My Song

by Harry Belafonte

  I’d barely had time to mutter a groggy good-morning when the host asked his next question: “How do you think Colin Powell is doing?”

  I was caught completely off guard. This was hardly the light banter the promoter had promised, but not one ever to duck a question, I replied, “He serves his master well.”

  “Serves his master well?” the radio host chortled. “What do you mean by that?”

  “In the days of slavery,” I explained, “there were those slaves who lived on the plantation, in shacks out back, and those who lived in the master’s house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master well.”

  Now I was fully awake. The urbane black Secretary of State hadn’t yet given the speech that would put his seal of approval on the half-truths and lies about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Still, he’d done plenty already to help the Bush administration ramp up for war with Iraq in retaliation for 9/11, even though Iraq had played no part in the attacks. “Colin Powell’s committed to come into the house of the master,” I added. “When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture.”

  Before I was done, I managed to rap the administration’s other prominent black as well. “I’d like to see both [Powell] and [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice show some moral backbone, show some courage,” I said, “show some commitment to principles that are far higher than those being espoused by their boss.”

  By the time I opened my concert that night, my comments were national news. I felt I had no reason to regret them, certainly no reason to apologize to Powell and Rice, but I got some blowback from unexpected quarters. “Harry knocked a brother,” Quincy Jones said disapprovingly on one interview show, as if no black should ever criticize any other black. Other black commentators harped on what a fine, upstanding fellow Colin Powell was, a war hero; how could I insult him that way? I was ready for the debate—I had a lot to say about Bush administration flunkies willing to sign off on sending young men and women to war on the basis of no hard evidence at all—and I knew just where to deliver my remarks. Ken Sunshine, a deft and much-admired public relations director, represented me (and still does). He called Larry King and asked if King would have me on his show the next night.

  The show started with a lot of positive footage about my role in the civil rights movement and other social causes. That was good. Larry and I then talked for a while about Colin Powell, I said my piece, and finally I took calls. The last one was the hardest, but also the one I’d been waiting for. “Hello, Mr. Belafonte…. I’m the mother of a twenty-three-year-old boy that was killed on— Tower One because he was an American citizen…. I feel that you’re talking first as a black man, as an American secondly, and that’s what saddens me and I think it would sadden all of us—the three thousand families whose people were mowed down because we were Americans trying to live the American dream. My boy was killed because he went to work.”

  I expressed my heartfelt sorrow for this woman’s terrible loss and for the U.S. servicemen she also invoked. “I sit and I grieve with each and every American who lost some loved one on 9/11,” I told her. “And I also sit and grieve with every American mother who lost some son to the Ku Klux Klan. Tyranny is not exclusive in the experience of Americans just to 9/11. A lot of people have known terror and terrorism. It’s a sad thing. And I’m not first black and then American. I’ve always been and will be first American and then whatever I happen to be, like the mosaic that makes up this country.

  “And I’m sorry if what I have said and the way in which I interpret our policy offends you to the degree you think I am ignorant of and willing to dismiss the death and pain that our nation feels. As a matter of fact, quite the contrary. It is precisely the pain that I know that this nation feels that I dread seeing us go through more of it, to lose more sons, more daughters, because we are being ill advised on how to deal with the ills of the nation…. And I hope we can find policies and thinkers and people who will come to their senses and lead us out of this abyss.”

  Separately, Larry King had Colin Powell on his show to get his take on all this. Powell said he didn’t mind my attacking his politics, “[but] to use a slave reference, I think, is unfortunate and is a throwback to another time and another place that I wish Harry had thought twice about using.” I’d often heard remarks such as the one Powell used about “a throwback to another time,” and such references were unfortunate. I am always saddened that, among blacks in particular, such views could be embraced, especially by the educated. For me, it is precisely the absence of debate on all the ramifications of slavery and the unwillingness to be thrown back “to another time” that has caused the issue of slavery to be an embarrassment for some and a trivial matter to be avoided at all costs for others. When Powell said what he did, I thought, Shame on you.

  Condoleezza Rice, asked for her reaction by another journalist, said, “Everybody should be able to debate views, but I don’t need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black.”

  To which I say, nine years later: Who was right and who was wrong about Iraq? About the satellite images showing supposed mobile factories for chemical weapons? About the supposed bunkers of munitions workers? About the stockpiled weapons of mass destruction? And is it too much to suggest that Powell and Rice, in their eagerness to please their president, did indeed make the moral compromises that house Negroes made in the days of slavery? That had they followed a higher moral calling, they might have helped prevent that war?

  By the time I next toured Europe, America had invaded and occupied Iraq. I’d always spoken my mind on issues of the day that upset me, both onstage and in press interviews, and I didn’t stop now. I called the war in Iraq a mistake, compounded by the mistake, as I saw it, of not pursuing the real malefactors of 9/11 in Afghanistan. In Germany, I made a point of praising the government and its people for being one of the first U.S. allies to refuse to send troops to the coalition in Iraq. I even debated representatives of the U.S. government on German television.

