My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  Sidney started articulating this position without, perhaps, realizing how strongly I felt. I stayed quiet while he went on, but my temper began rising. Julie, who was there with me, responded first. Later, in his autobiography, Sidney would say that “with blazing ferocity she lit into my position with an attack that was obviously directed at me personally. But my view was my view, so I held my ground.” That he did, and I held mine. Some in the room began to side with Sidney; others sided with me; but now the idea was tainted by dissension. For those who were looking for that one voice of doubt to get behind, Sidney provided it. Having spread those doubts, he effectively killed the vigil. I was so angry that Sidney and I stopped speaking. Two years would pass before we spoke again.

  A lot of people vied for places of influence with Coretta. I saw the beginnings of “Who will possess and be anointed? Who will own this legacy? Who will be steering the ship?” Ralph Abernathy was the number two man at the SCLC. His children were the same age as Martin’s and, along with his wife, Juanita, had deep ties to the King family. Abernathy, along with Jesse Jackson and others, had stood on that balcony in Memphis, pointing in the direction of the assassin’s gunfire. Already, Jesse was putting out feelers and talking to the press, positioning himself to be the successor. Soon he would go back to Chicago and brandish the “bloody garment” that Martin was wearing when he died. Like Abernathy, he, too, was angling for proximity to Coretta.

  I distanced myself from all this, and from the immediate family that enveloped Coretta at the funeral, and during the march from the funeral to the burial ground, as a horse-drawn cortege pulled the wagon with Martin’s body, I was well offscreen. At the burial, I did sit next to Coretta, at her express request. Not long afterward, she asked me who I thought should succeed Martin. We both knew she had no desire to take on his mantle, so we didn’t even discuss that possibility. But she did not want her influence diminished. Remaining a voice to be reckoned with in the choice of Martin’s successor would be one of the best ways to keep herself in the SCLC’s innermost circle. She asked if I wanted to be considered. I said no. The vow I’d made that day in Harlem hardly ended with Martin’s death. If anything, I was more needed now. But Martin had set up a line of succession by making Ralph Abernathy his vice president. The position was Ralph’s to accept or decline, and I knew how much Ralph wanted it. And as much as my heart was in the movement, the more I thought about it, the more I saw troubled waters.

  In one of our moments together that week, Coretta gave me the cuff links and tie clip that Martin had worn the day he died. They were among the few personal effects the police had passed on to her. In Martin’s breast pocket, the police had found a small leaf-green envelope, along with a handkerchief. One side of the envelope had scribbled notes in Martin’s hand for the speech he would have given in Washington inaugurating the Poor People’s Campaign. It listed names of dignitaries to mention, and notes on why the Poor People’s Campaign was so important. On the other side were typed pointers for the sermon he’d given the previous Sunday at the National Cathedral. Coretta gave the envelope to Stan Levison, who cherished it until his death. At Stan’s request, the envelope was then bequeathed to me.

  I would have done all I could for Martin’s family even if I hadn’t been named as one of three executors of his estate. (Harry Wachtel and Stan Levison, both lawyers, were the other two.) That role just formalized the responsibility I felt. The estate itself was meager—$5,000 in joint bank accounts. Martin had earned quite a bit of money from his five books, and $50,000 for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’d given all that money to the SCLC, Morehouse College, and the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Besides the payout on the insurance policy I had secured on Martin for the family some years earlier, more would be needed. That week, I gave Coretta the first of several checks to help support the family. I knew that once the King Center was set up and endowed, the institute would pay her a salary, and she would be all right. In that transition period, she never had to ask for money; at the slightest mention of financial need, I wrote her a check. I kept in touch with the children, too—Yolanda, Martin Luther King III, Dexter, and Bernice. I didn’t call them every day, but whenever I could, I reached out to them.

