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night she'd have it right.”
Another incident during the tour that shook
them all up was in Macon, Georgia, when
their battered, worn-out bus broke down.
Local service station attendants refused to
service it because it carried black passengers.
At another stop in South Carolina, it broke
down in front of a jail. Mary Wilson wrote in
her autobiography Dreamgirl: My Life As A
Supreme that all she could see “were black
hands clutching at the iron window bars, and
before long, they all started pleading with us
to help them. We girls hung back, afraid to
get close, but The Temptations and The
Miracles went up and shook hands with the
prisoners through the bars.” She asked one
of the musicians if there was anything they
could do to help, but was promptly told,
“We'd better get this bus fixed and get out of
here before they throw us in there, too. They
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just thought that was the way life was and
put it out of my head. Children, they don't
understand racism. They're too busy being
children. What I remember most from that
year is my sisters and I all got majorette
boots for Christmas.”
don't care about no innocence or guilt down
here. That's how they treat niggers in the
South.”
When yet another restaurant owner refused
to let the Motown entourage use the front
entrance, a heated argument between one of
The Miracles and owned ensued. The
proprietor reached for his gun as the artists
ran for their lives to the relative safety of the
bus. Bobby Rogers of The Miracles
remembered that “Diana was wide-eyed and
scared shitless. She was quiet...all The
Supremes were when these things went down
and just waiting to see who was gonna get
killed first. These are the kinds of lifechanging experiences I don't think any of us
ever really got over.”
Mickey Stevenson told Taraborelli about
Diana during this period: “This kid would
rehearse with an energy that was simply
uncanny for an eighteen-year-old performer
back then. For some of the others at the
company, something else was always more
important. For some of the men, it was
women. For the women, it was men. But for
Diana, it was the Motortown Revue. When
we finally got out there, it was a little raw on
the Supremes' part, and Diana would be
extremely upset and cry a lot after the shows.
She'd go off on her own somewhere and
Bill Murray, known in the entertainment
rehearse whatever bothered her and the next world as Winehead Willie and who was a
THEGAYUK | ISSUE 16 | NOV 2015 57