My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  In Washington after my trip, I reported first to Sarge Shriver, then to the President himself. I gave them both my best pitch for embracing Guinea. The idea that I put before them was that, through the Peace Corps, we would recruit all the theatrical talent we would need. During the volunteers’ two-year stay in the Corps, that talent would work on this major cultural development and get the process started. Sékou Touré’s commitment to culture was unique. Although, like everyone else, Guinea’s citizens delighted in the arts, they viewed working in them as a lesser profession, something only the poor would do. Sékou Touré thought the opposite, and I saw an opportunity for the Peace Corps to play a role.

  As we moved along with our discussions, I sensed futility. Like most countries in the developing world, Guinea had accepted aid from the Soviet Union; the fact that Sékou Touré had had nowhere else to turn, iced out as he was by France and all of France’s allies, had no sway at all. Cultural exchanges, maybe. Political ties? Not likely. The Kennedy administration did seem pleased that it had taken the risk of signing me up. But if they thought I’d be their loyal subject on civil rights, they learned otherwise when the first Freedom Riders ran into violent opposition in May 1961.

  Activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had decided to test a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that state segregation laws could not be enforced in interstate bus and train stations. Despite the ruling, Greyhound and Trailways stations, as well as train stations, still had white-only bathrooms, water fountains, and waiting areas.

  Inspired in part by the Greensboro sit-ins, CORE planned a nonviolent action of its own. Thirteen CORE volunteers would take Greyhound and Trailways buses from Washington, D.C., through the South and ignore the COLORED ONLY signs in the depots’ waiting areas, restaurants, and bathrooms. Highly trained in nonviolence, they understood the violent rage they would be confronting, how likely it was that they would be beaten, maybe even killed. No matter what happened, they pledged not to strike back.

  At the Greyhound terminal in Anniston, Alabama, one of the buses was met by a club-wielding mob. When its tires were slashed, the bus careened away with fifty cars in pursuit, only to grind to a halt and be set afire, its riders nearly burned to death inside. When a second bus reached the Anniston Trailways station, thugs rushed aboard to beat some of the riders with bats and iron pipes. Somehow that bus was able to pull away, bound for Birmingham, where yet another mob lay waiting. The Freedom Riders were set upon, many dealt head injuries so severe they needed stitching up at nearby hospitals. At that point, CORE’s leader, Jim Farmer, decided enough was enough, and he directed the Birmingham Freedom Riders to fly to New Orleans.

  Up in Nashville, Tennessee, SNCC leader Diane Nash viewed things very differently. She felt the Freedom Rides would appear to have failed unless at least one of the buses completed its route. Her fellow SNCCers agreed—and so the Freedom Rides became a SNCC production. I had huge admiration for Diane, and started conferring with her by phone about how I might help. I weighed in on what the route should be, where the Freedom Riders could safely stay each night, and what to do if they were again attacked. I wasn’t the only one who underwrote the Freedom Rides, but I certainly was a principal backer. If the Kennedys had asked me whether I was funding the Freedom Rides, I would have told them. But they didn’t.

  The Kennedy administration, caught by surprise when a photograph of the burning bus in Anniston circulated around the world, was now doing all it could to discourage any further confrontation. To them, the Freedom Riders were as much to blame as the angry mobs. Our hope was that the Freedom Riders would stir enough anger to draw more national press, while avoiding real harm under the watchful eye of federal agents. When I called Bobby Kennedy to get some reassurance of that, he was very discouraging. He told me that, barring a national disaster or threat to national security, he couldn’t just call out federal troops. The governors of those states were in charge. He had no authority. Bobby urged me to get SNCC to call off the whole thing. “This is hardly the time to stage a confrontation that just embarrasses everyone,” he told me. By “everyone,” I knew he meant the President. He didn’t need to add that the President was about to go to Vienna for a top-level summit with Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev. The last thing the White House needed was news footage of American Negroes being beaten by white policemen—perfect propaganda for the Soviet Union to make its case that the land of the free was anything but free. I told him the SNCCers had made their decision, and there was nothing I could do to stop them. “You say you have no authority,” I said. “Well, I have no authority, either.”