  The center did open soon enough. But not in the way I’d envisioned. I’d thought the center’s purpose would be to challenge injustice and nurture grassroots activism in the cause of civil rights, whether for blacks, American Indians, women, or all the dispossessed, whose plight Martin had taken up with the Poor People’s Campaign. But no. As Coretta set it up, the center was about polishing Martin’s public image. Under its aegis, professors wrote papers, sifting through the minutiae of Martin’s life. Meanwhile, Coretta made social appearances at the most elite places. The White House was perfect; the National Guard Armory would do.

  I was on the center’s board for a while, so I saw all this coming down. Whenever I suggested the center endorse one grassroots effort or another, my fellow board members would throw up their hands. “We have to attract funding,” some would say. “We can’t offend the funders!”

  Still, I was surprised when I got Coretta’s invitation to a commemorative dinner for Martin’s birthday the next January. It was to be a large, lavish affair in Atlanta. When I looked more closely at the fancy invitation, I did a double take. There among the list of sponsors was Henry Ford II, chairman and CEO of the Ford Motor company. He had just returned from South Africa, where the company had negotiated one of its most crushing labor contracts ever. By this time, the SCLC had established ties with South Africa’s government-in-exile, the ANC, and called for sanctions against U.S. companies that did business with the apartheid government. Yet here was “Hank the Deuce,” as he was known, heading up the dinner for Martin! When Coretta called to ask why I hadn’t RSVP’d, I told her I wouldn’t be coming. She was shocked. I told her that even if a Ford weren’t coming, I didn’t think a fancy dinner should be the way to honor Martin and his legacy. Had she perhaps planned something else for the anniversary, something a little more in keeping with the grassroots theme that I might participate in?

  No, Coretta admitted. The effort of organizing the dinner had exhausted her. “How are you honoring his memory?” she asked me. I told her I was going to Rikers Island, a prison in New York City overcrowded with young black teenagers. “I’m going to speak to the prisoners, the truly poorest among us.”

  To Coretta’s credit, she flew up to New York before the dinner. She spoke to the prisoners, and then she flew back down for her dinner. The King Center continued as it had before, embracing no causes, issuing no calls to action, just playing on what I call the soft side of conscience. None of this obscures Coretta’s greatest accomplishment—getting a national holiday proclaimed for Martin. No small feat. But the center, governed by timidity, hasn’t even become the beacon of scholarship its founders intended it to be. Noble laureates are welcomed; younger, more cutting-edge scholars are not vigorously pursued. Now, under the leadership of Martin’s children, it is basically a crypt with a reflecting pool, selling trinkets and memorabilia and books to tourists and students.

  The Poor People’s Campaign went on without Martin, but just barely. Rain fell on twenty-eight of its thirty-nine days, turning the Washington Mall into mud and soaking the five thousand or so hardy souls who set up their shanties there. Ralph Abernathy did his best to inspire this ragtag army, but his ego had gotten the better of him. He declared himself the mayor of Resurrection City, and in one speech, he actually said, “Every morning when I get up and look in the mirror I love Ralph Abernathy more and more.”

  I don’t know if even Martin could have made a triumph of the Poor People’s Campaign; most Americans, even liberal ones, had no patience with a shantytown of the ever-more-pungent poor on the Washington Mall. But I do know that Martin’s absence showed how brilliantly and effectively he’d kept his bickering deputies in line. Was there no one else who could truly lead the SCLC? Stan Levison and I agreed that of all the candidates, only And
rew Young had the necessary temperament and charisma. But in the aftermath of Martin’s death, Andrew had grown more reserved. He could be a feisty lieutenant, but not, it seemed, a self-reliant leader. Or perhaps he was recalling that last angry exchange with Martin in my apartment, and doubting whether Martin would have wanted him to take charge. By default, the job was Ralph Abernathy’s to take, and he took it.

