Motown was not selling out, it was buying into a bigger, wider audience.
King, who believed in equality of opportunity rather than separate development, had an echo in the way that Motown was marketing Detroit’s music to the world. Detroit’s reputation for integration, which attracted Dr. Some would make an impact way beyond the city – none more so than Motown, the record label founded in 1959 that brought a new, arguably “industrialized,” soul sound to the world. Not only that, but Detroit was seen as a model for race relations, and Black businesses were springing up to cater for the new population. Production-line work at General Motors, Ford, or Fruehauf trailers was hard, repetitive, and noisy, but compared to breaking your back to earn cents as a sharecropper or farm hand in the south, it was rewarding and regular. Detroit was booming, with 10 major automobile manufacturing companies. For decades, Detroit had been the destination of preference for many African-Americans in the south who were longing for a better life in the north. King’s speech at 1963’s The Walk To Freedom in Detroit.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message across. Motown was willing to subsume its corporate identity to a greater cause. The company’s first two albums of King’s speeches rank among the most iconic images in Motown’s huge catalogue, but don’t contain a single element of the company’s trademark sound – apart from its sometimes underestimated Black consciousness.
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