Singer Donna Loren recalls touring America in the early 1960s as a young Black performer, facing segregated restrooms and hotels. She describes Dick Clark's role in sponsoring the Caravan of Stars tour, which featured the first Supremes lineup, and the strange camaraderie between Black and white performers amid systemic racism.
So when you were in— when you were 16 to 21 and you saw that Black people had to use a different restroom and drinking soda and fountain and all this other stuff, did it bother you at all, or did you just go with it even though you knew you didn't want to talk about it? Because somebody said in your mind, you just had— you said, hey, I can't really talk about this, but And then how did you feel?
Okay, so I need to veer off again a little bit. So Dick Clark, you know, was very—
I love Dick Clark.
He was very embedded in the Dr Pepper company.
Yeah.
And they ended up sponsoring one of his tours called the Caravan of Stars. Oh, it was literally the very first Supremes tour.
Whoa.
But it was starring a guy named Gene Pitney that had 5 number 1— no, he was number 1 in 5 countries at the time, right? It was like this, what do you call, like a review of a bunch of different rock and roll artists, and then they threw me in because I was the Dr Pepper girl. I got to travel for, I think it was 21 days, and we were, you know, all the acts including Dick Clark, we were all traveling on a bus together, and the musicians and the equipment was on another bus, and Maury, my adopted dad, was with me. Well, in my little book, Pop '60s, you'll see he took a picture in, I believe it's Oklahoma City, where we all checked into a motel, and that was a big no-no. You know, they wouldn't take mixed company. But we happened to find a place that would, and Dick Clark always stayed with everybody. He never isolated himself. And my dad climbed up on a roof and took a picture of Diana Ross sitting on top of one of the— oh gosh, I forgot the name of the group now. The white guy in one of the groups, and she's sitting on top of his shoulders, and Mary, and, you know, and, um, oh gosh, what was— and Florence, you know, everybody's in the pool together, you know, in the South. And then there were times that we'd drive in like St. Louis where you had to go through the kitchen, and then we tried to check into a hotel, and you know, and they kept saying no. And then finally we got to like a fourth-rate place where I remember turning on the faucet and a big old cockroach came out and it, ugh, you know, but we all stuck it out together, you know, the white and the Black and everybody was all together. And that's, you know, that in music, that's, and shindig, same thing.
