In 1964, The Beatles made a huge step towards fighting racial segregation by refusing to play a show that had split the audience without their consent.

Showed their support for the US civil rights movement, refusing to perform to a segregated concert at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. As the pressure of The Beatles not performing threatened to boil over, officials at the concert eventually allowed the segregated audience to merge together. Upon entering the stage, John Lennon said: “We never play to segregated audiences and we aren’t going to start now.
“I’d sooner lose our appearance money,” he added.

The details of the incident were later captured in the recent and comprehensive documentary ‘The Beatles: Eight Days a Week’ directed by Ron Howard. “Their first controversial political stance didn’t have to do with Vietnam, it had to do with segregation in the South’, director Howard explained. “They found out that one of their concerts in Jacksonville, Florida was meant to be segregated and they refused to play it that way. They even had in their contract they would not play to segregated audiences. It was a ludicrous idea to them,” he added.

“But it was clear to them and that’s the position they took, and lo and behold, they de-segregated that concert’, he continued. “Often, the world was influencing what the Beatles were going through and the Beatles were influencing the way the world looked at things,” Howard said.
“When we were making the film, all these little facts had come out and Ron was sifting through them with his team,” Paul McCartney later explained. “We were due to play Jacksonville (Florida) in the States and we found out that it was going to be a segregated audience – blacks one side, whites the other – and it just seemed so mad, we couldn’t understand that. So we just said, ‘We’re not playing that!’”

“The concert we did do was the first non-segregated audience,” he adds. “And there was a girl, Kitty, who remembers it well as her first contact with whites, really, in a concert situation.

“So I’m very proud of that and it actually ended up in our contract – ‘will not play segregated audiences’ – and back then, you know, to us it was just common sense. But it turns out it was quite a statement.”

One year later, The Beatles secured an official contract signed by manager Brian Epstein that specified that the band “not be required to perform in front of a segregated audience”.

source: FarOutMagazine