The meeting, in a private apartment, appeared to have been tense from the beginning—all the white people were on one side of the room, and all the Negro people on the other. The exception was the actor Rip Torn, a white Texan and friend of Baldwin’s, who sat on an ottoman on the Negro side and admitted that he had once been a racist from a family of racists until one day he just basically decided that it was stupid. The attorney general and his aide Burke Marshall sat together. The Negroes were Lena, Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Kenneth Clark (the sociologist, who came armed with statistics), one or two others, and Jerome Smith, a young man from SNCC.
The meeting was a disaster. While the Negroes praised the attorney general’s stand against the University of Mississippi and support for the admission of James Meredith, and while they agreed that the Kennedy administration had done more for civil rights than any other administration in history, they also argued that it was not enough. They expected and needed more—quickly. The South was not budging on school desegregation and voting rights. The attorney general felt for them and understood their pain; he spoke about his own family and the kinds of discrimination it had to fight. Unfortunately, this did not establish rapport with the New York Negroes, whose minds could wander to the Draft Riots and Irish cops. His off-the-cuff prediction that there would be a black president in forty years was openly jeered. (Nevertheless, it was the perfect timetable for Barack Obama.)
Lena believed that the Negro group would have appreciated Robert Kennedy’s efforts more if young Jerome Smith of SNCC had not been there. Smith had been in the South, working for voter registration. His wife and children had been sent away for their safety. He had been jailed and beaten and was still physically injured from what had been done to him. He communicated the basic suffering of Southern Negroes and the shredding of their constitutional rights. The attorney general was taken aback by the naked fury of the young man. James Baldwin asked Smith if, feeling the way he did, he would fight for his country. Smith said he would not. He said he would risk his life in Mississippi but would not risk it in Vietnam so long as the United States tolerated Mississippi.
I was working on the Life clip desk when Lena went to Jackson, Mississippi, for the NAACP. Billy Strayhorn and Jeanne Noble of the Delta Sigma Thetas went with her. They were met at the airport by NAACP Mississippi field secretary Medgar Evers, a war veteran. He expressed his regrets that they could not stay with him and his family, but his house had just been bombed and was not yet repaired. Dick Gregory was also part of the rally—one of a group who wanted to take to the streets for a more militant protest. But the NAACP had decided that there could be no street protest in connection with the rally, and Evers, whatever his real feelings, had to go along with that. Gregory was angry and claimed that the reason for the ban on a street demonstration was that the NAACP was trying to “protect” Lena. Even after he used her as a scapegoat for his anger, Lena always spoke well of Dick Gregory. She actually had great respect for his courage. He was not afraid of being arrested or beaten—Lena, however, was terrified.
Life covered the rally—Evers was a Life stringer and Lena was the mother of a staff member. It printed a beautiful full-page close-up of Evers and Lena, who sang “This Little Light of Mine” at the rally. She was completely in awe of the children and young people who were not afraid to go to jail. In fact she was in awe of all the civil rights workers and, typically, felt inadequate. She thought that Medgar Evers was the bravest man she had ever met. She remembered the words of a Jackson teacher: “Medgar is our courage.”
Two days later, on the night of June 12, 1963, Evers was assassinated outside his home by a KKK sniper. On the morning of July 13, Lena got the news that Medgar Evers had been killed during the night just as she was about to appear on the Today show to talk about the Jackson rally with Hugh Downs. Although she had been up since 5:30 A.M. for coffee and makeup, she had not turned on the radio or the television. She was so shocked and incoherent that she thought she could not do the show. She managed to pull herself together, but had no idea later what she actually said.
A week later, Life, which arranged for Evers’ burial in Arlington, published a haunting full-page portrait of Myrlie Evers at her husband’s funeral. On June 19 the D.C. bureau of the NAACP led the congressional fight for a comprehensive civil rights bill. President Kennedy introduced the bill. Once again it was moral persuasion. It took the murder of a very good man.
W. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana on August 27, 1963, the day before the March on Washington. It is a pity that he did not see the march. Lena was there in Washington, wearing her NAACP cap, for what has been rightly called a “great human moment.” I followed the march from the Life clip desk, where I now had an “assistant.” She and I agreed that the best March on Washington story by far came from the great Harriet Van Horne, a columnist and writer on the World Telegram. She made us both cry. Newspapermen used to call writers like Van Horne “sob sisters.” She certainly made me sob. The march itself was really a day of peace and joy led by all religious denominations. It was the first spiritual love-in. America had never seen anything like it.
Eighteen days after the March on Washington, Birmingham exploded. September 15 was Youth Day; many of the young people and children had marched with Dr. King and were veterans of Bull Connor’s water hoses and attack dogs. Thanks to television news stories of previous violence, the Birmingham business community and city officials had recently opened lunch counters and schools to blacks. But haters are sore losers. Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, aged eleven to fourteen, were killed by a bomb placed a few feet from the basement ladies’ lounge of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It was timed to go off during Sunday school.
According to Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the FBI investigation found that the bomb was planned by the Klan in response to the new school desegregation order. An eyewitness saw four white men plant the bomb—but no one was charged with the crime. The day after the bombing, a white lawyer named Charles Morgan gave a speech in Birmingham:
He asked his audience: “Who did it?” and gave his own anguished answer: “We all did it … every person in this community who has in any way contributed … to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty … as the demented fool who threw that bomb.”
After his statement, Morgan was ostracized by the white community of Birmingham. Fourteen years later, in 1977, the Alabama attorney general reopened the case. A seventy-three-year-old Klansman named Robert Chambliss was charged with first-degree murder and a jury found him guilty. He died in prison.
Frank Horne had suffered a stroke in 1960. The right side of his body was slightly paralyzed. In 1962 he was investigated once again for his activities in so-called leftist organizations—again he was able to defend himself and was cleared. He founded the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) and went back to work (from 1962 to 1973) as a consultant on human relations with the New York City Housing and Redevelopment Board to see that there were no discriminatory hiring practices among private contractors and subcontractors working for the city—and to see that all city-owned or-funded housing was integrated. His marriage to Mercedes was over. He lived in Brooklyn’s St. George Hotel and, like his father, dined out and went to the theater in Manhattan. And he kept busy. In October 1964 he helped write the NCDH ten-year-plan to end discrimination in housing. In February 1966 he attended the Notre Dame Conference on Federal Civil Rights Legislation and Administration. The following year he was awarded the plaque of the Housing and Urban Renewal Conference for “dauntless courage … in the battle for open housing.” Later he wrote a collection of poetry called Haverstraw. In “He Won’t Stay Put: A Carol for All Seasons,” he wrote:
… and mighty Martin Luther King
he ain’t got no Santy this year
Nor blazing Malcolm X
<
br /> Nor gallant Bobby Kennedy
Nor fearless Medgar Evers
Nor brothers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney
Nor a million pot-bellied Biafran kids
Nor a million red-necked Mississippians …
Frank’s work appeared in The Crisis, Opportunity, Phylon, Carolina magazine, the Interracial Review, and other publications. According to Sterling Brown, a musical version of “Letters Found Near a Suicide” was still performed. Sixties students loved Frank’s “Suicide” poem—about the death of a young college athlete with absolutely no mention of race.
The November 1963 issue of Show magazine was famous for its cover. Lena, wearing a long white dress, was posed standing halfway through a torn white paper curtain. Was she caught between two worlds, or was she the crossover breakthrough? I helped her write the piece, since I was a “journalist.” It was about civil rights and was very good for Lena in a special way:
I don’t want to sing the same old songs or act in the same stereotypical musicals. There is a great problem for me as a performer in all this. I am not about to get a guitar and start doing protest songs … And I’d look pretty silly at the Waldorf in a Balmain dress describing the feelings of small children attacked by dogs and hoses … But there has to be some way for a sophisticated urban adult to express the movement …
The greatest protest songs are coming from the Southern students. I can’t sing these songs, but I think that songs can be written and plays and musicals produced which simply put the Negro in the context of the world—not necessarily as youth in protest … just as people who are around and alive … I think it is the great chance of my generation to try and express this.
