[MUSIC - HARRY BELAFONTE,
"JAMAICA FAIRWELL"] Where the nights are gay and
the sun shines gaily on the mountaintop. [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: You're right there. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Oh, please. HARRY BELAFONTE: Thank you. TOM PUTNAM: Good
evening, everyone. I'm Tom Putnam, director of the
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of Tom McNaught,
executive director of the Kennedy
Library Foundation, the members of the foundation's
board of directors who are here with us this evening, and all
of my library and foundation colleagues, I thank you for
joining us this evening. Let me first acknowledge
the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library
Forums, lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital,
the Lowell Institute, Raytheon, the Boston Foundation,
and our media partners the Boston Globe and WBUR. I also thank our special
sponsor Bingham McCutchen for this and other forms
related to civil rights issues as part of our new initiative,
JFK 50, Justice for All. How honored we are to have Harry
Belafonte with us here this evening, a man who Henry Louis
Gates once described as radical before it was chic and remained
so long after it wasn't. [LAUGHTER] An immensely
successful entertainer and worldwide star,
Harry Belafonte, in the words of
Bob Dylan no less, never took the easy path
though he certainly could have. In his memoir, Mr. Belafonte
writes how his unique childhood fostered in him, quote,
a lifelong camaraderie with those living in
poverty, and I never stopped feeling a
member of that tribe. He credits his tenacious
mother for urging him not to allow injustice
to go unchallenged and went on to dedicate
his life to social causes from bailing out his
friend Martin Luther King Jr. from the Birmingham
jail to helping to organize the
March on Washington, from initiating the
star-studded "We Are the World" single to leading
the American effort to end apartheid including hosting
former South African President Nelson Mandela on his triumphant
visit to the United States, which included a
stop at this library, from being named as one of
the first cultural advisors to the Peace Corps to serving
as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, All of which I'm sure we'll
hear more about this evening. In a recent interview,
he recounted that he's often asked
when as an artist did you decide to become an activist. I say to them I was
long an activist before I became an artist. I'm reminded of the
words John F. Kennedy used to describe Robert
Frost, whose contributions to our country, JFK suggested,
quote, was not to our size but to our spirit, not
to our political beliefs but to our insight,
not to our self-esteem but to our self-comprehension. If sometimes our
greatest artists have been the most
critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity
and their concern for justice, which must motivate
any true artist, makes them aware
that our nation falls short of its highest potential. Mr. Belafonte's memoir My Song
is on sale in our book store, and he'll sign copies at
the conclusion of our forum. Our moderator this evening
is Liz Walker, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. Ms. Walker served
for two decades as one of Boston's most
trusted news anchors and is currently a minister at
the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church
in Jamaica Plain. She also hosts the
weekly TV show Better Living with Liz Walker and
is a documentary filmmaker and humanitarian
activist focusing on international
education, women's issues, and the crisis in the Sudan. Allow me two final
and brief observations about Mr. Belafonte's memoir. The first is the
wonderful description of his friendship with Sidney
Poitier, who he describes as his first friend in life. Each of us, he writes,
were skinny, brooding, and vulnerable, and each
was as unlikely as the other to become a future star. Before their careers
took off, they shared various get
rich schemes, which included serving as a stand
up comedy team until, quote, we realized we weren't funny. [LAUGHTER] We started going to the
theater once or twice a week, splitting the cost
of a single ticket. One of us would go in for
the first half, come out at intermission-- LIZ WALKER: I love that-- TOM PUTNAM: And pass the stub
along with a plot summary to the other, who
would be the lucky one to see the second half. I was moved by reading about
Mr. Belafonte's childhood, his first successes as
an actor and a singer, and his early commitment to
issues of social justice, and the extraordinary
friendships he made in the initial
years of his career with the likes of Paul Robeson,
Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando,
and Robert F. Kennedy, who he describes as
the political leader he most admires for
speaking from his heart and moral center. And then at the end of
the book, I was equally affected by Mr. Belafonte's
most recent life stories, the wisdom garnered through
his years of self-reflection, and his heartwarming
account of his marriage in 2008 to his wife Pam who
is here with us tonight. The world is a better
place, Mr. Belafonte, for all you have
done, and those of us fortunate to be
here this evening and to have seen the benefits of
your work in this new century, we are the lucky ones to have
been passed the torn ticket stub from those
who've come before us and to have witnessed the
second half of your long life of engagement, steadfast
commitments, and their impact on our world. Ladies and gentlemen,
please join me in welcoming Liz Walker
and Harry Belafonte. [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: This is an honor. Mr. Belafonte, this is
so very exciting for me. It has been said that you have
packed enough life in your 84 years for 10 people-- an actor, a singer,
social activism that actually did
change the world. So sitting here with you
and having this conversation is indeed an honor and a
privilege for me, not only because of your iconic status
in the world but the fact that we're in this place
and your relationship with this family, our
family the Kennedys. There's so many
places to start, but I thought why not start there. You are in the midst of
a Civil Rights Movement. You are immersed there. You are a confidante of
Martin Luther King, Jr. And the candidate John F.
