Sam Cooke Wife Told Him “whites only” motel “A Change Is Gonna Come”

He had called ahead to make reservations for him and his wife. But, when they got to the motel, the desk clerk looked at them and nervously told them there were no vacancies. It was October 8, 1963, and the motel turned out to be a “whites only” motel.

He was furious that this could be happening to him, he thought he had achieved a fair amount of success in his life that those barriers no longer applied to him. But, it didn’t matter who he was, he still had the wrong skin color. His wife nudged him, and explained, that they needed to go. “They’re going to kill you,” she said. He replied back, “They’re not gonna kill me – I’m Sam Cooke.” His wife just looked at him and replied, “No…to them you’re just another …’ you know.”

Sam Cooke would later be arrested and jailed. He went on to continue his successful music career though, becoming a rare cross-over hit who became popular with both black and white alike, but he never did forget about that evening. Within one or two months of that incident, Sam Cooke started putting words down for a new song, a song, which he reportedly said “scared” him.

He sang it for his protégé Bobby Womack, asked him “What’s it sound like?” His friend truthfully told him, “It sounds like death,” to which Sam Cooke replied, “Man, that’s kind of how it sounds like to me. That’s why I’m never going to play it in public.”

The song was titled “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which has become Cooke’s signature song, a song Rolling Stone now calls one of the greatest songs of all time.

Unfortunately, Sam Cooke never lived to witness the song’s success. Just before the song was to be released as a single in December of 1964, Sam Cooke would be shot to death at a motel in Los Angeles.

The song eventually became one of the anthems for the civil rights movement, becoming a universal message of hope.

As Rosa Parks would later say, when she heard that Dr. Martin Luther King was killed, she wasn’t sure what to do or what to think. She went home, cried and hugged with her mother, then listened to Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” playing it over and over again. Parks said that Cooke’s voice “soothed” her and the words were “like medicine to the soul. It was as if Dr. King was speaking directly to me,” giving her the hope to go on, knowing that eventually…

A change is gonna come…