  The tents and shanties were still up on the Mall in early June, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. I’d spoken with him just days before about campaigning for him. I’d made appearances for him when he ran for the U.S. Senate in New York. Back in February, on The Tonight Show, I had encouraged him to seek the presidency. And now that he was running for president, I wanted to help him in any way I could. The days of wondering how we might find and access his moral center were long gone. In his famous trips to see the nation’s poor up close, Bobby had been transformed. I had come to admire him profoundly. I had even dared to imagine, for a few giddy weeks after President Johnson shocked the nation by declaring he wouldn’t seek reelection, a Robert Kennedy administration that might embrace the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign, given all that Bobby had said in the last year about America’s poor. Now both Martin and Bobby were gone. On the Washington Mall, the shanties and tents of the Poor People’s Campaign lingered until June 24. And then, as if to demonstrate that the whole country had tired of them, bulldozers rolled through the Mall’s Seventeenth Street entrance and demolished Resurrection City.

  In the wake of Bobby’s death, and Martin’s, I felt despair but also renewed determination. To abandon their causes now would be a gross betrayal. As always, in moments of moral quandary, I heard an echo of my childhood Catholicism, renounced but never entirely silenced. How can I be worthy? I must be worthy. How? Yet I felt tired. Tired of fighting, tired of the movement, tired of Harry Belafonte, political activist. That summer, an interviewer asked me what I was planning to do next for the cause. Maybe nothing, I told him. “I hate marching, and getting called at three a.m. to bail somebody out of jail, sitting on panels and talking to reporters and groups about America’s racial problem.” All I wanted, I said, was to “watch grass grow, and leaves change color, and see my children grow up.”

  In that bloodstained political season, I campaigned reluctantly for Eugene McCarthy. In person I found him cold and detached, but he said the right things, and Hubert Humphrey I found to be a craven opportunist. He’d played a central role in destroying the hopes of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party in 1964 to help assure Johnson’s election. As vice president, he’d pushed Johnson’s hawkish Vietnam policy, knowing how fraudulent and doomed it was, and a lot of American soldiers, including a disproportionate number of blacks, were dying as a result. Vicious toward critics of the war, Humphrey struck back however he could—in my case by terminating my Peace Corps role with a letter saying the Corps was “reorganizing” and that my services were no longer needed. In a dark time like that, humor was the best response. At the height of the Democratic Convention that August in Chicago, the Smothers Brothers ran an eight-minute skit on their TV program, showing footage of Mayor Richard Daley’s truncheon-wielding police battling demonstrators in the streets. I was superimposed in the foreground, singing “Don’t Stop the Carnival” in calypso style as if I were there on the streets. CBS went ballistic. They not only pulled the eight minutes, but in its place ran a free commercial for Richard Nixon, then fired the Smothers Brothers—not just censured them but fired them—even as their popularity was soaring with the largest audience share on television. It was that kind of summer.

  What I would do next for civil rights was a question I constantly asked myself. I found nothing in what Ralph Abernathy said or did to inspire me to stick with the SCLC. His strategies were insipid, his style off-putting. More than once he said to me, “You don’t treat me the way you treated Dr. King.” The first time I laughed it off. The second time I told him the truth. “The essential difference between you and Martin is that Martin earned it,” I said. “We didn’t just blindly throw gifts at his feet. We’re willing to serve you, but you have to demonstrate to the entire nation that you can fill that space.” The demonstrations were not forthcoming. It wasn’t too long after that that Abernathy went Republican and became President Nixon’s go-to guy on civil rights. That was about it for me and the SCLC. I kept working with SNCC for a while, but when in 1969 it changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect its official rejection of nonviolence, I lost heart. Soon after, SNCC quietly expired, a victim of battle fatigue and anti-white radicalism in more or less equal measures.

  Martin’s death had seriously crippled the movement he’d begun; that was becoming all too clear. The old groups were sputtering, their leaders competing, the sense of purpose dispelled. The movement for equality among blacks and whites in America was like a peeling poster on a brick wall, papered over with images of Black Panthers raising their fists. All those who had denounced Martin, from either the left or the right, now had a vacuum they could fill with whomever they wanted. Yet in that chaos, no one leader emerged. Everything shut down, all movements ground to a standstill.

