Book Read Free

My Song

Page 36

by Harry Belafonte


  When he awoke on August 28, 1963, Martin felt deeply anxious. What if no one came? What if violence broke out? What if people died? But by 9:00 a.m., one hundred charter buses an hour were rolling into Washington. Twenty-one long trains drew up to Union Station. At the Washington Monument, where a morning concert was to kick off the rally, tens of thousands gathered. Almost more astounding than the numbers was the complexion of the crowd: black and white in almost equal proportions, all happy and excited together. Martin could stop wondering whether anyone would come, and so could we.

  Joan Baez started by singing “Oh, Freedom,” and an amazing array of performers followed: Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, Josh White, and Bob Dylan. I could take no credit for getting any of them there, and in fact missed the concert. I’d had my hands full recruiting the celebrities who would join me at the Lincoln Memorial for the afternoon speeches. Just getting the Hollywood contingent onto a plane in L.A. the day before, and getting them from the Washington airport to a hotel, was a full-time job; keeping track of all the other celebrities arriving from New York was a second job. Or maybe a third—I lost count.

  Not long after noon, I got my whole gang down from their hotel rooms and onto a bus that took us to the far end of the reflecting pool. Tens of thousands of people had already made the walk here from the Washington Monument; many were cooling their feet in the reflecting pool. Less than half a mile away, discreetly hidden, were tanks and other combat vehicles, and troops armed to the teeth. But with not a hint of violence emanating from that crowd, the military might would remain where it was. Most in the crowd would have no idea it was there.

  We could have been let out right behind the Lincoln Memorial, but I’d decided we should take the risk of walking the length of the reflecting pool and interacting with the crowd. The power of that moment was something I’ve never forgotten; I can feel it still. To see Burt Lancaster walking by—that was good for a double take right there. But then to see Marlon and Charlton Heston, and Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Mahalia Jackson, James Garner, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Sammy Davis, Jr., one after another after another, in a posse, shaking hands as we all went by, talking, offering uplifting words: The effect was electrifying. I’ve thought a lot since then about the power of celebrity harnessed to social causes, whether it does any more than give a crowd a thrill and stroke a few stars’ egos. Maybe, sometimes. But not that day. Not with the whole country at a tipping point on civil rights. As a group, we played more of a role in most Americans’ daily lives than their priests or pastors, their politicians, or even their teachers. We were the ones singing America’s songs, starring in its movies and television shows, presiding at all the communing places of American mass culture. To see us all together, moving as one, saying by our presence here that segregation would not stand—that was powerful. And for all the power we were sending through that crowd, so much more was being beamed by television cameras into living rooms across the land.

  Behind the Lincoln Memorial, we had our own little holding pen, with tables of drinks and sandwiches. For a while we just mingled. The union leaders were there, too, and writers—everyone whose presence I’d thought would help elevate the occasion. Burt Lancaster chatted with Walter Reuther, Jimmy Baldwin hung with Charlton Heston, Sammy and Marlon talked as Marlon displayed an electric cattle prod that the Birmingham police had used to shock fleeing children. Finally we all took our seats on different levels behind the podium, and Camilla Williams sang the national anthem. I looked out and realized I would never again, in my life, see so many Americans gathered in one place. Not just 100,000, but more than 250,000—more people than we imagined in our wildest dreams. And not out of anger, or demagoguery, but hope. What, I wondered, must J. Edgar Hoover be thinking at that moment, holed up in his dark little den at the FBI?

  Julie and I were seated to the right of the podium just a row or so back. So we were perhaps ten feet from Martin, looking at him from behind, when he launched into his historic speech. As usual, he had a little envelope with scribbled notes—just the highlights he wanted to hit. He never had more notes than that. I heard his voice echo back from the speakers, over the crowd, and for a while just let myself ride the cadences. Occasionally he spoke a little too fast, but not on this day. He took his time, and let his phrases settle. I’d heard him speak many times and so I recognized phrases and themes I’d heard before. Today they were spun in a slightly new order. At some point, I sensed that that new order was improvisation; by either accident or intent, he’d departed from his prepared points. Yet miraculously, and magnificently, this speech became the synthesis of every speech he’d ever made, and the best of all of them. From behind him, Mahalia Jackson called out gently, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” And as he did, I heard something new: a tone of confidence that this enormous crowd had brought him. Change would come. Jim Crow would go.

