Bowers found the stage an ideal platform from which to espouse his opposition to racial inequality. He was purportedly reluctant to launch a public singing career until he realised: "What induced me more than any thing else to appear in public was to give the lie to 'negro serenaders' (minstrels), and to show to the world that coloured men and women could sing classical music as well as the members of the other race by whom they had been so terribly vilified". He became famous for refusing to perform before segregated or white-only audiences. For an 1855 performance in Hamilton, Ontario, where the theatre manager refused to seat six black patrons who had purchased reserved first-class seats, Bowers refused to perform.