  One night in Hamburg, a group of young Afro-Germans came backstage to see me. My message had resonated with them; in fact, they were rappers putting out their own version of “racist experiences” in their communities, songs that pertained to their plight. Their group was called Brothers Keepers: Adé Bantu from Nigeria, Tyron Ricketts from Jamaica, and Frank Dele Tibor, nicknamed ”Quiet Storm.”

  Germany, they explained over coffee, had absorbed its first blacks after World War I, when France imported black French Senegalese troops to help oversee the Rhineland. Hitler had promised to destroy France and rid the German landscape of these savages; by 1937, the Gestapo was rounding up African-German blacks and either forcibly sterilizing them or simply making them disappear. By 1939, assimilated African-German blacks were as openly persecuted as Jews. More than half a century later, Germany’s resurgent right wing was targeting blacks again. Even in mainstream German society, blacks were ghettoized.

  What I heard that night was the voice of the country’s underclass, oppressed but uncowed, a voice I’d never heard because I never even knew it existed. I began to understand how many Afro-German citizens there were. Some were actually the sons and daughters of black American G.I.’s based in Germany during the Cold War, and African diplomats, who’d since married white German women.

  I decided, then and there, to make a documentary about these and other rappers, expressing their own frustrations in various countries—including the rap underground I’d found in Cuba. Seven years later, I’m still working on it, still gathering footage for the project I’ve come to call Another Night in the Free World. Through these rappers, I want to dramatize the social injustices that exist in the world’s most developed countries—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as that great social activist Mother Jones so famously put it.

  My hope, when I added Another Night in the Free World to my fairly full pla
te of social causes, was to sing along on some of the raps, perhaps even add my own. I was eager to see what I could do—I hadn’t noticed any rules against septuagenarians in rap music—and I liked to think if I was part of the package, the film’s prospects might only improve. But by 2004, I had to confront a painful truth: My voice was nearly gone. I spoke in a hoarse rasp now. When I sang, my vocal cords, so stiff and scarred, couldn’t push my voice where I meant it to go. I’d undergone surgery and waited for the voice I remembered to return. But for all that New York’s best throat surgeons attempted, it hadn’t come back.

  So my new German friends would have to rap without me. More important, my European concerts of 2004 became my last. In Hamburg I sang before a capacity crowd of more than ten thousand, whose response led me back to my first performance in Berlin in the Tatania Palace in 1958. My prediction that the new Germany would become a different society from the one we had known during the Second World War had come to fruition. The Germans were by far my strongest and most loyal audience, and now, on this night, I wondered how many of my listeners had been with me that night at the pre–Berlin Wall performance almost fifty years earlier. Not many, I told myself. But their sons and daughters carried the flame, and one could not ask for more. That audience, one I had come to love, gave me a farewell I shall never forget. They didn’t know it was my good-bye. I never made a public declaration that it was over. Still haven’t. Often I’m asked, “Do you miss it?,” and my reply is, “Not more than I have to.”

  I made the same farewell in Vienna, then Paris, then flew back for two final concerts in the United States. One was at the Greek Theatre in L.A. Simply by chance, my very last public performance was a benefit concert in Atlanta for their local opera company, a booking to which I’d committed some time before. I did my best, and came out for two, maybe three encores with the crowd on its feet. But finally it was time to say good-bye.

  From those last concerts, I understood, with a sense of revelation, what it was I’d done. More than half a century ago, I had brought a young actor’s skills and ambition to the small wood stage of the Village Vanguard, and found a way to use them as a singer. Audiences came to see me as much as to hear me. I was a performer delivering lines set to music, with every nuance of every song blocked out, like an actor hitting his marks. The audiences appreciated the pacing. They saw how the lighting enhanced my act—not a mere spotlight, but colors constantly changing as the music’s moods changed. In a culture of replication, where each new star inspired copycats, no one had ever tried to imitate me, because mine was—literally—a hard act to follow, complicated on every level, and because at root it was an actor’s performance. Singers, at least the singers I knew, didn’t want to take that on. The fact was, I’d had no choice: I was good as a singer, but I wasn’t the best, and I’d known that from the start. I’d had to rely on my acting, and in the end, I could make a case that I was the greatest actor in the world: I’d convinced everyone I could sing.

  I remained a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF through President George W. Bush’s first term, and traveled a lot for the organization. I went to South Africa to promote understanding on HIV/AIDS—a subject that needed a lot of understanding, given that South Africa’s new president at the time, Thabo Mbeki, believed, among other misguided theories, that AIDS was the result of poverty, not blood-to-blood viral transmission. I went to Kenya and Senegal to promote public education, especially for girls, and to raise awareness there, too, of the facts of HIV/AIDS. UNICEF’s executive director was Carol Bellamy, a staunch Democrat and former New York state senator, who had been appointed by President Clinton, and she was doing such an outstanding job—she’d actually doubled UNICEF’s resources from $800 million to $1.8 billion—that she could hardly be broomed out, at least not in Bush’s first term. And while she stayed, so did I.

  That changed with the start of Bush’s second term. Bellamy was replaced by Ann M. Veneman, formerly Bush’s Secretary of Agriculture. Veneman came in with a fully partisan Republican agenda, and one of the first items on her to-do list involved me.