  Back in my hotel suite afterward, good friends gathered: Marlon, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. The march was so overwhelmingly successful that we couldn’t get our minds around it. Not one incidence of violence! Every television report was glowingly positive, not just about the mood of the crowd but about the prospects for the civil rights bill. The president had even received Martin back at the White House after his speech, along with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Walter Reuther, and A. Philip Randolph. “Maybe we should stay a few days,” I suggested to my friends. “We could meet in groups with Republican congressmen about the bill.” There I was again, pushing my friends too hard. This time, after gauging the mood, I let the suggestion drop.

  A television was on, and at some point we gathered in front of it to see a live roundtable interview with all the top civil rights leaders, including Martin. “Wait a minute,” I said. I looked more closely at the moderator and nearly fell off my chair. “My God!” I said. “It’s Jay Richard Kennedy!” My old financial adviser! The con man–turned–FBI informer!

  I hadn’t seen him since I’d ended our fraught relationship—not in person or on television. He wasn’t a television moderator. So how could he be there now, on this public television program, sitting with the country’s leading civil rights figures? It blew my mind.

  When I had an opportunity to speak with Martin a day or two later, I asked him what he knew of the program’s moderator. He said he’d gotten the impression that Jay Richard Kennedy was an adviser to James Farmer of CORE, one of the panel’s other guests. This turned out to be true: Kennedy had weaseled his way into Farmer’s good graces and become a confidant. In his conversations with the FBI, as transcripts later showed, Kennedy would pitch Farmer as the smart and accommodating civil rights leader the government should work with, while characterizing Martin as “dumb” and, at the same time, an active agent of Peking, whom the FBI should sideline at any cost. Soon Kennedy would also worm his way into Frank Sinatra’s inner circle, becoming the singer’s financial adviser, at least for a while. He would go on to infiltrate the Black Panthers, even becoming the paramour of one of the Panthers’ female leaders. Was he a mole for the FBI in these chapters of his strange life, too?

  All this I learned years later. At the time, I just wondered aloud, with Martin, what Jay Richard Kennedy’s true role might be. I told Martin my story, probably violating my legal agreement with Kennedy by sharing it. As far as I could see, though, Kennedy had changed the playing field by putting himself in close proximity to Martin and the other civil rights leaders. I had a higher obligation now, to make Martin aware of what a dangerous character Kennedy was. My story astonished him. Not surprisingly, Martin shared it with Clarence Jones, who passed it on to Stan Levison. And then I was in for a far greater surprise.

  The next time I saw Stan in New York, he told me there was something I needed to know. Usually Stan seemed so unflappable. Not now.

  “Okay,” I said. “Hit me.”

  “My ex-wife was your analyst.”

  I tried, without success, to get
my mind around that.

  “I was married to Janet,” Stan said. “Back in the forties. We got divorced. She then married Jay Richard Kennedy.” He held up his hands. “I don’t know what it means but … it happened.”

  Now my mind was totally blown. Could this really be a coincidence? Stan filled in what he could. Janet really was a psychotherapist; with Stan, she’d also participated in various leftist causes of the forties. Somehow, Stan had met Jay Richard and got into business with him—a chain of car washes or laundries in Latin America, as I recall. Stan hadn’t known much about Kennedy; only that when his marriage broke up, Janet went off with him. Whether she’d known of Jay Richard’s communist background, Stan had no idea. Had the FBI forced her to be an informant, too? Who knew? It was possible, we agreed, that Janet might have remained unaware of Jay Richard’s past as Jacob Solomonick, and known him only as Jay Richard Kennedy, novelist, screenwriter, and financial adviser. But then why had Janet, in my sessions with her, kept trying to worm out information about Paul Robeson, if not to pass it on to her husband?

