The Last Mile of The Way: Soul Music and the Civil Rights Movement

In the summer of 1960, a group of Soul performers was scheduled to perform at a segregated dance in Little Rock, Arkansas. Jesse Belvin, Jackie Wil-son and Arthur Prysock were to play two shows that evening—one for a black audience and a second show for a white audience. These segregated shows were essentially the norm in the majority of the country. However, that night, Jackie Wilson decided he was not going to perform the second show for a white audi-ence and encouraged the others to follow suit. They were all subsequently run out of town at gun point and somewhere outside of Little Rock, Belvin’s tires on his 59’ Cadillac blew and he lost control of the vehicle, resulting in the death of him and his wife. Arkansas investigators attributed the accident to “disgruntled white” audience members who slashed the tires of the Cadillac. Meanwhile at lo-cal Soul concerts the “K-9 dogs [were] patrolling the aisles to prevent race mixing or over demonstrativeness on part of the colored population” in Birmingham