My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  I played the Riviera every year now, for at least three or four weeks, and when I did, I did a lot of gambling. I would come into the casino after my last show and nod politely but coolly at the gamblers who looked up as I passed. Usually I’d stop at the craps table, or see who was in for chemin de fer, and let the heat steer me to one or the other. I brought heat of my own; when I had the dice at craps, or took over the bank at chemin de fer, the bets really went up. Sometimes I hit it big. More often, if I stayed in, I started to lose. The worst luck always came when I let the game get personal. I’d find myself sitting next to some arrogant oilman in a ten-gallon hat—the kind of guy who called me “Mr. Belafonte” to my face and probably “nigger” to my back—and stay in, trying to win at his expense. Or a beautiful woman would sit down to play, and we’d start trading looks, and my game would go to hell. I knew that those beautiful women were often shills, sent by the house for just that purpose when a bettor was doing too well. But you couldn’t prove it, and it was bad form to ask.

  When I lost, I kept losing; I once ended up down as much as $200,000. This was serious gambling. But I loved it—in a nerve-rattling, adrenaline-pumping way. I’d sign a marker; my debt would be charged against my contract. The pit boss would be instructed to call upstairs if I lost $100,000, just to confirm that I wasn’t drunk or angry. They were happy to take my money, but I was too important to upset, so they’d much rather have me stop for the night, and stay cool, than keep on losing. While Gus Greenbaum was alive, he’d try to talk me out of getting in so deep. “We don’t need your money,” he’d say. After he died, there were others who played that role. But as my salary rose, I could take the losses and still be standing, so they went only so far in their gentle expressions of concern. Some weeks, I lost half of my salary.

  When I did lose, I stayed pretty cool. I didn’t like showing the crowd how I felt, and I could sip a single drink all night, so I didn’t get sloppy the way so many gamblers did when those free drinks kept appearing, as if by magic, beside them. I had a lot of show-biz friends, though, who really detonated when they hit a cold streak. And for all of them, alcohol was a key component.

  One was Alan King, the comedian. I’d met Alan years before on the Borscht Belt, when we were both playing Grossinger’s and the Concord. Alan was the smartest dresser I’d ever seen: the bow tie tied just right, the perfectly pressed white shirt with diamond studs and cuff links, the pinkie ring, the big cigar. Despite his caustic stage image, he was one of the kindest and most generous-spirited comics in the business. Whenever I called him for a civil rights benefit, Alan was right there. And funny. Once, at an early benefit for Martin and the SCLC at the Harlem Armory on West 143rd Street, he took the stage, impeccably dressed, and shot his cuffs as he surveyed the all-black audience. “Before I go any further,” he said, “you should understand you’ve been backing the wrong King. He wants to get you into Woolworth’s. You stick with me, I’ll get you into ‘21.’ ” The crowd went crazy.

  Alan’s game in Vegas was craps. He’d have his big cigar in one hand, the dice in the other, and just before he rolled, he’d declare to the croupier, “Double on the hard eight!” It was hard enough rolling an eight with a three and a five, or a six and a two. But getting two fours—that was tough. And doubling his bet on the hard eight—that was taking a wild chance. In craps, you never have the table to yourself. Anyone else can join in and bet on your roll—or against it.

  One night, a little old lady in a funny hat kept betting a hundred dollars against Alan’s rolls, on which his bets were often up in the thousands. I could see Alan getting tense, but what really unhinged him was the croupier, who kept speaking in rhyme: “Don’t leave the gate before you play the hard eight.” Alan gave him a murderous look. “I don’t mind losing my money,” he said, “but I don’t need to lose it in rhyme.” With that, Alan gave the old lady a get-lost glance, as if trying to break his hex. Then, with a show of defiance, he doubled his bet, and the croupier, out of instinct, said, “Out of the door, come on a hard four …” Once again, Alan lost. He kept rolling, the old lady kept betting against him, and then the croupier let loose with another rhyme. Giving a drunken Tarzan shout, Alan leaped across the table and started strangling him. The guy was turning blue before the pit boss and a pack of security agents pulled Alan off.

