This time, when I took in the whole assembled clan, I could say that all of our marriages were happy. And happily, all of my children were still with the same partners they’d had at David’s wedding. As for David himself, he and Malena had had two beautiful children, Sarafina and Amadeus, the latter of whom was just eight months old at our wedding.
This was not to say that the “West Coast crowd,” as Adrienne put it, had not struggled professionally in the last eight years. Shari and Sam were still putting “packages” together. For many years, Shari had tried to lure me into working together with her. Nothing had made sense to me until Sam, in what was more a shot in the dark than a serious overture, asked me to play a role in his film Last Supper. Shari was producing it, Sam was directing it, and I, if I agreed, would play the lead: a vampire. Neither Shari nor Sam believed I’d sign on for this one, but I did. I can’t say I agreed because I wanted to play a vampire; I simply wasn’t going to say no again. In fact, not long before, I’d promised myself that if ever Shari pitched me another of her projects, I would say yes without the slightest hesitation. So I signed on, and they clapped a mask on me, and hung me from a harness on pulleys—hour after hour, day after day. It was one part The Silence of the Lambs, one part Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. I had to wonder if this was Shari’s revenge. The shooting is finished, but the film is still on the editing table.
Gina and Scott, also in L.A., are still auditioning for roles, though Gina has spent the last several years working on Sing Your Song, the documentary about my years in the civil rights movement. As its West Coast producer, she conducted many of the interviews herself and often made something happen that I would have found awkward to pursue myself: interviewing Sidney, for example. Her diligence also helped us interview some of my colleagues who shortly afterward passed away. At the same time, Gina is a hands-on mother with Maria, steering her to school plays and drama classes that may yet lead her to become an actress herself. The lure of acting is still strong in my family, perhaps a bit too strong. For all of its frustrations, Shari and Gina are still determinedly engaged.
Of all my children, David is the one who tried something entirely new. He started an arts-oriented company, Belafonte Arts and Media. Like anyone else in the financial world, he struggled during the downturns. And so, as I write these words, David and I are working on a cultural adventure called Bread and Roses for Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Its mission is to encourage the union’s more than two million members to express themselves and their cultures through the arts: to write and record their songs, start choral groups, produce plays, write prose and poetry. We want the real stories of union workers put to words and music, to have them heard by the rest of the country. They will have their own record label. It’s been a long time since working people had that kind of public platform. Not since Woody Guthrie and the Great Depression, the time of the great American cultural renaissance spawned by President Roosevelt and his Works Progress Administration program, has there been a time when art was unleashed to be all that it could be.
This undertaking with David completely absorbs me. The union actually set up its Bread and Roses program more than forty years ago at its New York headquarters, right in the heart of the theater district in midtown Manhattan.
Each day that I walk into the building on the way to my office, I am immersed in a diaspora of African workers. There is much to smile about or even laugh at as they, along with their Latino and Asian counterparts, launch into their early-day storytelling in the elevator. I am greatly inspired by the strength and resolve of these workers. They clean our hospitals, they care for the ill and disabled, they empty our urinals and change our sheets and raise their children. They in many ways do all the things my mother did. I see and understand their circumstances and struggle. I embrace their dignity. Our mission with Bread and Roses is to hold a mirror up to them, and honor their work and aspirations. In this time of cruel and tragic acts against the workers of America by the power elite, I’m called back to a time when Woody wrote:
As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me….
In the squares of the city,
In the shadow of a steeple,
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry,
I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?
With rank-and-file artists coming to embrace our efforts and put their workplace issues into story and song, the question before us is: How can we protect the rights that Americans have struggled to achieve for a hundred years, and are now in grave danger of losing? Artists are truly empowered, as they were generations before, with the gift to make a difference. We are the engines of inspiration, and if we use this gift, then we validate Paul Robeson’s belief that artists are the gatekeepers of truth and the true documentarians of history. I expect that the rest of my life will be spent in this pursuit.
About my own life, I have no complaints. But I do have grave concerns about race and poverty in this country, about what the movement has left undone and how little of a movement remains to do it.
To some degree, those needs have been papered over, for amazingly enough, we have a black president. Few if any of us in the early civil rights days would have imagined that would come to pass in our lifetimes—or ever. It’s an astonishing show of progress in American attitudes about race, and if lots of other factors were at play, from Barack Obama’s eloquence on the stump to his brilliant use of the Internet to reach voters, from Republican missteps to the economy’s meltdown—if, in other words, race wasn’t the largest factor—then that’s even more remarkable. Perhaps in my children’s lifetimes, or at least in their children’s, a presidential candidate’s skin color—and gender—may not matter to voters at all.
Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago. And as I write this, our President has yet to acknowledge that this fact is of any concern to him, let alone offer a blueprint of solutions that would inspire our citizens to participate and make the sacrifices to ensure the health of the nation.
