africanah.org

Arena for Contemporary African, African-American and Caribbean Art

Motown and Civil Rights

Motown

Motown and the Civil Rights Movement

ALAN LIGHT

THE story of Motown Records can be told in many ways. It can be presented as a tale of musical revolution, the creation of a sound steeped in gospel and blues but packed with endlessly inventive pop hooks. There is also the business story of the founder, Berry Gordy Jr.; for a time in the 1960s, Motown was the largest black-owned company in America.

Then there is the label’s sociocultural impact, which is the focus of an exhibition called “Motown: The Truth Is a Hit,” on display at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library system, through July 26. The introductory text to the show says its goal is to “explore Berry Gordy’s conception of the truth by tracing black music from its African roots” and “up to the present day.”

That is a lot to take on in a modest-size gallery; the Schomburg’s exhibition space is one room divided in half by two panels. If the space doesn’t allow for an expansive take on the history of African-American music, “The Truth Is a Hit” does offer an outline of the Motown narrative, highlighting some of its less familiar aspects.

In 1959, Mr. Gordy, a 29-year-old songwriter and former boxer, founded the label initially known as Tamla Records in his hometown, Detroit, with an $800 loan from his family.

The company’s first major hit came the next year with Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want).” In 1961 came Motown’s first million seller, “Shop Around,” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and its first pop No. 1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman,” by the teenage girl group the Marvelettes.

In the deluge that followed, such giants as the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder released more than 180 No. 1 hits worldwide. In 1968, Motown had five records in the pop Top 10; it also held the top three spots for a full month. And through soundtracks, radio, samples, commercials and covers, Motown’s songs remain almost as ubiquitous today as they were in the label’s peak years.

“When we went to Europe and Australia, they knew all about Motown,” Otis Williams, the last surviving member of the original Temptations, said in a 2009 interview. “They didn’t know about Warner Brothers or Columbia or whoever, but when we went behind the Iron Curtain, to Gdansk, or to Africa, and people knew about Motown, that’s when I thought, ‘Man, we are a very unique company.’ That let us know that it was really reaching far and wide.”

“The Truth Is a Hit” represents this triumph with a select few artifacts: Mr. Wonder’s chromatic harmonica, one of Diana Ross’s sequined dresses, the musicians’ chart for “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

Classic Motown songs play continuously in the gallery, but the video screen showing performances by the label’s acts is used only as a visual element and has no audio; on a recent visit, several young children were pressing their ears to the monitor hoping to hear music from the Jackson Five clip that was showing.

The exhibition illustrates Motown’s historic crossover to a mainstream pop (read: white) audience, but it also highlights a less familiar side of the label’s history, which was its connection and commitment to the civil rights movement.

Motown’s involvement manifested itself both through the company’s increasingly politicized music in the late 1960s, culminating with Gaye’s groundbreaking “What’s Going On” album in 1971; and through its recordings of speeches and poetry by leading black cultural figures. One of the wall panels is dedicated to LPs documenting an early version of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as well as albums by Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes and Stokely Carmichael, mostly issued on a Motown imprint called Black Forum.

“We looked at Martin Luther King and we thought, he’s doing the same thing on foot that we’re doing on the radio,” Abdul Fakir of the Four Tops, known as “Duke,” said in a 2009 interview. “I like to think that we were softening the blow for him a little bit.”

A sizable portion of the space in “The Truth Is a Hit” is devoted to the current Broadway hit “Motown: The Musical,” one of the exhibition’s sponsors.

The Schomburg exhibition is a reminder that the sounds that emerged from one building in Detroit truly did have a permanent global impact.

“We represented a social environment that was changing,” Mary Wilson of the Supremes said in 2009. “The experience we had known being black was not being bona fide citizens, not being able to drink out of the same water fountains, playing to segregated audiences. When that started to fall away, and you saw that music was one of the components that was helping it fall away, that’s when it really felt like we were doing something significant.”

(New York Times)

Exhibition in Schomburg Center Harlem