  Billy Eckstine, the great bandleader and crooner, was another hotheaded craps player, and the more he drank, the hotter he got. One night I went over to the Thunderbird to catch his act, and ended up at the craps table with him and Dinah Washington, the great blues and jazz singer. Dinah was married—she managed to accumulate eight husbands before her tragic death at thirty-nine in 1963—but she was with Billy that night. She had a little pet name for him, “Beezy.” On this night, she was over at the blackjack table, losing small stakes, while Billy was losing big-time at craps. Onstage, Billy was a great romantic; offstage, he was a womanizer, and a fairly hard, crude one at that. I watched as Dinah sashayed up behind him while he was in the middle of a roll. “Beezy,” she said, “I need another hundred.” Then she touched him. Big mistake! Billy put down the dice, turned to her, and said, “Give you a hundred? Bitch, if your brains were on fire I wouldn’t piss in your ears, unless I could piss gasoline.” I was pretty shaken by that. It was like seeing the devil emerge from Billy Eckstine’s smooth and handsome features. But even Billy was tame compared to Frank.

  Sinatra was, of course, the king of Vegas. When he blew into town, off a private plane, whisked to the Sands in a long black limo, it was “Yes, Mr. Sinatra” this, and “Yes, Mr. Sinatra” that. He got his high-roller suite of choice, and drinks and meals for his whole entourage. All on the house. Frank never had a tab, but he did have debts. All of us had debts. What he did with his, we never knew, though we certainly wondered, when he flew off to New Jersey to sing at some mobster’s birthday party, if that wasn’t payback.

  With Frank it was always baccarat with a big ring of people. Frank would be at one end and, on occasion, I’d be at the other. Frank would start out cool, though even then, you sensed his lethal edge. You knew the house was watching with a big smile; our presence juiced up the whole casino. Everyone from the high rollers to the old ladies playing one-armed bandits bet more and drank more and then bet again. Frank’s drink was Jack Daniel’s, and as the evening wore on, his eyes would turn hard and glossy. When he was winning, he had that glow. He’d crack jokes with whoever had come in with him—Dean Martin or Joey Bishop, or sometimes Peter Lawford—and handle his liquor well. But when he started losing, look out. Many a night he’d punch another player in the face, and then his bodyguards would intervene. If he felt the croupier was to blame for his luck, he’d call out in a loud voice to have him replaced, and if the croupier hesitated, Frank would swing at him, too. I melted away when that happened, and when I next saw him, I’d just pretend nothing had happened. In truth it didn’t bother me—it was just what happened when you put gambling, booze, and women together and the party went on all night. I liked Frank’s swagger, and I appreciated that he never, ever disrespected me. But that was the year—1962—that the Kennedys cut their ties with Frank, wary of his mob connections. Furious at them for the rest of his life, Frank bristled at my continuing closeness with the Kennedy clan. So our friendship was never quite the same.

  For all the racism I’d faced when I first came to Vegas, now I found the Strip, oddly enough, almost free of that taint. My ironclad contracts helped: no discrimination allowed! But I’d come to realize that on the casino floor, no one much cared what color you were. The only color that mattered was green.

  That wasn’t true when I left the Riviera’s cozy cocoon. The next racial slight might come on a New York street corner: the cabdriver with his light on who sped right by me as I hailed him, and then, just half a block down, picked up a waiting white passenger. That happened a lot. It might even come while I was on tour, from someone who knew exactly who I was, and dealt the race card anyway.

  That w
as how it happened in Atlanta, in June 1962, when I came down to give a fundraiser concert for the SCLC. Since Atlanta had a great concentration of middle-class blacks, and since my visit began with a press conference at which I was awarded the keys to the city, my guard was down a bit. After the conference, I checked into the Atlanta Cabana Motel without incident. Then Martin and Coretta and I, along with Miriam Makeba, who now sang at most of my concerts, made our way down for lunch to the motel’s fancy restaurant, the King’s Inn. The name seemed pretty ironic that day. Despite the hotel’s policy of accepting blacks, the restaurant’s management had a different view; we were denied service.

