Free The Lost Supreme: The Life of Dreamgirl Florence Ballard by Peter Benjaminson

own. But she was also realistic enough to admit that the Supremes badly needed a hit.
    Whatever the varying abilities of the groups involved, on this tour they were all black and all together in the segregated South. “We were in Macon, Georgia, doing one-nighters,” Flo remembered. “We had finished the show, and we were all getting on the bus. It was pitch black. . . . Mary Wells was getting on the bus, and we hear something say, ‘Pow!’—like that. We said, ‘That might be a firecracker. Who’s popping firecrackers?’ Then all of a sudden the bus driver says, ‘Hey, everybody hit the floor, quick!’ Somebody was shooting at us. Why? Because we was black! A bus full of black artists. The only white one on the bus was the bus driver, and he was scared. No one was hit. So we got to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that morning; we were all asleep on the bus.
    The bus driver got off, and he happened to be walking and he looked at the front of the bus, bullet holes was all in the front of the bus. He woke us up and he said, ‘Look! Told you those was bullets!’ Somebody could have got hit.”
    Although the tours played to mixed audiences—a harbinger of Motown’s future success in a world in which whites were the major record buyers—the white and black people in the audience were never allowed to mingle. Either the blacks were required to sit upstairs and the whites downstairs or the 41
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    blacks had to sit on one side of the theater and the whites on the other.
    Restrooms were segregated by color as well as gender.
    In fact, finding restrooms they could use was a continuing and annoying problem. The members of the Miracles “went up to a gas station and asked the guy could they use the bathroom,” Florence remembered. He said, ‘Hell, no,’ and got a shotgun out. And all of them came flying back to the bus. So we had to get in a deep, dark spot and the girls took their turn in the back of the bus, and then the guys took their turn in the back of the bus, because there was nowhere to stop.”
    Restaurants were also a major problem. If the touring artists couldn’t find a blacks-only restaurant on a particular day, they were out of luck. They sometimes tried to make light of it. Comedian Bill Murray would occasionally go up to a whites-only restaurant and try to order a sandwich. When the expected response was uttered—“We don’t serve black people”—he’d retort with “I don’t eat ’em either.”
    Apart from suffering from segregationist laws in the South, some Motown performers had occasional similar problems even in the North. A white Motown public relations employee, Alan Abrams, often accompanied Smokey Robinson and the other Miracles on tour. Abrams and the group would usually stay in the same hotel. On one tour, though, when the group was performing in Chicago, Abrams arrived late and took a room by himself in a Hyde Park hotel. Robinson dropped over to talk to him. After Robinson left, the hotel manager called Abrams and told him he’d have to leave the hotel because it was against the rules to have black visitors.
    In the South the Motown performers were barnstorming through a largely segregated area at a time when civil rights leaders were fighting to have equal rights for blacks made law, when civil rights marchers were met with police dogs and fire hoses, and when troops were needed to force the admission of black students to southern high schools and universities. The Motown performers tried to figure out far in advance what hotels would house them and 42
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    what restaurants would feed them. But their day might begin with a visit to a restaurant where they would be refused service in the front. “They didn’t serve black people in the front,” Florence recalled. “They’ve got a little place around the back; you go around in the back, and they’ve got a window. You don’t come in; they give you your food to take with you. . . . You better carry