My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  “Sure, I understand,” I said.

  Then I put in a call to Hilly Elkins, the top producer of Golden Boy. “Hilly,” I said, “I need to ask you something. How much is a night’s gross for your show?” He gave me a figure. “Okay,” I said. “Sammy’s told me that you won’t let him go because of your obligations to your backers. So I’ll take that burden off and buy the night. It makes that much difference to the integrity of the march that he come.” We were asking theaters to close down, something only a national crisis would justify. Having Sammy, and showing that his theater was shutting down, had become part of the validation that convinced others to come. If he backed out now, in the twilight moment, a lot of others would have had an excuse for backing out, too. A lot was riding on him.

  Stunned, Hilly said he’d see what he could do. A day or so later he called back. “Under pain of death, you can’t repeat this,” he said, “but Sammy wanted it this way. He didn’t want to cancel the show. He wanted us to take the rap for him.

  “I’ve talked to the backers,” Hilly added, “and we’ve decided we’ll take the hit—cancel the night and take the loss. Only we can’t tell Sammy that, or he’ll lose face. So you tell him you bought out the night, and we’ll tell him that, too.”

  When I went back to Sammy and told him I’d bought out the night, he was flabbergasted. “But that’s a lot of pokey, man.”

  “It’s that important you be there,” I told him. “I can’t have anyone think I was pulling a fast one by saying you’d be there when you wouldn’t.”

  On their third and final night, the marchers camped out at the City of St. Jude, a Catholic compound a few miles outside Montgomery’s city limits, with a church, hospital, and school that served the local black community. Along with the three thousand marchers sanctioned by the Alabama judge, some twenty-five thousand others gathered at the site, both to show solidarity and to hear all the stars rumored to be coming. I’d spent almost every waking hour for days making arrangements: flying in the entertainers from either coast, lining up transportation from the airport and hotel rooms for them. I’d told them their costs would be covered, and they were. In all, that evening would cost me $10,000. I could handle that. What I couldn’t control was the rain.

  By early evening, the campsite was saturated, the crowd soaked, and with all that rain, the electrical connections kept shorting out as we tried to set up the sound system. It hadn’t occurred to me that we might also need a stage. I’d thought the crowd would be much smaller, that we’d set up on some nearby hillside. Only the ground was so muddy that the mikes and klieg lights kept sinking and tipping. A teenager who worked in the local mortuary had the brainstorm that saved the night.

  The young man drove off in his pickup with a couple of his friends and soon returned with a full load of coffins—empty ones, that is. Soon we had our makeshift stage, a first row of coffins embedded in the mud, two or three rows above, and sheets of plywood secured on top of them. The lights kept sputtering out, leaving the crowd in darkness, and dozens of people pressed against the coffins had to be moved out lest they be crushed. But the concert started at last, and the lineup of stars, one after another, sent spirits soaring. Tony Bennett and Peter, Paul and Mary sang; so did Joan Baez and Johnny Mathis. In between musical performances, comics and other well-known figures addressed the crowd. Alan King, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Nipsey Russell, Anthony Perkins, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, George Kirby, Dick Gregory, Shelley Winters, Ossie Davis, Floyd Patterson—all got up on that stage of coffins and thanked the marchers. Even Ralph Bunche, the distinguished professor and political scientist who had helped form the United Nations with Eleanor Roosevelt after World War II, and had won a Nobel Peace Prize as its chief mediator in settling the Arab-Israeli war of 1947–49, an elder from the black establishment, stood with us on that stage, giving his blessing. I served as MC, and sang “Jamaica Farewell,” and brought out Martin and Coretta to rousing cheers. The feeling that night was truly powerful. We would not be denied.

  The marchers slept that night—if they slept—in the muddy field of St. Jude’s. The entertainers were driven into Montgomery to stay in a hotel. I still have my room key from that night. The number of entertainers and writers and others in that group had grown in the last twenty-four hours, and there weren’t enough rooms for all, so we put three or four to a room, grouped by gender. At one point in the night, a couple of the men, including my buddy Bill Attaway and Billy Eckstine, donned sheets and went into one of the women’s rooms, making ghostlike moans. I was right there with them. For some reason the women didn’t appreciate our humor. Not at all.