In the politicians I’ve admired, I’ve sensed an underlying spiritual essence. Bobby Kennedy could be coldly pragmatic, but when confronted by desperate poverty, he couldn’t turn away; he had to speak about what he’d seen with passion and clarity, and when I heard him, I knew he was speaking from that place Martin Luther King knew existed and told us to find—his moral center. Bobby spoke from the heart. There is no substitute for that.
For all of his smoothness and intellect, Barack Obama seems to lack a fundamental empathy with the dispossessed, be they white or black. Frankly, I would have thought the first black president would work especially hard to alleviate the plight of inner-city black Americans. I appreciate the passing of the stimulus package. I understand that a national health insurance bill helps us all. But why, I have kept wondering, hasn’t he used his power to bring more humanity to a justice system that imprisons one out of every three black males in America, giving us the largest prison population in the world? I would like for him to say more forcefully that racial problems exist. Show some heart, put some skin in the game. By tacking to the political center, disassociating himself from the left, he has all but abandoned the poor. And who else, after all, speaks for the poor but the left?
For the poor of America, a very bad time is about to get worse. Our black president seems to be holding his tongue because he is, after all, pragmatic. But here’s something I know, after more than half a century in the movement: The poor will not just curl up and die, much as the new political majority wishes they would. When your belly is empty, you do whatever it is you need to do to stop those hunger pains. You march, or you steal, or you pick up a gun.
In his book Black Recons
truction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that race would be the overarching issue of the twentieth century. I think he was right, especially if one adds in the genocide of World War II by a deluded “superior race” intent on ridding the world of “inferior” Jews (and blacks). I have little doubt that race is going to dominate the twenty-first century, too, not just at home but around the world.
I do acknowledge that in America we’ve made a lot of progress on race. The same country that could elect its first black president in 2008 no longer seems to openly tolerate racial slurs and racial humor. To the extent that a middle class still exists in this country, blacks are part of it. Mixed-race marriages are blurring the lines of race more than ever—just as southern racists feared they would—and as a result, to some extent, race is less and less of a factor in the workplace. All that is good. My frustration is: Where are the inheritors? Where are the new, young activists, shaking up the social order? They’re in Egypt, in Tunisia, in other more blatantly oppressive societies. But not here.
Here we have two tiers: the very rich, and everyone else. And the next generation, instead of tearing that system down, aspires to reach the top tier. How smooth is the machine that continues to oppress—so smooth that it co-opts those who might resist it, and saps their anger, and magnifies their greed until those squeezed hardest by that two-tier system have nothing to lose, and their anger spills into the streets.
Martin Luther King once said that anger was a necessary ingredient for change. And I subscribe to that completely. I was angry when I met him. Anger had helped protect me. Martin understood my anger and saw its value. But our cause showed me how to redirect it and to make it productive.
Of late, something has come into my life that daily touches me: two small creatures from some faraway celestial body. Pam calls them her grandchildren, Mateo and Oliive. I call them miracles to be celebrated and visited—and revisited. The eleven children who are the extensions of my gene pool—Adrienne, Shari, David, and Gina; their children, Rachel, Brian, Maria, Sarafina, and Amadeus; and the first two great-grandchildren, Isabella and Gabriel—all came into my world at varying stages of what has been my journey. I watch these children latch on to the world around them, propelled by the seductions of modern technology, and I both worry for them and envy them. Worry, because those high-tech tools seem to force us apart more than pull us together. Envy, because whatever this new world offers should, in many ways, lead us to the greater heights we struggle to attain.
I believe that my time was a remarkable one. I am aware that we now live in a world overrun by cruelty and destruction, and as our earth disintegrates and our spirits numb, we lose moral purpose and creative vision. But still I must believe, as I always have, that our best times lie ahead, and that in the final analysis, along the way we shall be comforted by one another.
That is my song.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With my appreciation of literature and great admiration for writers, I’d always hoped I could master language and maybe one day be a storyteller. Sensing an inadequacy for the task, I never really contemplated the idea of writing a book. But a combination of circumstance and desire overcame my insecurity, the consequence of which is this work.
It was difficult. It took me to places that exhausted me, frustrated me, troubled me. But in the end I was rewarded by the challenge.
I cannot say enough about Michael Shnayerson and what he brought into my space, guiding me through the minefields of storytelling. His enviable gift of craft created the frame within which this story was shaped. His focus kept me disciplined, and his challenges and questions always improved the result. I am both grateful for and rewarded by our journey.
