Not long after the Carnegie Hall concert, a black political operative named Frank Montero reached out to me on behalf of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. That surprised me. By now, I was clearly tied to the civil rights movement in general, and to Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular. Nothing I’d read about Kennedy so far suggested that either was an interest of his, and I didn’t know why I was being approached. But I figured out why soon enough: Jackie Robinson.
Kennedy had routed Hubert Humphrey in the early Democratic primaries, and Humphrey had dropped out, leaving Kennedy the clear leader in the field. Unfortunately, as he edged closer to the nomination, Kennedy, and more so Montero, his black adviser, began getting signals that the Democratic nominee might not be able to count on the black vote. Kennedy was an unknown quantity to the black community, and his Catholicism put off many in the black Baptist Church. Baseball legend Jackie Robinson had a special beef with the candidate because of Kennedy’s role in defeating the 1957 civil rights bill in the Senate. Also, Kennedy hadn’t held his gaze when they met. Robinson felt that Kennedy was acutely uncomfortable with Negroes. So Robinson, formerly a Humphrey man, had transferred his support to Richard Nixon. That was huge. Robinson felt that Nixon, as vice president under Eisenhower, had shown sympathy toward blacks when the administration sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in defense of the black students and the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Robinson’s feelings about Nixon were misguided, but he had made his move, and a lot of bourgeois black voters were inclined to agree with him. The Kennedy camp saw me as a potential counterweight to Robinson.
“Don’t look to me,” I told Montero. “You Massachusetts guys may think Kennedy’s great, but down here in New York, we’re for Stevenson.” Adlai Stevenson was just a write-in candidate, after his two crushing presidential-election defeats in 1952 and 1956. But we Stevenson fans were a loyal bunch. I said thanks but no thanks to the counterweight offer.
Montero was persistent, though. He kept calling, until one day he asked how I would feel if Kennedy paid me a social visit. “Visited me?” I echoed. Montero explained that the candidate was campaigning that week in New Jersey. If I didn’t mind, he’d like to come by the apartment late in the day. Sure, I said. I’d be happy to have the senator come visit.
The Secret Service arrived first, then the senator. “I understand that you and others have reservations about me,” Kennedy began. By “others,” I gathered he meant Negroes. Kennedy fixed me with a cool, clear gaze. “Let me tell you a bit more about where I stand.”
In his winning Boston accent, Kennedy rattled off a number of campaign positions, and then a lot of polling results. Not once, in his disquisition, did I hear the phrase “civil rights.” He concluded by saying he understood I had to stand by Stevenson through the convention, but would I endorse him in the general election?
“I’m fascinated that you and the Democratic machine find me so important,” I said. “Fascinated and flattered. But you’re making a big mistake if you think I can deliver the Negro vote for you. If you want the Negro vote, pay attention to what Martin Luther King is saying and doing. You get him, you don’t need me—or Jackie Robinson.”
Kennedy seemed puzzled by that. Why, he asked in so many words, was King so important?
I looked into those eyes for a hint of irony, but saw none. Kennedy was young, but his politics were old-school. To him, I could tell, the black vote was just a constituency you bought each election, if not with dollar bills and vague promises, then with star endorsements and public lip service, as well as contributions to the black churches and community organizations. Later, I would learn the Kennedy campaign had an Office of Minority Affairs, occupied by one old machine politician from Chicago whose primary function was to present a black face whenever needed. Among the white preppy Kennedy staffers, the office was known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“There’s something bigger going on here that you need to learn about,” I told the presidential candidate. “Six years after Brown v. Board of Education, schools in the South are still segregated, Negroes are being lynched for trying to vote, and a lot of us aren’t going to take it anymore. Civil rights is a freight train and it’s headed your way.”
Kennedy said he was all for civil rights, but I had to realize that the whole southern wing of the Democratic party was segregationist. There was only so much any Democratic president could do.
“Get Negroes the vote, and they’ll more than make up for all those segregationists,” I told him. “Who do you think constitutes the majority in all those southern states?”
