My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  “I’ll wait on the line,” Bobby said.

  I put the phone down and went to check; it was indeed the courier.

  Bobby waited until the courier rang the doorbell and handed over his check. “Okay,” I told him, “it’s in my hands.” Only then did he ring off.

  While we were waiting for the other checks, I put in a call to Hugh Morrow, Governor Rockefeller’s press man. I knew Hugh and knew that in his own buttoned-down way, he supported our cause; he had come to that “secret” fundraiser for Birmingham in late March. “Hugh,” I said, “I know you wrote a check at that party. But now I need another favor.”

  Hugh heard me out, and came back with good news: Governor Rockefeller wanted to help. I told Hugh that Clarence Jones was flying up to New York to gather all the checks and bring them down to Birmingham. Hugh told me to have Clarence call him at home on Sutton Place as soon as he arrived. “He’s not getting in until after midnight,” I warned. Hugh said that wasn’t a problem.

  Clarence called Hugh at about 1:00 a.m. from LaGuardia Airport.

  “Mr. Rockefeller would like to help,” Hugh told him. “Can you meet us at nine o’clock tomorrow morning at the Chase Manhattan Bank on Forty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue?”

  “But tomorrow’s Saturday,” Clarence said. “The bank will be closed.”

  “Please, Mr. Jones, just meet us at the bank.”

  At precisely 9:00 a.m., Clarence was ushered into the closed bank by security guards, and then downstairs to its central vault. There, beside the vault, were Hugh Morrow and Governor Rockefeller. As the three shook hands, the guards spun the vault’s combination locks and turned its immense wheels. In a moment or two, the gleaming vault door, two or three feet thick, swung silently open on well-oiled hinges. Clarence was dumbstruck, he told me later. “I mean I’m an educated Negro,” he said, “but I sure never stood in front of an open bank vault door before.” Inside were stacks of bills wrapped in cellophane. Governor Rockefeller strolled into the vault like he was walking into his private study, came back with a stack in either hand, and put them on a table in front of Clarence. “I hope this is enough,” the governor said with a little grin.

  “It’s a hundred thousand dollars,” Hugh explained.

  Hugh went on to say that the governor wanted this done in absolute secrecy. If word got out, Rockefeller might be seen as trying to buy black votes for next year’s presidential race against fellow Republican Barry Goldwater. Clarence said he understood. In fact, as I’d warned Clarence on the phone the night before, we needed to keep this a secret from the Kennedys, too, just as we needed to keep the Kennedys’ involvement a secret from the Rockefellers. Both sides wanted to help the children of Birmingham, but politics dictated that we keep the sides well apart.

  “So is that it?” Clarence asked. “I just take the money?”

  “Not quite,” Hugh said. He gestured to a clerk sitting at a typewriter, who asked for Clarence’s full name and address. He then put before Clarence a demand promissory note with Clarence’s name on it. Clarence knew what that was. It meant that he was getting a loan, payable on demand by the lender. What if the Chase Manhattan Bank demanded the money back next week, while it was still in the hands of Birmingham’s bail bondsmen? Clarence would be liable for it. But what choice did he have? I’m not even going to tell my wife I’ve signed this, Clarence thought as he signed the paper with a shaking hand.

  At the Birmingham motel where Martin was staying, local and national reporters gathered at noon for what the King camp had said would be important news. Martin and the “big mules” had signed off on the terms of their agreement, but Martin wouldn’t sanction it until he knew he could get the children released at exactly the same time. Too many parents, over the last days, had harshly criticized him for letting the children be part of the campaign at all, and for the terrible conditions to which so many of those children had been exposed. They called his decision immoral. He might have noted that SNCC had called on the children to march before the SCLC did—which was true—but that was inside baseball to the parents.

  An hour passed, then another, as Martin waited to hear if Clarence had collected enough money to free the children. Only when he learned that more than $160,000 was actually being transferred to the city’s bond clerks did he let the press conference begin. Graciously, he let Fred Shuttlesworth address the press first. In ringing words that would long be remembered, Fred Shuttlesworth proclaimed, “The City of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience.”

