“Free That Brown Eyed Man”: The United States v. Chuck Berry

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As 1959 turned into 1960, amidst escalating national tension over both the growing Civil Rights movement and the controversial popularity of rock ‘n’ roll music, Chuck Berry was charged with transporting a teenage girl across state lines with the intent to engage in “immoral practices.” The public scandal that ensued fed into conservative fears that rock ‘n’ roll encouraged the racial integration of America’s youth, both through the airwaves and at live venues. The federal officials involved in Berry’s prosecution saw him in particular and rock ‘n’ roll more generally as posing the same main threats to the racial status quo as those posed by state-enforced integration: the breakdown of racialized spaces and the erosion of taboos against interracial sex. This piece situates Berry’s music and his 1960 trial and conviction within legal and musical histories shaped by the sexual as well as spatial mandates of white supremacy. Courtroom debate from the trial demonstrates how the perceived unity of gendered racial identity and individual intent dictates the attorneys’ interpretations of both Berry and the Apache teenage runaway on whose behalf the state is intervening; this racialization of sexual intent caters to the state’s investment in jointly regulating the sexuality and mobility of racialized subjects. Portrayed at various points in the proceedings as the lawless foil of a racially segregated Missouri, the Southwest, where Berry and his band were touring when the alleged crimes took place, becomes a racialized space in which delinquency and sexual deviance result from unregulated contact between nonwhite populations.