The Night James Brown Led Police on a Two-State High-Speed Chase and Claimed They Tried to Kill Him
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The phone at James Brown's Augusta, Georgia office was still being answered with a crisp "Godfather of Soul," but the man himself wasn't there. He was 70 miles away in South Carolina's State Park Correctional Center, listed simply as James J. Brown, Inmate No. 155413, dishing out breakfast in a cook's white uniform every morning at 5:15, his purple wraparound sunglasses and matching foulard scarf the only concessions to the life he'd led before.
It was one of the more surreal images in rock and roll history: a man who'd inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson, who'd been summoned to cool race riots in Boston and Washington, who'd had an audience with the Pope and performed for multiple presidents, now directing the prison chapel choir (attendance had doubled since his arrival) while his wife Adrienne drove in on Saturdays with a bag of salon products and a hair dryer to keep his famous coiffure in order.
How James Brown, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the creator of funk, the man who gave a generation its anthem with "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," ended up there is one of the most dramatic, disputed, and genuinely strange stories in American music. And part of it wasn't fully told until 18 years after it happened.
From the Shack to the Stage
Brown was born in poverty in rural South Carolina, growing up in a shack, shining shoes and dancing for pennies. At 15 (some accounts say 16) he was convicted of theft and breaking into cars, and sentenced to eight years, eventually serving three. In prison, his nickname was "Music Box." He sang in the choir. When he got out, he started a band.
What followed was one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of popular music. His pioneering rhythm and blues got black audiences on their feet with funky drumbeats, punching horn riffs, and a performing style of such volcanic intensity that when he appeared on the 1964 TAMI Show, he reduced The Rolling Stones (who followed him) to a support act in all but name. He racked up 15 number one R&B hits. He built a personal business empire that included radio stations in Augusta, Knoxville, and Baltimore. He didn't just influence music; in many ways he invented it. Funk, hip-hop, go-go: all of it runs through James Brown.
By the late 1980s, though, the empire was crumbling.
The Slide Begins
The IRS placed a lien on Brown's 62-acre property on Beech Island, outside Augusta, in 1985, and he was forced to auction it off. His third marriage, to former hair stylist Adrienne Rodriguez (whom he'd wed in 1984), was volatile. She filed suit against him for assault in April 1988, then dropped the charge. Among the incidents alleged during that period: Brown had reportedly shot bullet holes through her $35,000 black mink coat.
The drug situation was worse. For most of his career, Brown had maintained a strict no-drugs policy in his entourage, firing band members who broke it. But his aide Bob Patton later said he'd accidentally shared a PCP-laced cannabis joint with Brown back in the mid-1970s, and that Brown had treated the experience as if it were merely marijuana. By the early 1980s, according to singer Vicki Anderson, Brown's regular PCP use, which he called "go-rilla" (his nickname for angel dust), had already been going on for years. After he married Adrienne, she joined him in using it.
One former mistress later described in GQ how Brown would smoke PCP until it became hard to find, supplemented by cocaine mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. While driving under the influence of PCP on one occasion, Brown reportedly insisted that trees along the road contained psychotronic surveillance equipment. He was also using sildenafil off-label, claiming it gave him extra energy.
By January 1988, Brown was facing four separate criminal charges within a twelve-month period, all relating to driving, PCP, and gun possession. In April 1988 he was arrested for domestic assault. Two months later he was arrested again on drug and weapons charges. That summer, he appeared on CNN's Sonya Live in LA in an interview that became notorious for his erratic behaviour, with many viewers and commentators concluding he was high on air.
He was 55 years old, and things were about to get considerably worse.
September 24, 1988
The incident that would define the final chapter of Brown's public downfall began that morning in Augusta with what can only be described as an extremely James Brown complaint.
Brown apparently concluded that staff from the insurance company next door to his offices were using his private toilet. This may or may not have been true. What is not in dispute is what he did about it: he walked into their seminar room, armed with a shotgun, and confronted the participants directly.
Police were called. Brown left.
What followed was a high-speed chase along Interstate 20 that crossed the Georgia–South Carolina state line, eventually involving as many as fourteen police cars, with speeds reaching 60 to 85 miles per hour. At one point, police set up a V-shaped roadblock using two vehicles. Brown drove around it. The FBI report notes he did so specifically to avoid hitting the police cars, though officers at the scene claimed he was attempting to ram them.
When Brown pulled into a parking lot, two officers shot out his front tyres. Their subsequent account was that he then tried to mow them down as he accelerated out of the lot. Brown's account was different. He said police had attacked his truck while he was stationary, kicking the door and smashing a window with the butt of a gun, and that he'd locked himself inside out of fear before the shooting started.
According to the FBI file that wouldn't surface for another 18 years, multiple officers shot at Brown's truck repeatedly. Brown himself later counted 23 bullet holes. Two of the shots hit the gas tank. Had either caused a spark, both the truck and Brown would have been incinerated.