  The next morning, most of us drove back to St. Jude’s to help Martin lead the more than three thousand marchers their last three miles into Montgomery. Our presence in force was a message in itself. Alabama state troopers lined the route, their faces like masks. Behind them, white bystanders glared. Many of them shouted, “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” or, at the white marchers, “Nigger lover.” I looked right at them, one after another, silently. Many just looked away, or met my gaze with hate, but some seemed startled and shamed. A few even waved and smiled.

  We were a conquering army, with not a gun among us, as we marched into Montgomery. When we reached the capitol building, Joan Baez climbed aboard a flatbed truck and led us all in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I took the mike to address the crowd. “Great day!” I shouted. “Great day!” But I also looked directly at the television cameras and said, “There are millions of us on the way. And every time you think you’ve given us some severe blow, we come back bigger and better.” Later, we would learn that Governor Wallace was in his office, peering out his window at us from behind his draperies.

  Without doubt, the horror of Bloody Sunday, combined with the triumph of our final march to Montgomery, helped push through the Voting Rights Act that President Johnson would sign into law on August 6, 1965. That day in Montgomery I was once again struck by how powerful nonviolence could be—if its practitioners were passionate and persistent enough, and if their cause was just. Beaten down, we came back stronger, in larger numbers, again and again, until the marchers became the majority. And when they did, change followed.

  Yet once again, the fury of the vanquished led to an act of revenge. This time the victim was a young white woman, Viola Liuzzo, mother of five. Drawn by the images of violence on the Pettus Bridge, she’d told her husband, a Teamsters business agent, that Selma was “everybody’s fight,” and had come down on her own to help. After the march to Montgomery, she volunteered to take carloads of stars to the airports in Montgomery or Jackson for their various flights home. I remember she was supposed to give Tony Bennett a ride next, but he deferred because he was having too good a time, so she took someone else. It was on the way back from that trip that Viola, accompanied by a young black activist, drew the attention of a car of Klansmen. They chased her 1963 Oldsmobile on Route 80 and killed her with two bullets to the head.

  Not long after that, I gave a benefit concert in Detroit for members of the United Auto Workers and civil rights activists. The Liuzzo family was there that night. Afterward they came backstage: Viola’s husband and all five children. We exchanged warm greetings and embraces. Suddenly, the next-to-youngest boy came up to me and punched me hard in the groin. Doubled me up! He was crying, his father was horrified, and I was dumbfounded. But I came to appreciate that the boy blamed me for his mother’s death. He wasn’t right, but maybe he wasn’t all wrong. Viola’s son, with his inconsolable loss and pain, haunted me for a long time after that.

  I guess he haunts me still.

  Around the time of Selma, I got an alarming call from Achar Maroff, Guinea’s ambassador to the U.N. “The project is in jeopardy,” Achar told me. “I can’t say anything more. The president wants you to fly over right away.”

  I was stunned. Everything had been going so well. My team of twenty was over there working
away; any week now they would break ground on Ralph Alswang’s amazing theater design. What could have gone wrong?

  At Achar’s direction, I boarded an empty Pan Am plane in New York: a deadhead run, as they called it, just the pilots, crew, and me. When we stopped in Boston, I looked out the window to see a coffin being brought aboard. Some African diplomat had died, I was told; his body was going back home. It felt like an eerie omen.