Kennedy reaches out to you. Tell me how you
met the president. HARRY BELAFONTE:
Before I do that, I would like to just express
my great sense of delight in sharing this evening
with you and the exchange we're going to have
and to have met the chancellor of the
university and certainly our host, the Kennedy Center. The opportunity to speak is
really for me quite an event. I had not thought that I
would have lived long enough to see yet another
marvelous rebellion perking on the horizon. [APPLAUSE] And that there would still
be an opportunity for me to be able to speak to many
of the young men and women who make up the heart of
the current rebellion, not just here in
the United States but in other parts
of the world as well. And coming here to the Kennedy
Center, the Kennedy Library, carries a lot of memory. When I first heard
of John Kennedy, it was in his service as
a senator and a person from whom we had
expectations that perhaps he would be better than
many we were experiencing and that he did come from
a family that appeared to be liberal on the edges, but
somewhere in the heart of who they were they kept eluding
us in terms of what was this family and its mission. I was approached by a young man
by the name of Harris Wofford, who was an African American
who was working for the Kennedy political machine, and
he called me one day and said that the young
senator had expressed an interest in meeting with me. And when I pressed him
for what was the motive, he just said, well, he believes
that he is misunderstood. He believes that
there are many of us in the black community that
should hear him more precisely than we had been hearing him and
that perhaps such an exchange might give us another
point of view about what we may be thinking of him. It was a bit codified. He didn't come right
out and say it, but what had happened at
that very moment in time was that a great American
icon, a huge heroic figure by the name of Jackie
Robinson, had become quite irritated with
the Democratic Party and with the Kennedys, and
he felt that in many ways not only he personally but
also black people in general had been very much
slighted by the party and slighted by the Kennedys. And he therefore decided to
step out and publicly endorse the opposition, which
was Richard Nixon. This so-- so unexpected
and at the time that was most strategic
and the Democratic Party's attempt at trying
to put together a platform and an agenda, they
saw this as a serious problem. In seeking solution,
they concluded that they should
hurry up and find out who could be the potential
allies for the Kennedy machine and his agenda and
that perhaps that would balance what was taking
place with Jackie Robinson. I understand the
game of politics, and there are some aspects of it
that I find most difficult, how we use people and how we use
people to impose thoughts and ideas on other people
that may not necessarily be our own ideas and our own
thoughts, the manipulation of it all. And when I met-- I told-- that I would-- I said that I would
meet with John. He came to my apartment. It was at the end of a
long day of campaigning in New Jersey for the
New Jersey primary. And he came to the apartment
at the end of that day and began to put before
me what he thought were the issues of the
day affecting black people and what he thought he could
do about making a difference. As he unfolded his
thoughts and his ideas, I became more and more
anxious at the fact that here was a
young man running for the most powerful
office in the world speaking about the
conditions of a people who made up so much of
the history of this nation and that he himself
was evidencing so little knowledge about us
and our pain and our anguish and certainly very
little understanding about our hopes and our desires. And as he went on
into the evening, I told him that I just felt that
there was not very much more left for us to say to each
other because I thought he was missing the point. I said looking for a celebrity
to answer another celebrity was a game that I
thought was not very-- not very forthcoming,
not the way I thought it should be if you're
seeking to run the country. It's not a game of celebrities. It's a game of ideas and games-- a game about
fundamental humanity. And to try to play the
black community this way was in itself its own insult, was
its own misguided approach. And I then evoked the name
of Dr. King and told him what our little group-- not so little but certainly
was not as well known then-- what we were setting out
to do and that if he really wanted to capture the
hearts and the minds of the African-American
community, it would do him
well to be talking to those who we have
chosen to be our leaders and our voice in the
struggle we are experiencing. The more I spoke of
Dr. King, the more he evidenced absolutely
no real in-depth knowledge about who this man was. And I found that rather curious
because we're already engaged with Montgomery Bus Boycott. We're already in motion. A lot of stuff was going
on, and for him to be so-- I wouldn't say he
was indifferent. I would say that
to be so uninformed struck me as very curious. And I recommended to him
that what he needed to do was to find a way
to access Dr. King. I would certainly put
myself at his disposal if that's what he wished to do. And maybe from that
approach, meeting Dr. King, something could be
hammered out that might be beneficial to the
Democratic Party. And he indicated at
the end of the evening that he would certainly
look into that. I wasn't quite sure what that
meant or where it would go, but I then began to look
around at the Democratic Party and the Democratic
machinery itself and discovered that there was a
young man by the name of Harris Wofford, who was a Quaker,
who was very much caught up with the Kennedy family, and
in his own interest in peace and the peace movement and that
he could leverage an approach to the Kennedys that might
be more captivating for them to begin to take
interest in Dr. King because Harris himself was
very much involved in where Dr. King was going
and particularly in the issues of nonviolence. So all of these things
began to pollinate. They began to brush each
other and touch each other, and things began to escalate. At the end of the
conversation, however, he said to me I understand that
you have committed to someone else-- because I told him that
I was for Adelaide Stevenson-- and the journey looked
very unyielding, and I wasn't quite
sure where we would go. We were nevertheless
committed to Stevenson and what he stood for. And he said, well, if
I win the primaries and I become the
Democratic Party nominee, would you then come on board. And I said only if I knew what
the platform was and trusted where he would lead
the Democratic Party. Much of my concern
about the Democrats was to be revealed
in what was going on so cruelly by the
powers in the South that made up the southern
Dixiecrats as they were called and these vicious
men who made up the philosophy of the South,
who worked very hard at passing laws that were so oppressive. And for them to be
given so much leverage in this campaign disturbed me. And that meant that
somewhere along the line those of us who are the
victims of this kind of political juggling were
going to pay the biggest price. Our issues would
never be settled. LIZ WALKER: You ended
up making a commercial for the president's campaign,
which I believe we have here, and we're going to show them. Why-- what changed
for you before that-- before we run that spot? What changed? HARRY BELAFONTE: What
happened at this moment-- and I'm speaking
of in this time-- was that Dr. King was arrested
on a very minor charge having to do with a
traffic violation, and he had been given a
sentence some months earlier. And it was given a kind
of period of probation. And he had violated
this probation by becoming involved in civil
disobedience and by picketing and doing the
things that he did, and getting arrested
violated the probation. And the state of Georgia
decided to sentence him then to the chain gang. And for us that was an
act of great horror. The idea of Dr. King on the
chain gang in the midst of all these conflicts
was a way to ensure that his safety was under
severe attack or would be and that we had to at all costs
get him off the chain gang and at least, if it was
an issue of justice, put him someplace where he
would not be in harm's way. And we appealed both
candidates, both to Nixon, which a group
of us having a committee, appealed to Nixon hoping
that he would intervene. And also the same appeal
was made to Kennedy. And Nixon just