  What, then, could I do on my own? To me the answer was obvious: take advantage of the Voting Rights Act and help elect black candidates at every level of the political system. I’d started as soon as the act was passed by joining Julian Bond on the campaign trail as he ran for the Georgia House of Representatives. That same year—1965—I’d helped persuade a young civil rights worker, John Conyers, to run for U.S. Congress in his home state of Michigan; twenty-two terms later, he’s still there, the second-longest-serving incumbent in the House. By 1969, enough blacks had won congressional seats to form the Congressional Black Caucus, with Conyers as its dean, but that was just the start. In 1970, I helped persuade Andy Young to run for Congress in Georgia, gave him money, and staged a lot of free concerts. He lost that first time, but he stayed the course and won in 1972. On the city level, I helped Carl Stokes become mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1967; that same year, I helped Richard Hatcher become mayor of Gary, Indiana. These were just the candidates in whose campaigns I played a significant role, with early endorsements and sizable contributions. For an awful lot of others, I made four- and five-figure contributions. If this was the best way to build on Martin’s achievements, then that’s what I would do, brick by brick, check by check. Most of these figures, not surprisingly, had started as activists and community organizers. They were the few in the black community who had networks of influence up and running; they could best compete with the white establishment politicians. But there was a trade-off. The more of these pioneers we elected to office, the fewer there were on the streets to do the organizing they had done.

  At the same time, I was immersing myself in the South Africa sanctions movement. Freeing Nelson Mandela, ending the horrors of apartheid—that was where I saw the greatest need. Close behind were the needs of the newly independent African nations, tipping between hope and despair. I would spend much of the next two decades doing all I could to help.

  The sixties had started, for me, with an awakening sense of Africa and its vast potential, not only for its proud tribes and nations, but as the world’s black homeland. Now, as the sixties in America came to an end, that homeland seemed only more precious. But also more imperiled. Independent nations were struggling to feed their poor, waging wars as their leaders profiteered. A strange story captured for me a sense of the hope in both America and Africa as the sixties began, and disillusionment in both continents as the decade came to an end. It was a story of three characters I’d known well: Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, and Ahmed Sékou Touré.

  I could see Miriam still as I’d met her in London in 1958, her youth and beauty and talent so radiant. How could I not have helped her? I had no regrets about that, though by the late sixties, Miriam was like a rebellious daughter, flaunting her brand of radical politics in my face, doing more than her share
of drugs, and going from one rocky romance to the next. From Hugh Masekela, the South African trumpet player, she’d gone to Black Panther Huey Newton, and now to Stokely. I didn’t introduce Miriam to Stokely, and neither told me the news. I had to figure it out by observing Stokely’s change of wardrobe. Stokely was accustomed to wearing Levi’s and a work shirt, with maybe a denim jacket. One day I went to one of Miriam’s concerts, and there, backstage, was Stokely, in one of the finest Nehru suits I’d ever seen. A hand-tailored Nehru suit. On one hand he sported a big jeweled ring; in the other, he held a gold-headed mahogany cane. No doubt about it: Here was Miriam’s new man. Miriam had the money now, and she liked to spend it. And both Miriam and Stokely seemed pretty turned on by that.

  Stokely had wowed Miriam with his cries of “Black Power” and his national stature as head of SNCC. He’d impressed her that much more by angrily leaving SNCC in 1967 when it refused to boot out whites altogether. (In fact, he was expelled for hogging the limelight and issuing fiery statements without his fellow SNCCers’ approval.) Briefly he’d become honorary prime minister of the Black Panthers, but when they also balked at severing all alliances with white activists, he broke with them, too. In the spring of 1969, he and Miriam decided they’d had enough of America’s institutional racism, a phrase that Stokely had coined. So they moved to Guinea at the invitation of my old friend Sékou Touré.

  For Stokely, who soon changed his name to Kwame Ture after two of Africa’s brightest political leaders, Kwame Nkrumah, ex-president of Ghana, and Sékou Touré, this new life seemed, at first, a dream come true. Africa had fascinated him for years; he was one of the northern SNCCers who was now wearing African robes. Sékou Touré made him a special aide, and Stokely came to regard him as a mentor. Miriam got her own plum post, as Guinea’s minister of culture. At some point, she also became Sékou Touré’s not-so-secret mistress.