  Whatever Janet’s role was, Jay Richard had been a very malevolent force in my life—and in Stan’s. I knew I was a target; after our legal separation, more than one of Kennedy’s clients had relayed nasty stories he’d spread about me. I’d supposedly cheated him, betrayed him, and, of course, failed to appreciate the great boost he’d given to my career. It seemed only logical that if Kennedy were still an FBI informant, he’d have done all he could to throw dirt on me. But what about Stan? Was it too much to imagine that Jay Richard Kennedy, out of spite toward his wife’s first husband, had provided the FBI with disinformation about Stan that had led J. Edgar Hoover to zero in on him? Kennedy had motive enough, and the FBI would surely chase any whisper. This was, after all, the height of the Cold War, a climate of spies and double agents, plots and counterplots. The Cuban missile crisis was still reverberating; The Manchurian Candidate, with Frank Sinatra as a former U.S. prisoner of war brainwashed by the communists to kill on remote command, had perfectly captured the country’s ongoing paranoia. I felt twinges of paranoia myself. In the days after Stan told me about Janet, I wondered, occasionally: Was Hoover right? Maybe Stan was an active communist, taking his orders from Moscow. Maybe he was in league with Janet and Jay Richard Kennedy, manipulating Martin and his whole circle. But then I would talk to Stan again, and think, Nah, impossible. The guy was a mensch. And he was.

  Years later, when I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the FBI for any and all transcripts related to me, I got a lot of jumbled, very redundant, highly redacted pages. They did confirm that the agency had combed my past for every rally and cause I’d had anything to do with, searching for the remotest communist ties. It had done that back in the early 1950s, when my name showed up in Counterattack magazine, and concluded I wasn’t a member of the Communist party or a threat of any kind. But in 1957—after Jay Richard Kennedy and I broke apart—there was Kennedy in the FBI files, identified as formerly Samuel R. Solomonick, telling the agency that while Harry Belafonte enjoyed great popularity, he was “generally disliked by the Negro people.” Eight years later, there he was again, telling the FBI that I, like Martin, was “an agent of the Peking government.”

  Censored though they were, the files confirmed that Jay Richard Kennedy had been an FBI informant over a period of years, at least from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. But not, perhaps, a very respected one. In a 1965 interoffice memo relaying Kennedy’s charge that I was an agent of the Peking government, the agent sending the report noted that Kennedy “would not give any facts to substantiate this allegation.” The agent also noted that Kennedy had been my manager some years before, and was still bitter over the loss of his client. Another agent wrote that Kennedy furnished “nebulous information.” He added that Kennedy “attempted to impress interviewing agents with his influence, social standing, power, and wealth.” That same year, another FBI interoffice memo would note that “Jay Richard Kennedy, a self-styled racial expert who claims considerable influence over James Farmer, head of CORE, feels he should have a talk with the director about racial matters and that he may communicate with him to arrange for an appointment.” The director, of course, being J. Edgar Hoover. Back came this reply: “We have, in the past, explored results of some of [Kennedy’s] speculation and determined it unfounded in fact. Accordingly, it is felt that it would be a waste of time for the director to give this man an audience.”

  So was Jay Richard Kennedy an FBI informant at the time he represented me in the mid-1950s or not? Did he seek me out, through Janet, either at the agency’s direction or at his own initiative to spy on me and so leverage his standing with the agency? Or was he a spy without portfolio at that point, exacting revenge only after our unhappy split by going to the agency and smearing me as best he could? On this, the FBI files would offer flatly contradictory versions. One document would confirm that Jay Richard Kennedy was a “confidential informant of the Office of Security circa 1958 through 1969 and reported to this office primarily on matters pertaining to the activities of various civil rights leaders.” But another internal FBI memo would note that Kennedy was interviewed by bureau agents as early as 1954. So Kennedy may have worked for the FBI when he was my agent. He stirred up enough lies and dirt about Stan Levison to get J. Edgar Hoover involved.

  I suppose I could have sought out Kennedy and demanded that at last he tell me the truth. But how would I have known if he was telling it?