ignored us altogether. Didn't even answer
a letter or a call. And the Kennedys we
discovered were at least willing to wrestle with
the moment in that context with exchanges back and forth. Bobby Kennedy engaged with
the hierarchy of the Georgia Democratic state
party and negotiated a deal that got Dr. King off
the charge, off the chain gang. With that it was expected that
Dr. King would endorse Kennedy. And the group of us who
were strategists working in certain areas of the
civil rights campaign thought that endorsing
Kennedy was inappropriate. We knew very little about him. We did not know what his
platform fully held for us and that Dr. King's integrity
and his independence was something that could
not be sacrificed even in circumstances such
as this unless we had greater proof and
greater reason to believe that what we were about and
our movement would be honored. And it was agreed that there
would be no endorsement by Dr. King, but in its
place, what we would do would be to express
publicly the appreciation of the black community and a
lot of black leaders including the King family. We took huge ads in newspapers
around America, the most leading journals, expressing our
deep gratitude to the Kennedys and to the Kennedy family
for intervening in behalf of Dr. King and expressing
our hopes that the Democratic Party would continue
in this spirit, and we were going
to endorse him. So instead of getting just
Dr. King, he got 400 others but did not get Dr. King. And in that context, I then
set out to do a series of ads and got on the campaign trail
and worked for John Kennedy to become president. LIZ WALKER: Let's
look at that ad. HARRY BELAFONTE: Hi. My name is Harry Belafonte. I'm an artist, and
I'm not a politician. But like most Americans,
I have a great interest in the political and the
economic destiny of my country. I'm seated here
Senator Jack Kennedy. As a Negro and as an American,
I have many questions, and I'm sure everyone
does, about civil rights, about foreign policy, about
the economy of the country, and about things
that will happen. JOHN F. KENNEDY: And I
want to make it very clear, Harry, that on this question
of equality of opportunity for all Americans, whether it's
in the field of civil rights, better minimum wages, better
housing, better working conditions, jobs, I
stand for these things. Democratic Party under Franklin
Roosevelt stood for them. HARRY BELAFONTE: I'm
voting for the senator. How about you? ANNOUNCER: Vote for a leader
like Roosevelt. Vote for John F. Kennedy for president. LIZ WALKER: There you go. There you go. [APPLAUSE] And in the end, this ad ran
a lot or ran a little bit, but certainly the African
Amer-- ran very little. What happened? HARRY BELAFONTE: Well,
they first aired the ad, and it was absolutely
amazing how ballistic the southern rulers went. They were furious and
made all sorts of threats that if that ad ever ran
again, they would guarantee that John would not be elected. And this went on and on and on. And so they pulled it. But not before it had
a chance to air once. I think-- I only know of once. There may have
been a second time but certainly no more than that. And that caused quite
a stir in the South, and I have to say that the slim
margin by which Kennedy won the election, one has to
take into consideration that although you can't-- no one campaign or one
group can lay claim to being the strategic
reason for victory, all of us have a right to lay some
claim that had it not been our presence
doing what we did, it might have been
a different story because the margin was so-- LIZ WALKER: So slim. HARRY BELAFONTE: Very slim. LIZ WALKER: The journey for
you to this pivotal point in history began with a rather
nomadic childhood I understand. You grew up in New
York, but you shuttled between New York and Jamaica. Tell us a little bit
about your growing up that would lead to
this powerful moment. HARRY BELAFONTE: I was
born in New York and Harlem and of immigrant parents. My mother was quite
young, much too young to have been
having children. And I was her first born. And in her disillusionment
about America and what she had hoped to
find when she came here, it all eluded her. And when she started
having children, she saw much of her life
getting away from her. My father who was a
bit of a scoundrel-- he was very violent. He was an alcoholic,
a philanderer, and whenever we saw him-- he was a seaman. He was always away-- and whenever we did
see him, it was never a moment that was filled
with expectations of joy. It was as a matter of
fact moments filled with great trepidation
and with great anxiousness 'cause we had no idea when
his alcohol and his violence would mix. And more often than not,
when those things happened, my mother became the
recipient of his violence. And in this context, my mother
found New York overwhelming and that she thought that
to her best interests and certainly the best
interests of her two children to take us back to the
island where she was born and to be brought up by the
community, the village in which she grew up, would be far more-- a far more responsible
thing for her to do and to ensure our safety
more fully than she was-- would have been able to ensure
our safety in New York City because there were no such
things as easily found baby sitters. And putting your children
in the care of strangers was a very hard
thing for her to do, which she had to do
on so many occasions. So when she took us back
to the island of Jamaica, I saw her on occasion,
mostly holidays, because I was there from
the age of a year and a half when she took us-- took me and then
ultimately my brother. I stayed there until I was 12. And then when I came back
to the United States, it was the dawning
of the conflict between England and Germany. And my mother was
like most people who were born in the colonies
concerned about Germany's power, and certainly if
Germany were to defeat England, she was concerned about what
happened with the colonies and therefore all of the
citizens of the world had made up the British empire. And so she brought
us back to America. And from then on,
I've stayed here and just lived the
life of my history. LIZ WALKER: A struggling life,
you dropped out of school at high school I believe. HARRY BELAFONTE:
First term high. I was on my way to being 17. And academics had
always overwhelmed me. I suffered from a disorder. My brain circuitry was
really out of whack, and it played havoc with
my focus, my attention, my learning capacity . Teachers were constantly
frustrated at the fact that what I appeared to
be never translated itself in terms of homework and
diligence as a student. And as a matter of fact,
each time I was taken out of a school to be
put somewhere else, there was a great celebration
at each school I left. [LAUGHTER] And I was always
fascinated at the fact that I could cause such joy
by just leaving the scene. It was quite an experience. But the problem that I had was
many years later identified as a disease to be
called dyslexia, and my severe case of it
really hampered my relationship to the world of academia. LIZ WALKER: But in the
meantime, destiny steps in. 18, you're working as a janitor,
and you get two tickets as part of gratuity for good work. And that lands you at
the American Negro-- tell us that story-- Theater. HARRY BELAFONTE: At the end
of the Second World War, I served in the
United States Navy, and at the end of that war, I
came out looking for reward, looking for some generosity to
be accessed by those of us who served of that-- the cause of the war and could
find nothing except animosity. Found very irritable America. Black GIs is in particular paid
a terrible price because we came back with an attitude. We came back with a sense
of achievement and victory in that there was to be
a reward for the victors. And black servicemen
found no such generosity. We came back to
laws that were more enforced than ever
before that had to do with racial segregation. Many black GIs were
set upon and beaten, one in particular young man by
the name of Isaac Woodard, who was a celebrated soldier. Came back, mustered
out in New Jersey on his way back to South
Carolina to see his family. Had gotten through the
war without any harm, had done brave things. And when he got down
South, they told him to sit in the back of the bus. He refused to do that. They hauled him off the
bus, beat him severely, and gouged out both of
his eyes with a blunt head of a billy club. And word got around the nation
and among black servicemen. And it was a peculiar time
in the world, not just for us as black Americans who
