“Dancing In the Street was released to a country bubbling over with racial tension. Seven weeks before it hit the charts, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law; also in July, there were race riots in Harlem and Rochester, New York, and Martin Luther King was jailed along with seventeen others for trying to integrate a Florida restaurant. On August 4, the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were found in Mississippi...

Suzanne Smith’s “Dancing In the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit” opens with an account of a July afternoon in 1967 when Martha and the Vandellas performed as the final act of the “Swinging Time Revue" at Detroit’s Fox Theater, and after singing their trademark song were informed that rioting had broken out in the city’s streets following a police raid, and the concert had to conclude for everyone to return to safety. A British reporter later... (Continues)