When the candidate left, after more than an hour, I felt I’d reached him, but just barely. I called Martin to report on my meeting, and shared my misgivings with him. Kennedy, I told him, was cold, calculating, and unschooled in the now-sacred cause of civil rights. At the same time, I acknowledged, he was whip-smart and knew how to listen. I said if the candidate called him for a meeting, Martin should find the time. Kennedy did, and the two men met on June 23, 1960, in the Central Park South apartment of Kennedy’s powerful father. It was a short talk, Martin told me later, with no sparks on either side. In fact, the two were fairly nonplussed by each other. Kennedy, of course, wanted King’s public endorsement; King declined to give it. King wanted a passionate commitment to civil rights; Kennedy’s assurances were lukewarm at best. But both sensed, as smart politicians, that they might be able to help each other.
Though none of the three of us knew it as yet, the stage had been set for a curious, long-running drama, in which Kennedy and King would test each other warily, again and again, wondering how much each could trust the other, seeking common ground in private even as they staked out their differences in public. As they did, I would find that I, too, had a role in this drama, as the mediator, the go-between, the one uniquely placed to explain one to the other. First, the coolly patrician Democratic candidate would have to become president. And then he would have to decide how much he could trust a black entertainer, one whose every move was chronicled in public, to be a reliable emissary.
After Kennedy won the nomination, I had some serious talks with Arthur Krim and a few other Hollywood Democrats—Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra among them—and did come out for Kennedy. I made a television commercial for him in Harlem, in which we sat in upholstered chairs with a little table between us, and the candidate told me earnestly how committed he was to civil rights, and then I looked into the camera and said I’d be voting for Kennedy; how about you? On the wall between us, a cockroach was crawling: a perfect symbol of the poverty that lurked beyond this little set, I thought, though of course the producers wiped it from the film. I remember Jackie Kennedy being at the shoot, very pregnant with John-John. The Kennedy camp ran the commercial throughout the South, hoping to galvanize black voters in Atlanta and other large cities where some were actually registered. The backlash from southern white Democrats was swift and extreme; I think the commercial ran just once across the region before being yanked.
Then, two weeks before the election, I had a chance to see if I’d made the right choice in supporting Kennedy. All summer and fall, the lunch-counter sit-ins had kept spreading throughout the South. On October 19, Martin Luther King was among those arrested in an orchestrated series of sit-ins in Atlanta. King’s group, one of eight, requested service at the Magnolia Room, a fashionable place in the Rich’s retail complex. The owner had King and his cohorts arrested and charged with trespassing.
King was jailed, along with thirty-five student protesters from the various sit-ins, after refusing to post bond of $500 each. “Jail, no bail!” Over the next days, as hoped, the protesters’ refusal to leave jail unless charges were dropped created headaches for Atlanta’s elected officials. The city’s mayor had the sly idea of declaring that Senator Kennedy wanted the protesters released. He asked one of Kennedy’s closest advisers, Harris Wofford, what he thought of that plan. Wofford was appalled. With the race neck and neck, the last thing Kennedy wanted to do
was show public support for King and the protesters. If he did that, whatever tenuous support he had among the South’s yellow-dog Democrats—white, mostly racist members of the party—would evaporate.
That much I understood. But then, overnight, the game changed dramatically. A judge in another county issued a bench warrant to the Atlanta judge, ordering him to keep King in jail for possible violation of a suspended sentence on another charge. The previous May, King had been charged with driving with an Alabama license after moving his residence to Georgia. For this misdemeanor, the judge in that case had issued him a twelve-month suspended sentence. The sit-in charge seemed to violate the terms of that sentence. The next morning, King was conveyed, in handcuffs and shackles, to that other judge’s jurisdiction, and sentenced to four months’ hard labor on a chain gang.
I was on the phone to Coretta King as soon as I heard the news. She was overwhelmed. Every hour that Martin spent on that chain gang, we knew, his life was in danger. What was there to keep some white supremacist on the gang from killing him with a blow of his pickax? Not the police guards, that was for sure. Six months pregnant, Coretta wept at the prospect of bearing her next child—her third—alone or, worse, as a widow.