were on the road to becoming engaged activists,
but we were also part of another
global phenomenon. The war talked about democracy. It talked about putting
an end to the beliefs in racial superiority
as evidenced by Hitler and the pure Aryan Brotherhood. And when we fought that war,
we believed in everything about the rights people and
democracy and believed it. Believed and Roosevelt,
believed in Churchill, believed in everything,
believed in the heroics of what we were doing. And came back with
these expectations and they weren't there. We had one of two options. One was to accept this
newly escalated belligerence from the society
at large, certainly from those who ran political
and social affairs, or to take up the
mood of rebellion, to take up the fact that we
would change the conditions under which we live. We would challenge
the system forever and that what was awakened in
us was the inordinate number of men and women
who have appeared to play that game who were
prepared to join and belong to organizations and to
do things that many of us have never done before. The idea that there were
forces around the country that want to fight for better
wages, fight for more access was quite interesting. And we found
ourselves with allies. And the more we
joined and the more we got caught up in the
affairs of liberation was the more the
opposition exerted itself to the height of its power. And we were called communists. We were beat up. We were demonized,
particularly blacks who sought to talk about the
change of social patterns and behavior. Our greatest heroes Paul
Robeson was beaten at Peekskill, and people rioted. Our government went after him
and demonized him and took away his passport and threatened
institutions and venues around the country
that if they hired him, there would be a
price for them to pay. And they just sought
to crush Paul. LIZ WALKER: How did you-- how
did you meet Paul Robeson? You were already in the theater? HARRY BELAFONTE: Well, yes. I am getting to this answer
that you gave me earlier. [LAUGHTER] LIZ WALKER: I'm sorry. HARRY BELAFONTE: Well,
anyway, in this campaigning to be active against
what we are experiencing, I lived up to the best
parts of my skill. I was a janitor's assistant, and
I could clean the best hallway, make your staircases look
polishing spit clean. And I could stop the boiler
and get your hot water going, and I could haul the garbage. And in the midst
of doing this work, I did a repair in
someone's apartment. And as a gratuity, they
gave me two tickets to go to a community
theater in Harlem. And I'd never been
to the theater and didn't know quite
what went on there. I'd been in music halls,
the Apollo and other places and saw the great
musicians of the day that just absolutely delighted me
and filled my soul with joy. But I had never seen
a theater, drama. And I went out of curiosity. And when the house lights went
down and the curtains went up, it was really an epiphany. I was so struck by what
I saw, these black men and women on stage in this
little theater at the Schomburg Library in Harlem. And these artists were speaking
the words of a skillful poet, and they were making people
laugh and making people anxious and manipulating the
environment and all with the use of words and all
with this thing called theater. And I just knew that more
than anything else the world, I wanted to be part
of this environment. Had no idea what I would-- goals I would set for myself
but I needed to be there, to be in this place. And I hung around long
enough to become caught up in its mechanisms. And one point, they
chose to do a play called Juno and the Paycock by
an Irish playwright named Sean O'Casey, and looking
around for somebody to play one of the characters
in the play, they came in my direction. And under the threat of being
considered not a team player, I took this part
expecting them to find somebody who would qualify. So I took the play and went
through the pains of hell trying to learn the part,
trying to read the text. And to do so from a
writer who not only had the eloquence of O'Casey but
who wrote in Irish brogue. [LAUGHTER] And fortunately for
me, I could adapt my West Indian
characteristics into the-- with the patois of
the Jamaica talk, which sounded so Irish
anyway, you know. [LAUGHTER] And before you knew it, this
whole black cast speaking in this Jamaican dialect was
play this incredible play about the Irish rebelling
against the British. And I enjoyed that and
enjoyed this place. And then on the third
night of the play, in walked the Colossus. In walked a man
named Paul Robeson. We all knew of him,
but we didn't know him. And he saw the play. And at the end he
stayed behind and talked with us and not only
delighted us with his words but inspired us of how he
defined the world in which we were seeking to live. And he called us-- he said if you choose this
mission to be in the arts and to be an artist,
you have embarked on the most powerful force
in our universe, art. He said it's more
powerful than religion. He said we are the
gatekeepers of truth, and he went on and on. And those who felt a little
contentious on the idea that it was greater than-- the
greatest force in the world would evoke religion,
and he'd say religion is sold because it is
at the behest of artists that we've convinced the world
of these great myths that run from the pages of the
Bible, written by artists in our temples of worship
created by architects that incredible design
and the beautiful mosaics and the painted glass windows. And certainly what Mozart
and Brahms and others have given us in the
mass, if it had not been for all these
forces in the arts, nothing could be as
celebrated as religion is if it had not
been for artists stepping into the space. Well, I thought that was a
very fanciful interpretation of everything and decided
this is where I wanted to go. Having met Mr.
Robeson that night, I then began to become more
engaged in what he was doing and what he was saying. I went to rallies and things
that he was a part of. And each time I went
to these rallies, I made sure that I identified
myself and expressed to him my great delight at being
part of the struggle that he had taken on
and that through him, I met other artists like John
Killens and young writers and people and then through
them began to meet people like Dr. WEB DuBois. And then I began to meet people
like Eleanor Roosevelt in this. And these moments of
great coincidence, I began to meet all these
people that had things to do, had ideas and thoughts
that deeply struck me. And I saw a purpose in who they
were and what they spoke about. And this meant now that my
most severe challenge had been put upon me
because God dammit, I'd have to start to
learn how to read. [LAUGHTER] And I'd have to
read a lot of stuff to just get in the same
room with these people, let alone engage in debate. And I think one of the
stories most struck my friend Dr. King when we took
up with each other was Dr. DuBois was one of the
first people that was given to me to read, and I used to
feel terribly self-conscious that I kept asking
these rather sophomoric, simplistic questions
from men and women who are far more
endowed with history and with what they
were doing than I. And I decided that to get around
their disdain or their animus for my lax-- I noticed something,
that I'd read a passage, and in this passage
I would see a number. And if I looked at
the foot of the page, the number indicated that
whatever Dr. DuBois was speaking about was derived from
the source that was notated at the foot of the page. And in my need to catch up
with the world at large, I said I don't have
to talk to these guys. I just got to read these books
and see where Dr. DuBois had-- they revered him so, I
thought all I had to do was just catch up. And I went to the
library and told the lady who was
the librarian that I would like to get these books. And she looked at
the list, and she said there was much too many,
that I could take a few but not the number that I asked for. I said, well, look, so I--
she said pare down my list. And I said let me make
things very easy for you. Forget all the titles I have. Just give me everything
you have on Ibid. [LAUGHTER] Somewhat nonplussed
by this request, she pointed out that there
was no such an author, and she happened to have
been white in her late 60s, I would say, or mid-60s,
beautiful flaxen white hair. And I really took
off on her saying how can you tell me
there's not such a writer. Our black educators
have quoted-- and I went on and on,
and the woman just looked at me absolutely