  The money we’d raised in those twenty-four hours freed thousands of children. I worried for days afterward that we wouldn’t get the bail money back. But that didn’t happen in Birmingham—perhaps because the sums were so huge that no bail clerk could claim to have lost track of them, perhaps because Bull Connor and his fellow commissioners were gone, banished by a judge’s ruling at last, and the more moderate Boutwell crew was in, doing what it could to heal the city.

  That next Tuesday, Clarence Jones was back in his office in lower Manhattan when his secretary announced that a messenger from Chase Manhattan Bank was in the reception area, insisting on handing an envelope to Clarence in person. Annoyed and apprehensive, Clarence came out, signed for the envelope, and then opened it as the messenger disappeared into an elevator. Inside was the promissory note he’d signed on Saturday morning. On it now was written, “Paid in full.” Not only was Clarence off the hook; Governor Rockefeller had made the $100,000 a gift to the movement.

  For the civil rights effort in America, Birmingham was the turning point. Bull Connor and the segregationists he stood for had nearly stopped the movement cold, and if they had, I don’t think Martin could have come back from that defeat. I think he would have lost the last of his power and credibility. The children had saved him. They’d saved us all, putting their lives on the line with an innocence and passion that finally proved more powerful than the fire hoses, and the attack dogs, and the police with their guns. Their purity came shining through, and the white citizens of Birmingham were simply shamed into surrender. It was the most astonishing victory of nonviolent action that any of us had yet seen.

  Without Bobby, the children might have stayed in jail a crucial few days more. Violence might have erupted as angry parents filled the streets. Bull Connor might have declared martial law, and Birmingham might have gone up in flames, taking the delicate truce with it. Bobby deserved enormous credit, and I sensed, when I told him so, that he took quiet pride in having done not just what needed to be done, but what was the right thing, too.

  That didn’t mean the Attorney General was now a convert to the cause. His cause was still protecting the President, in whose interest it still was to pay as low a price as possible. We could push for desegregation one city at a time, but even after Birmingham, President Kennedy saw no political gain in pushing for a federal civil rights bill. The yellow-dog Democrats and Republicans would just kill it in committee. The President and Bobby both felt that all of us in the movement should recognize this reality, and appreciate all they were doing behind the scenes to inch the ball forward. Those secret calls to the union leaders for Birmingham bail money? They were just the latest example. The Kennedys would do more, if we would just work with them in this quiet, back-channel way.

  But Birmingham had lit a match. If one southern city could be forced to integrate, why not every other? In Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers of the NAACP demanded the mayor grant the same concessions. Sit-ins and bloody arrests followed. How to contain this spreading conflagration? Bobby took a suggestion from Dick Gregory that he get in touch with James Baldwin, the black writer and activist who’d just published The Fire Next Time, his searing essays on race relations in America. Perhaps Jimmy Baldwin would have some intelligent and helpful ideas. Bobby duly invited Baldwin to lunch at Hickory Hill. On the spur of the moment, he suggested that Baldwin gather some representative black voices for an evening of private, off-the-record conversation in New York. Bobby meant the
very next night, when, as it happened, he would be in New York, staying at his father’s Central Park South apartment.

  “So I’m down here having lunch with Bobby,” Baldwin said when he reached me by phone from Hickory Hill. “He’d like to meet with a group of us….”

  Baldwin and I were very close. We’d met in the 1950s through the Committee for the Negro in the Arts and other left-wing groups that had drawn the FBI’s attention. Baldwin was a true intellectual, with a Noël Coward–like flair that intrigued me, and when he moved to France, I visited him with some regularity, drinking wine and sharing stories at the modest villa and vineyard he kept at Saint-Paul-de-Vence. When he came back to America to reengage himself in the struggle, our friendship hit a new level. With the publication of The Fire Next Time, he was traveling and lecturing throughout the South, articulating his own racial ideology.