  When I sift through the history of the civil rights movement, I’m struck by how almost every triumph was followed, in days or weeks, sometimes hours, by some grievous crime of hate, as if Jim Crow were a living, breathing, snarling being, and the hatred of every last racist in the South were concentrated in him as he pulled another trigger or lit another fuse. Medgar Evers’s murder on the night of President Kennedy’s historic civil rights speech was one such instance. The four black Sunday-school girls murdered by a bomb in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, less than three weeks after the March on Washington, was another. The heinousness of this act, carried out by Klansmen who planned their bomb to explode in the middle of a Sunday morning, was truly beyond human understanding. The girls—three of them fourteen years old, the other one eleven—had gone down to the women’s lounge in the basement to primp for the morning’s youth service. They were the ones closest to the bomb when it went off.

  Martin, when he preached at the funeral for three of the girls, declared, “They did not die in vain.” He was right, for the shocking murders shamed and silenced many of those in Congress planning to vote against the civil rights bill. How could America be said to have done enough for civil rights when Sunday-school girls could be killed with impunity?

  President Kennedy’s assassination, two months later, left a larger, darker stain on the country, one that extended far beyond the fight for civil rights. But its effect on civil rights was profound; the president who’d finally listened to his conscience and called for a sweeping civil rights bill would leave that bill as a legacy the entire country felt bound to see through.

  I was in Paris when I heard the news, visiting the set of the jewelry-heist film Topkapi. I’d gotten to know Jules Dassin, the blacklisted American director who’d started a new career in France, and Melina Mercouri, the Greek actress whom he’d soon marry, when they came to a concert I gave in Greece. Since then, we’d often seen each other in New York, and established a custom of sending little tchotchkes to each other. Dassin was directing Topkapi, and Mercouri was starring in it, along with Peter Ustinov, and I spent a delightful few hours at the Boulogne-Billancourt studio, watching this dazzling ensemble work together. Afterward, we drove into Paris for dinner. News of the assassination came over the radio, but of course in French. None of us quite understood what was being said. We rolled onto the Île Saint-Louis, and climbed up to the large, rambling apartment of our host and hostess, the American novelist James Jones and his wife, Gloria. We heard the news f
rom Gloria as she opened the door. Everyone was sitting in tears in front of a television set as those terrible, grainy clips of footage played again and again. I felt the bottomless grief that all of us who lived through that time did. But I also thought: What if some black radical did this? I needed to get back into the circle with Martin and prepare for the onslaught if that were the case.

  I didn’t go to the funeral. I didn’t want to invade the Kennedy family’s personal space. For all the conversations I’d had with Bobby, and the handful of talks with the President, I never regarded myself as an insider. I never made that presumption. I was a contact, a conduit, a useful character. That was enough for me.

  As images of the funeral reverberated in all our minds, and a new president inherited the challenge of passing the civil rights bill, I flew to Africa for a celebration full of joy and promise: Independence Day for Kenya. With me I brought Miriam Makeba and several musicians, though not Millard Thomas, who sadly had died of cancer. Miriam and I were received like visiting royalty. We sat in the reviewing stand as tribe after tribe paraded by. On one side of us was Jomo Kenyatta, the country’s first prime minister, who vowed that tribal rivalries would be buried and forgotten in the new republic. On the other was Prince Philip, representing the British Crown. At some point, the British flag was lowered, and the Kenyan flag hoisted up to take its place. Carefully, the British flag was folded and handed over to Prince Philip, who put it on his lap. I was within earshot as he turned to an aide. “You know,” he said with that casual tone of entitlement that royal breeding brings, “I never really appreciated the vastness of the British Empire until I started receiving all these bloody flags.”

  After the ceremony came the concert, in a vast amphitheater, to which we walked with all the tribes. There among them were a number of very proud, and very tall, Masai warriors, who were simply transfixed by Miriam. After greeting us with much flattery, one of the Masai started talking and gesturing toward Miriam, and then to me. Finally a translator stepped in. “He would like to know,” the translator relayed, “if you would be good enough to sell Miriam to him for ten head of cattle.”

 

‹ Prev