nonplussed with this thing in front of her
making these claims. And I walked away. And when I told the people
in my circle about the story, they did exactly what
everybody else did. They laughed. When I told this to
Dr. King, I don't think he was-- the moment
was caught on film, and I don't remember ever seeing
Martin with so deep a belly laugh as he evoked when I
told him the story about Ibid. It was right up his alley. But these were some of the
nuances, some of the things that the walls I bounced off of. The most important
thing about this period were the people who
were revealed to me-- LIZ WALKER: Sure. HARRY BELAFONTE:
Who had purpose, who had life and
more often than not, they found motivation for my
being in their midst and things that I could do. When I took up my
interest as a actor, leaving the American
Negro Theater knowing that I needed to
learn much more, I went to the New School
of Social Research. And the drama department
had been taken over by a German by the name of
Erwin Piscator, who was well known for the Dada
movement in Germany and certainly working with Max
Reinhardt and the Epic Theater, which in those days in the
early '30s was quite a force in Western theater and
Western playwriting. When he came to the United
States as an exile-- political exile from the Nazis,
he went to the New School, opened up a drama department,
and in my own research discovered that that
was where I needed to go to become more immersed
in the deeper nuances of the art of drama and acting. And when I got to the
first days of my class, I looked around the
room and saw a bunch of people, my peers, who just
didn't quite look like they belonged in that room. I mused to myself
that these people want to be actors
and not understand that I looked as peculiar
to them as they did to me. And the group was made up of
the following classmates-- Marlon Brando, Walter Matthau,
Rod Steiger, Bea Arthur, Tony Schwartz or Tony Curtis-- Bernie Schwartz-- and a number
of others, just to name a few. And for our early
years in the theater, I bounced around the room
with great joy and adventure with these as my classmates,
not ever suspecting that this one class alone
would have turned out such a powerful force and
unleash it on American culture. What these men and women
did not only as actors but all the writers, Robert
Penn Warren and people who anointed our school with
the rights to take their books and transform them into plays
and to meet up with Jean Paul Sartre in the early
existentialist movement and do his plays in our
school, all because of Piscator and how much he was respected. So we had a heavy dose of
not only the study of the art but immersed in the
power of social drama. Everything in our
school was geared towards social art and
the dynamics of art in the service of
social and human need. So as we did plays
and we did things, it was always around
what is it saying. What does it inspire? What does it influence? What do you do with the
hearts and minds of people who are now at your
disposal, to juggle it to-- none for me? [LAUGHTER] LIZ WALKER: we've got plenty. Now you-- is this-- you met Sidney Poitier not at
the New School but at the ANT or tell me how you met the man
you call your first friend. HARRY BELAFONTE: Well, when I
walked him the American Negro Theater with the gratuity
and I looked around, one of the people who
walked in almost exactly the same time that
it did, same day, wound up with the same dilemmas
and the same confusions was myself was this young
man named Sidney Poitier. And he was very, very
introverted and very quiet and terribly repressed
and didn't say very much. And all of us in the
group, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and others, saw
him as fairly strange. Now the only people I knew
of who were so fairly strange were members of my family. And what made them so
strange was the fact that a lot of their daily
work were doing things that were outside the law. As a lot of immigrants
had done, they got very much caught up in
bootlegging and the numbers business. In the Caribbeans and
the numbers business, there's an empathy here. There's a synergy between it
because we brought the numbers business to America. Most people don't know that. LIZ WALKER: No. HARRY BELAFONTE: The
Irish and the Italians take all the credit
but what the hell. [LAUGHTER] We give them a little slack
so they can look good. But one day I said
to Sidney when we were down in the bottom of
the stage emptying some trunks and trying to clean up
a mess and find costumes and stuff for our
play, I looked at him and the silence was thick. And I said to him
have you been in jail. And I never ever again
ever saw a look of fury in the face of a
fellow human being as I saw in Sydney when I
asked him that question. He popped. I mean, he really got uptight. And I thought I struck a chord. I said damn. First shot, I got a winner here. Something's wrong. And he just said what made
you ask that question. I said, well, you know,
you're kind of strange, and you don't say
much to anybody. And everybody's wondering
who and what you are. And he said none of your
business who and what I am, and if you gotta think
of me as something, why would you think
of me as a convict? And I said, well,
nothing else in you evidence is something
else I could have chosen. I just wonder who you are. From that moment on,
Sidney and I had this edge. We became very, very close. We became very competitive. We discovered that we were
just eight days apart in age. He was born in Florida
of West Indian parents. I was born in New York
of West Indian parents. He went to the Army. I went to the Navy. He came out about the same time
I did and couldn't find work and couldn't read
and couldn't write. And this scenario
just played itself out with such great similarity that
we just saw this in each other. Now comes the real rub. When we were given a play to do
called Days of Our Youth, he-- I got the part, and he was
given the role of my understudy, which is fine with me. [LAUGHTER] I know he'd never get a
chance to exercise the ability to play the part
because I didn't tend to miss any performances
except this one night. I'd paid somebody to
take over my duties as a janitor's assistant. I need to haul the
garbage to keep everything on point 'cause was my living. And I didn't make any money in
this theater bouncing from play to play and actor to actor. And so I had to pay
somebody a dollar and a half to make sure that
every night at 8:00 you going to be there to
pull the dumb waiters. Those days we had dumb waiters. People in Boston know
about dumb waiters, but it was really in New York
where they had a good run. And we run these damn
waiters up, get the garbage, pull it down, empty, clean
the pails, send them back up. And this I could not
jeopardize that job. And on this particular
night, the guy who did my errands for me--
who did the job for me told me he couldn't make it. And it was about 6:00, and
the play goes on at 8:00. And I was in-- I was in a real panic and
called everybody I could, and nobody could take the gig. And so I called the theater
and talked to the director and said I can't
make it tonight. My understudy is going
to have to go on. And so Sidney went
on that night. That very night, two
scouts from Broadway-- [LAUGHTER] Came up to Harlem
looking for young actors to become part of
a play they were going to do on Broadway, one
of the great Greek mythologies, Lysistrata, and they were
doing with an all black cast. And obviously seeing
Sidney Poitier, they decided that he would
be perfect for the young male lead, and they gave it to him. And that did not
sit well with me. [LAUGHTER] That I should have blown this
opportunity for the silliest of coincidences. So he went. And the play ran
three nights, got the worst reviews of any play
in the history of theater. And-- but on the third
night of the play, two other scouts
came from Hollywood to find a young
black actor to play opposite a young
white actor they were grooming to become a
big star at 20th Century Fox by the name of Richard Widmark. And so Richard Widmark
was playing this bad guy. He was in the hospital. And he had to be tended to
by a black doctor, which Sidney Poitier was to play. And so they took Sidney to
California, gave him a screen test, and the next thing I knew
was that Sidney Poitier was not only starred in his
first Broadway play but was now on his
way to a Hollywood-- And every time I
see Sidney and he begins to boast and feel
some dance around the fact that he has achieved
so much, I had to let him understand that