  I was glad to be called, but also a bit wary. “What’s the agenda?” I asked.

  “There’s so much anger out there in the black community,” Baldwin said. “Even Martin can’t get his hands around it. Bobby wants to understand that anger better, to know how to respond.”

  To me this was puzzling. With all the history that had passed between Bobby and me, what did he not yet know about anger in the black community?

  “And who’s going?” I asked.

  Baldwin said he was reaching out to Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun, and a handful of others. Someone from SNCC, for sure, someone from CORE.

  I said I’d go, though on thinking about it, I wondered if we weren’t just being set up. I loved Lena and Lorraine, but what could they tell Bobby that the movement leaders couldn’t convey with more thought and authority? The more I heard, the more I thought this whole enterprise, from Baldwin’s perspective, was froth combined with naïveté. And I wondered what Kennedy’s agenda was. Perhaps the Kennedys were trying to ease us into taking a more moderate line than SNCC or even the SCLC. They might then use that as leverage in the upcoming reelection campaign.

  I walked over the next evening, May 24, 1963, to find a real hodgepodge of guests at the Kennedy apartment on Central Park South. It was a perfect coterie for a cocktail party, but a slightly odd group to brief Bobby on the latest in U.S. race relations. A number of the guests were Baldwin’s functionaries: his literary agent, his lawyer, and his secretary, among them. Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry were there, as promised. So was Clarence Jones. The distinguished black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark was there; the studies he had done in the 1940s to gauge the impact of segregation on children, with the help of Dr. Viola Bernard, had helped influence the Supreme Court in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. There, too, were a couple of young activists from CORE and SNCC. Bobby emerged from the apartment’s recesses, accompanied by Burke Marshall and a press aide, and after hors d’oeuvres and a light buffet, Bobby addressed the room.

  He started by thanking everyone for coming. Then he got to his message. He ticked off all the things the administration was doing to help our cause. He also pointed out the political realities. “We have a party in revolt,” he said, “and we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them onboard if the Democratic party is going to prevail in the next elections.” Instead of recognizing that, he said, more and more blacks in America appeared to be heeding the radical messages of extremists like Malcolm X. If that continued, Bobby said, it would only bring trouble.

  At first the conversation was civil. But as it unfolded, it took in the incipient Vietnam War, and the assumption that young black and white men would fight together if the country needed them. Wasn’t that the spirit in which whites and blacks should be working—a patriotic spirit for the greater good of America?

  A young black man grew more and more agitated as Bobby went on in this way. Finally the young man said, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail-party patter. What you’re asking us young black people to do is pick up guns against people in Asia while you have continued to deny us our rights here.”

  Jerome Smith was a young volunteer for CORE who’d joined in the first Freedom Rides and, like John Lewis, been subjected to savage beatings. Unlike Lewis, he was about fed up with nonviolence, and he knew a lot of others who felt the same way. The next time police responded with guns and dogs and hoses, Jerome said, he would be ready—with a gun of his own. “When I pull the trigger,” he told us, “kiss it good-bye.”

  Bobby was stunned. The one thing he took for granted was that all Americans would be patriotic if confronted by a common enemy.

  Trying to ease past the awkward moment, James Baldwin asked Jerome how he felt about picking up a gun to fight for America if it actually declared war. “Never!” Jerome cried. “These are poor people who did nothing to us. They’re more my brothers than you are.” Not for another year would America send combat troops to Vietnam, but the Kennedy administration was heavily involved, and getting more so every day.

  “You will not fight for your country?” Bobby retorted. “How can you say that?”

  Back and forth went the tense exchange, until Jerome said that being in this living room with Kennedy made him want to vomit.

  At that moment, Lorraine stood up to say she felt sickened, too. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General,” she said, and then pointed to Jerome. “But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.”