There are many who could take credit for the fact that this book exists. I often was encouraged, more forcefully by some than by others, to document my life’s journey. To all of these people, I feel indebtedness: Stony Cooks; Carlos Santana; Jake Holmes, whose gift turned many of our thoughts into poetry; Taylor Branch; Julian Bond; Ira Gilbert; Richard Rosenberg, the gribenes of my life; Jay Cooper; Cy and Shirley Rossman; John Lewis; David Dinkins; Bill Lynch; my boss George Gresham and everybody at 1199; Jack and Mary Willis; Philip Rotter; Kenneth and Maria Cole, whose generosity of spirit soothes many anxious moments; Christina Malach; Jeff Roth of The New York Times for exhuming old clippings of my early career. Michael Fuchs … thanks for the pool, the vista, and the dogs! My gratitude to Peter Gethers, my very capable and encouraging editor at Knopf. And to the numerous others who nudged me along the way.
Mario Cuomo was my boss when, for seven years, I served as chairperson of the New York State Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission. In the decades since, we have locked steps in our pursuit of justice. Above all, though, he is my friend, and I am mindful that his was the final word that committed me to the task of putting pen to paper. Thanks for the push.
For my friends in The Gathering for Justice, The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, the Burns Institute, Barrios Unidos, Unity One, and all the missionaries of resistance who with their youth have invigorated me, with their minds have kept me endlessly attuned and alert, and with their passion for justice have stirred my spirits constantly. They continue to do so. Thanks for inspiring so much in this book.
For Harold Melvin, who insists on keeping me honest with his irreverence. To Esther Newberg, whose stewardship steered me to a safe port. Her advice was critical. For Mike Remer, who wisely counseled that suing the enemy doesn’t always guarantee justice and could be a sure way to abject poverty. He kept the ship afloat in the midst of J. Edgar Hoover’s consistent effort to sink it. And for Abe Briloff, whose moral clarity, strength of conviction, and caring attention made me keep my eye on the sparrow. To Chris Blackwell, my fellow Jamaican, who affords me many wondrous moments in my favorite place in the world—his home on Jamaica’s north coast. Thanks for your kindness. For Orin Lyons, who has daily deepened my trust in fellow beings. His wisdom, always shared with me, continues to guide me. Connie Rice: No movement person has more sway over me than she. When choices are put before us that could have dire consequences if miscalculated, she brings intellect and courage to the decision-making process that enables us to consistently triumph on the side of justice. Her will inspires me. And to Danny Glover. When he stepped into the autumn of my life and offered me his unconditional friendship, he filled a space that had been vacant for a long time. He calmed the loss of Paul Robeson and added joy for the walk ahead. For Nane Alejándrez, who embodies the courage of every noble warrior I have ever stood with; his generosity toward humanity moves the heart to reach for greater truths. Thanks for the time we spend in the prisons of California and for Cinco de Mayo. And I thank you for what you have brought to the struggle. In memory of Bo Taylor, who, in his death, left our mission without any doubt that honor was indispensable. We learned that our service to the cause should never waver from the examples of truth and courage that he displayed. That was his gift to us. Sorry he isn’t here for the dance. I am forever grateful that Shirley Cooks is my sister. How proud she makes me feel. Her quiet dignity commands respect from those she encounters, and her contribution in the service of our country is invaluable. She shares with me the peaks and valleys of our sibling history and validates the journey. To Lauren Coakley-Vincent for her sanity and for keeping me on track in a life that is filled with persistent demands and impossible schedules. I’m glad you do it. I just don’t know how. Perhaps most indispensable of all, Dr. David Miller, Dr. Reese Pritchett, and Maria Spinelli—I thank you for continued life and breath. Michael Cohl and Lori McGoran: So much was started on your turf. You understood the undertaking and knew that moments would come when I would need space. You made it available by sharing your homes, Yankee games, and so much more along the way. Your generosity always arrived when I needed it most. Thanks.
Lindsey, Sarah, Bill, Elise, Roy, Sue, and Dede, thanks to Pam, are now members of my extended family. I thank them for the many moments they helped me steal when the guards at the gate wer
en’t watching. Their love and thoughtfulness helped me scale the walls.
And to you dear Pamela,
Many of the things that I have done over the last years would not have happened had it not been for you. This book is one of them.
As fully as I had lived life, until I met you I had not visited that inner place you helped reveal. I wanted to tell a story, not just about my life, but about encounters experienced during my journey that might in some way enhance an understanding of the times. In our many conversations, you helped me understand the story I had to tell, and kept urging me to tell it. This book has taken up a great deal of time in your life, and your willingness to stay with me throughout the process has brought the whole thing to fruition. Thank you for all that you have given to bring this moment to pass. Your patience, your caring, your attentiveness to intent all helped to secure the confidence I needed to dare the venture. This work is very much your doing, and I thank you for the joy of it, thank you for helping me stay the course. Thank you for being.
Love you. Harry
INDEX
Abbott, Muriel, 8.1– 8.2, 8.3–8.4
Abernathy, Ralph, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4–13.5, 16.1–16.2, 16.3–16.4, 16.5, 16.6
My Song Page 56