the reason that he has been so celebrated, that he has
understand that all of it is rooted in garbage. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Yeah. Yeah. He laughs at it now, but
throughout the years, Sidney and I have
had many an exchange. I thought as I was writing
the book that I think-- the way in which
we start the book is with the story of Sidney
and myself and an experience that we had with
the Ku Klux Klan. And I thought would be
a nice interesting way to present the book
to our readers. So if you all want to
know what that story is-- LIZ WALKER: Please,
share it with us. HARRY BELAFONTE:
It's on sale outside. [LAUGHTER] LIZ WALKER: Very
good, Mr. Belafonte. Very good. HARRY BELAFONTE: I'm just-- I'm just being mischievous. It's [INAUDIBLE]. LIZ WALKER: Would you
like to share it or-- HARRY BELAFONTE: Yeah,
I'll just do it quickly. 1964 was it? Yeah. And Schwerner,
Goodman, and Chaney were missing from
Greenwood, Mississippi, and it was a dark
and painful time. And I got a call from
Greenwood from James Forman-- Jim Foreman who was one
of the leaders of SNCC, and he said we're in
a crisis down here. Three civil rights
workers are missing. We have thousands of-- really hundreds, not thousands--
hundreds and hundreds of young students down here with
the freedom education-- voter education. And the hundreds of these
young people, mostly white, had come down to help register
black people and poor people in the South to
get on the scrolls. And many of those
students made a contract, and the contract was
that they would come down for two weeks or three
weeks at the most. And at the end of
their term of duty, they would go back to
the north and attend to the business of getting
ready for the fall semester. But the coincidence of
that fact was at the time when these three
young men were missing and there was no
doubt in our minds that the Ku Klux Klan would
turn this exodus of students out of the South going
back to the north to attend the new semester, they
would not describe it as that. They'd describe it as a
victory for the Ku Klux Klan that all these young
people fled the South in the face of this terror
that had been unleashed. And what Jim called
about was the fact that many of the students
caucused and decided they would stay for the fall semester-- if not just a few
more weeks, they would stay for the entire
semester and that this required resources. If you're going to stay down
there for that long a time, you're going to need more cars,
more fuel, more food, more housing, just a lot of
resources and that they needed to have for the
next meeting that was going to take place
some way to affirm and to confirm for
these young people that resources were available
and that they should stay. And Jim calling me
said that he would like to know if I could
help them raise these funds. And I said, well,
how much do you need. And he said somewhere around
$100,000, which in those days was-- and even now to
tell you the truth-- but back then that
was a hefty sum to try to raise for a cause that
was not on everybody's agenda. And I told him I'd do it. And I then had to put all
resources on the flow, called people, individuals,
got on the phone, and in the three days,
I raised $70,000, which was as much as
they needed at that time. I could get the rest later. But I would be sending
it down and then discovered I couldn't send it
because to send that much money through Western Union to a
southern branch of the Western Union was an
invitation to mischief. Because any white man sitting
down in these Western Union offices and a young black
man or a young white student walking in and saying I'm here
to pick up $70,000 in cash, I don't think he would have
gotten out of the building or have be seen again. It was if it was not convenient. And no matter what we looked
at, it all had difficulties. So I concluded that I would
transfer these checks and stuff into cash, fill the satchel
like a doctor's bag, and take it down there myself. In the process of
doing this, I began to look at the lay of the land,
what could possibly happen. And as the scenario
began to reveal itself of all that could
potentially happen, I decided that I'd be
better off if two of us went instead of just one because
I think they would not hesitate obviously killing a
celebrity, but they'd be more difficult for
them to do to two. And so I did what I always do. I call my best friend. And in a tone that was
very familiar to him, got on the phone I
said, hey, Sid, yeah. How you doing? I'm doing fine. What's up? Listen, man, what are
you doing this weekend? [LAUGHTER] Nothing. What's up? Well, I used to call him
that all the time to go off on little trips here,
going down to the Bahamas and hang out, or do some thing. And in this instance, he
was ready for fun and games. And I said, well, Sid,
I got to make a trip. Yeah? I'm going down to
Greenwood, Mississippi. [LAUGHTER] And there was this silence. And he said and what
will you be doing in Greenwood, Mississippi. And I told him the story. And I said and I think
if both of us went down, it would be kind of cool. If one of us went
down, the chances are they'll take a shot. And Sidney listened and
said, Harry, let me tell you something-- he said Belafonte. He didn't call me Harry. Belafonte, let me
tell you something. I will make this trip. I'll go down with you. I tell you that if
we come back, there's one thing I want
you to understand. I want you to understand
this very clearly-- never, ever call me again. [LAUGHTER] And we went off. I informed Bobby Kennedy
that we were coming, Burke Marshall, the
Justice Department, to make sure
everybody was alerted that the two biggest n-words in
America was on their way down. In those days, we
used it in other ways. And Sidney was very uneasy. Well, so was I for that matter. And when we got to the airport
to go down on the Jackson, I told him I'd talked
to Bobby Kennedy. Justice Department
has been alerted. I'm sure we will-- they'll be safekeeping. And when we got down
to Jackson, there was nobody in the airport,
nobody except one black man, elderly, pushing a broom. And Sidney looked at
him and he [INAUDIBLE] for the longest time. He says, Belafonte, are
you trying to tell me that that's our protection. This is Burke Marshall's man? Something's wrong here. And so we went on down. I said, no, man this is-- you know could very well be. You would do movies. The guys get into disguise. They can't let
themselves be known. Anyway, we got into these-- we got into this little
plane, went on down to Greenwood, dark,
miserable night. I mean, I remember James
Weldon Johnson [INAUDIBLE]---- I mentioned in the book--
said call me the creation. And he said in it-- because
it's the first thing I thought of when I saw this
black Mississippi night. He says and God
stepped out on space, and far as the eye
of God can see, darkness covered everything
blacker than 100 midnights down by a cypress swamp. And that blackness to
me was very profound in its description. And I looked at this
Mississippi blackness, and I just said my God,
the horror of such darkness is really quite
a new experience. We got into these two cars,
which have been brushed down to be very dull so they would
not shine at night because that was the cars at the civil
rights workers used. We piled into these
two cars, Sidney and I had a back seat, Jim
in the front seat, and a guy named Willie Blue
driving, and another car. And as we got into these
cars in the distance, we saw these headlights going
up around the outer parameters of the airstrip. And I said to Sidney here
they are, and Willie Blue said there who are you. And I said, well, you know, FBI
and his man get it together. That ain't no goddamn FBI. That's the Ku Klux Klan. And I looked at Sidney,
who was in no mood to hear any witticisms or any remarks. It was just raw terror. And these guys cranked up the
motor, started of the car, and instead of driving
away from the headlights, they drove towards them. And they were trying
to shine the headlights into the cabin of
these trucks and cars to see if they could
identify anyone so when it left that little
area and hit on the highway, they were at least
if anything happened, they'd be able to notify-- or they'd be able to
testify or at least say what the person looked like. We got into Greenwood. On our way there,
a two-way radio called people from
CORE and SNCC. They came in cars,
met us on the highway, and gave us safekeeping
at which time these pickup trucks and
these guys from the Klan began to shoot in the
air and beat their rifle butts against the
side of these trucks. I wasn't quite sure