  At an early staff meeting, I was later told, Veneman went down the list of goodwill ambassadors one by one. When she got to me, she said, according to my source, “How do we get rid of him?”

  No one replied.

  I’m told she asked the question again because she thought perhaps she hadn’t been understood. “How do we get rid of him?”

  “You don’t,” came a solitary, brave reply.

  Veneman bristled.

  “Unless you have very good cause,” this staffer explained, “you’ll have a lot of answering to do in a lot of countries. Belafonte has a long history in the developing world and is held in very high esteem in places where we do a lot of work.”

  I don’t know what, if any, further inquiries Veneman made about me. I just know that she stopped trying to nudge me out. The agency did stop sending me on international missions; I could only interpret that as pique on Veneman’s part. But it couldn’t stop me from accepting other countries’ requests to have me visit: South Africa for one, Norway for another, Germany and Sweden, too.

  With President Obama’s election in 2008, Veneman was replaced by Anthony Lake, National Security Adviser under President Clinton. Once again I was deemed to be useful. In July 2010, I helped launch an international documentary project called Envision, partly sponsored by the United Nations, that plans to stage an annual festival of documentaries focusing on global children’s issues. It’s no secret that documentaries are where a lot of the world’s most important journalism is being done now, and I’m very excited by Envision’s potential. The very word defines, better than any other, what’s guided me all these years. All of us see the world as it exists; fewer envision what it might look like if made to change; and fewer still try to put together the people and ideas that make change happen. Paul Robeson was one; Martin Luther King, Jr., was one; Bobby Kennedy became one. And, of course, Nelson Mandela. I had just enough vision to see that they were visionaries, and to do what I could to help.

  The irony about envisioning is that it’s always prompted by a grave injustice right there in plain sight. Emmett Till. Rosa Parks. Walter Gadsden. To a list far longer than that, a new name was added on March 14, 2005: Ja’eisha Scott.

  I was in a Washington, D.C., hotel room when a horrifying story on the television news pinned me to my seat. Five-year-old Ja’eisha, a black kindergarten student at a public school in St. Petersburg, Florida, became unruly enough to be sent to the assistant principal’s office. Because the school had installed video cameras as part of a self-improvement exercise for teachers, what happened next was caught on tape. The assistant principal did try to calm Ja’eisha down by talking to her for some time, but the girl remained highly agitated. Finally the assistant principal called the police. When Ja’eisha refused to heed the three white officers who arrived, they pinned her arms behind her back with plastic ties as she screamed, “No, no,” handcuffed her ankles together, carried her forcibly out of the school, and kept her bound in their police car—for hours. How could this happen in America? I wanted to know. How could a five-year-old child be handcuffed and detained like a violent adult criminal?

  My first call was to Connie Rice, a cousin of Condoleezza Rice but a fundamentally different person from the Bush administration’s newly named Secretary of State. Connie was a poverty lawyer in southern California, often representing members of the Bloods and the Crips. She’d brought class-action suits to take on race and sex discrimination; she’d worked with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton to investigate massive police corruption in the L.A. Police Department. I’d met her back in 1993 when the NAACP gave me its Thurgood Marshall award; Connie was regional director of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Was Ja’eisha Scott an isolated case? I asked her. Connie told me no: It was a new code of social behavior, in a country that looked increasingly like a police state. Hundreds of children under ten years of age had been treated that way,
she said. Child incarceration was an appalling reality.

  With Connie’s help, I convened what I called “The Gathering of the Elders” in Atlanta: distinguished civil rights activists, public policy pioneers, writers of conscience. Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, was a sponsor. So was Andy Young. Among the elders were Professor Cornel West, my onetime colleague from the American Negro Theatre Ruby Dee, and many of the old-guard movement figures—Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Louis Farrakhan, and Oren Lyons of the Seneca and Onondaga peoples. I listened to various speakers say their piece, and as the day and a half of our scheduled talks wore on, I grew more and more despairing. These leaders were too dug into their own particular institutions and power bases. Any suggestion that we try to build something new was greeted with blank stares. They, more than half a century ago, were the youth who had turned America around. They’d taken to the streets and stopped the machine and seized the power to force change. I felt that now they were trapped by their pasts; they just couldn’t see the relevance of what I was asking them to consider. I needed today’s young and disenfranchised. And if child incarceration was my new focus, I had to look where those children were—in jail. All too often, I suspected, that’s where I’d find their older siblings and parents, too.

  With Connie Rice’s help, I started visiting prisons in southern California. The young men and women I met reminded me of SNCC volunteers—fierce and fearless—only tougher. I talked to a woman who’d been locked up for years on a third-strike violation: stealing three sweat suits. Maybe the judge had appreciated that she’d stolen the sweat suits in order to sell them to buy food for her children. But the judge had no power to reduce her sentence; the state legislature had overridden him by establishing mandatory sentencing rules: third strike and she was out, sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Where were this woman’s children? Left to the whims of the world, and facing prospects for incarceration themselves by their early teens.