  Martin felt the incident was somehow his fault because he and Coretta had recommended this particular hotel. He gave the manager a penetrating stare, until the man finally said, “I’m sorry, those are the rules.” When I got over my surprise, I was almost amused. Only a week or two before, I’d dined with the President, after attending his birthday party at Madison Square Garden, the one where Marilyn Monroe sang her famous rendition of “Happy Birthday.” And now I was hearing I couldn’t enter a run-of-the-mill coffee shop.

  Word got around fast. The newly elected mayor of Atlanta, a white liberal reformer and civil rights advocate named Carl Sanders, called us to apologize, and forced the restaurant to serve us after all. I knew his heart was in the right place; at my request, he’d already started removing the WHITE and COLORED signs from the bathrooms and water fountains and seating areas of the civic center where I was to sing that evening. But this was still the South. When I walked into the center to rehearse, I saw pale silhouettes on the walls where the signs had been, a perfect metaphor for the attitudes that lingered on.

  That was the fall that James Meredith announced his plan to enroll at the University of Mississippi, and the state’s Jim Crow governor, Ross Barnett, cried, “Never!” The Kennedys, more fed up now with segregationists than with civil rights activists—though it was always a close call—sent the U.S. Army to plow through a state police blockade in the college town of Oxford, with its pretty courthouse square, and keep Meredith from being mauled by a bloodthirsty mob. Meredith stayed on, enduring countless affronts, to graduate from Ole Miss. But as brave and triumphant as his one-man crusade was, it only showed how far the movement had to go. Eight years after Brown v. Board of Education, the fight for civil rights was seriously stalled.

  I could feel that frustration with the marchers was growing. The Kennedys were a perfect example of that. We needed a big win to counteract the apathy and exhaustion and to get the nation—the world—charged up again. We were all suffering from fatigue and, worse, redundancy. There was a killing sameness to each rally or march, from the staging and organizing, to asking our same donors to fund it, to making the same case—when they asked us how this time would be different—that we’d made countless times before. We needed a victory—a big, game-changing, history-making victory.

  I can’t say for sure who first suggested Birmingham, but history would tilt toward the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, whose Birmingham parsonage had been bombed. By that fall, SNCC was pushing Birmingham, too. By any measure, Birmingham was the true nerve center of the Jim Crow South. The most nonnegotiable place. It had segregated lunch counters, restrooms, and water fountains. It had black city workers in menial jobs with no hope of advancement. It had a nickname, “Bombingham,” for all the homemade bombs detonated by Klansmen in the city’s black community. It also had, in Eugene “Bull” Connor, a racist police chief with a hair-trigger temper. If we could break the back of segregation here, we’d regain our momentum. If we failed, the movement would be looking for an appropriate epitaph. I don’t think anything we did sent as much fear to the White House as the prospect of Birmingham. I don’t think in the civil rights movement there was anything else that carried that kind of potential outcome. It really could break the back of segregation.

  We knew what the stakes were—what we might win and what we might lose. Which was why we called the Birmingham project “Go for Broke.”

  Soon after New Year’s, Martin let himself be persuaded by several in his camp, Stan Levison and myself among them, that the SNCCers were right: Birmingham, Alabama, was the ultimate target. When it was concluded that he had no choice but to get involved, the question was how. We avoided making plans on the phone; we suspected all our phones were tapped, at one time or another, and that turned out be true. So we used code words, and met at my apartment, one of the few places that felt truly safe. Later, we would learn that FBI agents had gone so far as to set up surveillance microphones in motels where Martin was staying, listening to his conversations through the motel room walls. Our paranoia was hardly misplaced.

