My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  I didn’t expect Eisenhower to act with any alacrity on the pleas of ten thousand students, and in that, I wasn’t disappointed. But leading the march that day, I felt something new—the power of that crowd. For the first time I felt: We are omnipotent. We will not be stopped. Later, Martin would say that one of his greatest strategic decisions was recruiting me to the movement. I was on board, all right.

  Whatever he asked of me, I would do it.

  11

  I was moving closer to a new life, one in which the fight for civil rights would take precedence over almost everything. But how to strike the right balance was the trick. I hadn’t forgotten the Robeson lesson; I wanted to be sure I always had enough money to support my family, and not let my causes overwhelm their needs. Yet by now I was having almost daily talks with Martin. The more he and I spoke, the more I realized that the movement was more important than anything else. I was feeling my way with all this, in the fall of 1958, when I ran into a color barrier so blatant and infuriating—in Manhattan, of all places—that I put my existential balancing act aside. This one was going to take all the money and celebrity I could throw at it, in equal measures, right away.

  Now that we were a family, Julie and I had started searching for a larger apartment than the one we’d found off Central Park West. Our first thought was to rent on the Upper East Side, but every broker we contacted seemed to blanch when we walked in. The message, conveyed either implicitly or overtly, was that we’d be happier in some other neighborhood. I heard the message loud and clear, and I sent back one of my own, by calling a press conference to announce I’d filed a formal complaint with the city. One of those who heard the news was Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “I am sure that every New Yorker was shocked the other day to read that Harry Belafonte and his charming wife and baby were finding it practically impossible to get an apartment in New York City except in what might be considered segregated areas or in a hotel,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her nationally syndicated column on October 20, 1958. After condemning, in her gentle way, the discrimination still rampant in many New York neighborhoods, she added, “I can think of nothing I would enjoy more than having Mr. and Mrs. Belafonte as my neighbors. I hope they will find a home shortly where they and their enchanting little boy can grow up without feeling the evils of the segregation pattern.”

  On the phone, Mrs. Roosevelt went further; she invited Julie and me and David to move in with her! She had a lot of space, she told us, and didn’t need it all, and she’d love to have us as tenants. I thanked her profusely but told her if I were to accept her offer, I’d be walking away from a battle I needed to fight.

  Not long after, Julie and I fell in love with a four-bedroom rental at 300 West End Avenue, one of those great old drafty Upper West Side apartments with not only a living room but a library and pantry. Except that when we tried to rent it, the apartment was somehow suddenly unavailable. Furious, I sent a white friend—Mike Merrick, my publicist—in as my stalking horse. Now the lease was readily conferred. Mike passed it on to me, I signed it with my own name, and the lease was countersigned. Apparently the building manager didn’t know who I was. Julie and I moved our furniture in first, then showed up to take occupancy. Within hours, the building manager became aware he had a Negro as a tenant. He passed on the word to the building’s owner, who didn’t like this at all.

  The owner, as it turned out, was Ramfis Trujillo, an international playboy who’d romanced Kim Novak after her breakup with Sammy Davis, Jr., and illegitimate son of the dictator of the Dominican Republic. His own skin color was high-yellow Spanish, but he clearly saw himself as white, and in his building he’d maintained the neighborhood’s unwritten covenant against blacks. A billionaire thanks to his father’s years of tyranny, Ramfis was used to having his own way. He relayed word that I must pack up and leave. I declined.

  We had a one-year lease, which gave me exactly that much time to pull off my plan, because Trujillo, after failing to bully me into leaving right away, was surely not going to offer me the chance to renew. First, I set up a dummy real estate company. Then I set up two others, one for each of the sympathetic tenants who’d agreed to be my cohorts. With that, our three dummy companies began bidding against one another to buy the whole thirteen-story building.