what they scream, but one could assume they
were not love letters. And I did not do that
for any game playing. It was-- when I called
Sidney, I called him because I genuinely
felt the need for him and the kind of impact it
would have if both of us have gone rather than just one. And the generosity of
his commitment to meet me there did more to give us the
indelibility and our friendship than anything else could have. He put it on the line. We went on our lives, but
that's the Greenwood story. LIZ WALKER: He put
it on the line, and indeed so did
you, Mr. Belafonte. We have a few questions
from the audience. As a recent graduate of the
alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King, Morehouse
College, I am simply captivated like the rest
of us by your story. What do you say to
those in my generation who like you and Dr. King
wish to take their conscience to work? HARRY BELAFONTE:
I find answering that question a little
difficult because the richness of the history that
we've been speaking of, that whole time in America is
filled with so much detail, is filled with so
much story, is filled with so many illustrations
of courage and smarts. A lot of people are
referred to divine intervention is a big part
of what drove our movement. Although I don't
want to challenge that, I would have to
say don't defer too much to divine interpretation
because a lot of courageous men and women who did what they
did and did not depend just on the powers of God's wisdom. Dr. King was a man of great
learning, and he applied that. And when I look at all that
was yielded in that struggle to where we now reside,
anyone looking for motivation or for answers to
questions that plague them about the issues of today
need but just flip a page or two back into that
history from whence we came. Because almost everything
that I look at right here and now is so very
much like that time. Afghanistan and Iraq,
not too unlike Vietnam. Rebellion in Africa among
the people of Tunisia and other places, not too
unlike the time of Africans on the move for
sovereign dignity and creating their
own independence movement on that continent. Looking at the kind
of loss of purpose, our moral compass
has become so clouded that we are so caught
up in the pandemics of political strategy,
we have ignored the fact that something far more
important has been lost to us and that is the nation's
sense of moral purpose. We have lost our moral
compass if we ever had it. We have certainly
by now lost it, and here's where I find what was
significant to our struggle was that almost everything we did
was rooted in a moral context, in a moral frame. Dr. King's great power
resided in the moral purity of the things that
he chose to challenge the way in which he spoke,
the things that he told us was froth with
such moral power that even the enemy
could not compete. The only thing they could
resort to in the final analysis was what they resort
all the time-- mass murder, assassinations,
killings, beatings, violence. And what fascinates me
now is that whether it was the demise of
the Soviet Union and what happened to
communism and what happened in the contests
between the East and the West or between the
Soviets and the capitalists or Soviets and Americans,
et cetera, et cetera, it is interesting to me
that everybody suspected that any dismantling
of communism would carry with
it a consequence not the least of which
would be nuclear warfare. But interestingly enough,
not only was there not a shot fired but no nuclear
warfare, and this transition from what was a totalitarian,
cruel, oppressive experience for many Soviets was
now transforming itself into a democracy, no violence. Then you go to Mandela and
what happened with race. Everybody suspected the once
blacks took over the majority rule of South Africa,
white citizens would be destroyed just
out of the vengeance of black Africans, and yet
no such a thing happened. Nonviolence ruled the day. And then when you take a
look at Tunisia and Cairo and so much going
on in the world, it's the extent to which
nonviolence emerges as not only the most powerful tactic
but also the most powerful moral force at the table. When I look at what's going on
with the young people on Wall Street, I am just absolutely
rewarded and delighted at the fact that they've
chosen to take nonviolence as a tactic of choice. And when anybody says,
well, what do they want. There's no leadership. There's no-- what's
their purpose? They're just misfits. And everything rings
with such a familiarity. When I look back at my life,
John Lewis, Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Jesse Jackson,
Andy Young were all teenagers. They were 17 and 18. The oldest person in the
pack was Martin at 24. And I was two years
older than him, and he really didn't get on
his bicycle 'til he was 26. When you take a look at all
that youth and how they emerged from these places that
we never heard of-- who knew of Montgomery,
who knew of Rosa Parks, where did she come from, and
this little minister somewhere stuck in a church
off of rural south-- all of sudden he emerged
reluctantly to go to a rally and listen to something. And they said we're
glad you could show up 'cause it would look funny
your not being at the rally since we're holding
it in your church. And there Dr. King emerged. And you look and you
see all of this-- all these mythical figures
just emerge and did so much. What is everybody's dilemma
about the current movement? What is it that these young
people are not doing that y'all need to hear? What do they need-- you want some more
to get killed? That will come. I remember Kent State. I remember a lot of places
where innocent students who stepped into the fray
paid with their lives when the opposition stepped to
the table to wreak their havoc. And when I got
down on Wall Street and talk to these young people
and they solicit information from me, I'm fascinated
at what they say and what they would like to know
more about and the way in which they are extending themselves
to meet those of us whom I would call the
elders to come and sit with them and counsel and to
talk about what they are doing. But I am absolutely filled with
joy that I have lived this long and come to another moment
when young people have risen up in this America to say
what they're saying and to do what they will be
doing and doing much more of. And I'm fascinated at
watching the dilemma on the side of those
who wish us ill, those who are our detractors. It is-- the best is yet to
come, but also the worst of it is yet to be revealed. [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: Of all
your accomplishments, personal, professional, what
do you consider the greatest? What are you most proud of? HARRY BELAFONTE: Well,
what I am most benefited by are acts of coincidence
and just fleeting moments that were never
really expected to be very much that were turned into
things that were most profound. Whenever I hear a
knock at the door, I never fail to
answer that knock because I'm most curious
to who is the knocker and what do they want of me. And every time I've
answered the door, what has been revealed to me
people of purpose with ideas and thoughts if I can
connect with them can be most beneficial to the spirit,
to the heart, to the mind, and to developing a
set of camaraderie, a set of relationships that
have yield camaraderie in ways that I would never
have known had I not chosen the course that I'm on. And so much of it was
out of coincidence. Dr. King called me. I didn't reach for him. I perhaps would have. I maybe should have earlier. But he called me to say
he needed to talk to me. Eleanor Roosevelt called me and
said she needed to talk to me. John Kennedy called me
through his emissaries and said he needed
to talk to me. So each time somebody says
they need to talk to you and you take on the conversation
and this is your reward, well then, I wish somebody just
tap dance on my door all day long. But it was the ability to
be able to take advantage of these interventions, these
people who called on me to be of some service when to
serve was my willingness but it was not
clearly my objective. I wanted to do things to change
the way things were because I was born into poverty and I
have maintained my relationship to poverty all my life. I am very familiar with it. I am discomforted
by its existence, but I am comfortable with
the people who reside there. And wherever I go in the
world, you will find poverty. And I feel an
empathy with where I see this poverty because
along with poverty, there is injustice. My mother's counsel
