James Brown's Augusta Office — The 1988 Police Chase Begins

On September 24, 1988, James Brown — the Godfather of Soul, a man who had transformed American music across four decades — walked into an insurance seminar being held in an Augusta, Georgia office building he reportedly owned and ordered everyone out at gunpoint. Brown's complaint, by all accounts, was that someone at the seminar had been using his private bathroom. The incident, surreal even by the standards of rock and soul mythology, was the opening act of one of the most chaotic episodes in music history: a two-state police chase that would end with Brown's truck grinding on bare wheel rims through the front yard of a suburban housing project.

After the confrontation at the office, Brown fled in his pickup truck. What followed was a pursuit involving between ten and fourteen police vehicles, reaching speeds of 60 to 85 miles per hour, crossing the state line into South Carolina and back. Officers eventually shot out three of his tyres, but Brown kept driving on the rims — sparks flying, crowd gathering — for another six miles before the truck finally came to rest in a ditch. He was charged in both Georgia and South Carolina; eventually convicted of failing to stop for police and aggravated assault; and sentenced to six and a half years, of which he served roughly fifteen months before being paroled in 1991.

The exact office building from which the chase began has never been definitively identified in public records, and Augusta's downtown has changed considerably in the decades since. The city now celebrates Brown with an eight-foot bronze statue on Broad Street and the James Brown Arena, named in his honour in 2006. The chase that began in this part of Augusta is remembered less as a criminal episode and more as a final, tragicomic expression of the volatile energy that had driven Brown his entire career.