  If the building’s managing agent found this sudden interest in 300 West End Avenue baffling, he never said so. In fact, our offers were coming at a time of real change in the New York apartment market. Rental properties were growing less profitable for their owners. The whole concept of co-ops was just starting to take hold. What we were proposing would soon become a trend. We would buy the building outright from its owner, then try to sell as many of the apartments as possible to the tenants who lived in them. Any tenant who preferred to keep renting could do that. We had to hope most of the tenants would buy, though, or the money I was putting up to finance the scheme—more than $2 million—would be tied up in bricks and mortar for years.

  It all worked like a charm. Just as my one-year lease was about to lapse, our absentee billionaire owner accepted the high bid. Actually, it wasn’t very high; part of what made our timing good was that the Trujillos were under increasing political pressure, and both father and son were looking to build up their liquid assets in the event that they had to flee. I now owned my apartment … and the building. As most of the other tenants stepped up to buy their apartments, too, the money I’d invested came flowing back.

  One holdout was my fifth-floor neighbor, a widow who preferred to keep renting. I started thinking about how large a place Julie and I would have if we took over that one other apartment on the floor and combined the two. With our neighbor’s blessing, I not only bought her out, paying market value for an apartment she didn’t actually own, but found a rental apartment for her in another building, into which she happily moved. Now we had a twenty-one-room apartment, with nearly seven thousand square feet!

  As other tenants left, my partners and I meted out the apartments to friends, some of whom were black, some of whom had experienced the same discrimination I had in my own New York housing search. Lena Horne got the penthouse. Later, Ron Carter, my favorite bass player, got a nice apartment, too. We didn’t just invite black friends, though; our goal was integration, not reverse segregation. Eventually, 300 West End Avenue became known as “Harry’s building.” Strictly speaking, that was no longer true; when the building went completely co-op, I no longer owned any part of it besides our fifth-floor combined apartment. But I was glad to have a home that was mine.

  Julie and I would live in that cavernous apartment for nearly half a century, raising our children and entertaining a glittering array of guests. Among our first were Martin and Coretta King, just back from a trip to Europe; they came by one evening in March 1959 and put their feet up with us for a home screening of the about-to-be-released The Diary of Anne Frank. Martin would come to think of it as his home away from home, staying with us on many of his New York trips; on occasion, he brought with him two or three of his closest advisers, and by the mid-sixties, the apartment was one of the movement’s New York headquarters. Soon, Senator John F. Kennedy would come to visit, seeking my endorsement in his race for president. Eleanor Roosevelt would come to visit, too, though more often we went to see her, driving north to the family compound in Hyde Park, New York, for some of the most rewarding evenings of my life.

  At seventy-five in 1959, Mrs. Roosevelt was still active in various humanitarian causes, one of which was the Wiltwyck School in upstate New York, for mostly black children who had committed serious crimes but were too young to be incarcerated. We had been introduced to Wiltwyck by both Mrs. Roosevelt and Dr. Viola Bernard, Julie’s distinguished psychoanalyst, who had helped establish the school. Mrs. Roosevelt cared deeply about the welfare of these children, and our relationship, which had been fond but formal, deepened when I agreed to give back-to-back benefit concerts for Wiltwyck at Carnegie Hall, on April 19 and 20, 1959. Along with Millard Thom
as, Bob DeCormier, and the rest of my standard backup combo, I used a forty-seven-piece orchestra.

  The result, I have to say, was historic. I loved being up there on the Carnegie Hall stage for such a worthy cause, and I had a wonderful time, bantering with the audience between songs—every bit of which remains ingrained on the live double album that RCA Victor released later that year. Until that time, almost the only performances recorded live were Norman Granz’s jazz events. Belafonte at Carnegie Hall was a milestone, not just in RCA’s decision to record a live musical performance, but in its use of brand-new stereo recording equipment that captured the music crisply and complexly, better than if we’d recorded it in a studio. The album stayed on the charts for three years, and is generally regarded as one of the best live albums ever done. Mrs. Roosevelt liked the performance, too. “Here was one man, young and slim and gifted, a superb showman and actor, who sang his way into the hearts of a great audience for the benefit of a group of little colored and white boys who have found themselves entangled with the law,” she wrote in her column. “These boys appealed to the kind hearts of Mr. and Mrs. Belafonte when they met [them] last summer, and the program on Monday night was the result of that visit.”

