As a young black girl in 1960s America, the Beatles gave me the first taste of a new world
I remember well how my love affair with my Beatles started. On school nights, as a teenager, when I should have been asleep, I would instead huddle under a blanket in my bedroom, transistor radio hugging my ear, listening to “white music” on the high wattage WAPE (“Big Ape”) station. By day, meanwhile, I lived a rhythm and blues life in my all-black community in Jacksonville, Florida, in the segregated American South. It was a time of racial apartheid and turbulent resistance that was peaking in the 1960s. Through movies and television I was glimpsing a larger world of racial possibilities. I was a misfit teenager, ripe for change.
And then, during one of those nighttime rituals, I heard the Beatles wailing “I wanna hold your haaaand….”
I found out that they were young – from England of all places, so, surely they weren’t really white. Their songs had a forceful, funky dance beat and vocal swirls like the singers blasting from our record players and the local “black” radio station. They were brash and unafraid to break rules, fitting right into the times – at least as far as I was concerned. In addition, they had working class roots that seemed to be a source of pride; this appealed to me because of my everyday reality as one of the economically-deprived. But I lived in an oppressive, racialized society.
This was the atmosphere the Beatles entered in 1964 when they “invaded” the U.S. and did their part to change a part of my world. A new documentary by director Ron Howard, Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years, chronicles the band’s explosive musical launch in America. One of the most interesting and lesser talked-about elements of this, explored in the film, is how the group refused to play my hometown’s Gator Bowl unless city officials relented on their stipulation that audiences should be racially segregated.
By: Kitty Oliver
Source: i News
