“Then something happened, some real jive bullshit that changed my whole life and my whole attitude again, made me bitter and cynical again when I was really starting to feel good about the things that had changed in this country. I had just finished doing an Armed Forces Day broadcast, you know, Voice of America and all that bullshit. I had just walked this pretty white girl named Judy out to get a cab. She got in the cab, and I’m standing there in front of Birdland wringing wet because it’s a hot, steaming, muggy night in August. This white policeman comes up to me and tells me to move on. At the time I was doing a lot of boxing and so I thought to myself, I ought to hit this motherfucker because I knew what he was doing. But instead I said, “Move on, for what? I’m working downstairs. That’s my name up there, Miles Davis,” and I pointed to my name on the marquee all up in lights.
He said, “I don’t care where you work, I said move on! If you don’t move on I’m going to arrest you.” I just looked at his face real straight and hard, and I didn’t move. Then he said, “You’re under arrest!” He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. Now, boxers had told me that if a guy’s going to hit you, if you walk toward him you can see what’s happening. I saw by the way he was handling himself that the policeman was an ex-fighter. So I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. He stumbled, and all his stuff fell on the sidewalk, and I thought to myself. Oh, shit, they’re going to think that I fucked with him or something. I’m waiting for him to put the handcuffs on, because all his stuff is on the ground and shit. Then I move closer so he won’t be able to fuck me up. A crowd had gathered all of a sudden from out of nowhere, and this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming. Blood was running down the khaki suit I had on. Then I remember Dorothy Kilgallen coming outside with this horrible look on her face-I had known Dorothy for years and I used to date her good friend, Jean Bock-and saying, “Miles, what happened?” I couldn’t say nothing. Illinois Jacquet was there, too. It was almost a race riot, so the police got scared and hurried up and got my ass out of there and took me to the 54th Precinct where they took pictures of me bleeding and shit. So, I’m sitting there, madder than a motherfucker, right? And they’re saying to me in the station, “So you’re the wiseguy, huh?” Then they’d bump up against me, you know, try to get me mad so they could probably knock me upside my head again. I’m just sitting there, taking it all in, watching every move they make. I look up on the wall and see they were advertising voyages for officers to take to Germany, like a tour. And this is about fourteen years after the war. And they’re going there to learn police shit. It’s advertised in the brochure; they’ll probably teach them how to be meaner and shit, do to niggers over here what the Nazis did to the Jews over there. I couldn’t believe that shit in there and they’re supposed to be protecting us. I ain’t done nothing but help a woman friend of mine get a cab and she happened to be white and the white boy who was the policeman didn’t like seeing a nigger doing that. I had called my lawyer, Harold Lovett, at about three A.M. The police charged me with resisting arrest, and assault and battery of a police officer. Me! And I ain’t done nothing! It’s so late that Harold can’t really do nothing. They take me downtown to police headquarters and so Harold comes down to Centre Street, where they had me in the morning. It makes the front pages of the New York newspapers, and they repeat the charges in their headlines. There was a picture, which became famous, of me leaving the jail with this bandage all over my head (they had taken me to the hospital to have my head stitched up), and Frances-who had come down to see me when they were transferring me downtown-walking in front of me like a proud stallion. When Frances had come down to that police station and saw me all beat up like that, she was almost hysterical, screaming. I think the policemen started to think that they had made a mistake, a beautiful woman like this screaming over this nigger. And then Dorothy Kilgallen came down and then wrote about it in her column the next day. The piece was very negative against the police, and that was of some help to my cause. Now I would have expected this kind of bullshit about resisting arrest and all back in East St. Louis (before the city went all-black), but not here in New York City, which is supposed to be the slickest, hippest city in the world. But then, again, I was surrounded by white folks and I have learned that when this happens, if you’re black, there is no justice. None. At the hearing, the district attorney said to me, “When the policeman said, ‘You’re under arrest,’ and you looked at him, what did that look mean?” Harold Lovett, my lawyer, said, “What does that mean, 'What did that look mean?’ ” What they were trying to say was that I was going to knock the policeman down or something. My lawyers didn’t put me on the witness stand, because they thought that the white judge and white jury would mistake my confidence for arrogance, and be-cause of my bad temper, which they didn’t trust me to keep in check. But that incident changed me forever, made me much more bitter and cynical than I might have been. It took two months for three judges to rule that my arrest had been illegal and dismiss the charges against me. Later I sued the police department for $500,000. Harold wasn’t doing negligence suits, so he got another lawyer, who forgot to file the claim before the statute of limitations ran out. We lost the damage suit, and I was madder than a motherfucker, but there wasn’t nothing I could do about it. The police revoked my cabaret license, and that prevented me from playing New York clubs for a while. My band had played out the last set without me, but the club made an announcement about what had happened. I heard that the band had played their asses off without me, stretching out and playing everything, every tune the way they probably would have played them in their own groups. Cannonball and Coltrane both called off the tunes after I left, so I know the place was popping. But after that shit made the front pages of the New York papers for a couple of days, everything was quiet. A lot of people forgot about it in a second. But a lot of musicians and people in the know - black and white - didn’t, and thought I was a hero for standing up to the police like I did. Around this time, people-white people-started saying that I was always “angry,” that I was “racist,” or some silly shit like that. Now, I’ve been racist toward nobody, but that don’t mean I’m going to take shit from a person just because he’s white. I didn’t grin or shuffle and didn’t walk around with my finger up my ass begging for no handout and thinking I was inferior to whites. I was living in America, too, and I was going to try to get everything that was coming to me.
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