  A car was waiting at the Conakry airport to take me directly to Sékou Touré’s palace. With the president was his number one aide, Alassane Diop, who served as translator. Sékou Touré told me, sternly, that the United States could no longer deny its meddling in the Republic of Congo. Like other African leaders, Sékou Touré had had no doubt of the CIA’s hand in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first prime minister after the country’s independence from Belgium. Like many leaders who had turned first to the United States for support, only to be spurned, Lumumba had established Soviet ties; his killers took a U.S.-pleasing anti-communist line. Sékou Touré’s sympathies lay with the Soviet-backed rebels who’d tried, ever since, to overthrow the government. Through all this the United States had claimed a neutral role, but their complicity, Sékou Touré seethed, was now all too clear. A number of Cuban-American pilots, trained and sent by the CIA to fly B-26 bombers against the rebels, had just been shot down. These were, in fact, Bay of Pigs veterans, recruited because they were neither U.S. citizens nor permanent U.S. residents; if they were captured, the CIA could say they were mercenaries. But no one was buying that, least of all Sékou Touré. As a show of sympathy with the Congolese rebels, Sékou Touré was breaking diplomatic relations with the United States. “I worry that when we do that, the members of your project will be endangered,” he told me stiffly. “Therefore, they must leave as soon as possible.”

  I got very teary when I heard this, but Sékou Touré was firm; there could be no appeal. My team was devastated. Many sobbed as I gave them the news. They’d thrown themselves, body and soul, into this project. They loved the Guinean artists they’d come to know; they saw how vulnerable Guinea’s arts were to the vagaries of West African politics. Something very, very precious was being lost.

  I went back to Guinea after that, but just once or twice. In my Peace Corps capacity, I needed to focus on other African countries where more progress might be made. When I did visit, I found that the Chinese had put up an arts center on the plot Sékou Touré had pledged to us. It was a crude, square box of a building, utilitarian but graceless.

  Sékou Touré was cordial when I saw him on those visits, but the warmth was gone. Our moment had passed. So, it seemed, had the country’s moment of hope and idealism. The people were poorer than ever, their handsome president in his palace, cut off, increasingly paranoid. In this darkening climate, Achar Maroff, Sékou Touré’s staunch friend and ambassador, was called back from New York. Soon after, he was found hanging from a Conakry bridge.

  I was in L.A. the week that Watts began to burn, in August 1965. The outdoor stage of the Greek Theatre, where I performed every night, lay in a natural bowl, so I couldn’t see the flames on the horizon. But I did arrange with the mayor to get busloads of kids from Watts brought out to the show each night, and to have them distanced from the violence, and from the stage I made a nightly appeal for peace in the city. It was like asking a forest fire to put itself out. President Johnson had just signed the Voting Rights Act into law, yet even that no longer sufficed. The rioters wanted out of the ghetto, out of grinding poverty and broken public schools and harsh police abuse. They wanted the same freedoms and opportunities that white America enjoyed.

  While I was out there, I co-hosted a SNCC fundraiser with Sidney at a Beverly Hills discotheque. Everyone from Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor to Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, and James Garner showed up, and we raised a lot of money. But the irony of partying at a discotheque while Watts burned was not lost on anyone. I was happy to raise the money, but SNCC’s needs were bottomless, and its emerging leader, Stokely Carmichael, made no secret of his scorn for nonviolence. SNCC was happy to take our checks, but I knew that in private, Stokely and his circle were probably as dismissive of me as they were of Martin. We were part of the establishment. Which was to say, in the new phrase of that time, that we were part of the problem, not the solution.

  I was back in New York when I got the news that Dorothy Dandridge had died. I wasn’t surprised, but I felt profoundly sad, and not a little guilty. Dorothy’s marriage to Jack Dennison had all but ruined her. Abusive both physically and emotionally, Dennison had left Dorothy in tatters when their ill-starred marriage ended in 1962, three years after it began. Her marriage had drained her financially, too. She’d taken to singing in smoke-filled nightclubs to pay off her debts, only to learn that her managers had bilked her of $150,000. Worse, she owed nearly that much to the IRS. She’d had to sell her Hollywood home; far more devastating, she’d had to put her daughter in a state mental institution. Relegated to a small apartment on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood, alone and in despair, she’d suffered a nervous breakdown. The gorgeous, brilliantly talented woman I knew was gone, snuffed out by bad luck, a bad man, but also, I felt, by Hollywood’s blatant racism, the reflection, as always, of the country it entertained. I don’t think Dorothy meant to kill herself when she died of an overdose of antidepressants on September 8, 1965. But she did not have any reason to keep living. Her story was over.

