The late Jackie Wilson played a 1960 package show with several top singers in Little Rock, Arkansas, and when he realized they were scheduled to play two shows, first for blacks then for whites, he pulled out of the second one. In his autobiography, bandleader and “Willie and the Hand Jive” hitmaker Johnny Otis, who was white, recalls watching helplessly as a musician in his group was brutally beaten for neglecting to say “sir” in response to a white man’s question at an Augusta, Georgia, concert in 1951. Some artists who appeared to challenge the color line met with violence or even death. “Let’s get them out of here!” The Coasters returned to their bus in a hurry and left town. Leon Hughes Sr., a member of the Coasters, remembers pulling into a scheduled show in Lincoln, Utah, anticipating a pleasant night of singing smash hits “Young Blood” and “Yakety Yak.” He was climbing down from the bus when the promoter told them, “Uh, we’re looking for the Coasters band.” The group replied, “We’re the Coasters band.” The man said, “I think they’re white.” Hughes told him, “No, we’re black.” One of the men standing around panicked. If it was more blacks, it’d be a black dance, and if it was more whites, it’d be a white dance.” Whichever was the largest crowd, that was their dance. “It started happening a lot,” Price, 84, says. In the early Fifties, Lloyd “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” Price performed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was delighted to see blacks and whites dancing to his songs – until a white policeman stopped the music and stretched a rope down the middle of the dance floor. The judge told an assembled courthouse crowd, according to several who were in the audience, “We don’t want Yankees coming down to New Orleans mixing cream with our coffee.” “The South begins to mobilize, in a much more concerted way, these forces of massive resistance – the laws get tightened up, coinciding with federal law decisions.” In 1957, cops interrupted a biracial jam session at New Orleans’ Preservation Hall and arrested all the musicians. “There may have been more potential leeway and latitude, and a little bit of a blind eye being turned, prior to 1954-55,” says Brian Ward, a Northumbria University professor in England and author of 1998’s Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an interracial, all-woman jazz group, managed to get away with integrated concerts when they toured the South in the 1940s, although they were occasionally turned away from entire towns and members were hauled to prison. Historically, some concert-segregation laws had been haphazardly enforced, depending on the state and the racial attitudes of local officials and police officers. But that Birmingham performance stayed with Johnson. Often they couldn’t stay at hotels, were served rotten food at white restaurants and were outright banned from others they would instead drive out of the way to eat at black friends’ homes. The Flamingos, like all African American performers from that era, had to contend with Jim Crow absurdities. If you do, your ass is mine.’ Cruel things like that.” It was a rule when we came in: ‘I don’t want to see any of you darkies looking at the white women out there. “The cops were up there making sure we did not look at any white person. “It was ridiculous,” recalls Terry Johnson, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame–inducted group. The cops escorted the six-member doo-wop group, famous for “I Only Have Eyes for You” and “The Ladder of Love,” to its dressing room and gave strict instructions: As black performers, they were to make eye contact with only the black fans, who were confined to the balcony, and not with whites on the floor. One night in the late 1950s, the Flamingos‘ bus pulled up to a concert hall in Birmingham, Alabama, and a row of 30 to 50 police officers holding rifles and billy clubs was waiting for them. A version of this story was originally published in November 2017 and has since been updated.
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