  Both before and after those concerts, Julie and I drove up to Hyde Park as overnight guests on the family estate at Mrs. Roosevelt’s beloved Val-Kill Cottage. We would spend our afternoons engaged in archery—one of Mrs. Roosevelt’s passions, for some reason, though she’d gotten too old to use the bow herself. Or we’d drive into town for groceries in Mrs. Roosevelt’s Fiat sports car, a gift from her son Franklin junior, who owned the northeastern U.S. Fiat franchise. Mrs. Roosevelt was, of course, a very tall woman, nearly as tall as I was, and to fit comfortably in the driver’s seat, she had to have the convertible top down. Even then, it was quite a scrunch. To my shock, she was a fast driver. Quite fast, in fact. I found myself gripping the passenger door, and pushing an imaginary brake with my foot, often fearing the worst. I didn’t know how the news of our tragic deaths would be played, but I did know I’d get second billing.

  At dinners in the cottage’s cozy dining room, Mrs. Roosevelt would have a lively group of five or six, never more than eight. A number of them were African leaders, for Mrs. Roosevelt had worked hard to get their newly independent countries admitted to the United Nations. I met the son of Habib Bourguiba, first president of Tunisia, and Achar Maroff, the U.N. ambassador from Guinea. It was through Mrs. Roosevelt’s introductions that my own intense interaction with Africa began.

  Another rising African leader I met through her was Tom Mboya, a young Oxford-educated Kenyan labor organizer who foresaw that Kenyan independence from Britain, whenever it came, would fail if the country had no educated public servants. He had the vision of getting scholarships from American universities for talented Kenyan students, and then flying planeloads of them from Kenya to the United States. I pulled together a benefit for him in Harlem, then made appearances along with Jackie Robinson to raise funds for the airlift. A catalyst was Cora Weiss, a remarkable New Yorker who persuaded then-Senator Jack Kennedy to get his family foundation to help underwrite the effort. The first airlift brought eighty-one students and was a great success in everyone’s eyes—except those of the British government, which accused us of meddling in their affairs. We responded by staging a second airlift, and planning more to come.

  Julie and I went to dinners at Mrs. Roosevelt’s Manhattan apartment, too, and there another eclectic group would gather. One guest I remember meeting there was U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. I felt shy around him at first, but he quickly put me at ease. I’d never met anyone as self-confident as he. I’d have thought a man who makes decisions that affect the heart and soul of the nation would be more guarded. Bill wasn’t like that at all. He was very open and very direct, and when he spoke of social inequity, race, war, or politics, it was with real passion. He had a great disdain for war, keen doubts about the military-industrial complex and where it was going, and a deep commitment to civil rights. I adored the man, and when he took me seriously, I felt greatly rewarded. For Bill to regard me as his friend was to me far greater validation of my social and political views than a gold record or a starring role in a Hollywood film. Not long after we met, I found I needed a trustworthy lawyer. It was Bill who recommended a man who had been his law clerk, Sidney Davis, and who, for the rest of his life, became my adviser and legal counsel.

  At Val-Kill or in Manhattan, Mrs. Roosevelt’s guests would often just be family. Relaxed and happy, Mrs. Roosevelt would tell stories I remember half a century later. I suppose in response to some frustration I was probably airing one night about not being able to nudge President Eisenhower into doing more for civil rights, she told me about the time that A. Philip Randolph had gone to dinner at the White House. President Roosevelt had asked him for a candid view of what the administration needed to do for civil rights. “Don’t hold back,” the President had said. So Randolph talked and talked, taking the President to task for not using his bully pulpit. Over cigars and brandy, the President finally held up his hand. “I’ve heard everything you have to say, Mr. Randolph, and I don’t disagree. I do have the bully pulpit. I could do a lot more to change what’s wrong with this country, and it’s my intention to do that. But I have to ask you for one big favor that will ensure I get on with this job expeditiously.”