  In those phone calls, Bobby was anything but sympathetic. I was reminded of what Martin had said when the President-elect named his brother U.S. Attorney General. We hadn’t forgotten Bobby’s role as a twenty-seven-year-old legal counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy in his rabid persecution of suspected communist spies and sympathizers. “Somewhere in this man sits good,” Martin said. “Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause.” He was asking us to engage in a new aspect of nonviolence: to look the enemy in the eye and establish a mutual humanity. To us, the chances of doing that with the cold and tightly wound Bobby Kennedy seemed very dim indeed.

  Now a bus from Nashville, with Freedom Riders from SNCC aboard, again arrived at the Birmingham Greyhound terminal to be met by an angry mob. This time the police held back the mob until Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, arrived to order the students arrested. Eerily, at 11:30 the next night, he personally transported them from the jail to the Alabama-Tennessee state line, where he let them out to find their way home. Instead of retreating to Nashville, the Freedom Riders drove back to Birmingham in a car sent from Nashville by Diane Nash.

  The next day, I was on the phone to Bobby’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Burke Marshall, as the Freedom Riders made their way to Birmingham’s bus terminals and tried to board buses for Montgomery. Bobby had sent his personal assistant, John Seigenthaler, down to Alabama to negotiate with Governor John Patterson; the buses eventually left, bound for Montgomery, with a huge state police escort. At the city line, however, the police fell away. When the Freedom Riders reached the Montgomery Greyhound terminal, the largest and most violent mob yet materialized. John Lewis, at the start of his historic career in civil rights, was knocked unconscious. So was John Seigenthaler.

  At last, Bobby’s moral center seemed to stir. A night later, Dr. King arrived in Montgomery to address a packed church, only to have an angry mob block the doors from outside. As a result of long, tense talks between Bobby and Governor Patterson, National Guards arrived to let the congregants out at 4:30 a.m. Bobby also secured the Freedom Riders’ safety for the next leg of their trip, from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi. As part of the understanding, though, the Kennedys let the governors of both states uphold their Jim Crow laws in the bus stations. That was one hell of a concession, and it showed us that Bobby was perfectly capable of selling us short to keep the peace. His heart was in making his brother look good, not battling for civil rights. But Freedom Riders kept pouring into Jackson, and their arrests proved Gandhi right again. The state grew tired of tending them, especially with the continuing federal scrutiny. Eventually, Bobby would push the Interstate Commerce Commission into abiding by the Supreme Court’s ruling. With that, COLORED ONLY signs would come down in bus and train stations across the South.

  “What else do they want?” Bobby asked me with some irritation one day that June over lunch at Hickory Hill, his sprawling family estate in Virginia, after the Freedom Riders had won their initial victories. By “they” he meant the whole alphabet soup of civil rights groups causing all that trouble in the South: SNCC, the SCLC, CORE, and the NAACP. I’d come down to give a series of concerts at the outdoor Carter Barron amphitheater in Washington, D.C., and Bobby and his wife, Ethel, had come to hear me. Knowing I was playing to an influential crowd, I’d snuck a little politics in, with ne
w lines for old songs like “Michael Row the Boat Ashore”: “Mississippi on your knees, hallelujah / Another bus is on the way, hallelujah …”

  Over lunch, I tried to explain why desegregating bus and train stations, even lunch counters, was not enough, and why waiting any longer to pull down the rest of Jim Crow was not an option. The SNCCers stood ready to stage more “direct actions,” as they called their acts of civil disobedience: illegal gatherings meant to provoke mass arrests. No one could make them back off—not Bobby, not me, not even, and perhaps especially, Dr. King. “If you want to know what they’re going to do next, just read Gandhi,” I said. “The whole blueprint for what the movement is doing is right there. In fact, if you hand out copies to everyone in your Justice Department, you’ll all be ahead of the game.”

  “Staging protests isn’t nearly as powerful as registering voters,” Bobby argued. “If you want real power, get out the vote.”

  Ethel was at that luncheon, too; it was to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Of all the Kennedy women, she was the one I would end up admiring most. She wasn’t playacting. She looked at you and immediately got what you were about. Often in the coming years, when Bobby was balking at something we wanted him to do for the movement, I’d take my case to Ethel. “We have to talk to him,” she’d say, and she would. How often she’d bring him around, I couldn’t say for sure, but on the issues she chose to help us on, I knew she would prevail.