A few days after the Show piece came out Lena got a call from Harold Arlen. He had a song, he said, that he originally wrote with Ira Gershwin. Yip Harburg would give it new lyrics. It was called “Silent Spring” and was dedicated to the four young girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. Almost at the same time Jule Styne came over to play the score of Funny Girl. Lena told Styne that she was sick of hearing songs he had written for other singers. So Styne and Lena’s longtime pals Betty Comden and Adolph Green created new lyrics to “Hava Nagila” and called it “Now.” It was naturally infectious and the lyrics were rousing. “Now is the hour!” It became a cause célèbre when some radio stations banned it from being played. The song, a product of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway, actually came from the hearts of people who understood the struggles of formerly enslaved people. Lena was thrilled with “Now”—she finally had a protest song that she could sing in a way that was true to her and to the movement.
“Now” was the perfect song for her to sing at Carnegie Hall on the second night of the two-night Frank Sinatra—Lena Horne two-benefit concerts in the fall of 1963. Sinatra’s charity was an international children’s fund, and Lena’s charity was SNCC. The first evening, for Sinatra’s charity, sold out instantly. It was a very glamorous New York event—everyone was there. Lena had a great success with the Harold Arlen medley—but Lena and Sinatra, basically the same age, had a complicated relationship. Lennie knew him from the Dorsey days. Lena thought he was a great singer and a musician’s singer. And she certainly agreed with his outspoken liberal politics and his message of interracial unity and harmony. Sinatra had come under scrutiny from HUAC earlier than Lena, and he had basically been under surveillance by the FBI since 1945. Sinatra was “fingered” as a Communist by the well-known American fascist Gerald L. K. Smith, who founded the America First Party and lobbied for the release of all Nazi war criminals convicted at the Nuremberg trials. Smith petitioned HUAC:
I petition this committee of Congress to investigate the activities of FRANK SINATRA who, on the surface seems to be just a highly paid emaciated crooner, but who recently gave support to a meeting of the American Youth for Democracy which held an elaborate banquet at the Hotel Ambassador in Los Angeles and which organization was recently branded by J. EDGAR HOOVER as the successor to the Young Communist League and one of the most dangerous outfits in the nation.
But Lena’s problem with Sinatra was that in her eyes he was less than gentlemanly. Sometime in the late 1940s, Lena was deeply insulted when she and Lennie were invited to Palm Springs for a weekend with Sinatra to find no sign of his wife and that all the other women guests were starlets and party girls. Insulted not only for herself but for her friend Nancy Sinatra, instead of staying for the weekend, she and Lennie left after dinner the night they arrived. Now Frank arrived too late to rehearse the duets they had planned to sing for both evenings. This was not an insult, but Lena hated “winging it” and was happy only when she was overprepared.
The second evening, for SNCC, the cheap seats sold quickly but the expensive tickets did not. Lena wrote letters and made phone calls to everyone she knew, and did not know. Carnegie Hall finally sold out the expensive seats. The result was an amazing spirit on the SNCC night—everyone in the audience felt part of something special. Lena was so thrilled that she had to say something. “I don’t make speeches,” she said, “but tonight I have this overwhelming feeling of gratitude and pride that I am a New Yorker.” The audience yelled and clapped and clapped. Lena thought the ovation was because the audience members were participating in something bigger than themselves. It was a great moment in her life. When she sang “Now” she finally felt “authentic.” For once she felt the symbol had been useful.
Lena went from the SNCC concert to Washington to pose for pictures with President Kennedy as a member of the celebrity committee for the president’s reelection campaign. Frank Sinatra was not involved. Richard Adler of Broadway organized the performers.