  “What?” said Randolph.

  “Go out and make me do it.”

  Mrs. Roosevelt told me that story to make a point. All of us pushing for integration would have to do more than hold a rally now and then. Without an active mass movement to make the government truly uncomfortable, our elected leaders would not do anything—not because they didn’t want to do something, but because they needed political pressure to make decisions that many of their constituencies would resent.

  On another night, Mrs. Roosevelt told us the Brussels sprouts story. At the height of World War II, correspondence between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill fell into enemy hands and was eagerly pored over by the Nazi hierarchy. The Nazis’ best code breakers focused immediately on the mention of Brussels sprouts. Churchill had told Roosevelt how much he’d hated the Brussels sprouts served at the last dinner the two men had shared. They were one of the foods he most disliked, and he hoped never to have them again! Roosevelt responded, Churchill came back with more on Brussels sprouts, and the Nazis became convinced that the two were writing in code about the major Allied invasion of Europe that would surely come somewhere sometime soon. But no, Mrs. Roosevelt told us, they were actually just talking about … Brussels sprouts.

  Not all the talk at Mrs. Roosevelt’s dinners was so light. She had a prophetic view about school integration. She saw its political necessity, but she warned against it. She felt that using the school as the vanguard for integration put an unfair burden on both students and teachers. Better, she argued, to integrate all public housing. If neighborhoods were integrated, schools would fall in line. To dump the issue onto the schools and give them no choice was, she felt, the cowardly way for society to get past segregation. But she was, of course, fierce in her opposition to segregation and injustice in any form. She never abandoned the Democratic party, but fundamentally, I think, she was a socialist. She felt government should do more—even more than her husband had done in his four terms in office—to level the playing field so that the underclass had a fair share of social benefits and job opportunities. She well understood that race was the greatest barrier to that more equitable vision, how even the smallest nuances of race—all the small, quotidian human encounters a black man had in white America—shaped expectations on both sides of the racial divide. I came to feel that more than almost any white person I’d met, Mrs. Roosevelt had expunged any prejudice she might have grown up with and was, in the truest sense, a humanitarian.

  Sadly, in April 1960, Mrs. Roosevelt was badly injured by a car in New York City, and her health rapidly declined. Two years later, Julie and
I would read of her death with profound sadness, knowing, at the same time, how fortunate we’d been to have had her in our lives at all.

  I don’t know that Mrs. Roosevelt was a mother figure for me, though she did possess a lot of the traits I wished my own mother had: curiosity, open-mindedness, a happy spirit. Millie was trapped within her shell of sorrow and self-pity, unhappy as she could be. But at least, I would have said, she still seemed her feisty self. Until, one day in the late 1950s, I got a call from the Idlewild Airport police.

  “Sorry to bother you, but we have a situation,” reported a policeman from the old New York airport (now John F. Kennedy). “We have a woman who’s been here two days, says she’s your mother.”

  I’d had a number of so-called relatives from the islands try to contact me, bearing some surname variation on “Belafonte” and hoping for a little family handout. “Yeah, great,” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Goes by Millie. Says she flew in from L.A. Lives on Victoria Avenue.”

  I got a limo right away, and went as directed to the airport’s little police office. Millie was sitting on a bench beside it, her hair askew, with bundles at her feet. A homeless person. My mother.

  “What happened?” I said. I was in shock.

  My mother started to cry, though behind her tears, I could feel her rage. “The worst thing you ever did was put me in that house with that man. I can’t tell you what a living hell it has been.” In the limo, she went on and on about poor Bill Wright—in her book just another faithless, feckless man who’d betrayed her. I knew Bill. He was a sweet, rather passive fellow, always willing to work, if happier with his feet up. While my mother was in L.A., I’d sent my checks to a post office box that only she knew about; I didn’t want Bill to get too complacent. But in no way did he merit this steady stream of vitriol from my mother.