  Bobby turned red at that. I had never seen him so shaken. And now, with the floodgates opened, others spoke, too. In that room, it was almost as if all these people had suddenly realized they had this one chance to say what they really thought to one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. government, and no one, not even Bobby, was going to stop them.

  Bobby listened to another few minutes of this and then indicated the evening was over. Clarence took that opportunity to go over to him and say quietly that he and Martin appreciated all the administration had done to help resolve the Birmingham crisis. Bobby replied icily that he wished that Jones had said something publicly in defense of the administration at the Birmingham press conference—not about the union bail money, just to give the administration some credit.

  I wasn’t exempt from Bobby’s anger that night. “You know us better than that,” he said to me when I came over. “Why don’t you tell these people who we are?”

  “Why do you assume I don’t?” I said. “Maybe if we were not there telling them who you are, things would not be as calm as they are.”

  “Calm?” Bobby echoed. “With what’s going on in the streets?”

  “Yes,” I said, and then I criticized him in return. “You may think you’re doing enough,” I said, “but you don’t live with us, you don’t even visit our pain. Obviously, progress in America is in the eyes of the beholder. What you observe, Bobby, and what you want to see of us, is based upon the needs of the political machine. What we need is well beyond that. The problem is the failure of the power players to see us for who we really are and what we are really experiencing. Those children in Birmingham are our children, not yours …”

  Before I had finished, Bobby turned to Burke Marshall. “Enough,” he said, and turned on his heel, out of the living room and down a hall. His aides spent a few minutes trying to bring the temperature down, but it was a futile effort. With grimaces and glares, we muttered our good-byes and left.

  At about 12:30 a.m., I got a call at home from Jimmy Baldwin. “It broke in the Times,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Our evening. With Bobby. It’s in tomorrow’s New York Times.”

  “How the fuck did that happen?”

  Jimmy denied he’d done it, though he admitted he’d talked to the Times reporter.

  “Did it ever occur to you that you didn’t have to do that?”

  Baldwin was quoted in the morning’s story, and most of us believed he was responsible for it. In truth, though, almost everyone in that ro
om had a relationship with the media. Any of us could have been the leaker.

  Reading the story the next morning, I had a sick feeling. I felt we’d done a great disservice to Bobby—not by saying what we felt, but by embarrassing him in print. We’d also hurt our cause. Whether Bobby would even talk to me again, I had no idea. I felt sure that the trust we’d built up was seriously eroded, if not altogether swept away.

  In a sense I was right. Bobby was angrier at me than he was at Clarence; he felt I’d personally betrayed him. Still, we would have no choice but to talk again, sooner than I could have imagined, about how to deal with a march on Washington.

  14

  I’d barely finished the New York Times story the next morning when Martin called. He wanted every detail of the evening with Bobby. “Disaster,” I said with a sigh. But when I relayed Jerome Smith’s fighting words, Martin had a different view. “Maybe it’s just what Bobby needed to hear,” he said. “He’s going to hear a lot more of it if the President keeps dawdling on that civil rights bill.”

  Martin sensed what history would confirm: Birmingham had changed everything. Jim Crow would go. The only question was by which means: violence or nonviolence. Martin worried every day now that young, angry activists would stop heeding his pleas for nonviolence and, as Jerome had warned, pick up the gun. If the Kennedys understood that, they might be pushed at last into taking on Congress. “Philip keeps talking about a march on Washington,” Martin said, meaning A. Philip Randolph. “It sure would bring the movement right to the President’s door. Maybe it’s time.”

  It was a huge gamble. If we called for a march and the turnout was meager, Martin would lose a lot of the clout and credibility he’d just gained. But from now on that would always be his challenge. Each choice would be defined in absolute terms. If we missed our target, we were out. If we succeeded, we were welcome to take on another adventure. But this much we knew: If he failed to act on the idea of a march on Washington, this fateful moment would pass, and with it, perhaps, his last chance to stage a massive exercise in nonviolence before the streets of American cities north and south filled with rage and resentment, guns and blood.