain rustled shut and Comedian Gary Morton edged out to explain that Cole could not continue. Cried a down-front customer: “Ask him to come back so we can apologize.” Cole nervously reappeared, and got a five-minute ovation. “I just came here to entertain you,” he said when the applause died. “That’s what I thought you wanted.” Shouted the audience: “We do, we do. Sing. Sing.” But the evening was shattered. “Man, I love show business,” said Cole backstage, “but I don’t want to die for it.” After resting in his dressing room, he hurried through a second performance for Negroes, then flew to Chicago for a checkup. He rejoined the troupe three shows later to play to a packed house in Raleigh, N.C.

“Irresponsible Forces.” Birmingham police found out that the attack on Cole had been planned four days before in a filling station in Anniston, 60 miles from Birmingham. According to the plan, a mob of 150, led by an officer of the North Alabama Citizens’ Council, was to have stormed the auditorium and kidnaped Cole. Only the six showed up. So serious was the police view of the affair that two were charged with assault with intent to commit murder, the four others on lesser counts of conspiracy.

Most Birmingham residents agreed with the Post-Herald that the attack on Cole was “a warning to all of us that dangerously irresponsible forces are here, which, if given quarter, can result in nothing good for the community … If we are to have an orderly society, we must first have respect for law. Those who trample it underfoot must be made to feel its certain penalty.”