Working at Life, I met Sidney Lumet. We were introduced by James Lipton, later the host of television’s Inside the Actors Studio, then a TV writer and friend of Lena and Lennie’s. When I met Sidney, one of the great directors of live TV, he had just finished his second movie, Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards Jr. Sidney’s first movie, 12 Angry Men, was critically acclaimed. But when Sidney and I decided to marry, Lena and Lennie were not happy. First there was the sixteen-year age difference—I was twenty-six and he was forty-two. And they did not like the idea that I would be his third wife. The actress Rita Gam, who had a brief movie career, was his first wife. His second wife was Gloria Vanderbilt; some of her friends who also knew Lena rushed to express their rather snobbish disapproval.
Sidney was the successful child actor son of Yiddish-speaking actors. He spent World War II in the China-Burma-India theater in the Signal Corps (where all the actors went), and caught dengue fever. When he got out of the army, he went to see his agent, who said, in typical agent fashion, “Too bad you didn’t get taller.” So Sidney, on the short side, like so many ex—child actors, gave up acting to become a great director.
JFK was assassinated on November 22. It was utterly heartbreaking and unbelievable. Sidney and I and another couple had dinner that night at the Russian Tea Room. The restaurant was absolutely packed, but utterly silent. No one even looked up when I slapped Sidney’s face when he questioned whether Kennedy had been a great president. The next day Sidney and I were married by a judge. We canceled the musicians; half the guests did not come—the “Room” provided by the Waldorf suddenly looked too big. The Reverend Stephen Chinlund, my Episcopalian priest friend from Harvard, said a sad blessing. And Sidney and I spent our honeymoon glazed in front of the TV.
We had two daughters: Amy, born in 1964; and Jenny, born in 1967. Amy was born in London while Sidney was filming The Hill. She was born more or less at the same time as Lord Mountbatten’s twin grandsons. The queen came to the hospital to see the twins, but according to the nurses, when she toured the nursery she stopped in front of Amy’s cot and said, “That’s the one I want.” Jenny was born in New York, but went to nursery school in London when we all went back for Sidney to shoot Murder on the Orient Express, produced by Lord Brabourne, the father of Mountbatten
’s twin grandsons.
In 1965 Lena was “investigated” by the Johnson White House and “Now” was remembered in an FBI letter to Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s assistant:
Dear Mr. Moyers:
Reference is made to the memorandum dated November 16, 1964 … requesting name checks concerning Carol Channing and ten other individuals who were described as entertainers. The FBI has not investigated the following individuals and our files contain no derogatory information identifiable with them.
Carol Channing Peter Gennaro
Debby Reynolds Mike Nichols
Carol Burnett Elaine May
When it came to Lena, the FBI stated that she had already been investigated under the Kennedy White House and that a summary of information concerning her had been sent to Kennedy’s assistant Kenneth O’Donnell on January 5, 1962. In addition to the information contained in that summary, FBI files reported that the Los Angeles Times for November 1, 1963, stated that some Los Angeles radio stations banned the playing of Lena’s recording of “Now,” describing it as a “biting, angry integration message.” The article further described the record as voicing a “strong racial freedom message,” and the lyrics calling for action now “strengthened the racial unrest in the United States.”
Although the earlier information sent to the Kennedy administration did not keep Lena (or me) from being invited to the White House, Lena was never invited to anything by the Johnson administration.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
South/1960s
OVERCOMING
THE 1960–1964 civil rights movement, simply called “the movement,” was an old-fashioned grassroots movement of all ages, races, regions, and religions—although it was predominantly young, black, Southern, and Protestant. The movement was born in the same historically black Missionary colleges and universities that educated the Talented Tenth. The new civil rights movement, in fact, spoke the language of Reconstruction, making almost the same demands. Everything that was wanted had already been guaranteed by the Constitution: freedom, equality under the law, and voting rights—none of which was actually practiced, especially in rural areas. The legacy of Reconstruction remained undeniable. All large-scale humanitarian efforts in America owed an inspirational debt to Reconstruction, which encouraged an outpouring of dedication on the part of white teachers from the North who went to the dangerous, war-torn South. It happened again one hundred years later, when courageous young white Northerners descended on the South to face terror and murder in projects like the Freedom Rides and voter registration.
The Black Calhouns Page 30