Instead, he drove. On flat tyres, on the wheel rims, for six miles, back across the Savannah River into Georgia, before the truck finally lurched into a ditch in Augusta.
What Happened Next: Two Versions
The official version: Brown was pulled from the vehicle and arrested. PCP was found in his bloodstream. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol, assaulting a police officer, aggravated assault, and various driving and drug offences. He was sentenced to six years in prison. After serving approximately two years, he was released on parole on February 27, 1991.
Brown's version, as filed with the FBI: When roughly twenty officers arrived at the ditch, Brown was pulled from his truck and slammed against its side with enough force to injure his face and body. Later, while handcuffed at the station, a police officer walked up and punched him in the face hard enough to knock out his dental implants and leave him in what the report describes as excruciating pain.
"I never fired at them, or even pointed a gun in their direction," Brown later told Al Sharpton, "and they still shot at me over and over again."
Al Sharpton visited Brown at the Augusta jail shortly after the arrest. He recalled Brown repeating, over and over, that the police had tried to kill him, and pointing out, with some logic, that if they'd hit the gas tank and ignited it, they would have succeeded.
The FBI File
In 2007, the FBI released Brown's file to The Washington Post under a Freedom of Information Act request. The document gave the first official airing of the account Brown and Adrienne had filed at the time, an account that directly contradicted the police version on multiple points.
The bureau had investigated Brown's civil rights allegations. Their report was then passed to an assistant US attorney in Georgia, who concluded the claims had "no apparent prosecutive merit." The file was sealed. It stayed that way for 18 years.
It's worth noting the context: there was no smartphone footage, no dashcam video released to the public, no social media. It was Brown's word against that of numerous officers, in Georgia, in 1988. The FBI inquiry went nowhere.
Prison, Release, and Round Two
Inside South Carolina's State Park Correctional Center, Brown made the best of things in the way that only he could. He rose at 5:15 each morning to work the breakfast line. He wore his purple sunglasses with his cook's whites. He ran the chapel choir. On the pay phone, he told journalists he was "just sitting quiet, serving my time."
He was released in February 1991 after two years, with the rest of his sentence suspended.
In 1998, it happened again.
Brown discharged a rifle inside his house and then led the attending officers on another car chase, almost a carbon copy of the 1988 incident. This time the court ordered him to a rehabilitation facility, recognising substance abuse as the root cause. A week after completing a week of rehab for prescription drug dependency in January 1998, he was arrested again for unlawful use of a handgun and cannabis possession.
The legal and personal troubles continued in various forms for the rest of his life. When Brown was admitted to Emory University Hospital in December 2006, shortly before his death on Christmas Day, traces of cocaine were found in his system. His widow later suggested he'd been using crack with a female acquaintance in his final period.
The Legacy the Chaos Couldn't Erase
It's difficult to hold these two versions of James Brown in the same frame: the man who revolutionised American music, and the man driving on wheel rims across state lines with 23 bullet holes in his truck. But both are real.
The 2014 biopic Get On Up, starring Chadwick Boseman, opened with the 1988 car chase precisely because it's so cinematic, and so revealing. The superstar in freefall, the sirens behind him, the rims screeching on asphalt, the gas tank already hit twice. It's an ending that doesn't end, because Brown survived it and went back to prison and came back out and did it again.
What the biopic couldn't fully address is the question that the FBI file raises and that was never satisfactorily answered: what actually happened in that Augusta police station, in the ditch, in the parking lot? The official version and the Brown version are irreconcilable. In the absence of footage, and with the FBI's conclusions suppressed for nearly two decades, it became one of those American stories where the institutional account simply won by default.
Brown himself never stopped believing his version. "I'm a part of Old Glory," he said once, with characteristic grandiosity and genuine pathos. "It's just very bad that sometimes the country forgets."
He was buried in Augusta in January 2007. The office phone, presumably, was eventually answered differently.
Sources
FBI File on James Brown, released to The Washington Post under FOIA, 2007
People magazine, "James Brown: Hard Times for the Hardest Working Man," 1989
Wikipedia: James Brown, Legal Issues and Personal Life sections (citing Smith 2012 biography; Hoskyns/Barney interviews; GQ magazine retrospective)
Al Sharpton, public accounts of his visit to James Brown in Augusta jail, 1988
Sonya Live in L.A., CNN broadcast, April 1988
Get On Up (2014 film), dir. Tate Taylor, starring Chadwick Boseman
Richard Krantz, biographical writing on James Brown's later years
Mayor Charles DeVaney, Augusta, GA, quoted in contemporary press accounts, 1988
Interstate 20 / Georgia–South Carolina state police incident reports, September 24, 1988 (as cited in FBI file)
Vicki Anderson interview with Barney Hoskyns, as cited in Smith (2012) James Brown biography
Bob Patton recollection, as cited in Smith (2012)
GQ magazine retrospective on James Brown (post-2006)
