*Growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, during the height of the civil rights movement, Lionel Richie had a front-row seat to history. The Grammy-winning artist opened up to The Guardian about how those years influenced him, reflecting on his family’s efforts to protect him from the harsh realities of racial unrest.
“What I didn’t realize was that it made up the core of who I was,” Richie said. “At the time I didn’t realize because our parents made a point of keeping a lot of that edge away from us. We were in the bubble.”
Richie was just 15 when he longed to join the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches led by Martin Luther King Jr., but his parents stopped him. “I was longing to be part of it,” he recalled. “And my parents kept telling me it was dangerous.”
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The young Richie felt left out of history in the making. “I was angry, because I thought they had left me out of some of the most significant history,” he said. “My anger came when I realized what my grandmother and grandfather had gone through, what my mom and dad had gone through.”
When he asked his parents why they kept him from the movement, their answer reshaped his perspective. “‘We didn’t want anything to limit you in your thinking of what the possibilities for your future could be,’” they told him. “‘And if we had attached you to our anger then you would be stuck in our anger.’”
Now 76, Richie expressed frustration with what he views as society’s regression. However, he makes it clear that politics is not his path. “If you’re waiting for Martin Luther Richie, he ain’t coming,” he said. “But if you’re waiting for Lionel Richie, the bearer of love, you got me.”
Reflecting on the fate of past leaders, he added, “Politics is ugly, it’s nasty, and it’s got even worse now because they character-assassinate you before you even get in.”
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