My mother, her maiden name Dorothy Beeding, grew up next door to Elvis Presley in an extremely rare predominantly black neighborhood in Tupelo where poor blacks and poor whites lived side by side as friends and neighbors and as outcasts of society. This was in the forcibly segregated South.

My mother was 4 years older than Elvis, but my uncle was the same age. He and Elvis played together with the black children who lived around them. When Elvis recorded the song, “In the Ghetto,” he knew first-hand the struggles of living in a marginalized and oppressed neighborhood.

While they were living there Elvis’ father was sent to prison. My grandfather used to drive Elvis and his mother Gladys to visit his father Vernon at the prison. When Elvis was famous and would come back to Tupelo, he would sometimes drive by my grandmother sitting on her front porch and wave at her.

That’s my family ties to the King of Rock and Roll and to a heritage of racial equality in a land of legally enforced racism and segregation. I never heard my mother (or my father, also raised in the arrogance of the racist South) ever say anything racist. The blatant racism of the time and place, however, won my uncle over as he got older. For as long as I can remember, my uncle would frequently and randomly throw out cruel racist remarks, slurs, and insults.

Being a Southerner, Elvis was sometimes rumored to be a racist, but his ex-wife Prisilla Presley is quoted in IndieWire (July 21, 2022) as saying this about Elvis: “He was not a racist. He had never been a racist. He had friends, black friends, friends from all over. He loved their music, he loved their style. He loved being around black musicians . . . He loved being around anyone, actually. He was not prejudiced in any way.”

For some reason, although growing up in segregated neighborhoods and schools in Arkansas and Tennessee, I never thought anything negative about black people. I graduated in 1969 from a segregated high school in Jackson, Tennessee, right across the street from the city’s black high school. Integration finally arrived in 1972.

When in college I got the very strange summer job of selling black history books door-to-door in the deep South. That was my first real personal exposure to black people and to black history. It was life changing. I loved black people and was grasped, shocked, and inspired by their history, their suffering, and their courage. I wrote a book about the beauty of color. It’s called Off the Race Track–From Color-Blind to Color kind. Click the link for more.

“Elvis was a great man and did more for civil rights than people know.” –African American photojournalist Ernest Withers