I started calling everyone I knew who might be of help, starting with Harris Wofford. “If Kennedy really wants the black vote, the best thing he can do is get Martin out of jail,” I told him. Wofford drew up a letter of protest for Senator Kennedy to sign, but the campaign rebuffed it. A private deal had been struck with Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver, Jr., Wofford was told. Vandiver would get King released if the candidate stayed quiet. Wofford was sworn to secrecy on this, so to Coretta, and to me, the Kennedy camp seemed utterly unresponsive.
When news came that Martin had been transported to a maximum-security prison and put in solitary confinement, I started calling every Hollywood celebrity I knew, starting with Frank and Sammy, to get them to call Kennedy. I called labor leaders, too. I even called Jackie Robinson, to see if Nixon might be able to help. But I got no response from Nixon’s camp. Nor from Martin’s father, universally known as Daddy King, who, like many other black Baptist preachers, had come out in support of Nixon, allying themselves with the Republicans not only as the establishment party but the party of Lincoln.
Then, as suddenly as the nightmare had begun, it ended. The county judge who’d ordered King remanded to the state road gang without bail now reversed himself. King could leave the maximum-security prison after posting a $2,000 bond.
Over the next days, the truth came trickling out. Robert Kennedy, so cold to Harris Wofford’s behind-the-scenes pleas that his brother get involved in the King case, had had a change of heart. In the beginning, I did get through to Bobby. But he had promised me nothing, and seemed to wish the whole problem would just go away. Apparently, what moved him to action wasn’t anyone’s pleading. Instead, as a lawyer, he felt affronted by the county judge’s flouting of fundamental law. No one charged with a misdemeanor was supposed to be denied bail—period. Bristling, Bobby had called the judge to remind him of that.
Initially, the Kennedy camp tried to deny the story, and for good reason; Bobby’s call to a sitting judge on a case was as much a violation of legal ethics as the judge’s denial of bail on a misdemeanor. To the candidate’s relief, the story petered out quickly in the mainstream press. In the black community, though, word spread like wildfire: The Kennedys had gotten Martin released.
Daddy King was both relieved and grateful, and as an old-time political fixer, he wanted to do the honorable thing: make a public declaration that he’d changed allegiance from Nixon to Kennedy. Nixon hadn’t even returned his calls while Martin was in jail; Bobby Kennedy had made the call that got his son released. Daddy King started pushing Martin to endorse John Kennedy, too. But Martin didn’t endorse Kennedy, and more than anyone else, I was the reason why.
“You can’t afford to endorse him,” I argued in one long-distance call after another. “You don’t know this man, you don’t know what he’ll do in the course of his administration. If you anoint him and become his black mouthpiece, you’ll pay a huge political price if he lets us down. You won’t be able to retreat from that endorsement. You have to stay above this fray.” My endorsing him was one thing. Someone of King’s stature and moral responsibility, I knew, was quite another.
A summit meeting to hash out the issue was held at the Fifty-seventh Street offices of Belafonte Enterprises. Daddy King was there, along with several fledgling movement leaders, including Clarence Jones and Cleve Robinson. At the meeting, King’s lawyers and chief political fixer, Stan Levison, agreed with me completely. But how, we wondered, could King fail to do something for the Kennedy camp? It was Levison who came up with the answer. King wrote an open letter, saying he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.” But he stopped short of an endorsement because, as he put it in a formal statement, his role as a civil rights activist demanded that he stay nonpartisan. Word came back that the Kennedys were furious with us for derailing King’s endorsement. After the election, in a meeting with Bobby Kennedy at his home in McLean, Virginia, we rehashed the story and he gave me a wry smile. “It’s true we were angry,” he acknowledged. “But we could see it was politically shrewd, a clever move.”