  I brought the two camps together at our strategy meetings: the young SNCCers and the SCLC. The SNCCers wanted Martin’s participation, but in a plan of their devising. That was unrealistic. When you brought Martin in, you got his whole circle. These were some of the very elders from whom SNCC had split. The SNCCers rolled their eyes at the SCLC; they saw them as a lot of timid preachers and hangers-on, more focused on puffing themselves up than taking bold action. The elders, for their part, had trouble masking their condescension toward the SNCCers. Even Martin, in private, would express some exasperation. He felt that for all their courage, they really didn’t appreciate the dangers inherent in what they were proposing, especially in Birmingham. They were noble, but also naïve, he thought, and Martin was worried—very worried—about what might happen to them. In this mediator role I’d neither sought nor expected, I did my best to keep egos stroked and tempers in check.

  Martin was right to be worried, but the SNCCers weren’t as naïve as they seemed. They’d seen some hard times down in Mississippi, during the voter registration drive I’d helped launch eighteen months before. Perhaps our most unsung hero was Bob Moses, SNCC’s lead organizer in Mississippi. He was a Harvard-educated philosopher who’d left academia behind for arduous movement work, a man of almost no words with most of us, but a charismatic leader who inspired by putting his body on the line, right up front, again and again. He and his brave recruits had run up against a state legislature that seemed to take rich amusement in raising one barrier after another to their campaign. One new rule required that all voter applicants have their names published in local newspapers. Registered voters—which was to say whites—were also allowed to question the “moral character” of new applicants. Along with the deep, pervasive fear that all rural blacks had of being beaten or lynched, the new rules had all but doomed the drive.

  And then, in Greenwood, SNCC’s center of operations in the state, fire and violence erupted. The wood-frame house that served as SNCC’s office was torched, a SNCC volunteer named Jimmy Travis nearly died in a drive-by shooting, and a local black resident was hit by shotgun fire as he entered his home. That led to an angry confrontation between SNCC and police. Moses and another man were attacked by a police dog, and eight protesters, including Moses, were jailed. By the time the eight were given the maximum four-month sentences each for disorderly conduct, civil rights leaders, the national press, and activists such as comedian Dick Gregory had descended on Greenwood. Under all that pressure, the Greenwood authorities blinked. The eight jail sentences were suspended; Moses and the others walked out free. For a day, or two, they were euphoric. Then it began to sink in that this drama had no more acts. The press and civil rights leaders had left; the Greenwood office of SNCC was still a smoldering ruin; and the voter registration drive had failed.

  It was all up to Birmingham now.

  Very soon, in looking at Birmingham, we considered the issue of arrests. Martin decided if it came to that, and it almost certainly would, he would have to be among the first arrested. Stan Levison, Clarence Jones (Martin’s attorney), and I agreed, but some of his circle protested: Wouldn’t he be more needed outside? But Martin, still feeling the sting of Albany, was adamant. The only question was how long he should stay in, and then, when the point had been made, what we
would do about bail. We knew the bail for Martin would be high; at the same time, we’d have to bail out others so that Martin didn’t appear to get special treatment—the grave mistake of Albany, Georgia. We would need a big war chest for bail. That, I knew, was where I would be needed most.

  To help raise bail money for Birmingham, we staged a “secret” fundraiser at my West End apartment on March 31, 1963. The secrecy was because we didn’t want to reveal to the public our geographic target or our strategy. Along with a few famous actors—Sidney, Anthony Quinn, Fredric March—and other notables with deep pockets, we invited all the powerful journalists we knew. At least the ones we trusted. We wanted them in on the story before it happened, so they could write not just with authority but with understanding. Tom Wicker and Anthony Lewis of The New York Times were mainstays for us, but so, too, were James Wechsler of the New York Post, Murray Kempton of The New Republic, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s influential press adviser, Hugh Morrow. The whole liberal establishment was there that night, in on the “secret” related by Martin, Ralph Abernathy, and, among others, Fred Shuttlesworth, who by now had been the target of not one but two assassination attempts in Birmingham sanctioned directly by Bull Connor.