  Bobby was right, of course, that registering black voters was crucial. But was it more important than staging protests that shocked the system? That was the question I found myself debating the next day in my suite at the Hotel Woodruff, with a dozen young SNCCers. Ella Baker, SNCC’s matriarch, had called me to ask if I’d meet with them, and there was nothing I wouldn’t do for Ella. She’d started with Martin in the Montgomery Improvement Association, yet she was also the one who’d urged young, disaffected members of Martin’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to go off and form SNCC. I had not only agreed to meet with the SNCCers but offered to pay their way to Washington from Nashville or wherever they were, and put them up for the night.

  John Lewis wasn’t one of the SNCCers who came to my suite that day. For one thing, he was in jail in Mississippi with a busload of Freedom Riders. Even had he been free, though, he would have wanted no part of a meeting with Harry Belafonte, the singer who’d gotten so close to the Kennedys. He feared I would try to talk the SNCCers into focusing on voter registration, and out of staging more direct actions, just as the Kennedys wanted. Voter registration would put more Kennedy Democrats on the rolls while sparing the administration any further embarrassment. How, John would ask angrily when he got out of jail, was registering voters an act of Gandhian nonviolence?

  Even more off-putting to many of the SNCCers, I was a “King man.” In the year since SNCC’s founding, Martin had gone to great pains to praise it and say he well understood the need for young activists to have their own group. But Martin had lost a lot of respect when he’d declined the SNCCers’ plea to join them on a Freedom Ride. “I think I should choose the time and place of my Golgotha,” he’d declared, managing in one unfortunate statement not only to sound timid, but to compare himself to Jesus. From that point on, SNCCers would call him “De Lawd,” and roll their eyes at what they saw as his highfalutin airs. I was Martin’s confidant, the SNCCers well knew. Why have anything to do with me? As the dozen or so SNCCers filed into my suite, I realized I had doubts of my own. For one, I didn’t want to be their sole source of funds. For another, I worried that aligning myself with any one group would pigeonhole me. I wanted to be able to speak out on issues as a citizen, not as a member of the board of SNCC.

  The first thing that struck me was how young the SNCCers were; many were eighteen years old, none more than twenty-one. Most had already been tested by the first Freedom Rides. They’d literally stared down death and kept on, undeterred. They had the quiet confidence of battle-tested militants, and they knew their power; they, not the SCLC, had lately drawn the world’s attention to the savagery of segregation. They had little interest in heeding Dr. King or the Kennedys. But as we kept talking, I sensed them beginning to trust me as my own man, not Martin’s or the Kennedys’.

  On the tricky issue of voter registration, I was surprised to hear that these particular SNCCers saw it as the single most important initiative the movement could undertake. They also knew it was the most dangerous. There was nothing more threatening to southern whites than blacks getting the vote in states where blacks were the clear majority. A lot of other SNCCers sided with John Lewis in feeling that direct actions were more effective, but that, I would learn, was typical of SNCC. Every issue got hotly debated. The group was fiercely democratic; everything it did had to be approved by a majority vote, and all votes were equal. Other groups—the SCLC, the NAACP, CORE—had their boards of elders who made decisions. Not SNCC. That was what they’d left the SCLC to get away from. Tempers flared, but somehow, with everyone so committed to the movement, decisions got made and progress followed. Among all the causes and groups I’ve known in my decades of activism, SNCC was unique.

  Even before the students spelled out the details of their plan—mobilizing northern volunteers, opening field offices, canvassing the southern black communities—I knew I would have to help. That day, I wrote SNCC a check for $40,000. That was serious money in 1961. I sort of suspected I was signing on to be SNCC’s major angel for years to come. There weren’t a lot of other black angels with deep-pocketed robes flying around in the wings! But I would never regret that commitment.

  Nearly half a century later, in April 2010, I would listen to our nation’s first black U.S. Attorney General speak at SNCC’s fiftieth reunion. How much difference had SNCC made? Eric Holder would ask rhetorically. Enough, he would say, “that you can draw a straight line between the forming of SNCC and my fifth-floor office at the U.S. Department of Justice. Enough that you can draw a line from SNCC to the White House, and our first black president.”

  Those were pretty good returns on investment.

  I was plunging deeper into the movement, but I hadn’t let my day job slide. Miriam Makeba was with me on tour that whole summer and fall, from an outdoor concert at the Forest Hills Music Festival (in that all-white enclave with housing covenants against blacks), where we sang in pouring rain while the band took cover, to a sold-out three-week stand at L.A.’s Greek Theatre, to Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe, where the waiting list for our opening-night concert had 1,700 names. I had a new album out, Jump Up Calypso, that became one of my best sellers and my sixth gold album. But I was still taking care not to let calypso dominate my repertoire, which was why for my next album, Midnight Special, I mixed up folk and blues, and in so doing made a little music history with a very young Bob Dylan.