Any number of factors might be said to account for Kennedy’s razor-thin victory that November, from his father’s political sway in Cook County, Illinois, to Nixon’s flop sweat in the televised debates. But one of those factors, clearly, was the gratitude felt by blacks for Kennedy’s role in securing King’s release from that Georgia road gang. The Sunday before the election, Wofford organized the secret printing and dissemination of a pamphlet to black congregations around the country. The pamphlets reached their audience, and from pulpits in black churches around the country that morning, ministers came right out and told their congregations how to vote. And those that could, did.
I had little time to savor the afterglow of Kennedy’s victory. I was working day and night on New York 19, my next Revlon-sponsored variety show, and the first in the newly contracted series of five. I’d lined up John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet along with jazz singer Gloria Lynne; among the dancers was one Julie Robinson, along with Arthur Mitchell and members of the New York City Ballet. It aired on CBS on November 20, 1960, and once again, the critics doled out a lot of praise. “Mr. Belafonte wandered in Sunday night in an easy little epic entitled New York 19, that had more charm, spirit and movement than you could find in a barrel of Ed Sullivans,” declared the Los Angeles Times. “The air of casual informality with which the singer examined a slice of New York was fitted together with the precision of a Swiss watch.”
Some months later, as I began planning the hour that would run in the fall of 1961—the second in the series of five—I got a call from Charlie Revson. On the phone he was warm and inviting; he asked me to come in for a meeting at his office—just the two of us.
Over lunch in his private dining room, Revson started harrumphing about how, as a Jew from Montreal, he’d endured his own share of discrimination, and understood the evils of oppression. Then he brought up the show. “Good ratings,” he told me. “Good reviews. Very nice. But we’re getting some response that says you should do it all black.”
“What do you mean, exactly?” I asked. But I knew what he meant: The singers and dancers on the show were of different races.
“Some of our stations in the South are having a problem,” Revson explained. “They’re okay with an all-black cast. They just don’t want to see white singers and dancers on the stage together with them.”
“Mr. Revson, let me tell you something,” I said. “If you’d asked me to put on a flowery shirt and sing more calypso tunes, and dance more, because that’s what white people would like, I would consider it. Because I’m fully aware of the opportunity you’ve given me. No other black artist in America has the platform you’ve given me. But when you tell me no
whites, you’ve crossed a line: morally, socially, and politically. There’s no way to square it. I cannot become resegregated.”
“Okay,” Revson said, “if that’s how you feel.” By four o’clock that afternoon, I had a check from Revlon, a very big check for the balance due on the four future shows that Charlie Revson had just killed.
I thought seriously of telling my audiences, and the media, exactly what had transpired in Charlie Revson’s personal dining room. I wanted the world to know what a coward he was, colluding with, and appeasing, southern racists, but embarrassing corporate America would only underscore my reputation as an angry black man lurking behind the sunny stage persona. New York 19, with its black and white dancers, had had some small impact on segregation if the racists were braying about it—better to keep the impact a positive one.
As I played back my meeting with Revson over the next days, I had a little epiphany. Here I’d been fighting for the last few years to change Hollywood, and then television, to push them both into casting black actors in dignified, substantive roles, to have black leading men who did all the things that white leading men did—chase villains and rope horses, make money and make love—with leading ladies black and white. Time and again, I’d failed. My epiphany was simple. The movies and television weren’t all-powerful arbiters of culture. They just reflected the culture. Doing battle with them was like fighting a mirror.
To change the culture, you had to change the country.
And only one thing would change the country: the movement.
Later, Kennedy would come to be seen as the president who took on segregation, a great champion of civil rights cut down before the law he called for came to pass. That was true, in a sense, though no one in the movement, on the eve of his swearing-in, expected too much of him. At that juncture, I think it would be fair to say, both he and his brother Bobby, about to be confirmed as U.S. Attorney General, hoped civil rights would just simmer on a back burner while they ruled the country with the help of the party’s southern segregationist wing. Still, this was a new beginning, and none of us could fail to be dazzled by the dashing new President, his elegant wife, and the entire Kennedy clan. For those of us invited to participate in the inaugural gala the night before Kennedy’s swearing-in, it was the party of a lifetime, orchestrated by one of the new President’s closest friends, Frank Sinatra.
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