Bibek Acharya
It’s distressing and difficult to reconcile that even as recently as the 1960s, audiences in the US and the UK remained racially segregated. While the UK never officially enforced segregation, it also didn’t have laws that prohibited the practice until 1965. Meanwhile, in America, up until the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, racial segregation was effectively legally enforced by Jim Crow laws that dated back to 1896. Against this grim backdrop, The Beatles emerged at the forefront of a pop culture movement that helped to turn the tide of prejudice.
While the modern narrative surrounding the group often portrays them as teenyboppers who only earned their political stripes once their fame and fortune were already secured and a stoned encounter with Bob Dylan swayed them towards deeper pursuits, in truth, the very origins of the band were distinctly progressive and liberal. The humble, working-class Liverpudlians were never afraid to mix with their peers, and this attitude of free love for all became the core tenet that initially endeared them to their earliest audience.
For The Beatles, the rise to lofty heights came from a billowing feminist and LGBTQ+ support network. In fact, the very first place that the band found success was Hamburg, Germany. The Saint Pauli district that they called home was a bohemian hive “full of transvestites” as George Harrison put it. This world of disenfranchised outsiders looking for thrills and a place to embrace their own identity took the fun little band to their hearts.
It was amid this aura of acceptance and carefree liberation that The Beatles learned to cut loose. “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship,” Harrison would later reflect, “learning to play in front of people.” Those people came from all walks of life. So, they returned to Liverpool with a wellspring of enthusiasm under their belt and looked to transport the liberated progression of Saint Pauli to the cobbled corner of The Cavern Club—a fabled spot that likely wouldn’t have existed without the trailblazing Mona Best, Pete’s mother, who gave rock ‘n’ roll a stage in Liverpool, earning herself the nickname ‘The Mother of Merseybeat’.
It was at The Cavern Club that Brian Epstein would uncover the band. He recognised the group’s potential to bring people together in an instant—he felt the comforting collectivism of their buzzing output firsthand. He was openly gay during a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. Nevertheless, in a Cavern Club audience, egalitarianism came naturally, and he soon took up the position of managing the band.
While Lemmy Kilmister would claim that Epstein “cleaned them up for mass consumption”, even when they became a polished mainstream act, they never lost sight of their origins. This came to the fore in 1964 when a bold decision by the band led to a huge swing in the American public’s perception of racism.
Did The Beatles refuse to play to segregated audiences?
It was September 11th, and The Beatles were backstage at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. At this time, they had only been in America for a matter of months. John Lennon and Ringo Starr were the group’s oldest members, at the tender age of 23. But the band showed maturity and temerity beyond their years as they refused to take the stage with pressure mounting from both a bated public and berating officials.A few moments earlier, they had been informed that the audience at the venue was racially segregated. So, in a bold act of defiance, they enforced their own policy that they wouldn’t play unless officials allowed the crowd to merge together. They were reluctant, but the organisers soon realised that the Fab Four really weren’t going to play unless their demand was met.Upon entering the stage, John Lennon said: “We never play to segregated audiences and we aren’t going to start now.” This was met with cheers of approval. When he added, “I’d sooner lose our appearance money,” the applause grew. Despite the beloved esteem that audiences held them in, this reaction was far from forgone.
While the Civil Rights Act had been signed a few weeks earlier on July 2nd, its implementation was receiving significant pushback, and the policy hung in the balance. Florida was one of the regions where it was being contested the most. As recently as June, Martin Luther King Jr had been arrested in the state’s oldest city, St Augustine. When his old friend Rabbi Israel Dresner was mobilised to join in a St Augustine protest movement, he too was arrested along with 16 fellow rabbis who had joined him in a march for racial equality, resulting in the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history.How did The Beatles help to tackle racism in America?
However, the simple boon of The Beatles’ pop helped to negate some of the hostility within the state. In many ways, the seemingly unanimous cheers that greeted Lennon’s bold decree can be seen as a populist turning point for a progressive political goal. With King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech still ringing in the ear of the public consciousness, The Beatles showed how easy it was to implement his vision.
The details of the incident were later captured in the comprehensive documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week. “Their first controversial political stance didn’t have to do with Vietnam; it had to do with segregation in the South,” Ron Howard, who directed the feature, explained.
“They found out that one of their concerts in Jacksonville, Florida, was meant to be segregated, and they refused to play it that way. They even had in their contract that they would not play to segregated audiences. It was a ludicrous idea to them,” he added.
The group had grown up with a plethora of black musical heroes, and the notion of inequality was one that had always baffled them. Little Richard, in fact, was the idol who first took the fledgling group over to Hamburg to perform as his support band. Without him, they genuinely might never have made it. The Beatles never shied away from this notion themselves, and when they were accused of ripping off black musicians in 1971, they made it clear that Little Richard was far from the only black performer they were indebted to.“Chuck Berry is the greatest influence on Earth,” Lennon said. “So is Bo Diddley and so is Little Richard. There is not one white group on Earth that hasn’t got their music in them – and that’s all I ever listened to,” he added. “The only white I ever listened to was [Elvis] Presley on his early music records, and he was doing black music. Presley was in Memphis; obviously, he was listening to the [black] music. I don’t blame him for wanting to be that music. I wanted to be that.”
He concluded by saying, “It wasn’t a rip-off, it was a love-in.” It certainly seemed that way in Florida. It was a Promethean moment that gave the nation a notion of how harmonious things could be. Remembering the incident, Paul McCartney later recalled: “When we were making the film, all these little facts had come out and Ron was sifting through them with his team. We were due to play Jacksonville in the States, and we found out that it was going to be a segregated audience—blacks one side, whites the other—and it just seemed so mad, we couldn’t understand that. So we just said, ‘We’re not playing that!’”
‘Blackbird’ – a Beatles racial protest anthem?
The resultant concert felt so seismic and virtuous that they eventually had their internal policy drafted up in a binding contract signed by Epstein that stated the band would “not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience.” This ensured that mammoth forthcoming shows at huge venues like the Cow Palace in California would be free of segregation. Naturally, a legion of other artists followed suit, and the Civil Rights Movement was boldly bolstered by the proud and daring actions of the biggest celebrities the world has ever seen.
The band were far from safe from hostile backlash because of this decision, and McCartney would later reflect on the hostility in America, attempting to quell it with the lullaby-like protest song, ‘Blackbird’. However, the major moment of diegesis in this story remained the sunny night of social collectivism in Florida. As it happens, the fan mail that they received following the event would even form the inspiration behind McCartney’s track.
“There was a girl, Kitty, who remembers it well as her first contact with whites, really, in a concert situation,” McCartney recalled. “So I’m very proud of that, and it actually ended up in our contract – ‘will not play segregated audiences’ – and back then, you know, to us it was just common sense. But it turns out it was quite a statement.”
