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The first single I bought was "You Can't Hurry Love" by the Suprêmes. It was the summer of 1966 and I'd just turned fourteen. I was growing up in Colorado Springs, a time zone or two removed from Birmingham, Selma, Watts, and Chicago, where Martin Luther King, Jr.'s transcendent visions collided with the intransigent realities of segregation outside the South. In a technical sense, the public schools I attended were integrated. That technicality rested upon the presence of a few sons and daughters of black military officers from nearby Fort Carson, a major point of embarkation for GIs headed for Vietnam. When one of those families moved in across the street, no one complained. Their son Darnel was a few years older than me. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and had a good line-drive bat but kept mostly to himself. When, one summer night, someone threw a brick through their window, a group of the fathers, all of them World War II veterans, gathered to express their sympathy, sorrow, and what, even then, I sensed as shame. I watched from the front window as Major Hendricks accepted their offer to help put up a plywood patch. A few months later the family was gone.
No one said a word.
As I listen back toward that silence, contemplating how a white boy from the Rocky Mountains found his life's labors in African American cultural history, what I hear is Motown. The first time I wrote down the Top Twenty songs from the countdown on KYSN 1460, "Kissin' Radio," number one was "Where Did Our Love Go." Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Streets" stood at number nine. Over the next two years, I went to sleep to the strains of "Baby Love," "Come See about Me," "Stop! In the Name of Love," "Back in My Arms Again," "Nothing But Heartaches," and "I Hear a Symphony." (Not to mention "I Can't Help Myself," "My Girl," "Ooo Baby Baby," "Ain't That Peculiar," "Uptight," or "The Tracks of My Tears." Tips of an unfathomable iceberg.) In the summer of 1966, when "You Can't Hurry Love" became the Suprêmes' seventh number-one single in a little over two years, Motown's presence on KYSN included Jimmy Ruffin's "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,"...