Martha Reeves and the unrelenting fight for Motown: “Rocks were thrown; abuse was shouted”
“However we felt, we’d always step out and shine like royalty.” – Martha Reeves
Growing up, music was instilled in Martha Reeves’ bones. It was like it was always there, something that was both a gateway to escapism and a quick fix for sheer joy. It was “a family affair”, she once said, a tool to propagate unity and romance, as learnt from the way her father would play the guitar to “court” her mother, or the way her grandfather played the banjo to fill the home with the dreamy sounds of liberation.
It was something she connected so intensely to family and togetherness that when she first started to sing, she tried to sound exactly like her mother. “My first performance was as a three-year-old at a church talent show with my two older brothers, which we won. When it comes to music, I have my family to thank,” she once said, reflecting to The Guardian on where the heart to perform came from and the familial seeds that made her chase an impossible dream.
Whenever she’d sing, she’d feel free. But that was also something she learnt from her mother. Singing, to her mother and, by extension, her, was all about how you felt inside, and if it wasn’t coming from the heart, there was no point in doing it at all. If it didn’t mean something when the words fell from her lips, it wasn’t authentic. Any other way simply wouldn’t do. “If you can’t do it with love, find another,” she said.
But she also said that “fame should come with a warning”. In between constant cocaine offers and coercion into a lifestyle she never wanted a part of to begin with, as well as the unnerve that comes with witnessing heroes around her pass away at the harsh hands of substance, Reeves became a name hard-wired to exercise caution at every turn, armed with the understanding that everything could turn sour at the blink of an eye.
But beneath it all, she could also constantly hear the uneven breath of a far dirtier parasite, one that oppressed and ostracised people in the business based on their background, one that infiltrated the bones of Motown and lurked at every corner, like the insidious claws of a silhouette that preferred segregation over infiltrating the mainstream. Racism, for Reeves, permeated the walls of every space she found herself in, making Motown more a fight than a label or genre.
“Racism has been a constant presence in my life,” she explained. “In the ’60s, we had to fight and work far too hard to convince people we should be allowed to bring Motown to diverse crowds in auditoriums. Rocks were thrown; abuse was shouted. People denied us access to public toilets. When we made it to the stage, we’d wipe off the dust and put on our fancy clothes. However we felt, we’d always step out and shine like royalty.”
This was the same delicate defiance exercised by names like Billie Holiday, who, against all odds, went onstage as the epitome of the kind of intricate resilience that lurked far beneath the soft threads of her white gardenia. She emerged poised, half-stoic, like real power existed in the places and people who went out and did it anyway, despite the battlefield they were constantly in the middle of. Even in 2015, when Reeves was drawn offstage by heckling voices, she resigned from feeding into ugly behaviour, offering pacifying platitudes: they “didn’t ruin it” and “we had a good night anyway”.
But that also comes with the unfortunate familiarity of knowing exactly what to expect and standing tall regardless. Because Reeves always knew the right weapons to bring to the fight and how to pick her battles, starting with the quiet confidence that came with bringing Motown into the mainstream. Before, segregation defined almost every corner of the industry, right down to the category names magazines put out to celebrate music by Black people.
During shows when a physical barrier separated white and Black fans, Reeves recalled one moment when Smokey Robinson urged security to stand down, which enabled audiences to come together and dance to the music without those barriers, proving the power of letting those walls shatter and embracing unity once and for all. “And we saw with our own eyes, on the finale of ‘Mickey’s Monkey’, which was his big hit at the time, people get up out of their seats, break the barrier down and become one audience,” she told The Guardian in 2015.
“They started embracing each other, hitting each other’s hands, giving each other fives and getting up to dance together,” she added. “These were people that wouldn’t speak to each other when they first walked in. It proved that prejudice and racism is taught, and once people got up and broke those barriers down, we were one happy, lovable dancing family.”
She concluded: “And at the next gig we did, there was no barrier, no guards, and we went on peacefully after that”.