to me was never ever go to bed at night knowing
that there was something you could do during the
day to defy injustice and know that you didn't
step to the table. So with this rather pathetic
remark with this metaphor, I never quite
understood what she was talking about until these
moments reveal themselves. Yes. I cannot see any act of
injustice and not have everything in my total construct
become engaged in the act of injustice and my need to
participate in doing something about it. [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: I'm going to
take one more question, and then we want to show-- HARRY BELAFONTE: One more? LIZ WALKER: One
more, one more if I may because I think it's
pretty interesting, especially in light of your own life. Do you think young
black celebrities now could do more to be
positive role models, and if so, what do you suggest? HARRY BELAFONTE: I could answer
that question when you say do I think they
could do more if I knew what it was that they did. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] It seems to me that-- Robeson once said to me
get them to sing your song and they'll want to
know who you are. It was the first time
he heard me sing. Because when first put
me I was only acting. The next time he saw me
in another full blown way, I had become a singer. And he came to see
me at The Vanguard-- Village Vanguard in New York
and delighted in what he saw and then encouraged me to
continue to pursue that. He said get them to sing your
song and they'll want to-- I didn't quite
understand what all that meant until I woke up
one day and the entire world was singing (SINGING)
day-o, day-o, daylight come and
me wan go home. Day, me say day, me
say day, me say day. And you have never
seen anything until you see 50,000 Japanese people-- [LAUGHTER] Singing "Day-O" and all that
that song was about and all that it encompassed and its
journey and its content-- and when that record came out
and delighted so many people, I had a second round
with challenge. What do you do
with this platform? What do you do with
this much power? What do you do with
this much opportunity? What do you use your
platform to say? Where do you want to lead these
people who have put themselves at your disposal? Because I believe artists
are the gatekeepers of truth. I believe we do have a
mission and a purpose. Many have stepped into
the system of life and have blunted
that fact that art has mission and purpose that
is far greater than what it has been translated into
as just an instrument to entertain and
to go make money, and that's the end of it. It is a blasphemy that that
is where that power resides. And the question is to
artists who have not chosen to take advantage
of their celebrity is where resides for you
the reward in what you do beyond your bank account. If that is the sum total of
the rewards of your mission, then I feel sad for you
because you've really missed the best
part of life, which is what happens to people when
you're in the service of need. And it has a profound impact
when you step into that fray. When I walked into Africa
and saw that famine, it overwhelmed me. But the question is
what do you do about it. Well, I'm an artist. Find-- use the culture
and the power of culture. So we go out and did
"We Are the World." I call on my buddies and
say I just come from Africa. This abandonment of our fellow
beings is not only vulgar, but it's really criminal. And this indifference
that the world is-- how we can do
something about it. Let's use our celebrity power. And that collective gave
us "We Are the World," and everybody got into
a feel good moment. But it did a lot to awaken
consciousness in people. Well, this fact is replete
with opportunity time and time and time again for those
who step into the fray. And why these
artists don't do it, I can only arrive
at one conclusion. They know that there's a
price to pay from a material point of view because if
General Motors doesn't like you and if some food on the shelf
product doesn't like you, you don't do their TV show
'cause they are the sponsors. And if you are blacklisted
like some of us have been, you will not appear. And even if you do
appear, sometimes you say the wrong things,
you'll be taken off the air as we discuss in the book. What was done with
the Revlon and CBS when we got the
first Emmy for a show that we did because they didn't
like the fact that the cast-- not a specific act but
the fact that the cast was integrated, black and white. In the 1960s, we were
pulled off the air because I refused to change
the makeup of the cast system-- the casting system. And I was told by
CBS and by Revlon that my services were
no longer required. And that lingered. And then what happened
with Petula Clark. I did her show. She touched my arm. The account exec
sitting in a booth seeing Petula Clark touch
my arm was a racial offense beyond his capacity to
accept, and he told us that that scene would have
to be taken out of the-- and redone. And Petula Clark--
it was her show, and she was in charge
of its production-- was confronted with this, and
she asked me what should we do. And I said, Pat-- that was her nickname-- I said this is your
moment in America. This is your show. This is your platform. These are people who
you have reached out to and who have given
you a platform. Anything you do that
is not sit in rhythm with their expectations of
you can be a very costly. And I don't want to
take that charge. You do what you
think you have to do, and I will go wherever you
go in the solution of this. And she says I want to
know what you would do. And I said from
my perspective, I wouldn't let them
get away with it. I'd take them on and
go public and let them pay the price for what
they think is their anonymity. And she said, well, that's
exactly what we'll do. I will not redo it and let the
challenge take us where it may. Next thing we knew,
it made headlines in The New York Times. This guy's name,
which was Doyle Lott, was a member of the Lott family
from down in the Carolinas. You've heard of Senator Lott,
a very racist backward man. This was part of his tribe. And the young man who
represented the Plymouth Motorcar Company was him. And he was the account exec. And when he went on this tirade,
we rebelled, and he was fired. And Petula Clark went on
to a remarkable career, and I got hired again. [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: What a route. Mr. Belafonte, we know that you
are going to sign some books. We're going to
have to wrap it up though I don't want to because
I've enjoyed this conversation. The world is a better
place because you stepped in the fray,
so we thank you for-- [APPLAUSE] For your life, for your
commitment, your sacrifice. We have another piece
of video that we wanted to share with you from
the inaugural and pre-inaugural celebration, 1961. And as we let that run, we want
to thank you for your song. Thank you. HARRY BELAFONTE: Thank you. [APPLAUSE] [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] - (SINGING) Oh, when the
saints go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I want to be in that number. When the saints go
marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I want to be in that number. When the saints go
marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to shout hallelujah
when the saints go marching in. One more time. Yes, when the saints
go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I want to be in that number
when the saints go marching in. Yes, when the saints
go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to be in that number
when the saints go marching in. Oh, yes, I had a
dear old mother, and if you should
see her before I do, won't you tell her that you saw
me coming and I was strutting straight on through. When the saints go
marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to be in that number
when the saints go marching in. One more time. Yes, when the saints
go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to shout hallelujah
when the saint go marching in. Oh, when the saints
go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to be in that number
when the saints go marching in. Oh, when the saints
go marching in, yes, when the saints go
marching in, oh lord, I'm going to be in that number
when the saints go marching in. [END PLAYBACK] [APPLAUSE] LIZ WALKER: Great job. Great job. Excellent job. HARRY BELAFONTE: Thank
you so very, very much. Thank you. LIZ WALKER: Great
working with you. Thank you so much. This is an honor. This is an honor. HARRY BELAFONTE: Where do I go? ASSISTANT: Right here.