  For the title track, I’d planned to have Sonny Terry play harmonica. That was an easy choice; Sonny was the world’s greatest blues harp player, best known for his amazing collaborations with blues guitarist Brownie McGhee. Sonny and Brownie had shared stages with me that summer, and I adored them both. But with an orchestra due to assemble the next day, I got news that Sonny was sick in bed in Mississippi. Millard Thomas, my steady guitarist—the one who’d nearly burned down a hotel in St. Louis with both of us in it in the early days—said he had a young guy who could take Sonny’s place. The next day, a skinny, scraggly-haired kid no more than twenty years old sauntered into the studio with a brown paper bag. He emptied it onto a table, and four or five harmonicas fell out. “Mind if I hear you all run through it one time?” he asked. “Midnight Special” was a standard blues song, but sure, I said, why not?

  When we’d done our run-through, Bob nodded, chose one of the harmonicas, and asked for a glass of water. We started in again. Just as we reached his part, Bob dipped his harmonica into the glass of water, then shook off the water and began to blow a very funky harp. When he was finished, we listened to the playback and nodded. It was right on the money.

/>   We told him as much, but the kid didn’t linger. I’m not sure he even shook hands good-bye. On his way out, he tossed the harmonica he’d just played into the trash. I thought, Well, he certainly didn’t think much of that song. I had the sense he viewed me as an elder, and maybe not a worthy one at that. Two years later, he played a few songs at the March on Washington. He sang with Joan Baez, whom I associated with a nasty put-down of me in a Time cover story on emerging folksingers. Whoever called me “Belaphony” in the story was too cowardly to be quoted by name, and maybe it wasn’t Baez, but she was the folkie on the cover, so I blamed her! And I assumed her buddy Dylan probably felt the same way.

  All wrong—dead wrong. Baez harbored no such feelings, nor did Dylan, as I discovered in 2004, when I picked up Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles, Volume One. Here I’d nursed a wounded ego all these years, stung by a slight that even then I had to admit had no real basis in truth. (Was it the way he’d thrown that harmonica in the trash?) It turned out that Bob bought the cheapest harmonicas he could find, because they yielded a crude sound, and once you dipped the harmonica in water and blew as hard as you could, the harmonica was no good; you had to throw it out. Bob’s harp-playing on Midnight Special marked his first time in a recording studio. He’d been too shy to say what he felt about me. He sure made up for it in Chronicles. He wrote:

  Harry was the best balladeer in the land and everybody knew it. He was a fantastic artist, sang about lovers and slaves—chain gang workers, saints and sinners and children…. Harry was like Valentino. As a performer, he broke all attendance records. He could play to a packed house at Carnegie Hall and then the next day he might appear at a garment center union rally. To Harry, it didn’t make any difference. People were people. He had ideals and made you feel you’re part of the human race. There never was a performer who crossed so many lines as Harry. He appealed to everybody, whether they were steelworkers or symphony patrons or bobby-soxers, even children—everybody. He had that rare ability. Somewhere he had said that he didn’t like to go on television, because he didn’t think his music could be represented well on a small screen, and he was probably right. Everything about him was gigantic. The folk purists had a problem with him, but Harry—who could have kicked the shit out of all of them—couldn’t be bothered, said that all folksingers were interpreters, said it in a public way as if someone had summoned him to set the record straight. He even said he hated pop songs, thought they were junk. I could identify with Harry in all kinds of ways. Sometime in the past, he had been barred from the door of the world famous nightclub the Copacabana because of his color, and then later he’d be headlining the joint. You’ve got to wonder how that would make someone feel emotionally. Astoundingly and as unbelievable as it might have seemed, I’d be making my professional recording debut with Harry, playing harmonica on one of his albums called Midnight Special. Strangely enough, this was the only one memorable recording date that would stand out in my mind for years to come. Even my own sessions would become lost in abstractions. With Belafonte I felt like I’d become anointed in some kind of way…. Harry was that rare type of character that radiates greatness, and you hope that some of it rubs off on you. The man commands respect. You know he never took the easy path, though he could have.