  That fall, SNCC made one last effort to work through the system. In Alabama, Stokely formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization to register black voters, using the clout of the Voting Rights Act. State law called for every political party to have a visual symbol, so illiterate voters could identify it. Since the state’s Democratic party had a white rooster (along with the words “White Supremacy for the Right”), the new Lowndes County party chose a black panther. That was the genesis of the Black Panther party, which would soon arise, with guns and raised fists, in cities all over the country. The Lowndes County Black Panthers set the tone by carrying guns themselves, and not allowing white SNCCers to join.

  I didn’t support the new Lowndes County party and its anti-white stance. To me, Stokely was tearing apart SNCC for his own aggrandizement. And while I understood the deep well of anger from which his militancy came, I was firmly committed to nonviolence; carrying guns, I felt, was both dumb and dangerous. Mostly dumb. Our backgrounds heightened the tension between us. Stokely was Trinidadian, and there was always this competitive thing between Trinidadians and other West Indians. You could take us out of the islands, but you couldn’t quite take the islands out of us.

  The Lowndes County Black Panthers lost that November—possibly as a result of vote-tampering, given that they’d registered more black voters in the county than there were white voters—and SNCC was left $50,000 in debt. I did what I could to help, less by sending money to the group itself than by sending it to individual SNCCers I admired who were doing projects on their own. I couldn’t turn my back on Bob Moses; I couldn’t walk away from Julian Bond. This, from now on, was how I’d deal with SNCC.

  My broader sympathies lay with Martin and the SCLC. Money was tight there, too, in part because of SNCC; news images of the gun-toting Lowndes County Black Panthers were scaring a lot of white supporters away from the movement altogether. Even the most stalwart of our backers, though, were feeling tapped out and tired. We had the Civil Rights Act, we had the Voting Rights Act. Wasn’t that enough? When was this movement going to end? More to the point, when were we going to stop hounding them for money? What we needed to do, I told Martin, was broaden our base. I knew there was a lot of goodwill toward the movement in Europe. Why not do a few fundraisers there?

  The very idea irked Daddy King. “You can’t be going hat in hand to strangers and asking them to solve race problems in America,” he harrumphed at a strategy meeting I attended. “That makes our country look bad. You’re going to make a lot of white people really mad at us.”
<
br />   “Make them mad,” I echoed. “What are they going to do? Lynch us? Drop us in the river and have us disappear? They’re already doing that, so what does mad mean?”

  I knew what Daddy King was really saying. The flip side of Jerome Smith’s angry speech to Bobby Kennedy about not wanting to fight America’s wars while America was depriving him of his civil rights was a deep-rooted, almost pathological patriotism. Most blacks, even movement blacks, made a distinction between the government that was keeping them down and a gauzy, idealized image of America, its flag waving proudly for all. When Daddy King said he didn’t want to make white people mad, he meant he didn’t want to go up against the agencies of white America, starting with the U.S. State Department. After some days and more heated words, we reached a compromise. We would go, but do just one fundraiser, at the American Church in Paris. The very name sounded reassuring to Daddy King: a little island of Americans in that sea of foreigners. I knew just how little that island was; the American Church held only about five hundred parishioners. At least it would get us over there.

  Only it wouldn’t. Days before our departure, the American Church withdrew its invitation. The minister admitted the State Department had warned him not to host a bunch of left-wing Negroes, for fear of disturbing U.S.-French relations. Cold War tensions were also part of the picture: The State Department didn’t want a bunch of black Americans criticizing the U.S. government, and perhaps even claiming solidarity with Russia, as Paul Robeson had done in Paris a generation before. Daddy King was almost exultant. “I told you so!” he said. “I told you it wasn’t going to work!”

  I said, “Give me twenty-four hours.”

  I called my French gang: Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin. “Where can we do this?” I asked. In just a few hours Yves called back to say we had the 4,500-seat Palais des Sports. Not only that, but he’d talked to friends in the French labor movement. They would guarantee a sold-out house, including a whole array of stars. And they did; it was an amazing night: La Nuit des Droits Civiques, or Civil Rights Night. Thousands more listened through loudspeakers on the surrounding streets.